All the Stuff Around You is Made of Atoms
Seen via IEET:
A crack team of sixteen trained golden retrievers illustrate the structure of atoms—the particles that make up everything around you. They also show how atoms are weirder than you might think.
The only thing that would have made this better is if they’d used Collies.
Scanning Mummies
From WIRED Science:
An examination of mummified bodies has revealed that ancient Egyptians suffered from hardening of the arteries in surprising frequency, suggesting that blame for heart disease extends beyond the modern culprits of smoking, fast food and the remote control.
…NASA has issued a detailed refutation of apocalyptic rumors and movies made around those rumors.
Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom ask of astrophysics: Is a doomsday catastrophe likely?
The Economist:
The story of how the dinosaurs disappeared is getting more and more complicated
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CERN is reporting that the Large Hadron Collider could circulate particle beams through both of its pipes in just over a week. If all goes well, the first collisions would begin soon after that.
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A telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes.
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“Picture the bottom of the ocean. Anything below 1000 meters is fed entirely by ‘marine snow’ — the things that are supported by photosynthesis at the top of the ocean, and the things that eat them, and eventually fall to the ocean floor,” said Robert Vrijenhoek, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “When a whale drops into your neighborhood, it’s roughly equivalent to 2000 years of marine snow falling in a millisecond.”
I love this idea for the Fourth Plinth in London, the only remaining unused plinth in Trafalgar Square. From BLDGBLOG:
A rain-proof planetarium machine could be installed in public, anchored to the plinth indefinitely. Lurking over the square with its strange insectile geometries, the high-tech projector would rotate, dip, light up, and turn its bowed head to shine the lights of stars onto overcast skies above. Tourists in Covent Garden see Orion’s Belt on the all-enveloping stratus clouds—even a family out in Surrey spies a veil of illuminated nebulae in the sky.
If it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
Most people instinctively jump to the wrong answer that “feels” right - 100 - even if they later amend it.
We encounter problems like these in various guises every day. Without careful reasoning we often get them wrong, probably because our brains use two different systems to process information. One is intuitive and spontaneous; the other is deliberative and reasoned. Intuitive processing can serve us well in some areas - choosing a potential partner, for example, or in situations where you’ve had a lot of experience. It can trip us up in others, though, such as when we overvalue our own egocentric perspective. Deliberative processing, on the other hand, is key to conscious problem-solving and can help us override our intuitive tendencies if they look like leading us astray.
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