The Big Higgs Questions

The Big Higgs Question by Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg in the New York Review of Books provides a history of the theory behind the Higgs Boson written by one of the key contributors.  The Higgs is important because previously known particles such as the W and Z, carriers of the weak nuclear force, are known to have a nonzero mass, but some mechanism needed to be added to the theory in order to give them a mass (particles can in fact be completely massless, for example the photon.)  There were other alternatives, but the Higgs mechanism was the leading candidate and the recent experiments at CERN pretty much confirmed the Higgs as the winner.  However, theorists are not finished being puzzled!  According to Weinberg, it would be much more "natural" if the Higgs mass were hundred thousand trillion times larger then what was just measured!  A slight discrepancy, for which there is currently no particularly good explanation.

"Now where did I leave that screwdriver?"
--- the other Big Higgs Question 

Religion and Analytic Thinking

I recently read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.  He discusses evidence that we might have two quite different thinking mechanisms:  System 1 and System 2.  System 1, is fast, easy, intuitive - we are able to discover patterns and jump to certain conclusions nearly effortlessly.  However System 1 is somewhat error prone.  Consider the following puzzle:

The total cost of a bat and ball is $1.10; the bat costs a dollar more than the ball;  how much does the ball cost? 

 Most people answer this one quickly and alas, incorrectly.  Kahneman attributes this to using System 1.  The correct answer is at the bottom of this post.

System 2 is slower, more difficult, but much less error-prone - systematic, logical thinking as opposed to intuition.

His book provides numerous intriguing examples but is also a bit disheartening - even extremely well-trained people seem to have trouble solving many simple problems.

However, subjects that are prepared for an analytic task in various seemingly trivial ways - for example seeing certain words and pictures which prime them for reasoning systematically - go on to perform significantly better at certain simple but tricky tasks. 

There was a recent paper in Science Magazine, AnalyticThinking Promotes Religious Disbelief

by Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan (April 2012), which applied the methodology discussed in Kahneman's book to see if that could be used to affect a subject's reported religions belief.  In particular, they found that subjects who were primed in ways that are known to promote System 2 thinking did subsequently report higher rates of religious disbelief.

Sample images of The Thinker (left) and Discobolus (right) used in study 2. The images shown here are similar to, but not the exact same ones used in the study. [Source: Wikimedia] 

In the study, subjects who were primed by seeing a picture of The Thinker were more likely to report religious disbelief than subjects that saw a picture of the discus thrower.  There were other experiments in the study which were also seemed to indicate that preparing subjects in ways that promoted System 2 type thinking also affected the rate at which the subjects then reported religious disbelief.

Religious belief is pervasive in human societies - which has always been quite mysterious to me.  Religion usually seems to involve 'faith' to a large degree (which I take to be the belief in something despite very little actual evidence.)  I, however, try to be cautious even when I have quite a lot of evidence.  I know from long and sad experience how easy it's been to fool myself!  It's always nice to have multiple ways to cross-check something, the more the better, and perhaps eventually the evidence gets to be so overwhelming, I might actually starting believing.  Religion doesn't seem to work that way, it's often reported to come upon people suddenly, they are "born-again", they have an ecstatic spiritual experience and a "conversion".

Even when I was very young, six or so,  religious belief didn't seem to make any obvious sense, yet it was very pervasive when I was growing up, so I was always quite curious as to what was actually going on.  The first thing I remember seriously reading on the subject was The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.  It's been quite a while:  my impression was that while James was a very good writer, unfortunately I didn't really come away with much insight as to why religious belief was so common.

A few years ago there was a spate of books purporting to study religion "scientifically."  For example, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett  and The God Delusion  by biologist Richard Dawkins.  I had found other books by the same authors quite fascinating, but not these two.  They seemed to be mainly hatchet jobs on religion by committed atheists with little to no real scientific content.  

So this recent paper in Science was a pleasant surprise, it seems to be a serious attempt to study some aspects of religious belief experimentally.  


By the way, if you're interested in the subtleties of interpreting these types of experiments see this blog post by Samantha Bernecker about the paper.  

The correct answer to the bat and ball puzzle is 5 cents - however, the most common answer given is 10 cents. 

A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africa by Steve Kemper is a biography of the African explorer Heinrich Barth (1821–1865) one of the first Europeans to visit the fabled city Timbuktu in Mali. Though not completely free of the prejudices typical of his time, he treated the African people he encountered in his travels as individuals, recorded their names, their languages and histories and was fascinated by their cultures and way of life.  He respected and appreciated the highly developed civilizations he found in Africa - we should too.  They had their problems of course, but also impressive achievements.  A great adventure story!

Barth approaching Timbuktu

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Writing a satisfying sequel can't be easy. However George R. R. Martin managed to do it for me three times - the first three sequels to Game of Thrones were all excellent. But alas, the most recent installment in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons, fell completely flat. Martin did have very plausible extenuating circumstances - he was involved with the production of the HBO series of Game of Thrones, which was very well received.
Wolf Hall was the prize winning historical novel by Hilary Mantel, a story set in the time of Henry VIII, which featured his very able functionary/henchman Thomas Cromwell. Wolf Hall brought us through the events of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, ending portentously just prior to Henry's arrival at Wolf Hall, the home of the Seymour family and Jane, the next "winner" in Henry's ongoing wedding lottery.

Her next book Bring Up the Bodies covers the rest of Henry's calamitous marriage to Anne and his growing infatuation with Jane Seymour. Despite the high drama of the actual historical events, fodder for innumerable retellings historical and dramatic (I remember enjoying the film Anne of a Thousand Days long, long ago - it was panned by the critics, but I was young then and probably easier pleased than I would be today) Bring Up the Bodies was surprisingly unengaging. Perhaps it was because the focal character - Thomas Cromwell - was himself in a reasonably secure position during that period, so it lacked the propulsive forces of vulnerability and peril that, though I probably should be ashamed to admit it, usually work well enough for me. To be fair, Mantel is a very witty writer and flashes of that do appear in this book, though not as often as in the first one. Mantel is projecting a trilogy, and if we cheat and look ahead in the history books, Thomas Cromwell's further career ends up parlous indeed - so I will definitely give the author another chance when it comes out!

