The discovery of the Tiktaalik fossil back in 2006 was a cause of great celebration because it was a 385 million year old fossil that showed the early stages of forelimbs that indicated it was a transitional one from sea to amphibian. Neil Shubin, the leader of the team, wrote a highly engaging book Your Inner Fish that showed how much our human bides were shaped by our fishy ancestors. [Read more…]
Everyone is aware of all the reports that suggest that our cognitive powers go into decline with increased age. As a result, as some of us get into our senior years, we can’t help but identify as symptoms of that mental decline every time we do not remember some thing that we think we should, or when it takes awhile to do something that we think we used to do faster. We may joke about having ‘senior moments’ but those jokes are accompanied by a twinge of anxiety as to whether they are precursors of more serious problems to come. [Read more…]
Jordan Sargent has a remarkable photograph taken by Ingolf Kristiansen off the coast of Norway. Apparently a large number of herring were swimming close to the surface when a gust of cold wind froze the water near the surface, trapping the fish in place. I found this surprising because the phase change from water to ice is not instantaneous and one would think that as it happened the fish would go lower where it remains as water. [Read more…]
The only planet on which we know for sure that life exists is Earth. Even though this gives us just a sample of one, it is tempting to think that conditions here must be close to the ideal for life to emerge and that if there are other planets on which life exists, they must be Earth-like in terms of size and occupying the so-called ‘stellar habitable zone’ (SHZ) from its star so that the temperature range is similar to ours. [Read more…]
Those climate change deniers who gleefully seize on any cold spell in the US as evidence that global warming is a hoax conveniently ignore the fact that there is a part of the globe called the ‘southern hemisphere’ and winter here means summer there. It turns out that Australia is currently going through a blistering heat wave with elevated risks for forest fires and heat strokes. [Read more…]
Bicycle helmets undoubtedly protect users from brain injuries. But is it possible, as some studies have suggested, that the helmets make you hot and sweaty and distracted and thus increase the chances of an accident? This idea has been picked up by some who oppose mandatory helmet laws. [Read more…]
The company Virgin Galactic is working to be a space tourism company and has already people signed up to go into space. A few days ago it reached a milestone of sorts when it sent its plane on a 10-minute ride to an altitude to 21km. As a comparison, the International Space Station is at an orbital height of about 420km and the Hubble Space Telescope is at 559km, so it has a long way to go. [Read more…]
When people create videos using their cell phones, they usually do it in portrait mode. Not being someone who whips out a camera and records things, I am not sure why the portrait mode is the one that people prefer. Is it something to do with the ease of holding the phone? But whatever the reason, the net result is curiously dissatisfying to watch, apart from the black bands that appear on each side when you play it back on YouTube or a video player. [Read more…]
While the US and British governments undoubtedly have the resources to obtain the best computers and cryptographers that money can buy, they cannot (at far as I know) break really good encryption systems. This is why they have achieved much of their success the old-fashioned way and resorted to cheating, such as getting computer and chip makers and communication companies to collaborate with them to install back doors. News reports based on leaked documents by (who else?) Edward Snowden show that the NSA may have bribed RSA, one of the most important companies in the security industry, to get them to provide a loophole that the NSA could exploit. [Read more…]
I have not seen anything like this or even heard about it but it appears that weather conditions can be such that a thick carpet of ice can inexorably march from lakes onto land. It looks like a creeping monster, pushing aside even buildings in its path. It is called an ‘ice shove’ and scientists are familiar with the phenomenon and say it happens on occasion in places like Alaska. [Read more…]