Strange Dark Matter Interactions Could Create Galactic Disks and Dark Light.

So. Very. Awesome. Physics Create the First Image Ever of a Hydrogen Atom’s Orbital Structure. The full paper is here.

Looking at Art Through Different Eyes—Like a Bee. Charles Falco’s IR (and UV) photography.

Is Nature Unnatural? Decades of confounding experiments have physicists considering startling possibility: universe might not make sense. Also: Waiting for the Revolution: An interview with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist David J. Gross..

Measuring nothing would be a sad prospect for most scientists, but not physicists trying to probe the quantum vacuum.

Tragedy hit Moore, Oklahoma, when a massive tornado leveled the town. At the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal offered a helpful backgrounder to cover people’s most frequently asked questions.

There was big news in mathematics this week, namely the appearance of a new paper claiming a breakthrough in understanding one of mathematics’ oldest problems, the twin primes conjecture.

From Discovery News: “The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has recreated the world’s tiniest droplets of a primordial state of matter that last existed moments after the Big Bang, some 13.82 billion years ago. This surprise result was achieved by firing proton “bullets” into lead ions, creating a subatomic blood spatter-like effect.”

Hills and other topology can have interesting and complex effects on a flowfield.

Image: Gavin Peters. Via Wired Science and CollectSpace.com

Wired Science dug up some fascinating photos showing efforts to preserve historic Apollo rocket engines.

Sigh. The E-Cat people are back with the usual big claims of cold fusion. Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang once again leads the charge to put those claims in the proper perspective. “If this were an undergrad science experiment, I’d give the kids an F.”

In large earthquakes, the Earth moves for almost everyone. “If you leave a GPS receiver in a fixed location for days, months and years, it is precise enough to measure motions on the millimetre scale, allowing us to track strain building up across active faults, and even the incremental drift of the tectonic plates themselves across the Earth’s surface.”

Behold, The Mechanical Beauty of Early Automatons.

Can science bake a better apple pie? Students in this UCLA college class learn about the physics of food.

There’s a derelict atom smasher nestled in the middle of suburban Washington DC: The old Atomic Physics Observatory.

What do Morgan Freeman and Jon Stewart chat about when they hang out? Cosmology.

Bernard Vonnegut, brother to Kurt, was scientist who asked the question: How does one measure the wind speed inside a tornado?

I was pleased to see a new post over at You Are Not So Smart, tackling the issue of Survivorship Bias. We think we should study the successful in order to be a success, when in fact we should be examining failures. It’s a seriously great read. “You succumb to survivorship bias because you are innately terrible with statistics.”

Via National Geographic, we found this wonderful video of someone juggling three Rubik’s cubes…. while solving them:

Like tons of other hardcore fans, we went to see Star Trek: Into Darkness last weekend. My verdict: a fun popcorn action movie that satisfied as long as you didn’t think too hard about the gargantuan plot holes and nonsensical “science.” io9 wrote this entertaining Spoiler FAQ detailing the most obvious issues: “Look, you’re getting very upset, and this is just the first scene of the movie.” (Gene Roddenberry, who cared about plausibility, might just be turning in his grave.) Meanwhile, Gizmodo asks the Big Question: How Much Would It Cost to Build the Starship Enterprise? Grand Total: $478,947,711,160. And Jag Bhalla looked at the Cognitive Science of Star Trek: Kirk, Spock, emotion and reason.

How to Sell a Particle Accelerator: Positron-Electron Love Explosions. Competition heats up for bldg next collider.

Skeletons and monstrous lambs: remembering the historians of the Royal Society.

Mind. Blown. Physicists show they can entangle two photons that don’t even exist at the same time.

Interplanetary GPS: Spacecraft could determine their position in the solar system using signals from pulsars.

Deciphering the Strange Mathematics of Cicadas: “There is safety in numbers; or at least, survival in numbers.”

The world’s most powerful artificial tornado is part of the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany.

Over at The Crux, Amir Aczel reveals how he rediscovered the oldest zero in history. “The oldest zero in India with a confirmed date is from the mid-ninth century, and found in the Chatur-bujha temple in the city of Gwalior.”

Body Tracking Hardware will make the follow up to Second Life very different to the pioneering virtual world.

The Zen Master of Statistics: Last year, Time called Hans Rosling one of 100 most influential people in the world.

Upon request, Ed Yong provided a handy guide for scientists on giving comments (on other people’s studies) to journalists, inadvertently sparking yet another round of accusations of “Journosplaining.”

How Fast Does the Earth Rotate? Really, really fast, says Universe Today’s Fraser Cain.

How Benjamin Franklin Invented A Weight Loss Program, Using Balloons (and a footman).

Check out the Art of Science, A Princeton University Art Gallery Featuring Artistic Science Photos and Diagrams.

I loved Sabine H.’s review of Lee Smolin’s new book, Time Reborn, over at her Backreaction blog, because it captures what is simultaneously most maddening and endearing about physics: they love to argue and nitpick, but it comes from a genuine passion for their subject and a desire to always enhance their understanding. “Oddly enough however, I enjoyed reading the book. Not despite, but because I had something to complain about on every page. It made me question my opinions, and though I came out holding on to them, I learned quite something on the way.” The Time Lord (a.k.a. Sean Carroll) also shared his thoughts on the book with Edge.

The Boston Globe looks at disaster networks: “What’s the value of  … being able to find loved ones and reach out to strangers immediately?”

A preliminary analysis from the IceCube detector reveals more than two dozen neutrinos of unknown origin.

The Big Bang Theory filmed its season finale, and the Hollywood Reporter was on hand with a behind-the-scenes diary of the taping — including a nod to the show’s science advisor, UCLA physicist David Saltzberg.

Finally, here are ten reasons why time travel is no good, helpfully explained by puppets:

Ahem. First, a couple of caveats. I’ve met Weinstein. He’s a nice guy. He’s wicked smart. He knows way more math than I ever will (which admittedly is not saying much). I don’t doubt his sincerity, or that of some of his supporters, which apparently  includes Berkeley mathematician Edward Frenkel. And while I doubt his grandiose claims will be borne out once all the details emerge, he deserves to have those ideas heard, debated and evaluated (once there’s an actual paper) by his peers. But that’s so far above my pay grade, it’s a task best left to the professional physicists, who I’m sure are sharpening their knives as I type. (“Fresh meat!”)

No, my beef is with the Guardian for running the article in the first place. Seriously: why was it even written? Strip away all the purple prose and you’ve got a guy who’s been out of the field for 20 years, but still doing some dabbling on the side, who has an intriguing new idea that a couple of math professors think is promising, so he got invited to give a colloquium at Oxford by his old grad school buddy. Oh, and there’s no technical paper yet — not even a rough draft on the arxiv — so his ideas can’t even be appropriately evaluated by actual working physicists. How, exactly, does that qualify as newsworthy? Was your bullshit detector not working that day?

I’ll tell you what happened: the Guardian was seduced by the narrative offered by a man who, in his dual post as Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science, has proved himself to be highly adept at manipulating the media. It pains me to say this, since this is my field we’re talking about, but the Guardian got played, plain and simple.

Admittedly, it’s a very seductive narrative. Who doesn’t thrill to the idea of an obscure unknown genius toiling away in the shadows, snubbed by the stuffy, closed-minded academic establishment, who defies the odds and manages to achieve what all those brilliant scholars failed to do, thereby ensuring his or her scientific immortality? I love a good story! But this is science, not Good Will Hunting, and that narrative just isn’t true — or rather, it’s too simplistic.

Granted, sometimes there is such an odds-defying breakthrough, quite notably in mathematics. Ramanujam was largely self-taught and worked in isolation, and nonetheless made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory and infinite series. And just this last week, there was a major advance in prime numbers by a relatively obscure math professor at the University of New Hampshire who hadn’t published a paper since 2001. But by and large, most significant breakthroughs occur through established scientific channels — especially when it comes to modern cosmology and theoretical physics.

“I’m trying to promote, perhaps, a new way of doing science. Let’s start with really big ideas, let’s be brave and let’s have a discussion,” du Sautoy told The Guardian. Great idea! Except it’s not really a new way of doing science. And as Oxford cosmologist Andrew Pontzen pointed out in a New Scientist op-ed, nobody thought to invite any of the Oxford physicists. You know, the people most qualified to evaluate Weinstein’s work. It’s hard to have a collegial dialogue that way, especially with no technical paper on hand to provide the necessary background information. This seems more like trying to do science via press conference.

I do give props to reporter Alok Jha — whom I like and respect enormously, so this is a doubly painful post for me to write — for at least TRYING to inject some common sense into the piece, via theoretical physicists David Kaplan — who affirms that Weinstein is “serious” and not your typical crackpot, in that his theory actually exhibits coherence — and the University of Surrey’s Jim al-Khalili. [corrected spelling] Both men strike appropriate notes of caution, emphasizing that — du Sautoy’s insistence that Weinstein’s ideas “feel right” notwithstanding — ultimately, any such theory must go beyond pretty mathematics and fit the real-world data. Per al-Khalili:

“My main concern with Weinstein’s claims is that they are simply too grand – too sweeping. It would be one thing if he argued for some modest prediction that his theory was making, and importantly one that could be tested experimentally, or that it explained a phenomenon or mechanism that other theories have failed to do, but he makes the mistake of claiming too much for it.”

Credit: Sidney Harris. http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/index.php

Nicely put. I’d like to buy both of them a pint for their measured restraint on the record. But those qualifiers are utterly lost in the surrounding hype, such as breathlessly noting the similarity between “Weinstein” and “Einstein” — as if that means anything. (Also, as the Time Lord tartly observed on Twitter: “Pretty sure Einstein actually wrote research papers, not just gave interviews to newspapers.”)

Furthermore, the entire tail end of the article undercuts everything Kaplan and al-Khalili say by quoting du Sautoy (and, I’m sad to say, Frenkel) at length, disparaging the “Ivory Tower” of academia and touting this supposedly new, democratic way of doing physics whereby anyone with an Internet connection and a bit of gumption can play with the big boys.

It’s disingenuous — and pretty savvy, because it cuts off potential criticism at the knees. Now any physicist (or science writer) who objects to the piece can immediately be labeled a closed-minded big ol’ meanie who just can’t accept that anyone outside the Physics Club could make a worthwhile contribution.

Do I sound a little angry? It’s closer to irritation. I’m currently at a conference exploring the frontiers of cosmology and theoretical physics at the University of California, Davis, where for the past several days, some of the top physicists in the world have been vigorously debating all kinds of wildly creative, speculative, alternative ideas about inflation, dark matter, dark energy, the multiverse, string theory, and so forth, and the implications for the various theoretical models in light of the latest experimental results from the Planck mission. Two weeks ago, I was at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics for a week-long conference in which physicists grappled with fitting their theoretical models to confusing results from a number of dark matter detection experiments.

This is what truly free and open scientific discussion of brave/bold new ideas looks like. The tradition is alive and well in that stuffy old academic establishment. I’ll let Pontzen have the last word:

At what point during this long and difficult process does it become legitimate to proclaim a breakthrough? It’s a line in shifting sands, but that line has certainly been crossed. Du Sautoy – the University of Oxford’s professor of the public understanding of science, no less – has short-circuited science’s basic checks and balances. Yesterday’s shenanigans were anything but scientific.

Preach it.

Ah, Kepler Space Telescope, we hardly knew ye. Everyone’s favorite planet-hunting telescope suffered a hardware malfunction this week that looks to end its mission. Wired took a look at Kepler’s greatest hits: Water Worlds, Tatooines, and Earth Twins.

Star Trek: Into Darkness opened this week. Ian O’Neill looked at various concepts for warp drives. Over at Boing-Boing, there’s a cool post on the tricorder technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek – “A portable tool that could quickly identify any species anywhere.” Phil Plait, everyone’s favorite Bad Astronomer, indulged in a bit of nerd-gassing about the top six science mistakes portrayed in Star Trek, thereby channeling his inner Lawrence Krauss, who literally wrote the book on it (The Physics of Star Trek). And Kyle Hill gave us an outlet for our frustration with director J.J. Abrams’ overuse of lens flares: Q: What if you took a sip of alcohol every time you saw a lens flare in Star Trek: Into Darkness? A: Death by Lens Flare.

It was a banner day at the Large Hadron Collider: Artist Xavier Cortada honored the people and science of the CMS collaboration with five vividly colored banners draping the walls. “Each of Cortada’s five banners artistically interprets a different combination of particles into which theorists predicted the Higgs boson would decay—two photons, two Z bosons, two W bosons, two bottom quarks and two tau leptons.”

Mathematician Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire in Durham claims he has made a breakthrough towards solving centuries-old problem, providing the first proof that infinitely many prime numbers come in pairs.

Speaking of unsolved mathematical conundrums, Harald Helfgott of the École Normale Supériure in Paris posted a proof of one of the oldest open problems in number theory to the arxiv. Evelyn Lamb has the scoop: “The ternary Goldbach conjecture … is easy to state but hard to prove.”

What Stresses Gorilla Glass Makes It Stronger: Theory tackles how glass remembers earlier forces.

Physicists Find Way to Measure Earth’s Rarest Element via the ionization potential of astatine.

Confused about supersymmetry? Ethan Siegal of Starts With a Bang offers this handy primer on the rise and fall of SUSY.

DIY physics experiment: Backyard Roller Coaster Physics. All you need is a light bucket with a sturdy handle, some rope, and some water to explore centripetal force.

The Hofstadter Butterfly-shaped energy spectrum exists in the quantum realm. Photo : University of Oregon.

Back in 1976, physicist Douglas Hofstadter predicted that there would be a fractal butterfly-shaped energy spectrum lurking in the quantum realm. Now, 40 years later, scientists at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) have proven its existence in graphene.

Per Nature: “The Hofstadter butterfly emerges when electrons are confined to a two-dimensional sheet, and subjected to both a periodic potential energy (akin to a marble rolling on a sheet the shape of an egg carton) and a strong magnetic field.”

“I’m a middle-aged physics professor and I love heavy metal. There, I said it.” Philip Moriarty explores what happens when the uncertainty principle goes up to 11. DON’T JUDGE HIM! It’s both harmonically sophisticated and rhythmically complex.