Sexy Graffiti near MIT

I heard that it's been there several years.

Younger Dryas Impact?

The Younger Dryas was a cold period about 12,000 years ago that lasted about a thousand years. The previous ice age had seemingly ended, but then the Younger Dryas was a return to cold conditions. Many large animals became extinct around that time, possibly because of the rapidly changing climate.
There is a controversial hypothesis that the Younger Dryas was caused by an extraterrestrial impact. See Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling for the original article in PNAS (2007). The controversy peaked with this highly skeptical article Mammoth-Killer Impact Flunks Out in Science (2010).

After a new study failed to find nanodiamonds, impact experts are flatly rejecting outsiders' claims that an impact 12,900 years ago devastated the megafauna.

However the proponents of the impact hypothesis have not surrendered! Evidence from central Mexico supporting the Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact hypothesis in PNAS (2012) details new evidence from lake sediments in Mexico.

Fiona Apple

Fiona Apple is promoting a new album and her recent performance received a good review at the New York Times: Fiona Apple Returns to the Faithful.
She also has the most charming collection of music videos. Here are my favorites.

That Obscure Object of Confusion

I just watched Luis Buñuel's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Even I couldn't help noticing that the character Conchita (the obscure object of desire) was played by two different actresses Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina. The first time I noticed this, one actress leaves, another one returns, but all the other characters don't seem to notice the difference. What the hell was going on? Strangely enough, I quit noticing the difference too! I can recall the first scene in which I noticed the switch but after that, I didn't notice the further switching at all! In the script, there really was only one character. As an experiment, the filmmakers just chose to use two different actresses for the same part and exchanged them seemingly at random.
Even more weirdly, the two actresses don't really look much alike!

Walter Lewin at ESG

I had the pleasure of lunch today at MIT's Experimental Study Group (ESG). The special guest was Walter Lewin a retired MIT astrophysicist known for his popular online physics courses.
Professor Lewin is 76 but he still has a very sharp wit, however the MIT undergraduates were no slouches either.
He was asked, "What do you tell a student who doesn't like physics?"
"Well, I can tell you that they had a lousy teacher. That's the only possible reason. I can make anyone like physics. I can make a dog like physics."
Laughter from the students.
After being peppered with questions from the students for a half or hour or more, he was asked, "Do you have a favorite area of physics?"
"No."
"A least favorite area of physics?"
"Thermodynamics, I hate it"
"Did you have a lousy teacher?"
Everyone laughed including Professor Lewin.

Professor Lewin has a new book out For the Love of Physics.

Did Herman Weyl really prefer Beauty to Truth?

There's a famous quotation attributed to the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl:

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

Contemporary physicists (in particular String Theorists) have been known to go on about how "beautiful" they find some theory (typically their own haha) especially when hard evidence to support that theory is nowhere in sight. There's usually a kind of tacit implication that the expositor is better in touch with the mysteries of the cosmos than the great unwashed who don't appreciate the "beauty" of their revolutionary new theory. After all the great Weyl valued Beauty over Truth didn't he? Peter Woit points out in a recent blog post Dyson on Fringe Physics, String Cosmology and Hermann Weyl that the context of that quote is quite significant and it's more than a little misleading to take it out of that context. It was published in a paper by Freeman Dyson in Nature on the occasion of Weyl's passing:

Characteristic of Weyl was an aesthetic sense which dominated his thinking on all subjects. He once said to me, half joking, ‘My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful’. This remark sums up his personality perfectly. It shows his profound faith in an ultimate harmony of Nature, in which the laws should inevitably express themselves in a mathematically beautiful form. It shows also his recognition of human frailty, and his humor, which always stopped him short of being pompous.

A particular example of this was Weyl's gauge theory of gravity, which turned out to be fatally flawed, but which he was reluctant to abandon because of its beauty. As it turns out, some of the principles that he used in this unworkable theory of gravity found use later on in other areas of physics. However, just because Weyl liked one of his theories that didn't work out at first, but some of the ideas later proved to be useful, doesn't mean the odds are particularly good at all for contemporary theorists with pet theories they claim to be beautiful. The libraries have aisles and aisles full of journals and dissertations which haven't turned out to be significant and it's extremely likely that the vast majority of them will never turn out to significant, not least because they often contradict each other!
The rest of Woit's blog post is worth reading too, as usual.

Randomness on Your Next Chip?

Generating truly random numbers is actually quite tricky. Intel has announced that its next generation of computer chips, Ivy Bridge will have a new instruction RDRAND which will quickly generate a random number for you right on the processor chip - nice huh. But how random will it be? That may depend on how you want to use the random numbers. One very demanding application is cryptography. Most cryptographic protocols require a very high quality source of random numbers. Is the output generated by Intel's new RDRAND instruction good enough for cryptography purposes? The devil is in the details and the most detailed source of information I could find is this Intel document: Bull Mountain Software Implementation Guide. According to that document the random number is generated in three stages:
1. A Hardware Entropy Source
2. A Conditioner which distills the entropy into high-quality nondeterministic random numbers
3. A deterministic random bit generator which is seeded from the conditioner

The entropy source uses thermal noise within the chip's silicon to output a random stream of 0's and 1's.
The conditioner takes pairs of 256-bit samples from the entropy source and algorithmically combines them into a single 256-bit number which is supposed to be even "more random" than the bits generated by the hardware.
The deterministic random bit generator or DRBG "spreads" that 256-bit conditioned number into as many as 511 128-bit samples.

