Static

I can tell it's winter because my flannel pajama bottoms are sticking to my legs.

I'm not fat; I'm healthy

How could my chubby self NOT choose to feature this little beauty in the weird science category?
"Being Overweight Offers Health Benefits"

Temperature's rising

Cooler near the lake. Four words that anyone who lives on the shores of a remotely sizable body of water dread every spring. Yes, we get the bonus of a warmer autumn, but in April that is hardly a consolation.

Serendipity

By Tkgd2007 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

I love the coincidence that Lucy (Australopithecus) was discovered on the anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. 

Color blind?

This is something I have always wondered, but Elise at IFLS and Michael at Vsauce state it better than I.
Everyone is told that the sky is blue, so we look at the sky and see blue. But what if what I perceive as sky blue is the same color that you perceive as sea green? Or cotton-candy pink? We don't know. We are both looking at a blue sky but may be seeing marginally different (or even radically different) colors.

Yes. Yes, we are.

 

Words of "climate scientist Professor Jason Box, who was unequivocal about the implications findings from Stockholm University scientists that methane plumes were escaping from the sea-floor in the Arctic ocean.
Despite his concerns Prof Box, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, was polite enough to censor his language... ."

Once you get past the snow...

I have a feeling (based on absolutely no empirical evidence) that Ohio is going to be a fantastic place to ride out climate change. We're seeing more extremes in weather everywhere, but so far *knockonwood* the truly nasty stuff is skirting us nicely.
Ideally, we would reduce emissions, shrink our carbon footprint, and reverse climate change, but Antarctica thinks otherwise. She's coming apart at the seams and NASA says it's unstoppable.

If you own beachfront property, sell. And move to Ohio.

Mother Nature is a badass bitch

I posted this a while back (four years ago! time flies) about the volcanic eruption of Mt. Tambora, noting that the ash it spewed into the atmosphere was responsible for what we call "the year without a summer."
Turns out, according to Slate, Tambora was responsible for more than just a really snowy June. Scientists have linked (indirectly) the worldwide cholera epidemic of the early Victorian era, the Opium trade in the Golden Triangle (and by extension the Opium Wars) and the British Empire's failed attempts at Arctic exploration to the eruption. Oh, and did I mention the first depression ever in the fledgling United States? All of this is aside from the directly catastrophic events like the staggeringly enormous pyroclastic flow, the tsunami, and the devastating famine due to the loss of a growing season (or three).

Ka-boom

On this day 130 years ago an Indonesian island disappeared.

The eruption of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait was equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT  —about 13,000 times the yield of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima, Japan.
The 1883 eruption ejected approximately 5 cubic miles of rock, ash, and pumice. The cataclysmic explosion was heard in Perth, Australia, about 1,930 miles to the south, as well as the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, about 3,000 miles to the west. [You read that right. It was HEARD 3000 miles away.]
At least 36,417 people died, and many more thousands were injured, mostly from the tsunamis that followed the explosion.

The pressure wave generated by the colossal fourth and final explosion radiated out from Krakatoa at 675 mph. It was so powerful that it ruptured the eardrums of sailors on ships in the Sunda Strait, and caused a spike of more than 2½ inches of mercury in pressure gauges attached to gasometers in the Batavia gasworks, sending them off the scale. The pressure wave radiated across the globe and was recorded on barographs all over the world, which continued to register it up to 5 days after the explosion. Barographic recordings show that the shock-wave from the final explosion reverberated around the globe 7 times in total.  [Yep, you read that right too. The shock wave from the most devastating explosion circled the globe seven times and registered -measurably- for five days.]

Now, 130 years later, Son of Krakatoa, Anak Krakatau, grows at a rate of nearly 7 meters a year. 

Distinct extinction

A new species of mammal was introduced to the world last week. The olinguito "had been mistaken for its close relative, the olingo, by zookeepers and museum curators for nearly a century."
That's right, for almost 100 years we've been trying to mate olingos in captivity with olinguitos  captivity. And the zoologists were probably starting to worry about the species since they had no success breeding them and their habitat is shrinking.
This got me to wondering about the efforts to breed other animals at the brink of extinction. Do you think humans would have (of should have) attempted to save the dinosaurs had we been around and capable of it? Are there animals that deserve preservation more than others?

Meteor

I told myself I was going to get out of bed before dawn to see the Perseids, but then I thought, "It's cloudy," and went back to sleep. Instead, I looked at some cool pictures that other people with not cloudy skies in far-away places took.

This is my favorite. Read about it here.

I eat one bite at a time.

A new study finds that "the ritual of singing before eating a slice of cake, or any other dessert, increases one's appreciation of the treat. The result is that the food ends up tasting better, at least in our minds."
It's actually the ritual of singing and not the song, thankfully for those around me who have to listen to me try to carry a tune. The study also found that any personal ritual will enhance your enjoyment of food.
This is why I ritually slaughter a chicken before every meal. Oh. Wait.

