Hindsight is a wonderful thing-
have a look at this quote by the physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Abraham Michelson (born 19th Dec, 1852)-
“The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.”
- he made this comment in 1903, two years before Albert Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity....
Friday, 29 April 2011
Saturday, 23 April 2011
Hedgehogs
Welcome (back) to Weirdbeautiful.
By the time you read this post, I hope to be half way up a Swiss Alp, taking pictures of pretty much anything weird or beautiful, floral or fauna-l. Pictures will be posted on here when I get back. In the meantime, there's just one link I want to post today; to an old newspaper story (new to weirdbeautiful but published in 2008); mainly the link is because of the baby hedgehog picture at the top of the article-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1935609/Hedgehogs-arrive-early-with-warm-weather.html
By the time you read this post, I hope to be half way up a Swiss Alp, taking pictures of pretty much anything weird or beautiful, floral or fauna-l. Pictures will be posted on here when I get back. In the meantime, there's just one link I want to post today; to an old newspaper story (new to weirdbeautiful but published in 2008); mainly the link is because of the baby hedgehog picture at the top of the article-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1935609/Hedgehogs-arrive-early-with-warm-weather.html
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
Jellyfish pictures and why we don't believe science
"Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow."
- Aesop
Welcome (back) to Weirdbeautiful
First link today is this set of jellyfish pictures that are both weird and beautiful at once-
http://www.designswan.com/archives/beautiful-monsters-from-the-white-sea-by-alexander-semenov.html
The second link is to an article called "The Science of Why we Don't Believe Science"- part psychology, part philosophy-of-science, it's an interesting read-
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney
Saturday, 16 April 2011
Nuthatches, Sniffer-Wasps and Antibiotics
(c) Iva Lee, 2011 | All rights reserved
Welcome (back) to Weirdbeautiful
Beautiful image of the day is this picture of a Brown-headed Nuthatch, Sitta pusilla, by the South Carolina photographer Iva Lee . The Brown-headed Nuthatch is a small songbird native to pine forests of the Southeastern USA- it is one of the smaller nuthatch species, measuring around 9cm (3.5 inches); the Eurasian Nuthatch, Sitta europaea, for example- the creature that is so loved by British twitchers- is a good 5cm (2 inches) larger.
Many thanks to Iva Lee for letting us this image on weirdbeautiful.
First weird link-of-the-day today is this article on sciencedaily.com on research by Dr Martin Kaltenpoth showing that wasps cultivate antibiotic-producing bacteria in special glands beside their antennae:-
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110411194823.htm
Sticking with the theme of wasps, today's second link is weirder still: an article claiming that because of their impressive sense of smell, wasps can be trained to sniff out explosives, toxic chemicals and food/crop mould...-
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2006/0702-wasps_mans_new_best_friend.htm
Monday, 28 March 2011
Little Green Bee-eaters (Merops orientalis) sandbathing, Gujarat Province, India. Picture by J. M. Garg. This image has a creative commons attribution 3.0 licence.
The Week, The Liben Lark and Using Snail Slime to Treat Wrinkles
Hi. Welcome (back) to Weirdbeautiful.
Quote of the week this week is from "The Week" the news-recapping magazine-
"Until last week, I'd never heard of the Liben lark, a diminutive songbird living in a remote corner of Southern Ethiopea, but its fate, according to the naturalist Michael McCarthy may mark "a milestone in our destruction of the planet". For there are now fewer than 100 Liben larks left and it's very likely that within five years, there'll be none....the Liben lark is set to become the first bird from Africa to go extinct in recorded history. McCarthy guesses that some 200 species of birds have disappeared over the last 500 years, from the dodo to the great auk. But mainland Africa is so vast and robust that "at least in ornithological terms, it has been able to soak up the punishment [that] we humans have increasingly inflicted on its ecosystems."....A week ago, the Ethiopean ambassador to London (sic) was presented with a cheque for £242,000 raised by last year's British Birdwatching Fair in Rutland, to fund general conservation work on the Liben plain...."