Iron Man—Extreme Firmware Update 3.0. Paul Zehr on the science of neuroprosthetics in Iron Man 3.

Einstein’s BEER Planet Discovered: what is this beaming effect and how can it help in the search for exoplanets?

Researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden have figured out the mechanism behind the curved path of a curling stone: microscopic roughness. “As the stone slides over the ice the roughness on its leading half will produce small scratches in the ice. The rotation of the stone will give the scratches a slight deviation from the sliding direction. When the rough protrusions on the trailing half shortly pass the same area, they will cross the scratches from the front in a small angle. When crossing these scratches they will have a tendency to follow them. It is this scratch-guiding or track steering mechanism that generate the sideway force necessary to cause the curl.”

Why the free market is like quantum mechanics (and both are unrealistic constructs).

Here’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the making of that jaw-dropping video,  “A Boy and His Atom” — the world’s smallest movie made by moving actual atoms frame by frame.

It took one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers 5 days to model a simple childhood past time: popping bubbles.  This physics simulation is one of the most accurate you’ll ever see of what happens when foamy soap bubbles pop:

“When you’re talking about probability, there are two fundamental schools: frequentist and Bayesian interpretations.” Mark Chu-Carroll gives an excellent primer on discrete probability theory.

Is It Quantum Computing Or Not? DWave based their processor on an effect called quantum annealing. “We have a system that can do useful computations based on quantum effects. It may not be a quantum computer as some purists might define it, but it does have one huge advantage: it exists and is available to do meaningful work.”

Dropping in on Gottfried Leibniz: fantastic post by Stephen Wolfram on the co-inventor of calculus, inspired by a visit to the Leibniz archives in Hanover, Germany.

Commander Chris Hatfield, who produced some of the most entertaining videos evah while on board the International Space Station, returned to Earth this week. He went out with a bang, though, performing his rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” as his final bow. Here’s a look at Hatfield’s greatest video hits.

Quantum Mechanical Words and Mathematical Organisms. Are thoughts more fundamental to our reality than particles? It could be that the reason mathematics is so effective in describing reality because “reality is a mathematical thing.”

Alice E. Kober: The overlooked woman who cracked one of the greatest mysteries in history, Linear B. “It is now clear that without Dr. Kober’s work, [Michael] Ventris could never have deciphered Linear B when he did, if ever. Yet because history is always written by the victors — and the story of Linear B has long been a British masculine triumphal narrative — the contributions of this brilliant American woman have been all but lost to time.”

Terahertz imaging reveals Goya's hidden signature. Source: paper by C. Seco et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3101. Via Technology Review.

Terahertz Image Reveals Goya’s Hidden Signature in Old Master Painting. Darkened varnish obscures Goya’s signature in a 1771 masterpiece, according to a new analysis using terahertz waves.

Speaking of nifty high-tech imaging, Ciudad Blanca (“White City”), Legendary Lost City, Has Possibly Been Found In a Honduran Rain Forest. The archaeologists used a laser-based technique called LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) to image the topography beneath the thick rainforest canopy.  For more about LIDAR, see my March 2012 post.

Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics, Chemistry of Dying Stars. “Red ochre—Fe2O3—is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red. It’s really cheap because it’s really plentiful. And it’s really plentiful because of nuclear fusion in dying stars.”

Simanek’s Perpetual Futility: a short history of the (futile) search for perpetual motion.

The Game Of Thrones Car Paradox: How Magic Makes People Stupid — technologically, that is (although I think we can all agree that various members of the Stark family habitually make very bad choices). Over at Jalopnik, Jason Torchinsky wonders “why they have no cars, or, for that matter, any post-medieval technology at all,” and concludes that it’s because with magic, there’s no need for a scientific process if all you have to do is mutter incantations . “Muggle pride, bitches!”

Check out this blueprint for a SteamMegaPunk Flyer dating back to 1868, the creation of Joseph M. Kaufmann of Glagow

Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Sphinx: “More than 170 years before Jean-François Champollion had the first real success in translating Egyptian hieroglyphs, the 17th century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher was convinced he had cracked it. He was very wrong. Daniel Stolzenberg looks at Kircher’s Egyptian Oedipus, a book that has been called ‘one of the most learned monstrosities of all times.’”

The laser shooting Soviet Polyus-Skif satellite launched (and failed) this week in 1987. Amy Shira Teital tells the tale at Ars Technica.

“To become a scientist is hard enough. But to become one while running a gauntlet of lies, insults, mockeries, and disapproval—this was what my mother had to do. If such treatment is unthinkable (or, at least, unusual) today, it is largely because my mother and other female scientists of her generation proved equal to every obstacle thrown in their way.” An amazing story from the son of Joan Feynman.

Speaking of la famille Feynman, this past week, we celebrated Richard Feynman’s birthday, and Robin Ince hosted a “Happy birthday Mr Feynman” gig at the Bloomsbury Theatre in England. Among the highlights: Grace Petrie’s performance of a song about Feynman and his first wife Arline, who died of tuberculosis in 1945 at age 25. Petrie’s lyrics are based on Feynman’s famous  (and heart-rending) love letter to her written some 16 months after her death:

The very word “avalanche” calls to mind snowy avalanches and sand piles, but materials get their properties, like magnetism, from atomic structure, putting this is the realm of quantum mechanics. We’re really talking about a cascade of “spin flips” that culminate in a reversal of the sample’s magnetization — a not-well-understood phenomenon called magnetic deflagration. “Spin” is the quantum mechanical version of angular momentum — electrons have spin, and hence angular momentum — except it’s never so simple at the atomic scale. I’ll let Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles give you the “toddler” version (there’s a lot more detail and a fun toddler-centric video at that link):

“Electrons, and all other fundamental particles, have a property known as “spin.” This is an intrinsic angular momentum associated with the particles, as if they were little spinning balls of charge. … The spin angular momentum of an electron does have some strange properties, though, that are very unlike those of ordinary rotating objects. For one thing, it has only two possible states, “spin up” and “spin down.” … Electron spin is like a turntable with only forward and backward settings at a single speed, with the power cord wired directly into the mains so it can’t be shut off. It’s always spinning in one direction or the other.”

As Chad’s post makes clear, spin is really complicated (and important) but all you need to know for purposes of this post is that there are only two possible states (spin-up and spin-down) and it’s possible to flip those spins via, for example, a magnetic pulse. So back to that new paper: the scientists were interested in modeling these magnetic avalanches (uncontrolled cascades of spin-flips) because this can be a significant source of energy loss in things like electrical generators. They can also damage disk drives.

Credit: Pradeep Subedi et al. Source: Physical Review Letters.

The researchers — hailing from New York University, the University of Barcelona, City College of New York, and the University of Florida — used a molecular magnet (basically a collection of magnetic molecules) to test the hypothesis. They zapped one side of the sample with a magnetic pulses, and traced how that initial pulse spread throughout the sample material thanks to carefully placed magnetic sensors.

This enabled them to pinpoint the precise conditions that lead to magnetic avalanches. And they found that it’s actually more like a wildfire — a tiny, magnetic, spin-flipping wildfire spreading through a quantum mechanical forest.

Fire isn’t a substance, contrary to what the ancient Greeks believed; it’s a chemical reaction — oxidation, to be specific — and the three basic components needed are fuel, heat, and air (oxygen). Under the right circumstances, these basic ingredients ignite a sustained chemical chain reaction, and if that isn’t nipped in the bud, the fire spreads rapidly via conduction, convection and radiation. Take out one of those three ingredients, and you stop the spread. That’s the basis for firefighting strategies.

Photo: Federal Bureau of Land Management. Via How Stuff Works.

Exactly how wildfires spread is a complicated thing to model, but the seminal work on this was done back in 1972 by an aeronautical engineer named Richard Rothermel. His model still widely used, even though — like many mathematical models — it’s an idealized case study. It’s well suited if you’re talking a fire spreading through a uniform field of wheat, but less accurate for fires spreading through a landscape dotted with clumps of trees and shrubs, for example. But it’s quick and simple, and reasonably reliable, and hence useful in the field, where time is of the essence.

Using Rothermel’s model, it’s possible to determine just how much energy would be needed to transfer sufficient heat to ignite the fuel. (Every kind of fuel has an “ignition point” or “flash point”; the flash point for wood is 572 degrees Fahrenheit, or 300 C.) Once you know that, you can calculate the rate of ignition needed for the fire to spread rapidly, accounting for critical variables like wind speed and the slope of the ground.

What’s this got to do with flipping spins in a magnetic crystal? The magnetic pulse the scientists applied to their sample is the equivalent to a “spark” igniting a bit of fuel, kickstarting the chemical chain reaction that leads to a rampant wildfire. Or rather, when the spins flipped, they released energy and transmitted it to other nearby atoms in the crystal, which then flipped their spins, and so on, producing a runaway reaction — magnetic deflagration.

So magnetic avalanches are more like wildfires (or wildfires behave like magnetic avalanches), even though they seem like very different systems. Who knows what we could learn by mimicking combustion processes at the atomic level, both for materials and for battling forest fires?

References:

Bortolozzo, U. et al. (2007) “Light intensity distributions for spatiotemporal pulses generated in a ring cavity with a liquid crystal gain medium,” Physical Review Letters 99(2): 023901.

Rothermel, Richard C. (1972). “A mathematical model for predicting fire spread in wildland and fuels,” USDA Forest Service INT-115.

Scott, Joe H. and Burgan, Robert E. (2005). “Standard Fire Behavior Fuel Models: A Comprehensive Set for Use with Rothermel’s Surface Fire Spread Model,” USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RMRS-GTR-153.

Subedi, Pradeep et al. (2013) “Onset of a propagating self-sustained spin-reversal front in a magnetic system,” Physical Review Letters 110(20).

Perhaps those viewers should have been monitoring the Twitter chatter more carefully. American Idol has never been exclusively about rewarding merit; it is the voters, not the judges, who have the final word. I call it the “Squee Factor.” Arbos’s inspiring personal story won him a rabid fan base, dubbed “Lazzies,” who choked the social networking feed each week with outpourings of devotion, urging each other to save him from elimination. According to Alessandro Vespignani, a computational physicist at Northeastern University, all those tweets collectively contain enough information to predict which contestants are likely to be eliminated.

It’s Person of Interest for the social media set. Vespignani is among those scientists specializing in what’s known as big data analytics: mining the huge amounts of personal information we reveal online to build demographic profiles, the better to target advertising or improve train scheduling, among other uses. Vespignani is harnessing the power of social networking to model the spread of disease outbreaks, stock market behavior, collective social dynamics, and election outcomes — or voting behavior for American Idol. And Twitter is his current favorite tool.

Modeling these kinds of complex systems is a bit like trying to predict the weather. It’s well nigh impossible to accurately forecast weather conditions beyond ten days, given the large number of factors that can influence the outcome. Even then, “The better the data you gather about the climate at a certain moment, the better your predictions will be about the future,” said Vespignani. The same holds true for his social networking models.

Cell phones have been a mainstay of studying social phenomena for many years. With their GPS tracking components and call logs, they make fantastic behavioral “sensors,” providing a far more accurate record than random surveys or asking people to record their own behavior in a diary—the traditional methodology for such studies.

But exploiting cell phone data for predictive models is soooo 2008. Twitter brings data collection to a whole new level. “Twitter is not just where you go; it is what you think about politics, about society, about who you think will win American Idol—what we call social phenomena,” said Vespignani. “What we can do now is map the social space.” His lab collects hundreds of millions of tweets every day, posted by several million users, giving him an exponentially larger sample size.

It is no easy feat sifting through huge amounts of raw unstructured data to find those proverbial needles in haystacks. Fortunately, “physics has taught us a lot about what to do with big data,” said Vespignani. His primary filter is vocabulary. Much like physicists at the Large Hadron Collider sift through the detritus of billions of collisions between elementary particles to pick out the unique signature of a Higgs boson, Vespignani sifts through millions of tweets looking for the most relevant words to whatever system he is trying to model. That makes Twitter a kind of social collider.

“Ninety percent of the things we do, we are predictable like atoms,” said Vespignani, although he is quick to clarify that he meant this solely in a statistical sense. “When you do weather forecasting, you are not predicting the motion of a water molecule or an oxygen atom,” he said. “This is what we can predict: social collective phenomena, not the behavior of single individuals.” Ultimately, his goal is to model how consensus of opinion forms, and how ideas and viruses spread through a population (whether online or off).

Phil Phillips and Jessica Sanchez, finalists for American Idol Season 11. Phillips won the competition. Source: Publicity still, Fox TV.

Last year, during the eleventh season of American Idol, Vespignani and his students analyzed the Twitter activity during the voting period for nine episodes leading up to the finale, and found that the number of tweets that mentioned a specific contestant during each voting period was a good indicator of how many votes that contestant received. This made it possible to predict which contestants were most likely to be eliminated each week. The two finalists that season were Jessica Sanchez and Phil Phillips.

Vespignani’s group broke down the Twitter activity even further by geographical region—a subset that proved to make a crucial difference in the predictions. The initial analysis favored Sanchez as the ultimate winner of the competition.

But the subset revealed that Sanchez had many fans outside the US, particularly in the Philippines, and those fans were not eligible to vote. When the group adjusted their analysis to exclude Tweets from outside the U.S., the model showed Phillips in the lead. And Phillips did win the title, with Sanchez as runner-up.

American Idol served as a handy test case, because it is a relatively simple model. “We used American Idol because we figured if we could not do predictions there, we would not be able to make predictions anywhere else,” said Vespignani.

Granted, even Twitter has its limitations as a predictive tool, because it represents just a fraction of potential voters. For every rabid “Lazzie” who casts multiple votes, there are a million passive viewers (like me) who never bother to vote at all. Then again, we’re unlikely to be airing our Idol views on Twitter. Vespignani argued that despite this relatively small sample set, the people tweeting about the competition are doing so because they are fans of the show, and hence are the most likely to vote for their favorite contestant. This makes it much easier to identify likely voters and classify them according to their preferences.

