Most of the known visible mass in the universe (i.e., excluding dark matter) is made up of protons and neutrons. We know that protons and neutrons are themselves made up of yet smaller particles called quarks and gluons. The gluons are massless so you would think that most of the mass of the universe would be quark mass. But that is not the case. In fact, quark masses are a small fraction of the total mass of each proton and neutron. So where does the rest of the mass come from?
[Read more…]

Joost Vles writes about a subject that I have long had an interest in and that is queuing theory. I have noticed that airports and banks tend to favor the single line system but grocery stores go for the separate queues. He points out what should be obvious but that some people do not seem to realize, and that is that a single long queue where the people break at the head of it to go to the next available server is better than each server having their own queue.
[Read more…]

There is something fascinating about watching time-lapse films of plants that show them moving. Plants move so imperceptibly slowly that they seem inert so it is disconcerting to see them growing and moving towards water and sunlight as if they have a sense of awareness. Here is a case where an almost dead plant comes back to life after being given water.

(Via Rusty Blazenhoff)

Donald Trump, the Republican party, and their propaganda arm Fox News have been relentlessly promoting xenophobia by arguing that immigrants are coming to the US to kill people. But researchers Pajau Vangay and Dan Knights noticed something interesting and that is that the microbes in the guts of immigrants have a much greater microbe diversity than those of Americans. But the longer the immigrants live here, their guts change to match more closely the narrower gut diversity of the locals, and this narrowing gets more pronounced in the guts of their children. This is not necessarily a good thing because wider microbe gut diversity seems to be good for your health.
[Read more…]

Some readers may recall me discussing a book manuscript that I have been working on, the title of which is THE GREAT PARADOX OF SCIENCE: Why its theories work so well without being true and may have been wondering what was happening concerning it. I am pleased to say that Oxford University Press will be publishing it and should appear at the usual retail outlets sometime in mid-2019, though early orders can be made some months before. I will keep readers posted because, as described below, the book deals with topics that should be of interest to many of you.
[Read more…]

I have long been curious about the way memory works and as time has gone by become more convinced that we rarely remember things as they happen but instead we reconstruct memories each time we recall an event, adding some details and eliminating others, and the new story becomes recorded as the memory. Hence I am always wary of relying too much on my own or other people’s memories, especially of things that happened a long time ago, and usually look for some corroborating evidence.
[Read more…]

Yesterday China opened the world’s longest bridge across the sea, connecting Hong Kong with Macau on the mainland. It is 55km (34 miles) long. It required the construction of two artificial islands so that the bridge can go underwater at places to allow for shipping traffic. It is not the longest bridge overall, just the sixth longest but the five longer ones are also in China. The bridge does not allow private vehicles to use it, just buses, trucks, government vehicles, and other vehicles with special permits, so traffic should be light.
[Read more…]

An iceberg has been observed that is in the shape of a square about a mile along a side.

It turns out that this kind of geometrically symmetric icebergs is not unprecedented.

Such objects are not unknown, however, and even have a name – tabular icebergs.

These are flat and long and form by splitting away from the edges of ice shelves.

Kelly Brunt, a glaciologist with Nasa and the University of Maryland, said the process of formation was a bit like a fingernail growing too long and cracking off at the end.

They were often geometrically-shaped as a result, she said.

“What makes this one a bit unusual is that it looks almost like a square,” she added.

These scientists are missing the most obvious explanation, that this is a monolith sent to us by highly advanced extra-terrestrial beings, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey to make us more intelligent about the need to take action to save the planet.