-Jolyon Connell published in The Week, 19th March 2011)
The Liben lark is also known as the Sidamo Lark, Heteromirafra sidamoensis. You can find out more about it [HERE].
Today's other link is both weird and- potentially beautiful- the use of Snail slime
as an anti-wrinkle cream.... Now admittedly, this was published in a tabloid newspaper, so I make no guarantees about its accuracy or truthfulness, but it is an interesting story-
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3493885/Snail-slime-cream-to-be-showcased-in-Milan.html
Quote of the week this week is from "The Week" the news-recapping magazine-
"Until last week, I'd never heard of the Liben lark, a diminutive songbird living in a remote corner of Southern Ethiopea, but its fate, according to the naturalist Michael McCarthy may mark "a milestone in our destruction of the planet". For there are now fewer than 100 Liben larks left and it's very likely that within five years, there'll be none....the Liben lark is set to become the first bird from Africa to go extinct in recorded history. McCarthy guesses that some 200 species of birds have disappeared over the last 500 years, from the dodo to the great auk. But mainland Africa is so vast and robust that "at least in ornithological terms, it has been able to soak up the punishment [that] we humans have increasingly inflicted on its ecosystems."....A week ago, the Ethiopean ambassador to London (sic) was presented with a cheque for £242,000 raised by last year's British Birdwatching Fair in Rutland, to fund general conservation work on the Liben plain...."
-Jolyon Connell published in The Week, 19th March 2011)
The Liben lark is also known as the Sidamo Lark, Heteromirafra sidamoensis. You can find out more about it [HERE].
Today's other link is both weird and- potentially beautiful- the use of Snail slime
as an anti-wrinkle cream.... Now admittedly, this was published in a tabloid newspaper, so I make no guarantees about its accuracy or truthfulness, but it is an interesting story-
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3493885/Snail-slime-cream-to-be-showcased-in-Milan.html
Monday, 14 March 2011
Science Communication, CNN and the Fukushima power plant incident
Hi. Welcome (back) to Weirdbeautiful
Today's first link is about the nuclear incident in Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan. The reason I am posting this particular news piece is that it is a beautiful example of really good science communication. In Britain, the tv news has been attacked/lampooned several recently for its over-simplification of technical stories and for patronising its viewers; this applies to economic and political stories but especially to science stories. This is CNN's take on the Fukishima incident- the news reader paraphrases the expert's oppinions so perfectly it is -well- just a beautiful example of really good science communication-
http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2011/03/11/exp.arena.nuclear.japan.quake.cnn.html
Hydrogen explosion, Fukushima Daiichi Power plant, Japan, picture from Ctv, Winnipeg (licence details [here])
You can find wikipedia's coverage of the Fukushima incidents here-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents
For comparison it is interesting to look at the corresponding articles on the Three Mile Island Accident-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
the Windscale Fire*-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
and the more severe Chernobyl accident-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Chernobyl nuclear reactor, as seen from Pripyat, public domain image by Jason Minshull
*I should probably mention that there are one or two minor problems with the Wikipedia Windscale fire article- it states that "the fire has been described as the worst reactor accident until Three Mile Island in 1979. Epidemiological estimates put the number of additional cancers caused by the Three Mile Island accident at not more than one; only Chernobyl produced immediate casualties"- this and especially its implication that Windscale did not result in additional cancer cases is arguable. Earlier in the same article, the following sentence appears "It had previously been estimated that the incident caused 200 additional cancer cases, although this figure has recently been revised upwards to 240.". In other words, Windscale did lead to an increase in cancer incidence, Three Mile Island did not. This contradicts the idea that Windscale was less severe than Three Mile Island.