Doing the same for political elections is much more complicated. Case in point: the recent Italian elections held in late February. “It is a country that is going completely nuts,” said Vespignani of his native land. “It’s one of the few countries where people don’t tell the truth about their opinions.” That makes it more difficult to identify and classify users according to their political preferences, on top of the usual biases that inevitably creep in with regard to geography and so forth.

A snapshot of twitter activity by Italian voters in the days leading up to the election on February 24. Image via TweetPolitik.

Technically, Vespignani’s team looked at the raw signal, rather than making explicit predictions. Still, with the exception of disgraced politician Silvio Berlusconi winning a shocking thirty percent of the vote (an outcome none of the official polls predicted), the group’s model matched the election results pretty well—better than the standard electoral polls, in fact, and at a fraction of the cost.

Of course, the “Squee Factor” can only take you so far on American Idol (or elsewhere). Arbos’ luck ran out the very next week, when he was sent home after butchering his cover of The Carpenters’ “Close To You,” in which he couldn’t manage a simple key change. It was so bad even the genial Randy Jackson admitted, on live TV: “You know that I love you, the person…. But all I can say is, ‘No, no, no, NO.’ That was horrible.”

Last week, Candace Glover and Kree Harrison — both of whom have given consistently solid performances this season — emerged as the top two finalists. But Vespignani’s team won’t be analyzing Twitter to predict which of them will win this season’s competition. Last year’s exercise served its academic purpose, with a published paper and a presentation in March at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore. Besides, “this year the show is not as fun,” he said.

Personally, I’m rooting for Candace. But I’m not getting my hopes up, for reasons that can be summed up in two words: Melinda Doolittle. She was a contestant for the sixth season of American Idol in 2007– the only other time I’ve watched the show. I happened to be flipping channels and caught her performance of “Nut Bush City Limits” — and was blown away. So was the notoriously acerbic Simon Cowell, who took to calling her “My Melinda.”

Twitter was barely one year old, but even without that metric, I was sure Doolittle was a lock for the finale. Week after week, she knocked it out of the park, whether she was asked to perform rock (“Have a Nice Day“), Diana Ross (“Home“), Inspirational (“There Will Come a Day“), Motown (“Since You’ve Been Gone“, “I Am a Woman“), or country (“Trouble is a Woman“). On the basis of pure talent, she should have won.

But Doolittle didn’t have the “Squee Factor” — at least, not as much as seventeen-year-old Jordin Sparks, who won the title, and budding heartthrob Blake Lewis, who was runner-up that season. So much for the wisdom of crowds. I was so disgusted I never followed American Idol again — until the last few weeks, when Vespignani’s work gave me a reason to tune in again. But I’m still nursing a grudge from 2007. Sure, Sparks was adorable and talented, but c’mon! She wasn’t in the same league! Check out Doolittle’s killer rendition of “My Funny Valentine,” easily one of the top performances in the competition’s history:

Sigh. Yep. Still bitter. The voters did better this time around.

References:

Ciulla, Fabio et al. (2012) “Beating the News Using Social Media: The Case Study of American Idol,” EPJ Data Science 1:8.

Fumanelli, M. et al. (2012) “Inferring the Structure of Social Contacts from Demographic Data in the Analysis of Infectious Diseases Spread,” PLoS Computational Biology 8: e1002673.

Goncalves, B., Perra, N., and Vespignani, A. (2011) “Modeling Users’ Activity on Twitter Networks: Validation of Dunbar’s Number,” PLoS ONE 6(8): e22656.

Ratkiewicz, J. et al. (2010) “Characterizing and Modeling the Dynamics of Online Popularity,” Physical Review Letters 105: 158701.

I also chatted with the folks at Skeptically Speaking about evidence for ancient supernovae in bacterial fossils, on an episode that also featured Ethan Siegel of Starts With a Bang expounding on black hole firewalls. Over at Nautilus, I mused on the mystery of whether animals exhibit consciousness. And I have a new short piece up at Simons Science News: Model Behavior: The Mathematics of Juggling, accompanying a fantastic video by George Hart.

Greg Gbur, a.k.a. Dr. Skyskll, explores Chladni patterns: “exotic & beautiful vibration figures that can be displayed with the help of just a little sand.” Somewhat related: Watch how mercury completely flips out when it’s blasted by sound.

Some Facets of Geology of Diamonds: Picasso diamond shows complex growth patterns highlighted by cathodoluminescence. Also, Inside Science explores why the filmmakers behind the new screen adaptation of The Great Gatsby chose to use real diamonds on set instead of faux gems.

A Decade of Explosions: Kyle Hill on how Mythbusters taught him that he could do science. For realz.

Under just the right circumstances, electricity and water form a floating bridge between two containers.

What do “most physicists” work on? Hint: not particle physics. It’s a very diverse field.

A Grand Unified Theory of Everything? Not so much. Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis turn a jaded eye to the paper on causal entropic forces that made such a splash last week. “Unfortunately, such grand, unified, one-size-fits-all solutions almost never work—because they radically underestimate the complexity of real world problems.”

Here is the most awesome video we saw this week: Oscillate – a mesmerizing abstract animation of waveforms by Daniel Sierra. Per This Colossal: “While essentially an experiment in animation, Sierra says the project was an attempt “to visualize waveform patterns that evolve from the fundamental sine wave to more complex patterns, creating a mesmerizing audio-visual experience in which sight and sound work in unison.””

“Just like the dog that didn’t bark in the night time, the absence of antimatter in the universe worries us.” Tara Shears explains what matters to us about antimatter.

By studying a glob of 20 million-year-old amber, scientists have proven once and for all that glass does not flow.

Math fans rejoice! There is a movie thriller now being shown in select cities about what would happen if we could solve the Traveling Salesman problem and P = NP.

A fat chance of chaos? Apparently Julia sets can be fat fractals.

US Air Force Measures Potato Cannon Muzzle Velocities. What fuel fires potatoes out of a cannon the fastest?

Remove the Noise: New Method for Gravitational Wave Detection with Atomic Sensors.

A "detail theft" by ScanLAB Projects: http://www.scanlab-ucl.co.uk/. Via BldgBlog.

Documentary Holography: using “state-of-the-art 3D scanning technologies to capture buildings, objects and spaces.”

Frank Kovak couldn’t be an astrophysicist, so he built a planetarium in his own backyard.

NASA launched two rockets from Marshall Islands to paint the upper atmosphere red and white to study “neutral winds.”

Here’s a fascinating account of what it’s like to study math in China. Apparently, the symbol for rice is the same as the symbol for meter.

Controlling drag with tunable bubble mattresses. “Chemical engineer Rob Lammertink at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and his colleagues designed and fabricated microfluidic chips that could influence the flow of fluids much as microelectronic chips steer the flow of electricity.”

A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers. Meanwhile, at the Institute for Quantum Computing, scientists are imagining their own quantum future. “Let’s just harness the quantum world, and we’ll be good for the next hundred years,” said institute director Raymond Laflamme.

Superhydrophobic cicada wings are self-cleaning. “Researchers now find the design of their wings can cause filth to jump right off of them with the aid of dew, findings that might help lead to better artificial self-cleaning materials.”

Shimmering Chain-link Fence Installation by Soo Sunny Park creates “a fractalized rainbow of color.”

Smallest lab-made drop of liquid might cause strange particle behavior. A new result from the CMS collaboration takes a step toward revealing the origin of the mysterious ‘ridge effect.’

New model revolutionizes tornado prediction and sheds light on why some storms generate tornadoes and others do not. “We hope that with more accurate predictions and improved lead time, more people will heed warnings and loss of life and property will be reduced.” And here’s 56 years of tornadoes on a map, plotting each path, using brightness for F-scale (level of intensity).

Flowers, music, strip clubs…Richard Feynman’s scientific curiosity knew no bounds. Christopher Riley pays tribute to an eccentric genius.

An amusing science paper in the Journal of Physics Special Topics (unearthed by Improbable Research) takes a look at the trajectory of a falling Batman: “The film Batman Begins shows the character of Batman gliding using a rigid form of his cape. This paper assesses the feasibility of such a glide and finds that while a reasonable distance could be traveled if gliding from a tall building, the speed at which Batman would be traveling would be too dangerous to stop without some method of slowing down.”

“Once upon a time in linear algebra: Blending words with numbers.” Physics grad student Nicole Yunger Halpern at TEDx-Dartmouth:

We’ve Got Data. A bunch of high school physics students came to Six Flags. They rode the roller coasters. They took data on the G-Forces. Here’s what they found.

It was a killer week for materials physics. Imagine downloading an app that can change the shape of your mobile phone, thanks to the unique properties of shape-memory alloys.

Simple Trick Turns Commercial Polymer Into World’s Toughest Fibre — using a mechanism based on a slip knot.

Materials Science for Cosplay, Part 1: Steel. “You can weld it, cold-work it, and forge it.” But it will rust.

The 3 Little Pigs Never Thought of This Building Material: an apartment covered in layer of living, breathing algae.

Credit: Pierre Carreau. http://www.pierrecarreau.com/

Wow. Just — wow. Photographer Pierre Carreau loved waves as a child, and his latest photographs tap into that early fascination by seeming to freeze ocean waves in time. Per This Colossal. Carreau “shoots waves with a variety of high speed cameras using various macro and wide angle lenses, capturing water shapes that appear more sculptural than liquid.”

Isaac Newton:  The Last Lone Genius? Physics historian ThonyChristie is cranky about the historical inaccuracies in the BBC’s new documentary film biography of Newton, The Last Magician.

Is Time Real?  Astrophysicist Adam Frank reviews Lee Smolin’s new book, Time Reborn.

Quantum Biology Comes of Age. Fifteen years ago, Johnjoe McFadden proposed  that quantum tunneling of protons in hydrogen bonds in DNA might play a role in mutogenesis — and this could explain adaptive mutations in E Coli, for example, .”whereby the bacteria mutates preferentially as a direct response to selective pressures from its environment, and which it can only make use of after it has mutated.” It was met with considerable skepticism, but physicists are now starting to warm to the idea.

How do we hear a pin drop? UCLA scientists used hair cells from bull frogs to find out.

The Oxford Electric Bell has been ringing for 137 years and shows no sign of stopping any time soon. It’s the Energizer Bunny of bells. Per io9: “The batteries [a classic Volta dry pile] have a lot of power, and the bell discharges a tiny part of that power with each ring, so the experiment has staying power. Its makers clearly wanted it to keep going, because they coated the batteries with sulfur to keep them insulated. They neglected, however, to leave a record of what’s inside the coating.”

A most profound math problem: Alexander Nazaryan takes a look at whether P = NP.

The Slow Mo Guys place a lit firecracker in a LEGO house and capture the destruction at 2,500 frames per second (h/t Laughing Squid):

Sometimes physics messes with your head. Take antimatter. Does it fall? Physicists at CERN and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory went all Isaac Newton on antimatter and, well, dropped some to find out.

A new dark-matter detector hears first particle pops — okay, it’s mostly from cosmic rays and similar mundane things, but COUPP-60 is up and running and hoping to detect its first dark matter particle.

Confused about all those seemingly contradictory dark matter experimental results? Physicist Matt Strassler gives a great overview to help you keep everything straight.

For the First Time Ever, You Can Now Hear What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Listen to the voice of the man who brought our modern age of long-distance communication into being.

Wind turbulence may have a greater impact on power output than previously thought.

Granted, it’s blurry, but could this be the only photograph of Einstein’s derivation of the mass-energy equivalence? i09 has more, including a link to the relevant 2007 paper deciphering the physicist’s scribblings.

That condensation on your beer can might not be a good sign. Because SCIENCE! It’s the opposite of evaporative cooling. And it has one of the best back stories ever:

The experiment started in the bathroom of co-author Dargan Frierson, where the pair used a space heater and hot shower to vary temperature and humidity. After confirming Frierson’s back-of-the-napkin calculations (the heating effects of condensation are well-known, albeit untested with beer cans, specifically) the pair turned to more rigorous experimental methods. “You can’t write an article for Physics Today where the data has come from a setup on the top of the toilet tank in one of the author’s bathrooms,” said Durran.

Tunguska Meteorite Fragments Discovered: Nobody knows what exploded over Siberia in 1908 but this could help solve the mystery.

Moebius Noodles and other Adventurous Math For the Playground Set: “Kids don’t dream of becoming mathematicians because they already are mathematicians. Children have more imagination than it takes to do differential calculus. They are frequently all too literate like logicians and precise like set theorists. They are persistent, fascinated with strange outcomes and are out to explore the “what-if” scenarios.”

“If we knew which projects would produce useful things, we would have to have a time machine to look into future.” In response to proposed changes by Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX),  Rhett Allain asks, should we change the way NSF funds projects? And answers: Not that way. And the Curious Wavefunction sadly concludes that “the head of the House Committee on Science does not understand how science works.”

Fantastic piece on what it feels like to be bad at math. “My hazy, anxious, defensive procrastination made me a better teacher.”

Over at the New Yorker‘s Elements blog, Gary Marcus waxes philosophical in a thoughtful post ruminating on the vexatious relationship between science and religion.

Can science constitute a felony? A young high school student was expelled — and slapped with felony charges — after attempting an informal science experiment on school grounds that went badly — as in, it exploded. It prompted some interesting discussion about how to encourage student curiosity while preserving safety. D.N. Lee had an especially sharp, insightful take on the matter: “A system that values obedience over curiosity isn’t education and it definitely isn’t science. Her expulsion and arrest sends a very clear and striking message to students, especially urban students of color: Don’t try this at home, or school or anywhere. Science exploration is not for you!”

Finally, IBM made major waves this week with “A Boy And His Atom”: The world’s smallest stop-motion movie made by manipulating carbon atoms on a copper surface.

Physics Buzz cheekily suggested replacing it with a strange abstract symbol and referring to it as “The Particle Formerly Known as Higgs” (think pop star Prince, children of the Nineties). I’m with the Guardian‘s Jon Butterworth on this one: “a dispute about the name is an embarrassing sideshow.”