The DRBG they used is called CTR_DRBG, which defined in section 10.2.1 of the following pdf document from NIST: Recommendation for Random Number Generation Using Deterministic Random Bit Generators. Intel uses the AES block cipher option.

Intel has filed a US patent application, number 20100332574, here's a link to the USPTO page for the application and a link to another patent web site, faq.org which I found a bit easier to use.

The Intel Bull Mountain document has a section titled "Guaranteeing DBRG Reseeding"

Some may furthermore feel it necessary, for standards compliance, to demand an absolute guarantee that values returned by RdRand reflect independent entropy samples within the DRNG

which goes on to list a couple of techniques

to guarantee that the random value returned is based on an entropy sample independent from the prior function invocation, and independent from the subsequent function invocation

which may enable one to circumvent the DRBG.

Here's another skeptical discussion of using RdRand in cryptography: RDRAND and Is it possible to protect against malicious hw accelerators?

Too bad, it might have been nice if the raw hardware entropy source was directly available, so that applications could test and manipulate it directly.

The Schneier on Security blog from September 2011 has extensive comments on the new Intel random number generator.

Intel’s Digital Random Number Generator (DRNG) from some members of the Intel team contains some nice slides explaining the architecture.

Conceptual Foundations of the Ivy Bridge Random Number Generator by Jesse Walker of Intel Labs provides slides discussing some of the theory.

I'm working on a web site dedicated to the Intel RdRand facility, currently there's a glossary and bibliography, I'm also working on an article about using RdRand in cryptography which I will post there.

Manta Trust

Giant Mantas are my favorite creatures of the sea, here's a photo one of my favorite encounters from 2010:
photo by Sten Johansson
I just learned about the web site Manta Trust from Daniel Fernando, who I met in Sri Lanka last year. Daniel is a marine biologist and is very knowledgeable and dedicated to manta conservation. He is based in Sri Lanka - a beautiful country which has abundant and varied marine life but limited resources at this point in its development and history.


The Manta Trust web site is an excellent source of information about manta rays and conservation.
Here's one of my previous blog posts on mantas.

An Opinion about Standing Armies

According to Issacson's biography of Franklin, Old Ben wasn't the only wit at the 1787 Constitutional Convention:

A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

--- Elbridge Gerry

Ben Franklin Biography

I just finished Walter Issacson's highly entertaining biography of Benjamin Franklin.

One month before his death at age 85, Franklin - who had suffered poor health for several years and knew he did not have long to live - wrote about his religious beliefs with his usual good humor:

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity: tho' it is a Question I do not dogmatise upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble

Supercontinent formation and True Polar Wander

There have been several periods in the history of this planet when all the continents have united in a single supercontinent. The most recent occasion was the supercontinent Pangaea, which began to break up 175 million years ago with the formation of the proto-Atlantic Ocean.
Map of Pangaea

Not only do the continents move around relative to one another, the entire solid earth may shift with respect to the earth's axis of rotation: True Polar Wander (TPW). The article Absolute plate motions and true polar wander in the absence of hotspot tracks in Nature (2008) discusses the evidence for TPW at the time of the formation of Pangaea, 300 million years ago.

Supercontinent cycles and the calculation of absolute palaeolongitude in deep time, also in Nature(2012), outlines a far-reaching theory that tries to explain where and how a new supercontinent forms in relation to the previous supercontinent in the cycle. The next supercontinent is conjectured to be Amasia which may form due to the closing of the Arctic and Caribbean seas.

She chills me out - thanks to my oxytocin receptor gene

Can your girlfriend help chill you out before some stressful activity? It probably depends on whether you have the G allele of the rs53576 single nucleotide polymorphism of the oxytocin receptor gene, according to this study in PNAS: Common oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) polymorphism and social support interact to reduce stress in humans . See a previous blog post You're Nice, He's a Jerk - is it because of your Oxycotin receptor genes? for more fascinating research about the behavioral differences attributed to different variants of this gene.

Step up to the bar - the Milky Way bar

Apparently there's a bar/box shaped concentration of stars in the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

This central bar is oriented about 20 degrees from our line of sight to the center of the galaxy - so the diagram above doesn't look quite right to me. The bar seems to rotate like a cylinder - rigidly. This type of structure is typical of many galaxies, not just ours. There's evidence that our bar is a fairly uniform population, there's no real evidence of recent mergers. That's inconsistent with a model of galaxy formation by merger, which seemed to work well for elliptical galaxies. Our Milky Way is a barred spiral - different from ellipticals - but it was thought for a while that the central bulge of spirals might have formed a similar manner. Now that no longer appears to be true.
For some scientific details see The Bulge Radial Velocity Assay (BRAVA): II. Complete Sample and Data Release and OUR MILKY WAY AS A PURE-DISK GALAXY—A CHALLENGE FOR GALAXY FORMATION.

Magma

Magma is melted rock, when it reaches the surface it's called lava. Magma comes from deep underground where it's much hotter, so the rock down there is melted, isn't it? Well not really. Beneath the earth's crust is the mantle and it's by and large solid too. The difference between the crust and the mantle is mainly chemical, they are both solid.
So then, where does magma come from, how does all that rock melt and create such appalling displays at volcanic eruptions?

As it turns out, magma forms by decompression melting. Not only is the temperature higher deep underground in the mantle, the pressure is also terrifically greater. We usually think of solids melting when the temperature rises, but they can also melt when the pressure decreases. Peridotite the mantle rock, is solid at the high pressures and temperatures found down in the mantle, but it will melt when the pressure is released by an opening to the surface - a volcano.