Fiction to fact

Today is the 35th birthday of the very first person to EVER be conceived through in-vitro fertilization.
36 years ago, "test tube babies" were science fiction. Science fiction needs to throw down some more challenges.

Springtime

At 11:20 this morning "the tilt of the Earth's axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the Sun, the center of the Sun being in the same plane as the Earth's equator."
Astronomers refer to this day as the "northward equinox." "The subsolar point (the place on the Earth's surface where the center of the Sun is exactly overhead) crosses the Equator moving northward at the March equinox." (Apparently the term "vernal" was too ethnocentric.)

The rest of us call this day "the first day of spring."

Calling it spring, however, does not make it so. Certainly not in Cleveland, Ohio, where we have another 40 days to endure before the last frost date arrives.

A Red lobster is a Cooked lobster

Per the Punkinhead's request, today we answer the question "Why do lobsters turn red when you cook them?"
Thanks to the diligent scientists at Imperial College, London, and Royal Holloway College back in 2002, we know. It's a lot of chemistry, but it boils down to "a subunit of the lobster shell protein called astaxthanthin. It is a carotenoid, and like a carrot, would naturally be orange. But when clamped by beta-crustacyanin in a live lobster shell deep in the sea, the astaxthanthin flattened to become blue.
"Once the lobster fell into the hands of a cook, it was doomed to a different tint. The bubbling water denatured the crustacyanin segment so much that it became stuck in its free form, coloured orange."

Or in layman's terms, the orange was being smooshed into a different shape making it blue. When the boiling water frees the orange protein, it gets to be orange again.

Large, black, and sweet.

A while back, I saw a study that linked diet soda with obesity (drinking a lot of it = fatter people). Now I see that there may also be a link to depression. "New research suggests that drinking sweetened beverages, especially diet drinks, is associated with an increased risk of depression in adults... ."
Both studies (as always) caution not to draw too much of a hardline conclusion since there is no actual evidence for causality, just evidence of a link. (It could be that obese people are depressed and drink more diet soda, not necessarily that the diet soda leads to depression and obesity.)
At any rate, I'm pointing this out because the study also found "[a]dults who drank coffee had a 10 percent lower risk of depression compared to people who didn't drink any coffee."




 Mmmmmmmm coffee. This totally justifies my stop at Starbucks this morning.

Attractive

You know that saying, "pretty is as pretty does"? Turns out that is scientifically untrue. Studies show that "selfish, narcissistic jerks" are liked because they are better at making themselves physically attractive.
From the link:

Previous research links negative personality traits, like narcissism, to "increased likeability," says Makini Brice at Medical Daily. "Whether we like it or not, people who are considered physically attractive are assumed to be, at least initially, kinder, smarter, and more confident." Narcissists with dark personality traits are flat-out better at making themselves look more appealing, says Julie Beck at Popular Science. Or, looking at it the other way, "mean people are just as ugly as the rest of us, they're just better at fooling everyone into thinking they're hot." 

I wish I were mean.

Which proves you don't have to be smart to be rich

Does anyone else find it appalling that the Republican nominee for President of the United States is completely unaware of the physics involved in air travel?
I know the previous week's gaffes involving dismissing nearly half of the nation for not paying Federal income tax (an achievement most people in Mitt's income bracket aspire to) and attacking Barack Obama for (fictional) support of the terrorists who murdered our ambassador to Libya were bad for Governor Romney.
But really, there is nothing he said that isn't his opinion. He probably isn't going to get the vote of a majority of poor Americans unless they are ultra-conservative ideologues. And he has always said that he thinks Americans should be tossing around the threat of bombs and war throughout the Middle East.
But even I, with my tiny understanding of science in general and physics specifically, even I, know why you can't open a plane window. Didn't he ever see the Twilight Zone?

I suppose it's all in the definitions

So I read this study yesterday that said that organic food isn't more nutritious than its non-organic counterparts. But it has 30% less pesticides.
If that's not more nutritious, I don't know what is.

You saw me standing alone

The August full moon is called the Sturgeon Moon according to Farmer's Almanac. (The sturgeon fishing was great in August-- for the Algonquins.)
But tonight we get a special bonus moon (or you could say the bonus is in 29 days on the 31st) . The Blue Moon occurs "7 times in the 19-year Metonic cycle" or once every two to three years because the  lunar cycle and the solar cycle don't exactly line up. It's not really blue and no one is quite sure where the blue in its name came from. But the saying "once in a blue moon" meaning a rare event comes from the infrequency of full moons like last night's. I hope you all take advantage of it and do something rare and eventful.
And maybe go fishing tonight? I hear the sturgeon are jumpin'.