CERN has observed matter-antimatter asymmetry in the decays of a fourth subatomic particle. Sean Carroll, (a.k.a. the Time Lord) took issue with the media coverage — et tu, Symmetry Breaking? Per Sean, there’s a crucial nuance that is often missed: “The logic is as irresistible as it is faulty: the process of baryogenesis, by which matter came to dominate over antimatter, requires that there be CP violation in the early universe; we are studying CP violation here in the late universe; obviously, what we’re doing helps us understand the matter/antimatter asymmetry. But that’s only true if the kind of CP violation we are studying is actually somehow related to baryogenesis. Which, most experts believe, it is not.”

Event display for the energy (size of circles) measured in different IceCube sensors. Source: IceCube collaboration.

Record-energy neutrinos caught by IceCube might help find the source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

“WIIIILMAAAAA!” The Physics of Fred Flintstone’s Flaming Feet.

Travel with Albert Einstein through Space and Time. “Journey by Starlight is a graphic novel that takes you on a historical journey through the discoveries of astronomers and physicists, kicking off in the year 1200 BCE and ending with the postmortem travels of Einstein’s brain.”

The Math Dude explains: How to Use Statistics to Understand Poll Results, and make math simpler.

Stephen Hawking’s advice for twenty-first century grads: Embrace complexity.

“It’s just like living on Earth, only you weigh 90 pounds more!” Popular Science does the math: what life on Kepler-62e would be like.

Perpetual Motion Test Could Amend Theory of Time. This is a fantastic article at Simons Science News on Frank Wilczek’s controversial (but intriguing!) “time crystal” concept and an ion trap experiment that’s being built to test it. I wrote about this for Discovery News last year, in the context of what exotic concepts one might need to build a working TARDIS, because I’m a big ol’ geek, while Alexandra Witze gave it a more serious (non-cocktail-party-physics) treatment in Science News (sub req’d because you get what you pay for). Spoiler alert: it’s not really good for a perpetual motion machine.

A new paper in Scientific Reports analyzed 50 years of physics papers, examining how citations flow to and from cities, based on where papers are published, and then ranking them based on a PageRank-style algorithm. The result: Boston, Berkeley, and Los Angeles came out on top.

Cracking Goldbach’s Conjecture: how grid computing is helping mathematicians tackle an old problem.

Dating ancient water samples using Atom Trap Trace Analysis, or ATTA.

Credit: Sam van Doorn. http://www.samvandoorn.net/?/web/project-1/

Now this is awesome: Camper Obscura, A VW Camper Converted into a Camera Obscura. Even more awesome: A Drawing Machine that Records Chaos of Pinball. “the better you are at pinball the more complex the drawing.”

Chad Orzel investigates Playground Physics: the merry-go-round is, fundamentally, an angular momentum conservation problem

Eight years ago, Michael Chwe, an associate professor of political science at UCLA, had an epiphany while watching the teen movie Clueless (an adaptation of Emma): it was all about manipulation and game theory! The result is his new book, Jane Austen: Game Theorist, published by Princeton University Press. SciAm’s Ferris Jabr channeled his inner Austen with a wittily acerbic reality check, in which Jane responds: Game Theory? Sir, You Flatter Me: “I believe you have conceived a whole new way of looking at my writing, one that has yielded revelations never before articulated. I am exceedingly and selfishly glad that readers who can match your cleverness are rare in number, otherwise I fear people would spend more time reading books about my books than reading my novels themselves.”

“Laser Forest” installation involves a forest of 150 interactive rods installed in an empty factory space that when touched trigger both light and audio cues, effectively creating a large interactive instrument.

What we talk about when we talk about symmetry: Don Lincoln on the beautiful math behind our elegant universe.

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life, thanks to a couple of young engineers.

Physicists Build World’s First “Magnetic Hose” for Transmitting Magnetic Fields. “So-called “transformation optics” allows these fields to be bent, twisted and steered in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. The trick is to create bespoke materials–metamaterials–that interact with the fields at a sub wavelength scale, guiding them in specific, predetermined ways.”

A remote-controlled robot discovered three burial chambers deep within the Temple of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan.

Greg Gbur, a.k.a. “Dr. Skyskull,” summarizes the potential for constructing an invisibility cloak out of metamaterials. “The cloak guides light around the central region and sending it along its original path, like water flowing around a boulder in a stream.  The lines in the illustration represent rays of light being deflected and returned to their original trajectories.”

Physics Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek explains: Why does the Higgs Particle matter? (First: Imagine Europa.)

The European Space Agency thinks that “space junk such as debris from rockets must be removed from the Earth’s orbit to avoid crashes that could cost satellite operators millions of euros and knock out mobile and GPS networks.” Yes. Let’s clean it up already.

What is physics, really? Per a new article in Physics World, it’s not as straightforward as the old adage is “f it moves it’s biology, if it smells it’s chemistry and if it doesn’t work it’s physics.”

A single equation grounded in basic physics principles could describe intelligence and stimulate new insights in fields as diverse as finance and robotics, according to new research that’s been getting a bit of buzz. io9′s George Dvorsky chatted with the paper’s author, Alex Wissner-Gross.

Finally, why do New Yorkers fold their pizza? And what does that have to do with physics? Let a talking pizza explain it to you:

Lighter elements form inside stars over the course of billions of years as they slowly burn through their fuel. But when massive stars use up their fuel — going from hydrogen to helium, to carbon, oxygen and so on — eventually there’s nothing left but iron and nickel. At that point, their cores collapse and they explode into supernovae. When that happens, heavier elements form within seconds — including gold, silver, lead, and uranium, as well as platinum — and are ultimately scattered throughout space, seeding the universe, so to speak.

Huge amounts of energy are needed for that to happen, because it requires nuclei to fuse. The energy output from a supernova over the course of two weeks amounts to the equivalent of the total energy of 1 billion sun-like stars over 4 billion years, according to Shawn Bishop, an astrophysicist at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Bishop was at the American Physical Society’s recent April meeting in Denver, reporting on his preliminary evidence that certain fossils of ancient bacteria might contain an iron isotope produced by supernovae around 2.2 million years ago.

Supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. Source: NASA. Public domain.

Bishop has been investigating this possibility for several years now. Whether we’re talking about Type II or Type Ia supernovae, one of the elements that gets scattered throughout space is a neutron-rich isotope of iron, 60Fe. It has a pretty short half-life, however, especially compared to the age of our Solar System, so there shouldn’t be any 60Fe on Earth.

Except there is — a tiny bit, preserved in the ferromanganese crust deep on the ocean floor, discovered several years ago. This indicates that around the same time as that layer formed in the crust, Earth got pelted with some supernovae debris. “That we’re here talking about it means it wasn’t too close,” Bishop joked at a meeting press briefing in Denver.

But if there’s 60Fe in the crust on the ocean floor, there might be traces of it elsewhere — possibly even in microfossils of a certain kind of magnetotactic bacteria found in core sediments taken from the ocean floor. And Bishop has figured out how to search for those traces using accelerator mass spectroscopy (AMS).

The bacteria in question were first described in a 1963 paper by Italian microbiologist Salvatore Bellini, who observed such bacteria orienting themselves toward the North Pole in bog sediment samples when he exampled them under a microscope. He realized they could somehow sense magnetic fields, and used that ability for navigation to find their preferred low-oxygen environments. Richard Blakemore published the first peer-reviewed paper on the critters in Science in 1975; it was Blakemore who first described them as “magnetotactic,” and the name has stuck.

Okay, but why does Bishop think these bacteria might be the key to verifying his hypothesis? Their magnetic sense comes from chains of pure magnetite crystals formed by extracting iron from the ocean water and sediments along the sea bed. Bishop thinks it’s possible that fine-grained debris from a supernova explosion could pass through Earth’s atmosphere, rapidly oxidizing in the process so that they are broken down into tiny nano-oxides.

Magnetotactic bacteria form chains out of magnetite crystals to navigate. Source: Shawn Bishop.

These would rapidly dissolve in oxygen, form rust, and eventually settle in the sediment along the ocean floor, where the bacteria would suck them up for their crystal chains. When the bacteria eventually die, those chains remain behind in the sediment, and 60Fe would be locked inside. So any traces of 60Fe found in that sediment would constitute a kind of biogenic signature of a supernova event, preserved in the fossil record.

So that’s what Bishop set out to find. Over the last few years, he’s obtained two sediment cores from the Pacific Ocean near the equator. He developed chemical processes to dissolve the tiny bacteria grains inside those samples, and then ran those samples through an AMS, calibrated using industrial magnetite (found in black printer toner). “We’re literally counting individual atoms of 60Fe,” he said.

When Bishop analyzed the data, he found strong peaks in 60Fe concentrations corresponding with a possible supernova event around 2.2 million years ago. He also cited a 2002 Physical Review Letters paper analyzing the motion of various star formations relative to earth around the same time period, indicating that there may have been several supernovae in a star cluster called Scorpio Centauri that passed near Earth –  handy “smoking gun” candidates for the source of that 60Fe.

It’s worth noting that Bishop emphasized repeatedly that these are merely preliminary results from his analysis, done in January and augmented just two weeks before the Denver meeting. They have not undergone peer review, and are as yet unpublished. He’s working on that over the next six months, and will also be moving on to analyzing the second core sample, which has five times more material, thereby improving the statistical quality of his results. He’d also like to extend the AMS analysis to searching for another supernova-produced isotope, aluminum-26, thereby garnering even more evidence for his hypothesis.

So is Bishop right that there is evidence of a supernova locked in the fossils of these ancient bacteria? It’s starting to seem plausible, at least. Only time will tell.

References:

Benitez, Narcisco; Maiz-Apellaniz, Jesus; Canelles, Matilde. (2002) “Evidence for Nearby Supernova Explosions,” Physical Review Letters 88, letter 081101.

Bishop, Shawn and Egli, R. (2011) “Discovery Prospects for a Supernova Signature of Biogenic Origin,” Icarus 212: 960-962.

Blakemore, Richard. (1975) “Magnetotactic Bacteria,” Science 190(4212): 377-379.

Knie, K. et al. (2004) “60Fe Anomaly in a Deep-Sea Manganese Crust and Implications for a Nearby Supernova Source,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 171103.

Seeger, P. A., Fowler, W.A., Clayton, D. D. (1965) “Nucleosynthesis of heavy elements by neutron capture,” The Astrophysical Journal Supplement 11: 121–166.

Seriously, it might seem trivial, but it’s a theoretical question that dates back to the late 19th century, when Lord Rayleigh and a Belgian physicist named Joseph Plateau studied the behavior of fluids, particularly how a column of water, for example, will fragment into discrete drops after just 10 centimeters. They attributed this to surface tension, which amplifies the effects of small fluctuations, or waves, that develop naturally in a column of liquid as gravity pulls it down, eventually forming drops. It’s called the Rayleigh-Plateau instability.

Honey forms long thin strands as it pours that resist breaking up into droplets. Photo: Sean Carroll.

But honey — also a kind of fluid — doesn’t behave like that; it is much more stable. The breaking up into droplets is delayed significantly, so much so that a single strand can stretch as much as 10 meters before it snaps.

Physicists have been puzzling over why this might be the case ever since. In fact, there have been several attempts at modeling the behavior of honey as it drips over the last eight years, and a team of French scientists think they may have finally cracked the case with a new paper in Physical Review Letters.

Honey is an example of a non-Newtonian fluid – a fluid that changes its behavior when under stress or strain. Let me borrow a few paragraphs from my 2012 post on “oobleck” for context. Isaac Newton first delineated the properties of what he deemed an “ideal liquid,” of which water is the best example. One of those properties is viscosity, loosely defined as how much friction/resistance there is to flow in a given substance.

The friction arises because a flowing liquid is essentially a series of layers sliding past one another. The faster one layer slides over another, the more resistance there is, and the slower one layer slides over another, the less resistance there is. Anyone who’s ever stuck their arm out of the window of a moving car can attest that there is more air resistance the faster the car is moving (air is technically a fluid).

That’s the basic principle.  But the world is not an ideal place. In a Newtonian fluid, the viscosity is largely dependent on temperature and pressure: water will continue to flow — i.e., act like water — regardless of other forces acting upon it, such as being stirred or mixed. In a non-Newtonian fluid, the viscosity changes in response to an applied strain or shearing force, thereby straddling the boundary between liquid and solid behavior.

A simulation of fluids with different viscosities. Source: Wikimedia Commons, User:Anynobody.

Stirring a cup of water produces a shearing force, and the water shears to move out of the way. The viscosity remains unchanged. But non-Newtonian fluids? Their viscosity changes when a shearing force is applied.

Blood, ketchup, yogurt, gravy, mud, pudding, custard, thickened pie fillings and, yes, honey, are all examples of non-Newtonian fluids. They aren’t all exactly alike in terms of their behavior, but none of them adhere to Newton’s definition of an ideal liquid.

Not all non-Newtonian fluids are created equal: they respond to stress or a shearing force in different ways. Some react as a result of the amount of stress applied, while others react as a result of the length of time that stress is applied, like cream (viscosity increases with stress over time, i.e., the longer you whip it, the thicker it gets).

Oobleck, or custard, becomes more solid — viscosity increases with increased stress– while others become more fluid, like honey, ketchup, or tomato sauce, and viscosity decreases with stress over time. (You can perform a DIY viscosity experiment at home testing various liquids; instructions here.)

What does viscosity have to do with why strands of honey resist breaking up into droplets, compared to a less viscous fluid like water? Prior research seemed to indicate that viscosity didn’t really play a role in this behavior — gravity was primarily responsible for forming strands as a liquid was poured. But that would mean that all fluids should break at the same point, regardless of viscosity — and that clearly wasn’t the case when it comes to a viscous fluid like honey.

Back in 2004, physicists at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby modeled “an infinitely long dribble” of honey to try to shed some light on the problem. They introduced a “wobble” — the aforementioned fluctuation or wave — into the strand, and monitored how that strand behaved over time. The honey proved very stable, and the researchers concluded this was the case because the honey dripped more quickly than the wobble grew.

It turns out that the point at which a strand of fluid breaks does depend on its viscosity. Specifically, the more viscous the fluid, the more it slows down the amplification of the little wobbles or waves that ultimately lead to the formation of drops and cause the strand to break.