The Mid-Pleistocene Transition

Before 1.2 million years ago, glacial cycles had a 40,000 year periodicity. But in the past 700,000 years the ice-age cycle has been around 100,000 years. There was a transitional period in between. See Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration Across the Mid-Pleistocene Transition from 2009 in Science magazine. There is a 41,000 year periodicity in the earth's orbit which could explain the earlier periodicity (see Milankovitch cycles), but the the transition to the more recent 100,000 year cycle is currently rather mysterious.

Type Ia Supernovae and the discovery of Cosmic Acceleration

It's not so easy to figure out the distance to far away objects in the sky - see an older post on the cosmic distance ladder. However, it's possible for even beginning astronomy students to climb the First Three Rungs of the Cosmological Distance Ladder. The top of the ladder isn't so easy though. The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae". A key element of that discovery was the use of Type Ia supernova to determine distances. Type Ia supernova are supposed to the explosion of a white dwarf star, conveniently it seems to be possible to determine the absolute luminosity of those explosions, which indicates the actual distance.

The preprint Type Ia Supernovae and the discovery of the Cosmic Acceleration is a nice explanation of the history of this discovery by Alejandro Clocchiatti a member of one of the groups which made the discovery - the High-z Supernova Search Team.

Kepler's supernova

Hank Paulson: Facts and Figures - or Fiction?

Henry Paulson has had a distinguished career as CEO of Goldman Sachs and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush. As Treasury Secretary he was a key figure in the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
He's also known as an avid nature lover. In the article Birds and Bankers in the New Yorker he's quoted as saying, "The Amazon dumps enough fresh water in the ocean every hour to fill one Lake Superior.”
However, according to Wikipedia:
the water volume of Lake Superior is 12,000 cubic kilometers;
the average discharge of the Amazon River is approximately 209,000 cubic meters per second.
Based on those figures, according to my calculations it would actually take approximately 15,948 hours (1.82 years) for the Amazon River to discharge enough fresh water to fill Lake Superior.
I hope Secretary Paulson had superior sources of information while discharging his duties during the financial crisis.

You're Nice, He's a Jerk - is it because of your Oxycotin receptor genes?

A study published in PNAS: Thin-slicing study of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene and the evaluation and expression of the prosocial disposition indicates that individual differences in social behavior are correlated with variants of their Oxycotin receptor genes. Previously, another study in PNAS: Oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) is related to psychological resources indicated that variation in this gene was also related to other personality traits. Forget about horoscopes, find out whether your potential mate has the A or G allele of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) SNP rs53576!
Oxytocin is the "love hormone" associated with maternal and sexual behavior.

Gliding Along the Alps for Eleven Hours

Did You Wonder How a Plane Stayed Up for 11 Hours With No Engine? an article by James Fallows about the flight in The Atlantic.

Hedy Lamarr - Screen Siren and Inventor

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

Hedy Lamarr was a glamorous Hollywood actress and the inventor of frequency hopping, the basic technique used in wireless communication. Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World is a new book by Richard Rhodes the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The new book is reviewed in Slate: The Inventor in Hollywood; in Nature: Technology: Inventing beauty.

Allergies

There's a special section on Allergies in Nature magazine this week. That holds special interest for me personally since I'm allergy prone. I've been violently allergic to eggs since I was an infant - for example, I can't have vaccinations cultured with eggs including flu vaccines. When I was 19, before I knew that some vaccinations were cultured in eggs, I received one and then spent a week in the MIT infirmary - I needed two shots every 15 minutes for the first 36 hours just to keep me alive - ouch!
I had asthma as a child, but grew out of it. I developed an allergy to cats and many other furry animals (but not dogs) while in college - I would walk into a room with a cat and in seconds start sneezing and rubbing my eyes. But that's been much less severe since my early forties. I developed hay fever in my mid-thirties which persists but it seems to be getting somewhat less severe. I also seem to have developed allergies to kiwis and avocados, both of which I loved growing up, both of which I unknowingly ate mixed with eggs (kiwi sherbert and guacamole) during my thirties and ever since have experienced strong reactions.

Atophy: Marching with allergies in Nature is written by an individual tormented by a wide array of allergies. The author also suffered from chronic eczema, one annoyance I've been mercifully spared.


Food: Picky eaters discusses food allergies, including the possibility of creating tolerance by ingesting tiny amounts of the allergen and gradually increasing the dosage.

How do porcupines make love?

This riddle appears in the 1987 film Black Widow starring Debra Winger and Theresa Russell.
The two main characters are: women; formidable adversaries; and they are stronger and more clever then the men in the story. They use men to further their goals - kindly in one instance, cruelly in another - but they control their own destinies.
Any other good examples of stories - filmed or written - along those lines?




The article How do porcupines make love? from Annals of Improbable Research, reveals the punch line to the joke and then goes on to detail the actual mating behavior of these mammals - your previous ignorance of you may come to cherish.




When I was a little kid, nine or so, I had heard the f-word, realized of course, it was probably something naughty, but didn't yet know the actual definition. I finally asked another kid, who disdainfully outlined the concept. "Oh," I responded, "you mean copulation?"

Leonardo's Rule

Leonardo da Vinci observed that

all the branches of a tree at every stage of its height when
put together are equal in thickness to the trunk

There have been various attempts to explain that, involving the tree's vascular system for example. The preprint Leonardo's rule, self-similarity and wind-induced stresses in trees votes for wind resistance. See also Leonardo's Formula Explains Why Trees Don't Splinter at Science Now.

Occupy Harvard ... Not

Harvard Security checking ID's at the entrance to Harvard Yard - the first time I've noticed this in years living in the Harvard Square area.