In 2001, The Scientific Illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Hornegger published a really great book looking at the effects of radiation on insect populations in various areas. It is called "Heteroptera: the beautiful and the Other, or Images of a Mutating World"
and its central argument is that even supposedly sub-clinical/ non-significant levels of radioactivity do produce noticeable increases in mutations in living creatures. The book is not scientifically rigourous- in its current state, it would certainly not stand up to scientific peer review, but that is not really its objective. As it stands, there is not enough evidence for the book's central idea, but it does raise some very interesting questions. Hesse-Honegger may well be right - I would be very interested indeed to see it thoroughly investigated. The book has other attributes, however, and not just the stunning illustrations it contains; the accounts of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident it relates are particularly interesting. Local people described feeling and intense and sudden burning sensation on their skin, like sunburn, and tasting a metallic taste in their mouths as the radiation reached them. This strange taste associated with radioactive elements is not unusual- the chemist Louis Slotin described experiencing a bitter taste in his mouth (and had a strong burning feeling in his left hand), during the nuclear accident that later killed him.
I confess to having a (possibly macabre) fascination with nuclear physics, nuclear accidents and radiation: the science behind it is really interesting, complex and subtle. Partly for this reason, it took a while before the events at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were fully understood. In due course, we -the world public- will, no doubt, discover exactly what is occuring at this very moment in the Fukushima nuclear power plant. For the sake of Japan's people and ecosystems, we can only hope that the plant's current problems are safely resolved.
Today's first link is about the nuclear incident in Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan. The reason I am posting this particular news piece is that it is a beautiful example of really good science communication. In Britain, the tv news has been attacked/lampooned several recently for its over-simplification of technical stories and for patronising its viewers; this applies to economic and political stories but especially to science stories. This is CNN's take on the Fukishima incident- the news reader paraphrases the expert's oppinions so perfectly it is -well- just a beautiful example of really good science communication-
http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2011/03/11/exp.arena.nuclear.japan.quake.cnn.html
Hydrogen explosion, Fukushima Daiichi Power plant, Japan, picture from Ctv, Winnipeg (licence details [here])
You can find wikipedia's coverage of the Fukushima incidents here-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents
For comparison it is interesting to look at the corresponding articles on the Three Mile Island Accident-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
the Windscale Fire*-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
and the more severe Chernobyl accident-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Chernobyl nuclear reactor, as seen from Pripyat, public domain image by Jason Minshull
*I should probably mention that there are one or two minor problems with the Wikipedia Windscale fire article- it states that "the fire has been described as the worst reactor accident until Three Mile Island in 1979. Epidemiological estimates put the number of additional cancers caused by the Three Mile Island accident at not more than one; only Chernobyl produced immediate casualties"- this and especially its implication that Windscale did not result in additional cancer cases is arguable. Earlier in the same article, the following sentence appears "It had previously been estimated that the incident caused 200 additional cancer cases, although this figure has recently been revised upwards to 240.". In other words, Windscale did lead to an increase in cancer incidence, Three Mile Island did not. This contradicts the idea that Windscale was less severe than Three Mile Island.
In 2001, The Scientific Illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Hornegger published a really great book looking at the effects of radiation on insect populations in various areas. It is called "Heteroptera: the beautiful and the Other, or Images of a Mutating World"
and its central argument is that even supposedly sub-clinical/ non-significant levels of radioactivity do produce noticeable increases in mutations in living creatures. The book is not scientifically rigourous- in its current state, it would certainly not stand up to scientific peer review, but that is not really its objective. As it stands, there is not enough evidence for the book's central idea, but it does raise some very interesting questions. Hesse-Honegger may well be right - I would be very interested indeed to see it thoroughly investigated. The book has other attributes, however, and not just the stunning illustrations it contains; the accounts of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident it relates are particularly interesting. Local people described feeling and intense and sudden burning sensation on their skin, like sunburn, and tasting a metallic taste in their mouths as the radiation reached them. This strange taste associated with radioactive elements is not unusual- the chemist Louis Slotin described experiencing a bitter taste in his mouth (and had a strong burning feeling in his left hand), during the nuclear accident that later killed him.
I confess to having a (possibly macabre) fascination with nuclear physics, nuclear accidents and radiation: the science behind it is really interesting, complex and subtle. Partly for this reason, it took a while before the events at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were fully understood. In due course, we -the world public- will, no doubt, discover exactly what is occuring at this very moment in the Fukushima nuclear power plant. For the sake of Japan's people and ecosystems, we can only hope that the plant's current problems are safely resolved.
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