Category: Science

Check out this piece by Richard Seager in American Scientist on The Source of Europe’s Mild Climate

If you grow up in England, as I did, a few items of unquestioned wisdom are passed down to you from the preceding generation. Along with stories of a plucky island race with a glorious past and the benefits of drinking unbelievable quantities of milky tea, you will be told that England is blessed with its pleasant climate courtesy of the Gulf Stream, that huge current of warm water that flows northeast across the Atlantic from its source in the Gulf of Mexico. That the Gulf Stream is responsible for Europe’s mild winters is widely known and accepted, but, as I will show, it is nothing more than the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend.

And he does, using nothing more than existing data, clear simple models, and a healthy sense of skepticism. Beautiful work.

Money quote:

Imagine being an electrical engineer and hearing that a third of the country doesn’t believe all that stuff about electricity and radio waves, but thinks there actually are little people moving about inside their televisions. That’s how biologists feel about the state of knowledge about biology here; we’ve got a lot of people with medieval attitudes about the subject.

After reading this, I don’t think I’ll ever use the metaphor of something “going over like a lead balloon” again. Jeff’s conclusion: “Thus to change gasses from helium to lead vapor, the diameter of the balloon would only grow by about 3 meters (with the lead vapor at a temperature of 2500K).”
Toasty….
—
[Via the latest Tangled Bank]

Now making landfall in Northern Australia: Typhoon Monica

The latest advisory from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center lists Monica as a category 5 cyclone with sustained wind of 155 knots (178 mph) and a central pressure of 879 mb. This is an incredibly powerful cylone that actually is stronger than Hurricane Wilma (the strongest hurricane ever in the Atlantic).

Winds are gusting to 218 mph. I can’t imagine what that would be like – can you?

From The Inquirer: US grants patent for anti-gravity device:

“ACCUSATIONS that the US Patent office is giving out dotty patents were given some credence this week after the magazine Nature discovered that the watchdog had just granted one to a bloke who claimed to have invented an anti-gravity machine.

Boris Volfson, of Huntington, is the proud holder of patent 6,960,975, which is for a space vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield that alters the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity.”

No word on whether it has to be constructed from transparent aluminum.

A picture that needs no explanation (original at LSU):

(Via Boing-boing.)

From today’s Guardian: Scientists learn the taste of words: “Now you know why those restaurant menus wax lyrical about that succulent salmon on a bed of piquant herbs. The words themselves enhance the flavour. Oxford scientists today confirm what every sommelier has always known instinctively: that labels can trick the brain into a different kind of perception.”

(fMRI = “functional magnetic resonance imaging”. Check out the gallery. No, this particular image doesn’t have anything to do with today’s Guardian story, but it’s too cool to pass up….)

Shades of Pons-Fleischmann, 1989, perhaps? Or possibly not…? Newsday is reporting UCLA Researchers Produce Nuclear Fusion: “In the latest attempt to create nuclear fusion under laboratory conditions, scientists reported they achieved it in a tabletop experiment that uses a strong electric field generated by a small crystal.”

Coincidentally, last night I was finishing up the wonderful new book A Different Universe by Robert Lauglin. His comments on the cold fusion scandal:

The cold fusion example is dear to my heart because I was in an office with a nuclear expert when a journalist phoned him and asked him for comments on the [Pons-Fleischmann] paper. It was probably the closest I have ever come to dying of a heart attack, for we were both suffocating with laughter reading the pages, each funnier than the last, as they slowly crept out of the FAX machine…. [Their] claim made no sense at all quantum-mechanically. The energy scales of ordinary chemistry are not right for catalyzing nuclear reactions. But it turned out that enough people did not believe in quantum mechanics, were willing to distort its complexities to their own ends, or simply viewed its practitioners as con artists that the voices of reason went unheard…. [This led to work that] wound up squandering between $50 million and $100 million of taxpayer money.

In the present case the claims are more modest, but a healthy skepticism is definitely warranted.

There’s science: a method of learning about the physical universe by applying the principles of the scientific method, which includes making empirical observations, proposing hypotheses to explain those observations, and testing those hypotheses in valid and reliable ways; also refers to the organized body of knowledge that results from scientific study.

And then there’s Kansas, as reported in the Guardian today: But the largest applause of the evening was reserved for a silver-haired gentleman in a navy blue blazer. “I have a question: if man comes from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Why do you waste time teaching something in science class that is not scientific?” he thundered.

(Woodrow Wilson had it right, a mere 83 years ago: “…of course, like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should still be raised.)

For those who want a more detailed explanation of the massive Sumatran earthquake than you’ll get from CNN, the BBC, or the NYT, check out the US Geological Survey page for the quake. Not only was it a huge quake; it was the result of a huge shift: “Preliminary locations of larger aftershocks following today’s earthquake show that approximately 1000 km of the plate boundary slipped as a result of the earthquake.” The accompanying map shows the location of the plates and faults; the Indian plate is moving northwards into the Burma plate at 6 cm a year.

I couldn’t find much on the web about seismic activity in this area. Roger Bilham’s history of earthquakes in India is a reasonable starting point. If readers know of other good studies, could you link to them in comments to this blog entry? And please consider making a donation to the Red Cross, or the emergency aid organisation of your choice.