Enter to Grow in Wisdom - but the gate is locked haha - it's usually open, at least during the daytime

Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays

Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays hit the earth's atmosphere with energies millions of times higher than the most powerful man-made particle accelerator (the LHC). When these cosmic rays slam into the atmosphere, they create an air shower of up to billions of secondary particles which can be detected on the ground. They also generate a streak of ultraviolet light bright enough (barely) to be detected on the ground in ideal conditions. There are two amazing detector arrays: the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina; and the Telescope Array Project in Utah, which are currently collecting data using vast arrays of detectors. The recent preprint Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays reviews the latest data gathered by these two observatories. One of the main unresolved questions is the source of these fantastically energetic particles - which particles are produced within our own Milky Way galaxy and which are extragalactic.

Nonlocal Correlations without Alignment or Calibration

Nonlocal correlations are one of the spookiest things about quantum mechanics. Einstein didn't much care for quantum mechanics, he tried to show that quantum mechanics was inconsistent with his special theory of relativity with the EPR paradox. While thought provoking, the EPR paradox did not end up being viewed as a fatal flaw for quantum mechanics.
Experimental schemes for actually testing quantum nonlocality have required quite a bit of alignment and calibration of different parts of the experiment which might make a skeptic wonder if such experiments really are an ironclad test of nonlocality. The preprint Guaranteed violation of a Bell inequality without aligned reference frames or calibrated devices is a clever test of quantum nonlocality which doesn't require a lot of the alignment and calibration steps used in other approaches.

Einstein and controversy in Weimar Germany

Einstein's theory of general relativity was astonishingly controversial around 1920, even at the level of the general public. Einstein was caught up in the politics and anti-semitism rampant in Germany at the time. See the preprint Reactionaries and Einstein's Fame: "German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science," Relativity, and the Bad Nauheim Meeting
Cut with a kitchen knife, Dada through the last Weimar beer belly culture of Germany, 1919/1920 - Hannah Höch

Spacecraft Navigation by Pulsar

Currently spacecraft find their position and velocity using radio signals sent back and forth from earth-based antennas. That's quite accurate for the components of position and velocity in the direction of earth, but in other directions the accuracy is not so good. The authors of the preprint Autonomous Spacecraft Navigation Based on Pulsar Timing Information propose using an x-ray telescope onboard the spacecraft to track the signals emitted by pulsars, which rival atomic clocks in accuracy. New models of x-ray telescopes are getting small and accurate enough to find the position and velocity of a spacecraft more accurately than an earth-based system, for interplanetary missions when the spacecraft is more than 1AU from earth.

Puzzling Star Formation Rates in Galaxies

The rate at which stars form in Galaxies is expected to decrease with time. The spectral lines in more distant galaxies are shifted to the red end of the spectrum. The light from very distant galaxies left in the distant past, so we would expect that the star formation rate in galaxies with high redshift should increase. That does not appear to be the case: On the puzzling plateau in the specific star formation rate at z=2-7

A Dramatic Demonstration of the Power of Mental Frames

by Simon Singh

The Local Leo Cold Cloud

I've been fascinated with the Local Bubble, a region nearly empty of stars containing hot but low-density gas within the Milky Way near our Sun. Especially since it appears that the mysterious object Geminga, a radio-quiet x-ray plusar, might be the cause of this bubble. The preprint The Local Leo Cold Cloud and New Limits on a Local Hot Bubble describes a very cold cloud of gas within the Local Bubble - Curiouser and Curiouser.

Robot Bird Video

Balance Sheet Recession

What is a balance sheet recession and is the US in one?
Richard Koo: How the West is Repeating Japan's Mistakes.

Argon on Venus

There is Too much argon 40 on the moon (a recent blog post) and argon in the atmosphere of Venus is hard to understand as well. In both lunar rocks and the atmosphere of Venus the Argon 40/argon 36 ratio is 1:1 while in the atmosphere of Earth argon 40 is 99.6%.

See also 40Ar retention in the terrestrial planets and Geochemistry: Earth holds its breath in Nature 2007.

Star Clusters

Families of dynamically hot stellar systems over ten orders of magnitude in mass is a survey of star clusters in size from a few hundred to giant elliptical galaxies with a trillion stars.

Too much argon 40 on the moon

The decay of radioactive isotope potassium 40 to argon 40 is one of the main ways of finding the age of rocks: see Potassium-argon dating at Wikipedia.
But on the moon, the Apollo missions found much more argon 40 than could be explained by potassium decay. Other explanations don't look so great either, see: On the question of the 40Ar excess in lunar soils.

Globular clusters have little dark matter

Apparently globular clusters have little or no dark matter:
Evidence Against Dark Matter Halos Surrounding the Globular Clusters MGC1 and NGC 2419. This preprint also finds the motion of stars in these globular clusters is consistent with Newtonian gravity and not MOND, even though the clusters are in the low acceleration range in which MOND is supposed to make a difference. However previous see the blog post Velocities in Globular Clusters for a report that MOND does work in GCs!
Maybe globular clusters originated as the nuclear cluster of a galaxy: the preprint Nuclear Star Clusters mentions this as a possibility while discussing the star clusters at the center of galaxies.

In contrast Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are dark matter dominated.

The Gamma Ray bubbles of the Milky Way

NASA's Fermi Telescope Finds Giant Structure in our Galaxy

Here's the preprint announcing the discovery: Giant Gamma-ray Bubbles from Fermi-LAT: AGN Activity or Bipolar Galactic Wind?.

These bubbles are gigantic and may have been created by an episode of Galactic center activity 1-2 Mya Fermi Bubbles: Evidence for a Possible Recent AGN Jet Activity in the Galaxy.

On the other hand maybe they are really, really old! The Fermi Bubbles: Giant, Multi-Billion-Year-Old Reservoirs of Galactic Center Cosmic Rays

Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays

Here's a nice review preprint: Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays.