The Danish work focused on pinpointing the exact point at which the effects of viscosity were no longer relevant. This latest paper sheds further light on this phenomenon, demonstrating that it also depends on where the wavy fluctuations develop along the dripping strand. Per Physics Focus:

“For perturbations that start at the nozzle, this influence of viscosity doesn’t count for much, because they get rapidly stretched out as the jet descends, before they can grow and create a pinch-off. But irregularities appearing further down the jet can grow in amplitude before they get stretched too much, so viscosity matters for them.”

The French scientists tested their model’s prediction by experimenting with dripping silicone oils, varying the viscosity, and those predictions held except in the case of the most viscous fluids. At that point, they hypothesize, “the jets become so thick before they break that they are more susceptible to perturbation than the theory can describe.”

SCIENCE! See? Honey might be commonplace, but from a physics standpoint, it’s fascinating stuff. Incidentally, it’s not just the way it forms long strands that’s interesting scientifically. There’s also a nifty rope coiling effect that occurs as the dripping honey hits the surface. I’ll let Dustin at Smarter Every Day fill you in on that little bit of fluid dynamics:

References:

Garcia, J.M., et al. (2005) “Viscosity Measurements of Nectar- and Honey-Thick Liquids: Product, Liquid, and Time Comparisons,” Dysphagia 20(4): 325-335.

Javadi, A. et al. (2013) “Delayed Capillary Breakup of Falling Viscous Jets,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 144501.

Papageorgiou, D. T. (1995). “On the Breakup of Viscous Liquid Threads,” Physics of Fluids 7 (7): 1529–1521.

Senchenko, S. and Bohr, T. (2005) “Shape and Stability of a Viscous Thread,” Phys. Rev. E 71, 056301.

The biggest news out of this week’s April meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver was the announcement of possible evidence for a dark matter particle in the latest data from the CDMS collaboration. A note of caution is in order. It’s what’s called a three-sigma result, and while certainly worthy of note, these kinds of signals turn up in particle physics data all the time. Most of them disappear upon subsequent analysis. In fact, at the same meeting, others on the CDMS collaboration reported on a 2.7-sigma result from last year, that did not withstand additional analysis and disappeared. Matt Francis opted for a message of hope: “If these results are real, they correspond to a WIMP mass around 8.6 GeV.” [NOTE: This and the next paragraph edited slightly to clear up confusion between two different dark matter experiments; see comments.]

There were also new results from the AMS experiment on board the International Space Station. These, too, do not constitute a discovery. Yet. Per Katie Mack: “What AMS has done is measure, to very high accuracy, the amount of antimatter the galaxy is bombarding us with. It might be coming from dark matter… but really there’s no compelling evidence that it is. And it’s certainly too soon to break out the champagne.” As Katie said, it’s far too early to make a definitive declaration. Keep cool! We’ll find those sneaky particles eventually!

As if the Boston bombings weren’t tragedy enough, there was also an explosion at a fertilizer plant in Waco, Texas, this week, with many more fatalities. Discover dug into the archives for a 1996 article (in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing) on why fertilizer explodes. And Kyle Hill explained how analyzing mushroom clouds can tell us quite a bit about such explosions.

Northern cardinal's call represented by wavelet transform. Image credit: M. Fischer/Aguasonic Acoustics.

So very cool: Mark Fischer uses wavelet transforms to visualize the acoustic signatures of the calls of whales, birds, and insects — many of which lie outside the range of human hearing — into colorful images. They’re like Fourier transforms, only instead of using sinusoids, he uses wavelets. The results are stunning. Now we can see the calls of animals, even if we can’t hear them.

Did a physics professor inspire Alfred Jarry to create the character of Père Ubu, the anti-hero of his plays?

It all began with the “classroom martyrdom” of one Félix-Frédéric Hébert (1832–1917), a physics teacher at the lycée in Rennes. Possessed of a large stomach, short legs and an air of bluff pomposity, Hébert was ragged mercilessly by his pupils. “What made him unique and inspired a plethora of ingenious inventions aimed at stirring him up”, recalled one, “was that we could look forward to beautiful tears, noble sobs and ceremonious supplications.” Two brothers, Charles and Henri Morin, began writing and illustrating a series of satirical sketches recounting the exploits of the ridiculous Père Hébert, and these stories were added to by other boys. The “Hébert cycle” consists of long poems, plays, mock newspapers and fantasy adventures.

Fun bit of historical trivia: A hydrodynamical effect first described by Thomas Young was exploited in the 1950s to build frisbee-shaped military aircraft.

As Don Lincoln explained at Symmetry this week, when a scientific result fails the test of “naturalness,” it can point to new physics.

More evidence that Nature is an awesome materials scientist. Parasitic Worm Inspires Better Sticky Medical Tape.”

The New York Times multimedia team knocks it out of the park again with this amazing interactive animation of all the Kepler planetary systems, including Kepler 62.

Via Steven Strogatz, Jen-Luc Piquant discovered Why Do Math, a terrific multimedia website for undergrads exploring the mathematics sailing, voting, and cochlear implants among other topics.

The Physics Buzz podcast explores the future of fusion energy with a look at the National Ignition Facility and ITER.

It’s short, sweet, and a wee bit silly, but this (non-dialogue) stop-motion animation of Albert Einstein schooling Darth Vader on why he shouldn’t use the force is fun — and impressive, given how much work went into it. Big Al, the Force is with you!

The LHC passed the ping-pong ball test! Physicists sent an ultra-clean, miniature ping-pong ball through part of the Large Hadron Collider beam pipe to test for hidden defects.

A Second Higgs Boson? Physicists Debate New Particle at the APS April Meeting. Per LiveScience: “A secondary spike in Higgs data presented in December 2012 led to speculation that physicists had perhaps found a second Higgs boson of a different mass. However, that spike showed up in only one LHC experiment. Other lines of evidence produced at the collider have failed to show similar anomalies.”

Flapping flight, despite being utilized by creatures of many sizes, remains remarkably difficult to engineer.

Is Your Entire Life Really Encoded in Digits of Pi? Well, yes and no, as Evelyn Lamb explained this week at Slate: “If you look at it the right way, pi really does have it all.” However, Lamb added a clarification in her accompanying blog post about what this really means for human creativity: “No one with any sense will be switching to a pi-mining strategy to write the next great American novel.”

Judges announced the winners of the 2012 Global Particle Physics Photowalk, showcasing the modern beauty of science.

Inside Science interviews JPL planetary scientist Kevin Grazier on his role as technical consultant for the new SyFy series Defiance.

From the How Did I Miss This Department: The world’s greatest buildings provide a window on great math and great design. Eg, the Sydney Opera House provides an illuminating example of a challenging architectural — and mathematical — problem to create its signature soaring vaulted roofs.

Science as Art: Nanoscale Materials Imitate Everything From Flowers to Frost. Wired showcases the best of the best from the Material Research Society’s annual competition.

Last week it was tears in zero gravity. This week astronaut Chris Hadfield once again brings the awesome with a demonstration of what happens when you wring out a washcloth in space.

It’s no secret that we are huge fans of San Francisco’s Exploratorium here at the cocktail party. Honestly, if we lived in San Francisco, they would have to arrest us for stalking because we’d be there nearly every damn day. The Exploratorium has just opened its doors in a shiny  new location, prompting a nostalgic trip down memory lane for the old site at the Finch and the Pea.

Physicist Sara Callori uses Punnett squares to try to figure out who Sophie’s father really is in Mamma Mia? Sure, it’s middle-school level genetics and the reality is far more complicated. Disclaimers duly noted. It’s still a fun analysis. “Basically I wanted to know that given the men’s eye and hair colors, what was the chance that a daughter they had with Meryl Streep would end up with blue eyes or blond hair.”

Per io9, “Refractographs are eye candy brought to you by physics.” And thanks to this handy video tutorial, it’s easier than you think to create beautiful colorscapes.

“In the beginning, there was a righteous bass.” This is what the Big Bang really sounds like, according to physicist Jon Cramer.

Evan Bianco on math and reason. “Reasoning backwards is the process of solving an inverse problem: estimating a physical system from indirect data. Straight-up reasoning, which we call the forward problem, is a kind of data collection: empiricism. It obeys a natural causality by which we relate model parameters to the data that we observe.”

The First Book of Space Travel: How a Female Author and Illustrator Got Kids into Science in 1953. That author was Jeanne Bendick, who authored and illustrated more than one hundred mid-century children’s books about science and technology.

What Should We Wear? Advice from Scientists about Clothing and Fashion. Meanwhile, Scicurious ponders bench-friendly hair, and whether, when it comes to fashion and being taken seriously as a scientist, there might be a bit of a double standard for men and women in science.

MIT physicists find that variations in population density may accurately reflect the population’s risk of collapse.

Think the sequestration doesn’t affect science? Think again. The Jet Propulsion Lab has canceled this year’s annual free open house – a hugely popular event drawing +40,000 Southlanders every year — because of budget cuts. Outreach is one of the first things to go when finances get tight.

Abstraction is crucial in science and poetry: “take a look at Tycho Brahe’s 16th century astronomical data, and see if you can make sense of it without math.”

Symmetry sits down with Fabiola Gianotti, who recently finished an eventful four years as spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

NASA’s cold fusion folly. Excellent commentary on NASA’s ill-advised venture into low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), with the agency making some  speculative claims about its potential to solve all our energy issues. “The one hitch in the plan, unfortunately, is that they’re going to have to violate some very well established physics to make it happen.” Cuing comments from the Cold Fusion Propaganda Posse in 3…2…1….

Finally, as io9 observed, “It’s not every day you get astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, theoretical physicists Brian Greene, executive director of the World Science Festival Tracy Day, Science Friday’s Ira Flatow, acclaimed science fiction author Neal Stephenson, and Bill “The Bowtie” Nye under one roof chinwagging about the science of storytelling and the storytelling of science.” When you do, you record that discussion and make it freely available to everyone:

It’s not just that physicists like to measure everything as accurately as possible down to multiple decimal places. The size of the proton is relevant to certain predictions of quantum electrodynamics (QED), the theory that describes the interactions of light with matter, and this odd result, if it can’t be resolved, might mean something is missing in QED. Anyway, various experiments since then have sought to resolve the conundrum, with little success — the mysterious shrinking proton continues to be a baffling anomaly, according to physicists reporting on the latest experimental results at the APS April Meeting held in Denver last weekend.

I am on record as championing the Bohr model of the atom when speaking to general audiences with little to no background in physics, in which electrons move about the atomic nucleus in circular orbits. But this is a case where the Bohr model just isn’t gonna cut it. You really need the quantum mechanical description of the atom to grok the significance of the mystery of the shrinking proton. Technically, the electrons don’t really “move” around the nucleus in orbits. Electrons are really waves (although they show up as particles when you perform an experiment to determine its position), and those waves are stationary.

Sure, you can check to see where an electron is, but each time you do, it will show up in a different position — not because it’s moving, but because of the superposition of states. The electron doesn’t have a fixed position until you look at it and the wave function collapses. (If you make a ton of measurements and plot the various positions of the electron, eventually you’ll get a ghostly orbit-like pattern.) So the electron can be anywhere inside this region — including inside the actual proton, as weird as that sounds.

Given the above, just what does it mean to talk about the radius of the proton? The proton is made up of three charged quarks bound together by the strong nuclear force. However, “The proton is not a hard shell, it’s fuzzy like a cloud,” MIT’s Jan Bernauer explained at an APS press conference in Denver. “How would you describe the radius of a cloud?” Well, you’d likely talk about the density of water molecules within that cloud. The proton radius is similar, except in this case we’re talking about the distribution of the charge density. The radius of the proton is that distance at which the charge density drops below a certain energy threshold.

Once you’ve settled on how to define it, how the heck do you measure that radius? You can use the electron. Physicists usually probe the proton radius (of hydrogen atoms, in the present case) either by scattering electrons or by studying the difference between atomic energy levels known as the Lamb shift, after Willis Lamb, who first measured this shift in 1947, ultimately winning the Nobel Prize in 1955 for his work. Here’s the late Hans Bethe talking about the Lamb shift:

Per Nature:

“Physicists can measure the size of the proton by watching as an electron interacts with a proton. A single electron orbiting a proton can occupy only certain, discrete energy levels, which are described by the laws of quantum mechanics. Some of these energy levels depend in part on the size of the proton.”

There are numerous techniques for doing this, according to Argonne National Lab physicist John Arrington. There is electron scattering, a versatile tool that lets physicists probe things at different scales; at high energies, it’s great for measuring quarks and gluons, and at lower energies, it’s ideal for probing the structure of the proton. Then there’s spectroscopic techniques, in which lasers are used to zap a sample, producing a signature that can be analyzed by a spectrometer. There are many different kinds of spectroscopy, depending on the kind of laser used and what, exactly, an experiment is designed to measure. In the case of the proton radius, electron and muon spectroscopy are the most useful.

According to Arrington, in their quest to resolve the shrinking proton puzzle, physicists have thus far used electron scattering [(0.8770(60)], electron spectroscopy [0.8758(77)], and muon spectroscopy, in which the electron is replaced by its heavier sibling, the muon [0.8409(4)] to measure the radius. It’s the latter muon spectroscopy result that is problematic. The hope is that experiments using muon scattering will fill in the data gap and ultimately help resolve the conundrum.

“Assume the proton is a ball of charge, with the electron dancing through the proton,” said Randolf Pohl of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, who was one of the physicists who performed the original 2010 spectroscopic measurements, as well as the latest confirming results. “When it is in the center of the proton, it is attracted equally from all sides, with the charges all around it, so there is no net attraction between proton and muon. This shifts the whole energy state up. That is the effect we are looking at with laser spectroscopy, when we measure the difference between two energy levels: when the electron is inside and outside the proton.” In other words, they’re measuring the Lamb shift.

Pohl’s experiments used muonic hydrogen, where the electron orbiting the nucleus is actually a muon, the heavier sibling of an electron. The muon is nearly 200 times heavier, which means its orbital is much smaller and it has a much higher probability of being inside the proton — 10 million times more likely, in fact. And that means it’s 10 million times more sensitive as a measurement technique, because it is closer to the proton.