The Missing Satellites Problem

The standard of model of the cosmology Lambda-CDM predicts that our Milky Way galaxy should have many more satellite galaxies than we actually see: Dwarf Galaxy Problem. It could be that some are actually missing or perhaps they are fainter than expected and hard to detect. See the preprints Notes on the Missing Satellites Problem for a review and also Too big to fail? The puzzling darkness of massive Milky Way subhalos.

Guarding the Germline

The great apes (humans, gorillas and chimps) are able to reproduce for many decades -longer than other primates. Researchers have discovered a genetic change which is active in human testis that helps guard the genome and ensure the quality of sperm. See the original report Endogenous retrovirus drives hitherto unknown proapoptotic p63 isoforms in the male germ line of humans and great apes in PNAS and Those retroviruses get everywhere at the MicrobiologyBytes blog.
It wasn't clear to me if this also occurs in Orangutans, the paper said the change occurred about 15 million years ago and the Orangutans diverged 12-16Mya Comparative and demographic analysis of orang-utan genomes. Female orangutans are fertile for 30 years, fairly similar to human females. What about the males?

Modified Gravity works well for Gas Rich Galaxies

The motion of stars and gas in galaxies surprisingly is not so easily explained by the gravity they produce. They tend to follow flat rotation curves - after a certain distance the velocity tends to be the same whether a star is nearer or farther from the center of the galaxy. It had been expected that more distant stars and gas would be moving slower. The most popular explanation for this is dark matter , that 80% of the mass of galaxies like our Milky Way is some new unseen form that doesn't interact much, except by gravity. Another possible explanation is MOND, a theory that modifies gravity when it is very weak. A recent preprint shows that MOND works very well for gas-rich galaxies while dark matter is rather less natural and convincing: A Novel Test of the Modified Newtonian Dynamics with Gas Rich Galaxies.

An Unusual Earlier Ice Age

There was an earlier ice age in the southern supercontinent Gondwana at the boundary between the Ordovician and Silurian periods around 445 million years ago. This ice age was unusual in that it occurred while CO2 levels were high and also coincided with a major extinction event. See The Magnitude and Duration of Late Ordovician–Early Silurian Glaciation in Science.

Video of Mantis Shrimp doing Somersaults!

From the underwater filming experts Scubazoo.
See also Mantis Shrimps are Really, Really Cute and New Form of Vision Discovered for more about mantis shrimps.

The Downsizing Problem for Galaxies

It was commonly thought that galaxies form and grow larger by mergers of smaller masses. However, it has been observed that galaxies with high redshifts (which indicates that they are being observed at an early time) are on average larger than galaxies at low redshifts. This is the Downsizing Problem. The preprints Feedback in Galaxy Formation and The Many Manifestations of Downsizing: Hierarchical Galaxy Formation Models confront Observations discuss this and other problems in galaxy formation theory.

Polar Ring Galaxies

Polar Ring Galaxies have a large ring of material perpendicular to the main galaxy. See also Polar Disk Galaxy found in Wall between Voids.

Source: Hubblesite.org

Another Void Model of Cosmic Acceleration

Supernovae observations published in 1998 surprisingly indicated that the expansion of the universe is accelerating - with the standard explanation being Dark Energy. A very different explanation for this acceleration is the possibility that we are near the center of a gigantic void in the distribution of galaxies. Many such Voids (smaller, but still mind-bogglingly large themselves) have been found. The preprint Reconciling the local void with the CMB elaborates on earlier proposals by relaxing the assumption that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is scale-invariant.
Here's an earlier blog post on this topic: Void Models of Cosmic Acceleration.

Ghost Imaging

Quantum effects are sometimes very strange and occasionally even useful. Ghost imaging is a particularly bizarre example. It's possible to create an image using pairs of photons. One photon is sent to the subject and the other is sent to the camera. An image of the subject is created using the photon which is received by the camera - even though that photon was never anywhere near the subject! This is possible because of the (weird) quantum nature of photons. Here's a blog post that discusses recent research in which the photon source is classical instead of quantum - supposedly you can even use sunlight. Making ghost images by getting sunlight to act quantum

Neandertals Cooked

Neandertals have often been characterized as highly carnivorous but now it appears that they ate a variety of plant foods and even cooked them: Microfossils in calculus demonstrate consumption of plants and cooked foods in Neanderthal diets at PNAS and here's a link to the full paper.

Top Quark Asymmetry

There are six quarks in the standard model of physics, the heaviest is the top quark. The Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois had earlier detected an unexpected asymmetry in top quark/antiquark production, but it wasn't overwhelmingly significant statistically speaking. New results in 2011 are more significant - see this preprint: Evidence for a Mass Dependent Forward-Backward Asymmetry in Top Quark Pair Production . There's a discussion at the Résonaances blog.

Motion Blinds Change Awareness

Motion Silences Awareness of Visual Change

One Way Ticket to Mars

Getting to the planet Mars isn't so difficult, as it turns out - it's coming back that's hard. Are you you willing to permanently relocate? To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars discusses the possibilities.

Extinctions and Ocean Anoxia

There were a series of massive extinctions during the Cambrian period around 500 million years ago, the period when the first modern animals are found. There is new evidence that the extinctions coincided with dramatic decreases in ocean oxygen levels: Biogeochemistry: Toxic Cambrian oceans in Nature.

Hubble pictures of Hanny

Hubble Zooms in on a Space Oddity has better images of Hanny's Voorwerp.

The Flood Myth

There's a big flood in the book of Genesis as well as other cultures: Flood myth. One hypothesis is that those stories originated from the time when the Black Sea basin was mainly dry land: Black Sea deluge theory at Wikipedia and The Search for Noah's Flood at National Geographic. Here's another possibility: Lost Civilization May Have Existed Beneath the Persian Gulf. During the last Ice Age the Persian Gulf was dry land and may have been heavily settled. Maybe the flooding there as water levels rose at the end of the Ice Age was the origin of the stories?

Renormalization

Quantum Field Theory (QFT)is the basic framework for both particle physics and condensed matter physics. However, disturbingly, QFT calculations are plagued by unwanted infinities. All too often, when we use the theory to calculate some observable property - for example, the mass of a particle - our calculation diverges, there is no finite solution. This can't be a good thing, especially when we find in our laboratories that the mass of that particle is indeed finite. Ordinarily, this would seem like a really good reason to throw up our hands and find ourselves a better theory. But theoretical physicists are made of sterner stuff. Whenever they stumble across one of these infinities they simply use the actual observed laboratory value instead. They then proceed with their calculations until they hit another observable infinity and do it again. For certain happy theories, clever people have proved that it's only necessary to resort to the process of kludging in laboratory values a finite number of times. The theory is then said to be renormalizable and the lucky physicist who creates such a theory may well get a Nobel Prize. Steven Weinberg got his Nobel Prize after the theory of electroweak interactions which he helped create was shown to be renormalizable. In the 2009 preprint Living with Infinities Weinberg discusses the problems with infinities in QFT.

Hanny's Voorwerp

Hanny's Voorwerp is mysterious green object found by an amateur during the Galaxy Zoo project, which enlists the public to help classify galaxies over the internet.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080625.html

Replication Fall Offs

The replication of experimental results is a fundamental part of the scientific process. If you get some interesting results, someone else should try it too, to make sure what you got wasn't just a fluke. The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method? in the New Yorker documents many examples of scientific research in which there was an initial report of significance, followed by a sequence of replication attempts which yielded poor confirmation. Many of these cases were in medicine and psychology, fields in which experimental trials are extremely difficult and expensive.
This really isn't surprising at all. Scientific research is now a major industry. Thousands upon thousands of people are out there racking their brains to come up with new results. Each individual may try and discard dozens or hundreds of ideas before stumbling across something interesting and apparently significant. Now let's imagine a million people around the world are flipping coins every day. On some days, some of the flippers will get a very skewed outcome. A tiny number of people might even get a skewed result several days in a row. But if they keep trying to "replicate" their results, they will eventually find that the significance falls off due to a regression toward the mean. Alas, despite all the training and talent that goes into science, most of the novel ideas researchers try out will not end up being significant. But when thousands of insignificant ideas are tested, a small percentage will end up looking good - initially. Researchers are paid to get results, they will keep trying new ideas until they get a skewed result. But was that result truly significant, or was it just a statistical fluke? There are billions of circuit elements following Ohm's law in the computer I'm typing this with - that's not a statistical fluke. Some scientific results have been tested and replicated an astronomical number of times, especially when they prove useful in technology. But it shouldn't be surprising if difficult experiments - especially involving complicated living organisms - often prove to be disappointing despite some initial promise.
The Journal of Irreproducible Results collects science humor. Some of the examples in the New Yorker article aren't too funny however, especially in the medical field.

Human Activity and Fires

Humans cause fires, right? Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires! It might seem that in places and times with less human presence and activity there should be fewer fires. But there is now evidence to the contrary: The Burning Issue in Science reports that evidence from Antarctic ice cores shows declining levels of fire in the Southern Hemisphere until the 1600's, followed by a dramatic peak in the 1800's and now unprecedented low levels of burning.

Origins of Life at Higher Temperatures

Modern biology depends on an intricate web of chemical reactions, many of which are vastly accelerated by enzymes, which themselves are typically large molecules made by complicated machinery. How did this extraordinary network manage to evolve from a nonliving environment? This paper in PNAS, The Impact of temperature on the time required for the establishment of primordial biochemistry, and for the evolution of enzymes, points out in that many important biochemical reactions proceed much faster in higher temperature environments, which might have been typical in the early earth.

Sipidan

I've been scuba diving at Sipidan in Malaysia for five weeks now. Some of the highlights have included: swimming in the middle of school of 80 bumphead parrotfish, helping my dive guide Niger rescue a sea turtle which had a rope tied to its arms (today), watching two tiny (3 cm) cuttlefish apparently gobbling up even tinier shrimp by shooting out a long thin retractable tentacle out from the midst of their other tentacles (yesterday).
Allister Lee's blog Aquatastic has lots of nice pictures of Sipidan.

Money Spoils the Fun

People will do some things just for the fun of it. What happens if you provide a financial reward for the same task? The task in this case is to try to press a button exactly 5 seconds after a cue. This study shows that that the financial reward can undermine the appeal of a task people will do for fun: Neural basis of the undermining effect of monetary reward on intrinsic motivation and Removing financial incentives demotivates the brain

Entanglement at High Temperature

Entanglement is one of the most characteristic attributes of "quantum weirdness". Entangled systems are usually microscopic and low temperature. But when the system is not in thermal equilibrium, it should be possible to create entanglement at higher temperatures. Applications may include photosynthesis and perhaps even practical devices some day. See Quantum physics: Hot entanglement in Nature.

Is there a problem with Quantum Theory?

Jeremy Bernstein recounts the history of controversies in the interpretation of quantum theory in the preprint Dear Fellow Quantum Mechanics. In particular to we need to take a quantum/probabilistic view of past events as well as future ones? Creepy.

A New Kind of Robotic Gripper

Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material

How Cats Drink

I had always heard that the raspy hairs on the cat's tongue were what enabled it to lap up water so neatly. Not at all. The cat flicks the tip of its tongue into the water which shoots up a stream of water and the cat, with perfect timing, closes its jaws over the stream to capture it - four times a second! See For Cats, a Big Gulp With a Touch of the Tongue in The New York Times

Spidan Diving

I've been diving in Sipidan and Mabul in Malaysia for the past couple of days.  Two of the highlights were a purple hairy squat lobster (not a lobster but a tiny crab that lives on sponges and looks pretty much how it sounds) and a pair of sea moths or dragonfish, which at first glance look like a 3 cm long bit of scum sitting on the sand but are actually intricate little creatures under a cheap magnifying glass.