“We thought we would measure the same radius [as prior experiments] but with smaller uncertainty,” Pohl confessed. Instead, they found a significantly smaller proton radius than all the prior measurements that had been made, and the latest results only reconfirm that 2010 finding.

“Physics is like solving a jigsaw puzzle,” Bernauer said. “We have some pieces and we find new connecting pieces to broaden our knowledge. But this part doesn’t quite fit.” One possibility is that the result is due to experimental error or a misapplication of QED theory. If that’s the case, it’s not a trivial error; Pohl and his cohorts have spent years checking and re-checking the data.

Alternatively, perhaps physicists need to make some tweaks to update the underlying QED theory to account for these unusual results. While QED is still correct, there might be something a little different about the muon’s properties that needs to be taken into account

Finally, there’s the most exciting — and hence least likely — explanation: that this is due to new physics beyond the Standard Model, possibly even indirect evidence for the “superpartners” predicted by supersymmetry theories. Or there could be another force carrier to augment the photon. Those as-yet-undetected hypothetical particles could be altering the interactions between muon and proton.

However, “The most boring explanation is the most possible: someone messed up the experiment,” Pohl said. “I would like to see more data before claiming there is something beyond the Standard Model.” But if, even after more experiments are done, the discrepancy still holds up, “Then I will get excited too.”

References:

Antognini, Anton et al. (2013) “Proton Structure from the Measurement of 2S-2P Transition Frequencies of Muonic Hydrogen,” Science 339(6118): 417-420.

Distler, Michael O., Bernauer, Jan C., and Walcher, Thomas. (2011) “The RMS Charge Radius of the Proton and Zemach Moments,” Phys. Lett. B 696:343-347.

Lamb, Willis E.; Retherford, Robert C. (1947). “Fine Structure of the Hydrogen Atom by a Microwave Method,” Physical Review 72 (3): 241–243.

Pohl, R. et al. (2010) “The Size of the Proton,” Nature 466, 213-217.

Pohl, Randolf et al. (2013). “Muonic hydrogen and the proton radius puzzle,” submitted to Annu. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci., January 5, 2013.

Stepping up to the plate to bat for Wilson’s team, Ashutosh Jogalekar wrote, “In many fields math is a powerful tool, but only a tool nonetheless; what matters is a physical feel for the systems to which it is applied.”

Others didn’t see it this way, most notably Berkeley mathematics professor Edward Frenkel, who wrote an impassioned response for Slate. Chad Orzel also weighed in on the debate. While concurring that Wilson had a valid point, he pinpoints exactly what so many physicists and mathematicians found objectionable: “If you don’t have a mathematical description of something, you don’t really understand it. Observations are all well and good, but without a coherent picture to hold them all together, you don’t really have anything nailed down. Big data alone will not save you, in the absence of a quantitative model.” In a follow-up post, he opines that Wilson may have learned the wrong lesson from his personal experiences.

Enhance your appreciation for math with this American Scientist feature, “Adventures in Mathematical Knitting” (purchase req’d and worth it): “[P]eople have been expressing mathematics through knitting for a long time. The oldest known knitted mathematical surfaces were created by Scottish chemistry professor Alexander Crum Brown.”

This week saw the passing of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher — a polarizing figure, needless to say. But here’s a little bit of obscure historical trivia for you: apparently, thanks to her interest in science (she had a chemistry degree), she knew about the W boson discovery before everyone else.

Also passing this week: Martyl Langsdorf, a painter who designed the “doomsday clock” graphic for the June 1947 cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as a way to evoke the potential devastation of nuclear weapons. The clock currently is set to 11:55 — five minutes until Doomsday.

Terahertz rays unveil a man’s face under the surface of a famous fresco. Credit: J. Bianca Jackson and Dominique Martos-Levif.

Terahertz rays reveal ancient Roman man hidden beneath famous painting at the Louvre. “The technology is a new addition to the palette that art conservators and scientists use to see below the surface and detect changes, including fake signatures and other alterations in a painting. Termed terahertz spectroscopy, it uses beams of electromagnetic radiation that lie between microwaves, like those used in kitchen ovens, and the infrared rays used in TV remote controls. This radiation is relatively weak, does not damage paintings and does not involve exposure to harmful radiation.”

Japanese physicists have achieved the first demonstration of the storage and release of light in a metamaterial.

Listen to the first 760,000 years of the universe. Sonification of the latest data from the ESA’s Planck Mission.

Few animals can compete with a peregrine falcon for pure speed. (Aerodynamics for the win!)

Everything you need to know about dark matter, explained in 7 steps by Corey S. Powell.

David Harris reviews “The Particles,” a new app that aims to guide users through the rich, diverse, and sometimes confusing world of subatomic particles.

FLUIDIC. Credit: WHITEvoid, via This Colossal.

FLUIDIC – A Sculpture in Motion: An Interactive Field of 12,000 Spheres Illuminated by Lasers. Per This Colossal: “Surrounded by 3D cameras the piece can sense viewer’s motions which are then translated into light patterns, but amazingly the light supplied to the individual voxels is fully external. An array of high-speed lasers project into the cloud to create the dynamic visuals in real-time.”

Here’s a nice three-minute video introduction to the early days of the Universe, narrated by CERN physicist Tom Whyntie.

Scientists are using carbon and DNA, to push cheap and scalable graphene electronics to the nanoscale.

The Claude Glass “was a small convex mirror in a foldable case that could be carried around in someone’s pocket. Also called a “dark mirror,” it was tinted so that it reflected a scene in shades of gold and gray.”

A hunt for dark matter in a former gold mine — the Los Angeles Times ran a fantastic piece on the LUX experiment.

How Bayes’ Rule Can Make You A Better Thinker: the power of probabalistic reasoning. “Bayes’s Rule is a theorem in probability theory that answers the question, “When you encounter new information, how much should it change your confidence in a belief?” It’s essentially about making decisions under uncertainty, and how we should update or revise our theories as new evidence emerges.”

Iron Man’s Top Ten Heavy Metal Moments—Reflections on the first 50 years of Scientific R & D from Stark Industries.

Spinning Black Holes Are a Drag. How do you describe the properties of a spinning singularity in a simple way? Peter Edmonds has some ideas.

Check out these wonderfully eclectic illustrations to Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis (1650).

NASA will be sending a robot on an asteroid fishing expedition. Per Discovery News: “A hooked asteroid will be tamed and delivered to a rendezvous point of our choosing (much closer to home) to allow a manned expedition easy access. This wouldn’t only be great for science, it could also drive significant technologies intended for robotic asteroid deflection and, perhaps, mining techniques.”

Your LEGO Thing of the Week: LEGO Space Kraken Demolishing a Star Wars Super Star Destroyer by LEGO builder Iain Heath.

Finally, there’s no crying in space — or at least, tears can’t fall in zero gravity because PHYSICS:

I’ve written about chaos and fractal patterns before, most notably in the work of painter Jackson Pollock. “Chaos” — a word that typically denotes utter randomness — has a different meaning in the context of math and science. It applies to systems that only appear to be random on the surface; underneath is a hidden order. The stock market is a chaotic system, for example: a slight blip can be amplified many times over until the system “goes critical” and the market crashes. It’s known as the “butterfly effect”: a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and the air disturbance amplifies over time and distance, eventually causing a tornado in Texas.

Fractal patterns are the mathematical offspring of chaos theory, the remnant of chaotic motion — wreckage strewn in the wake of a hurricane, for example. It’s kind of like fossilized footprints left behind by now-extinct dinosaurs: those patterns are left behind by the movement of a chaotic system

2D Mandelbrot Set. Created by Wolfgang Beyer with the program Ultra Fractal 3. Via Wikimedia Commons.

What makes fractals so unusual — and so visually appealing, and hence hugely popular — is that such an image might appear to be haphazard on the surface, but look closer and you realize that there is, in fact, a single geometric pattern repeated thousands of times over at different size scales, just like those nested Russian dolls. That telltale pattern is known as “self-similarity.”

The Mandelbrot set is named after the late mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, often called the “father of fractals,” although he certainly wasn’t the only person who developed them. Even the set that bears his name actually dates back to work by Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia early in the 20th century.

Mandelbrot saw the first visualizations of the set back in 1980, while at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. He absolutely deserves credit for popularizing the Mandelbrot set, making it one of the most readily recognizable fractal shapes.

It’s a wonderful example, too, of how complex elaborate patterns can emerge from a few simple rules (in this case, the iterative application of a single equation). No matter how many times you “zoom” into the generated image, you will still see those same exquisite details repeating at ever-smaller size scales.

But what happens when you go from two dimensions to three? You get a “Mandelbulb.” I was reminded of this over the weekend when I stumbled across this stunning computer animation of a Mandelbulb modeling the movement of 250,000,000 particles:

It’s actually no easy feat to translate the 2D Mandelbrot set into that third dimension. Mathematician and sci-fi author Rudy Rucker — one of the founders of cyberpunk — speculated about the possibility two decades ago, even writing a short story (“As Above, So Below”) based on the concept in 1987. (You can read it here.) But computer processing power just wasn’t up to the task back then; it required billions of calculations, for starters.

A Mandelbulb, created by Ondrej Karlik. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. People tried spinning the 2D fractal image, for example, or toyed with mathematical tricks in higher dimensions. But none produced a “true” fractal, according to Daniel White, an amateur fractal enthusiast in the U.K. who became fascinated by the challenge.

Rather than relying on complicated mathematics, he approached the problem geometrically. There are lots of ways of doing this, but two possibilities involve extending the initial flat 2D plane into a box or a sphere and then performing the same iterative process in the newly 3D space.

White came up with a basic equation in 2007 that almost did the trick. It wasn’t until 2009 when White and his fellow enthusiast Paul Nylander collaborated successfully to produce the first Mandelbulb. Nylander realized he could raise White’s equation to a higher power to produce a Mandelbulb.

Still, their resulting image wasn’t an entirely true 3D fractal either. “There are still ‘whipped cream’ sections, where there isn’t detail,” White told New Scientist in 2009. “If the real thing does exist — and I’m not saying 100% that it does — one would expect even more variety than we are currently seeing.”

True fractal or not, the Mandelbulb is a truly beautiful geometric shape.

April 1 is also the birthday of astrophysicist Joan Feynman, the lesser-known sister to physicist Richard Feynman. This seemed especially pertinent in light of the continued blowback from the infamous New York Times obituary for rocket scientist Yvonne Brill, which inexplicably focused on her beef stroganoff. For those who still don’t get what the fuss is all about — *cough* the NYT obituary editor and reporter *cough* — check out Melanie Tannenbaum’s excellent two-part blog post on “benevolent sexism”: Part I and Part II.

Jennie Dusheck of The Last Word on Nothing brought it all home with this fantastic example of how ridiculous the same standard sounds when applied to, say, Albert Einstein: “Family Man Who Invented Relativity and Made Great Chili Died.” As physicist Matt Buckley noted on Twitter, “I hope I get interviewed by the New York Times someday. Then the world will know how awesome the pizza I make is.”

The big physics news this week came from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a massive particle detector mounted on the International Space Station that may have detected dark matter particles. To wit: AMS detected some extra positrons that seemed to fit the energy ranges predicted by models for dark matter particles. This finding is consistent with earlier results from the PAMELA experiment, although far from a definitive “discovery.”

Many in the online science-minded community felt the initial press release and early media coverage, in particular, were, shall we say, “over-hyped.” A number of prominent science bloggers quickly weighed in with a more measured take on the AMS result, including Matthew Francis, Rob Knop, Jester at Resonaances (who declared the results “nice but not game-changing”), Matt Buckley (at MetaFilter) and Ethan Siegel of Starts With a Bang, who was especially displeased with the press coverage, noting, “[B]ased on what AMS has presented, there is nothing to suggest that they have detected any evidence whatsoever for particle dark matter.”

For several years now, the APS March Meeting has held an annual Physics Singalong hosted by Haverford College physics professor Walter Smith, who prompts participants to belt out fave tunes — with lyrics reconfigured into a physics twist — and Physics Central has the podcast of this year’s singalong. (Smith maintains what he describes as the premiere online collection of physics songs in the world.) If you want even more details, I blogged about this back in 2006 on the occasion of the very first such event.

Check out “A is for Ampere”, the first episode of a new Webseries called Circuit Playground; this episode explains the basics of electrical current:

These portraits were drawn with mathematical equations (specifically parametric functions), and they are AWESOME!

Another home-run from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: “If too many Planck-kitties are near each other, the ‘purr frequency’ shreds local space-time.”

All the fashion forward geekerati are wearing these Curiosity Rover dresses and DNA leggings by Shenova — or at least they should be!

Not an April Fool’s joke: IBM Seeks a Superefficient Computer Using Fluids.

Astrophysicist Mario Livio posted some thoughtful musings on perfect numbers. “[W]e only know of 48 perfect numbers! The last of these, which has 34,850,340 digits, was discovered in February 2013 through the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project, which has been running for 17 years.”

Female posing (1968), Richard Feynman. Source: Brain Pickings.

Think physicist Richard Feynmann’s only artistic hobby was playing the bongos? Surprise! He also dabbled in art. This week, Brain Pickings featured “The Art of Ofey” (his artsy nom de plume), a selection of Feynman’s sketches and drawings. “I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.”

io9 editor Annalee Newitz toured the Molecular Foundry at the University of California, Berkeley, where “tomorrow’s material world is being built.”

Admittedly, I’m a little biased, since I write for the site occasionally, but the newly launched Simons Science News has been posting some pretty excellent articles, like this one on phase transitions and quasicrystals by Natalie Wolchover: Solid or Liquid? Physicists Redefine States of Matter.

Cosmic rays reveal a surprisingly direct connection between you and a supernova 1000 light years away.

Astrophysicist and cosmic-tie collector Neil de Grasse Tyson fields ten questions, including, who he likes better from the Star Wars franchise — Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. Not to be outdone, Caltech physicist John Preskill answers three questions, including “Just what is quantum entanglement?”

An unexpected benefit of turning off Japan’s nuclear reactors: physicists can see a flood of geoneutrinos from deep within the Earth, yielding insight into the planet’s deep mantle processes.

Discovery News asks a provocative question: Is An Alien Message Embedded In Our Genetic Code? Grant Jacobs has an answer. (tl;dr: “No.”)

Learn about the True Science of Parallel Universes, courtesy of Minute Physics:

It’s the physics paradox that’s not dead yet! Both Nature and New Scientist (subscription required) featured very nice stories on the black hole firewalls debate this week. You can also check out my own article for Scientific American/Simons Science News, and the accompanying blog post, from last December.

Take The Atlantic’s quiz: Is NASA or the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)? The Universe as Art or Art of the Universe?

Introducing the Paper-and-Pencil Cosmological Calculator, for all those who struggle with converting redshift into parsecs

Via John Ptak of Ptak Science Books comes this fascinating look at Atomic- , Solar- and Vacuum-Powered Airport-Laden Dirigibles and Other Wild Ideas of Future (circa 1920s) Flight.

You had me at “Thermal imaging of emperor penguins in Antarctica.” And those images show that, for instance,

“the heads, beaks, eyes, and flippers … are the warmest while much of their feathered surface remains several degrees colder than the temperature around them. Not only does this indicate that the penguins’ skin and feathers are extremely effective insulators—the core temperature of each penguin is roughly the same as a human’s—but it means that the penguins are losing heat via radiative cooling toward the sky, the same way your car does when frost forms.”

These stock photographs of “scientists” are way more hilarious than you ever imagined — far worse than anything on The Big Bang Theory.

Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya is the world’s foremost sculptor of fog — a most ephemeral medium. Per The Finch and the Pea: “Working with engineers, she developed a system to create and disperse water vapor through pipes to create fog. For her first fog sculpture, she covered the entire Pepsi pavilion at Osaka’s Expo ’70 in fog. Since then, using the same technology, she has created more than 50 fog sculptures in environments ranging from art galleries to bridges to forests.”

Finally, the Internet was made for cats. And science. And the Science of Cats:

Yowza! Scientists from Zhejiang University in China have made a graphene aerogel that’s less than one-seventh the density of air.

In other graphene-related news, a lab “accident” may solve your annoying battery problems, according to this article in Slate. UCLA grad student Maher El-Kady “wondered what would happen if he placed a sheet of graphite oxide—an abundant carbon compound—under a laser. And not just any laser, but a really inexpensive one, something that millions of people around the world already have—a DVD burner containing a technology called LightScribe, which is used for etching labels and designs on your mixtapes…. The simple trick produced very high-quality sheets of graphene, very quickly, and at low cost.” I also love this quote by Kaner:
“Nothing in science is actually an accident—it only looks like that way when you look back.”

Researchers at Stanford Linear Accelerator have created an x-ray beam with two slightly different colors. “Tuning the color of the x-rays will allow researchers to pick out specific atomic and molecular dynamics like how bonds break and rearrange in chemical reactions.”

The NOvA neutrino detector, technically still under construction, has nonetheless already begun to take data from cosmic rays.

Young Albert Einstein, 1882. Via Brainpicker.

Ladies and gentlemen: Albert Einstein as a toddler. He had a certain confident savoir-faire even then.

Justice & the Sign for Equality. In honor of civil rights for all when it comes to marriage, John Ptak tracks down when the ” = ” sign first appears in print — in Robert Recorde’s The Whetstone of Witte, published in 1557.

Dinosaur-killing impact set the world on fire: Researchers argue forcefully that the ensuing heat set off global forest fires.

Neutrino Oscillations Are Cool. OPERA snags it third tau neutrino: the experiment has caught a muon neutrino oscillating into a tau neutrino, an extremely rare event.

Socrates (In The Form Of A 9-Year-Old) Shows Up In A Suburban Backyard In Washington. Per Robert Krulwich: “This 9-year-old — what he knows is different. It’s not local; it can’t be found looking under a couch. It’s mind stuff, found mostly in books or college classrooms, or by letting your mind run free.”

Georgia Tech and Purdue scientists made a recyclable solar cell. Now solar energy is truly renewable.

I lived in Washington, DC, for six years, and well remember the news stories about exploding manhole covers. Has the mystery finally been explained? “Researchers who mapped methane concentrations on the streets of the nation’s capital found natural gas leaks everywhere, at concentrations of up to 50 times the normal background levels, they reported here last week at a meeting of the American Physical Society. The leaking gas wastes resources, enhances ozone production, and exacerbates global warming — not to mention powering the city’s infamous exploding manholes.”

From the "Black Hole" series by Fabian Oefner: http://www.fabianoefner.com/64838/1159918/projects/black-hole

The physics of fluids in spellbinding color (see photo, right)! Per io9: “Switzerland-based photographer Fabian Oefner has a knack for exploring the intersection of science and art. In his latest work, he pours a variety of colored paints over a rod connected to a power drill to produce some remarkable shots of fluid in motion. Who knew combining acrylics with power tools could be so beautiful?”

A blob of “intelligent” goo can compute solutions to Traveling Salesman problem and produces a route map as well. It didn’t even need to consult Google maps.

What happens when you “turn off” gravity in the new game Parallax? Mega-coolness, that’s what.

Watch Oppenheimer recall witnessing Trinity nuclear test in 1945. “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

The philosophy of the Higgs: “Is there a role for philosophy in physics? Should physicists listen to philosophers?” Particle physicist Michael Krämer hangs out with philosophers and learns that one should be wary of irrelevant blondes.

Counter-intuitive, but apparently true, based on analysis of cell phone data: Strong Social Ties Hinder the Spread of Rumours.

Eeek! The Blob is hungry! Actually it’s magnetic paste. And it’s kind of awesome.

Blasphemy! Historical contingency and the futility of reductionism: Why chemistry (and biology) is not physics. Ashutosh Jogalekar makes the argument: “The reductionist zeitgeist of physics cannot “explain” chemistry any more than “entropy” explains the inexorable march of life from birth to death.” Discuss.

Prince Rupert’s Drop: The Curious Properties of a Molten Glass Blob Dropped in Cold Water:

What an 18th century treatise on population can teach us about energy resources: Revisiting Thomas Malthus.

This week’s adventure in patent pseudoscience: Introducing the Terahertz Egg, with water imprinting! Just don’t ask the applicant to specify exactly how this happens.

I wish we’d known about these spiffy waveform wedding rings by Japanese artist/designer Sakurako Shimizu when the Time Lord and I got married five years ago. Each one is custom made, “etched with a waveform of a couple’s voices uttering any words they choose.” What could be more romantic than that?

Waveform wedding rings by Japanese artist and designer Sakurako Shimizu. Source: io9.

If a dry tree pops sap bubbles in the woods, does it make a sound? YES! In certain conditions, tree sap may reach extreme negative pressures and emit popping sounds.

Learn about Charles Munroe, the man who used letters to make explosions more destructive: “You can etch words into metal with an explosion, and those words reveal a startling thing about how explosives work.”

Can the Ice Wall in Game of Thrones Survive Science? tl;dr: “no.” Scientists are such killjoys.

And finally, speaking of Game of Thrones (Season 3 premiere on Sunday!), okay, it’s not related to physics in any way, but we adore this Game of Thrones Random Death Generator, which helpfully lets you know how you’d die in Westeros. Per the Mary Sue: “Because you wouldn’t live. Let’s be honest here.”  My favorite: “Stabbed by Arya Stark for Standing in Her Way (Served You Right).” But the generator told me I was choked to death by an imprisoned Jaime Lannister instead. C’est la vie! Far better than being “bored to death by Catelyn.”

Winter is coming.

“Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise.

The above proverb adorns the Web page of Nathan Mlot, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Mlot studies ants, specifically how they self-assemble/self-organize. He made a splash in the media a couple of years ago when he reported that, based on his experiments, fire ants can actually link together to form life rafts should, say, their nest flood. Any single ant has a certain amount of hydrophobia — the ability to repel water — and this property is intensified when they link together, weaving their bodies much like a waterproof fabric.

They gather up any eggs, make their way to the surface via their tunnels in the nest, and as the flood waters rise, they’ll chomp down on each other’s bodies with their mandibles and claws, until a flat raft-like structure forms, with each ant behaving like an individual molecule in a material — say, grains of sand in a sand pile. And they can do this in less than 100 seconds. Plus, the ant-raft is “self-healing”: it’s robust enough that if it loses an ant here and there, the overall structure can stay stable and intact.

Source: Georgia Tech Ant Lab, http://antlab.gatech.edu

In short, the ant raft is a super-organism and the ants become a kind of granular medium. Even weirder, when they all link up like that, the ants start exhibiting more fluid-like properties — so much so, that it’s possible to “pour” them from a teapot into a teacup.

Mlot is just one of the people doing interesting interdisciplinary work on ants at Georgia Tech — two other ant researchers from the same institution reported on their latest work at the annual March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago. Not only is the collective motion of the ants themselves a form of granular media, but so is the soil in which they dig to construct their large underground nests.

Fire ants — so named because of their fiery stings — are an invasive species in the region, thanks to a US cargo ship that docked in Mobile, Alabama in the 1930s, leaving behind a colony of Solenopsis invicta. And I do mean invasive: per Wikipedia, more than $5 billion is spent annually on controlling fire ant populations — and treating those suffering the aftereffects of its sting and the ants do costly damage to crops and livestock to boot.

A well-constructed fire ant nest can last a good ten years. You pretty much have to kill them all in one fell swoop, or you’ll find the infestation bouncing back in no time. The only country that’s been remotely successful at beating back a fire ant invasion is Australia, which managed to wipe out 99% of its fire ant population by 2007 — for a cost of $175 million (Australian currency).

Fire ants build large underground nests by grabbing particles of soil in their mandibles and transporting it to the surface. They navigate their nests via a series of narrow tunnels connecting larger chambers, according to Daria Monaenkova, a Georgia Tech physics postdoc who spoke at the APS meeting.

It’s tough to monitor the critters in the wild, so Monaenkova recreated ant-friendly environments in the lab. She placed her fire ants in artificial soil to track their progress, tweaking the conditions to determine which variables contributed to the ideal conditions for a colony of fire ants to set up camp in your backyard, monitoring their activity from various angles via a homemade x-ray CT scanning system.

Fire ants "grab" tunnel walls with their antennae to keep themselves from falling. Source: Nick Gravish, Georgia Tech

Per Monaenkova, the reason the ants thrive in more temperate climates is that the soil can’t be too cold if the ants are to successfully dig their nests. It also needs to be wet. That’s due to the nature of granular media. A certain degree of wetness enhances cohesion, so the nest walls are less likely to collapse.

Can any of this apply to controlling invasive species? That’s a tougher nut to crack. Even pouring hot water into the nest to kill the ants isn’t foolproof, because some always survive, and eventually they come back and rebuild the nest. But the ants need moistened soil, so keeping your backyard dry could discourage them, and hopefully drive them into your neighbor’s yard instead. Droughts are our friend when it comes to discouraging fire ants.

That’s because dryer soil lacks cohesion — the individual grains don’t stick together as well, making it harder for the ants to dig stable tunnels. If the soil cohesion is too low, or lacking altogether, the ants dig less because it’s so exhausting; their digging rate decreases in inverse proportion to the excavation force required.

As for those tunnels, it turns out there are good reasons why they are so narrow. Monaenkov was joined at the APS meeting by her Georgia Tech colleague Nick Gravish, a graduate student. He noted that if ants were human-sized, their tunnels would be equivalent to our tallest buildings, yet the ants are incredibly productive: they build far more tunnels than we build skyscrapers.

Mostly, Gravish is interested in what he terms locomotion in confined environments — that is, how fire ants navigate those narrow tunnels at such high speeds. Environmental engineering simplifies subterranean locomotion, he explained, often limiting studies to a flat, featureless surface, which doesn’t shed much light on how ants cope in real-world conditions. He wanted to observe the fire ants in situ to determine how physical confinement — e.g., their vertical tunnels — influences the ants’ ability to move rapidly and stably.

So he built several sets of glass tubes with different diameters to see how width affects the ants’ movement. He found that when an ant falls, it knows how to arrest its fall using its sensory appendages (antennae), which serve as a stabilizing mechanism. Gravish tested this by performing “active perturbation experiments” with his tubes — that is, he shook them really hard to see if/when he could dislodge the critters. Per Gravish, “extreme perturbation” proved necessary because “ants have a very robust adhesive system.” It turns out that the ants’ ability to arrest their fall is highly dependent on the size of the tunnel with respect to the ants’ body size. If the tunnel is too wide, the ants can’t “jam” their bodies against the sides with their antennae.

Next he decided to see what size tunnels would be built if he just let his ants dig freely. He found they dug tunnels with diameters proportional to their body size — ideal for ensuring the ants could arrest their fall. He is now investigating how tunnel constraints affect the ants’ collective motion.

Working so closely with fire ants is not without risk. Fire ant stings are nothing to sneer at; if you happen to be highly allergic to the venom, they can even be fatal. At best, they are extremely painful, and if you scratch at the bite, it can easily become infected.  When asked how often they had been stung by their experimental subjects, both Gravish and Monaenkova ruefully admitted they’d lost count. Fortunately neither of them is allergic. You’ve really got to love your research to risk constant bites by fire ants, is all I’m saying.

References:

Gravish, Nick et al. (2012) “Effects of Worker Size on the Dynamics of Fire Ant Tunnel Construction,” Journal of the Royal Society Interface, August 2012 (online).

Gravish, N. et al, (2012) “Dynamics and robustness of fire ant nest construction.,” Journal of the Royal Society Interface (in review).

Gravish, N., Monaenkova, D., Goodisman, M.A.D., and Goldman, D.I., (2013) “Climbing, falling and jamming during ant locomotion in confined environments.,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (in review).

Mlot, Nathan; Tovey, Craig A.; and Hu, David L. (2011) “Fire Ants Self-Assemble Into Waterproof Rafts To Survive Floods,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(17).