Atlantic Deep Water Reversal

Warm water sinks in the North Atlantic, forming a deep water current which flows southward at the bottom of the Atlantic all the way to Antarctica.  This has a profound effect on our climate - for example, contributing to the warm temperatures Europe enjoys despite its northernly latitude.  However, during the last Ice Age the deep Atlantic current may have actually been reversed, flowing instead from south to north.  See Reversed flow of Atlantic deep water during the Last Glacial Maximum in Nature.

Reionization Early Galaxies

According to the theory of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background was formed when then the temperature cooled so that that electrons and protons could combine to form atoms of neutral hydrogen. Currently however, the inter galactic medium consists mainly of ionized hydrogen gas.  When and how this gas became reionized is one of the biggest puzzles in current cosmology.    See Early star-forming galaxies and the reionization of the Universe in Nature.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

At the moment I'm in Kota Kinabula, Malaysia on the island of Borneo.  Earlier this afternoon I wandered into a little bookstore near my hotel, browsed through the classics section and idly picked up a copy of  The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe, which is often credited as one of the earliest detective stories.  I just read it.  If you, dear detective, browse back a few posts in this blog, you may be able to perceive a tiny bit of a correlation between that story and my own recent activities.  The correlation was not premeditated:   I'm not sure if I've actually read Poe's story before, - but if I did, it was long ago and I definitely didn't remember the pertinent coincidence, because I was amusing myself by trying to figure out the mystery as the story went along. 

Unintuitive Mathematics

Some mathematical methods can seem rather unintuitive in practice and worse, sometimes yield startling and uninintuive results - for example Goedel's incompleteness theorem and Cantorian set theory.  Terence Tao continues his discussion of mathematical techniques in The “no self-defeating object” argument, and the vagueness paradox.

Why Medical Studies are Often Wrong

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science in the Atlantic Magazine.
Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.

A Clever Auto Security Attack

An electronic car lock jammer (inexpensive and readily available) can be used by thieves to prevent a car owner from locking their car.  After the owner leaves the vicinity of their  unlockable car, the robbers collect any valuables left inside.  See Thieves jam key-fob lock signals in mystery car thefts:  Tech-savvy blaggers lift swag leaving windows intact

Problem Solving Strategies in Real Analysis

Fields medallist Terence Tao let's us in on his problem solving strategies - many of which are specific to the subject he was teaching, Real Analysis, but some of them are more generic. 

Orangutans

I just spent a week at an Orangutan sanctuary in Malaysia. Unsurprisingly, they have a great sense of balance - Harry was standing on my arms waving his hands in the air with the greatest of ease, somewhere in between these frames alas.

Dunster House at Sunset

Gravitational Lensing

One of the most intriguing predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity, is that light rays are bent by massive objects.  For example, if two galaxies are closely lined up from our point of view, the foreground galaxy can magnify the image of the background galaxy or create multiple images, etc.   The source for the gravity of the foreground object could even be the mysterious substance "Dark matter".  Hence gravitational lensing is a tool that can tell us something about the distribution of Dark matter - see the preprint Gravitational Lensing

Quantum Theory and Relativity

There are subtle issues with the compatability of the two workhorse theories of contemporary physics:  special relativity and quantum mechanics.  The EPR paradox from the 1930's (the E stands for Einstein)  and Bell's Theorem from the 1960's are two of the classic examples.  The weight of suspicion often tends to fall on the quantum side.  Einstein, notably unenthusiastic about the fundamental role of probability in quantum mechanics,  believed that "God does not throw dice".  John Bell, when asked if quantum mechanics could be wrong replied, "I hesitated to think it might be wrong;  but I knew it was rotten".  Nonetheless quantum mechanics has turned out to be fantastically accurate and the basis for much our current understanding of matter and radiation - likewise for special relativity.  The preprint Can quantum theory and special relativity peacefully coexist? discusses the issues.

Sunrise Mystic River Bridge

Moonrise Over East Cambridge

UFO Over Harvard

UFO Over Harvard, October 11, 2010, 6:52pm

Taken from my place looking west.  I might have been shooting through a closed window, not sure.  I didn't notice the "UFO" at the time and it didn't appear in the previous or the next frames, taken at the same place and direction with minutes.  The crescent moon was also near the horizon just outside the frame to the left.  What was it?

Counterfactual Reasoning in Mathematics

In mathematics, we often assume something (not P), show that it leads to a logical contradiction, and then conclude that P is in fact true.  Mathematician Terence Tao has an interesting discussion of proof by contradiction and related techniques in The “no self-defeating object” argument, revisited.

Void Models of Cosmic Acceleration

Spatial and temporal tuning in void models for acceleration is another preprint that makes the Void model appear rather contrived.  Here a couple of my previous posts on the topic:  A Vote for the Copernican Principle and The Copernican Principle.

À rebours

I recently stumbled upon the "decadent" 1884 novel À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans - a character in the book collects Redon paintings (see also my previous post). 

The illustrations by Arthur Zaidenberg are scanned from the 1931 Illustrated Editions issue of A Rebours.

The protagonist has gemstones set in the back of a tortoise, which causes its death.

Odilon Redon





Ophelia among the flowers

   

My whole originality, therefore,

consists in having made improbable beings live humanly

according to the laws of the probable,

by as far as possible putting the logic of the visible

at the service of the invisible.

-ODILON REDON (1898)

Crying Spider - Smiling Spider.