I was reminded of Kipling and my juvenile attempt to emulate him when I interviewed mathematical biologist James Murray for my latest article for Simons Science News on Turing patterns — a mechanism devised in 1952 by Alan Turing to explain such naturally occurring patterns as tiger stripes, leopard spots, the precisely spaced rows of alligator teeth, angelfish stripes, and so forth. One of Kipling’s stories was entitled “How the Leopard Got Its Spots,” and Murray confessed that his interest in the possibility of Turing mechanisms in biological systems was piqued when he read that story to his young daughter and she pressed him to explain how the leopard really got its spots. (His daughter sounds like a natural-born scientist.)

From the article:

[Turing] proposed that patterns such as spots form as a result of the interactions between two chemicals that spread throughout a system much like gas atoms in a box do, with one crucial difference. Instead of diffusing evenly like a gas, the chemicals, which Turing called “morphogens,” diffuse at different rates. One serves as an activator to express a unique characteristic, like a tiger’s stripe, and the other acts as an inhibitor, kicking in periodically to shut down the activator’s expression.

To explain Turing’s idea, [Murray] …  imagined a field of dry grass dotted with grasshoppers. If the grass were set on fire at several random points and no moisture were present to inhibit the flames, Murray said, the fires would char the entire field. If this scenario played out like a Turing mechanism, however, the heat from the encroaching flames would cause some of the fleeing grasshoppers to sweat, dampening the grass around them and thereby creating periodic unburned spots in the otherwise burned field.

Turing patterns are a perennial favorite among science writers, especially in light of the 100th anniversary of Turing’s birth last year. Also? Pretty! And narrative angles like why the tiger has stripes play to broad audiences, so editors love them too.

Scientists, on the other hand, have mixed feelings about Turing’s little foray into mathematical biology. Even Murray, who has done seminal work in biological patterning, confessed that he was a little burnt out on Turing after the centenary, pronouncing the mathematician’s contributions to biology rather over-rated. Turing was a mathematician, first and foremost, and his proposed mechanism is (by his own admission) a highly simplified and idealized take on a messy, complicated system.

Nor was he the first to tackle this sort of thing: in 1917, for example, D’Arcy Thompson published On Growth and Form, which also talked about chemical morphogens contributing to periodic patterns. And Boris Belousov independently came up with a closely related model to that proposed by Turing, probably also in the early 1950s, although Belousov struggled to get his work published; it did not appear until 1959, in an obscure journal. Per Murray (in a 2012 paper), Belousov showed “how a group of three reacting chemicals could spontaneously oscillate between a colorless and a yellow solution.”

That doesn’t mean reaction-diffusion and other proposed models for pattern formation can’t be useful: they may lead to breakthroughs later on. This certainly seems to be the case with Turing mechanisms, and the Simons Science News article gives a bit more detail on two recent papers in particular that are generating interest among mathematical biologists: one on how the ridges form on the roof of the mouth in mice, and another on the formation of digit patterns in mouse paws, and why polydactylism may occur.

The latter is particularly intriguing because it might provide additional evidence for the thesis expounded by Neil Shubin (Your Inner Fish), among others, that our hands have an evolutionary antecedent in fish fins. Maria Ros, one of the co-authors, explained that in their experiments, they were able to produce mutated mouse embryos with as many as 14 digits on a paw, looking for all the world like a fan-shaped fin — particularly since they don’t have joints. “We’ve always been interested in why we have five digits and how this is controlled,” she told me. “Our ancestors were polydactyl. In the transition from the fish to tetrapods, from the life in the water to the life on the earth [land, not the planet], there was a transition from the fin to the limb.”

Examples of form constants. Source: Cowan 2002, http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Models_of_visual_hallucinations

If we really want to get into some interesting speculation, we can think about whether a Turing model can be applied to neurons in the brain, which could be “described mathematically as activators or inhibitors, encouraging or dampening the firing of other, nearby neurons in the brain.” And that could potentially explain why we see certain recurring patterns when we hallucinate.

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, a University of Chicago neurologist named Heinrich Kluever classified hallucination patterns into tidy categories known as form constants: checkerboards, honeycombs, tunnels, spirals and cobwebs.

Over seventy years later, another Chicago researcher, Jack Cowan – who holds dual appointments in mathematics and neurology – set out to reproduce those hallucinatory patterns mathematically, believing they could provide clues to the brain’s circuitry.

While the random fluctuations in brain activity might technically just be “noise,” the brain will take that noise and turn it into a pattern. Since there is no external input when the eyes are closed, that pattern should reflect the architecture of the brain, specifically the functional organization of the visual cortex.

That organization is rather fractal in nature, repeating the same patterns at different size scales. “Like tree branches, the brain recapitulates,” neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris told me when we chatted last year for my (forthcoming) book on the science of self. “You are not seeing the cells themselves, but the way they’re organized – as if the brain is revealing itself to itself.”

Cowan found that the predicted patterns from his calculations closely matched what people see when under the influence of LSD, and suspected these patterns might arise from a type of Turing mechanism.

Neurons respond not just to color and brightness in the visual field – the external input – but also to internal interactions with other neurons. Nigel Goldenfeld, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, worked with Cowan on a model for a generic neural network with random connections. They showed that in such a case, the firing of neurons would amplify the Turing effect, making hallucinations more common.

But if our visual cortex actually behaved in this way, it would interfere with our vision. “You don’t want to be enthralled by a hallucinatory spiral when there is a dangerous tiger in front of you,” said Goldenfeld. So he and Cowan speculated that this might be why our brainy architecture is non-random: it confers an evolutionary advantage that limits interactions to stronger short-range connections with nearby neurons. Excited neurons simply follow the familiar uniform diffusion patterns we associate with the behavior of atoms in a gas, and the visual external input from the eyes easily dominates any weaker internal activity.

Sure, it’s highly speculative. That’s part of the excitement of doing cutting-edge science. It will be fascinating to see what biologists and neuroscientists interested in Turing-type mechanisms and biological/brainy patterning come up with next.

References:

Bressloff, Paul C.; Cowan, Jack D.; Golubitsky, Martin; Thomas, Peter J.; Weiner, Matthew C. (2002). “What Geometric Visual Hallucinations Tell Us About the Visual Cortex,” Neural Computation (The MIT Press) 14 (3): 473–491.

Economou, Andrew D. et al. (2012) “Periodic Stripe Formation by a Turing-Mechanism Operating at Growth Zones in the Mammalian Palate,” Nature Genetics 44(3): 348-351.

Economou, Andrew D. and Green, Jeremy B.A. (2013) “Thick and Thin Fingers Point Out Turing Waves,” Genome Biology 14:101.

Ermentrout, G.B. and Cowan, J.D. (1979) “A mathematical theory of visual hallucination patterns,” Biological Cybernetics 34(3): 137-150.

Kondo, Shigeru and Miura, Takashi. (2010) “Reaction-Diffusion Model as a Framework for Understanding Biological Pattern Formation,” Science 329: 1616.

Murray, James D. (2012) “Why Are There No Three-Headed Monsters? Mathematical Modeling in Biology,” Notices of the AMS 59:6.

Sheth, Rushikesh et al. (2012) “Hox Genes Regulate Digit Patterning by Controlling the Wavelength of a Turing-Type Mechanism,” Science 338: 1476.

Turing, Alan M. (1952) “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 237(641): 37-72.

While everyone else was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with ruminations on beer and snakes and all that jazz, Matt Francis decided to celebrate the accomplishments of an Irish mathematician: “On October 16, 1843, the great Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton was walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin. He had been pondering for a long time whether complex numbers could be extended to higher dimensions. During his perambulation, he realized the answer was “yes”, and carved his solution on the Brougham Bridge.”

Voyager 1 has left the solar system! No it hasn’t! Yes it has! The Atlantic‘s Rebecca Rosen explains the confusion. “The official position remains that the spacecraft has not yet crossed over into interstellar space.”

It’s about time! Physicists Confirm They Have (Finally) Found And Killed The ‘God Particle.’ The Onion hits it out of the park yet again.

Why Should You Think Like a Scientist? Because “I don’t know” is not enough, says Chad Orzel.

Piotr Traczyk rocks out at FameLab 2013. Credit: Julia Hoffman, for Symmetry Breaking.

CERN hosted FameLab 2013, a blend of science fair and talent show in which young scientists present their research in three minutes. This year’s participants included particle physicist Piotr Traczyk, who built his own CMS-detector-inspired electric guitar (I blogged about his project at Discovery News last year). He placed second with his explication of how scientists at the Large Hadron Collider search for missing bits of the Standard Model of particle physics using jigsaw puzzle pieces.

Retired Stanford astrophysicist Peter Sturrock’s new book takes a statistical approach to the Shakespeare authorship question and, after presenting evidence, asks readers to decide for themselves. Cuing cries of outrage from the humanities sector — “Man, physicists think they know everything!” — in 3, 2, 1….

What “The God Particle” Hath Wrought: Sean Carroll (a.k.a. The Time Lord) laments one of the worst paragraphs ever written about the Higgs, courtesy of CBS.com: “Originally I thought the journalist was just making things up, but it turns out that it’s Michio Kaku’s fault.” And over at Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Faye Flam asks a provocative question: Michio Kaku Says Higgs Boson Caused the Big Bang. Should Reporters Trust Him?

Did you catch Ed Yong’s terrific feature on swarms in Wired this week? Swarm science is the New Black but some folks were into swarms before they were cool — like Islands & Rivers, makers of this awesome video called “Murmuration”:

Speaking of swarms, there is an excellent explication of the hard-to-define concept of emergent phenomena over at Wiring the Brain in the context of a discussion on the genetics of emergent phenotypes.

Here’s Kyle Hill with breaking news from the Fortress of Solitude: Superman explains why he didn’t destroy that Russian meteor before it hit: “It’s all a matter of physics.” And it looks like Hill is giving Jim Kakalios, author of The Physics of Superheroes, a run for his money with this post on teaching physics with Batman: “Find out how fast Batman and The Joker are going post-POW.”

Quantum Reality Poll Redux: Young Guns and the measurement problem. Remember when quantum physicist Maximillian Schlosshauer (University of Portland) and his colleagues published a poll of physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians on their views of quantum mechanics and the nature of reality? Christoph Sommer (University of Munster, Germany) has posed the same questions to graduate students. Per Physics Buzz:  “While the students’ philosophical views often mirror those of their older counterparts, they diverge on several key questions from the 16-question poll on the foundations of quantum mechanics.”

“By symmetry we can predict that you want me.” Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal offers pick-up lines to snag a physicist: “It would make things simpler….” Call it the spherical seduction.

I was blown away by these stunning light-and-shadow sculptures by artist Diet Wiegman. Per the folks at This Colossal: “Approach a sculpture by … Wiegman and you might be left scratching your head at this random assembly of trash and objects, but shine a light on this same pile of detritus and suddenly a perfectly formed shadow appears: the unmistakable form of Michael Jackson, Michelangelo’s David or even a faithful recreation of the Earth’s surface as it reflects off a metal tray.” Check it out:

Sacrilege! The Virtuosi re-evaluates the values of the tiles in Scrabble™: “These point values were based on the English lexicon of the late 1930’s.  Now, some 70 years later, that lexicon has changed considerably, having gained many new words (e.g.: EMAIL) and lost a few old ones.  So, if one were to repeat the analysis of the game designer in the present day, would one come to different conclusions regarding how points should be assigned to various letters?”

Fun with metrics: This handy calculator lets you convert the square footage of your home into Tetris blocks. According to real estate company Movoto, it takes 1,351,458,219 Tetriminos to build an average two-story, 2,500-square-foot house.

Did first century Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Hanania know about Halley’s comet? Astrophysicist Mario Livio says it depends on how you interpret a key Talmudic passage.

The Mathematics of Averting the Next Big Network Failure. “In a system of interconnected networks like the economy, city infrastructure or the human body, [this] model indicates that a small outage in one network can cascade through the entire system, touching off a sudden, catastrophic failure.”

Hawking is a biopic from director Stephen Finnigan, focusing on the life of physicist Stephen Hawking. The documentary premiered at the SXSW 2013 Film Festival.

Morgan Freeman, in a CERN hard hat, inside the Large Hadron Collider. You're welcome. Credit: Laurent Egli/CERN. Source: io9.

So, this happened: Morgan Freeman joined some of the world’s top physicists at an award ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland for the Fundamental Physics Prize. Per Freeman: “You can think of this as the Oscars, but instead of movie stars, you’re with the greatest minds in the world.”

Cara Santa Maria of Talk Nerdy To Me always asks the Big Questions: What’s the deal with cryonic preservation? Is it pseudoscience? Would you be frozen for a chance at immortality?

Whoa! Check out this Faraday-caged quadrotor hovering between 2 Dual Resonant Solid State Tesla Coils at the 2012 Western Winter Teslathon.

I, Quantum Robot:  a practical use of the combination of quantum computing and robot technology.

“From janitor to chemist, the women of Oak Ridge worked hard and talked little.” A wonderful new book by Denise Kiernan explores on how women helped build the atomic bomb. Also, Ann Finkbeiner uncovers another little-known tale from the atomic age regarding a patent clerk named Captain Paul P. Stoutenburgh.  “On April 1, 1946, he apparently shot first his wife and his 12-year old daughter and then himself.”

Making Lines into Stars, Botany to Cosmology — featuring the “living/anthropomorphized” agates of 17th century polymath Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher. Also: Stanford is crowdsourcing the correspondence of Kircher (h/t: Brain Picker)

Slate dug up a needlepoint pattern from 1811 to teach girls about the solar system, with a quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “These are they glorious works, parent of good.”

Scicurious brings the Friday Weird Science with a look at a new study on liquor preferences. Not all liquors are created equal, prompting  a burning question: Bourbon or Vodka? Pick your poison. (I’m more of a vodka person.)

Set phasers to “Sweeeet!” Using a nanoscale drum, scientists have built a laser that uses sound waves instead of light like a conventional laser. They call it a phaser. Because We Are All Star Trek Now.

FInally, I give you Doctor Who pontificating (kinda) on Phyiiiisics!: “I hope you’re getting all this down.” Go forth and be edified.

So even though I no longer gorge myself on Twinkies, I totally understood when the announcement late last year that Hostess was filing for bankruptcy gave rise to howls of anguish around the Internet  over the prospect that many of the company’s tasty snacky-cakes would no longer be available to consumers – including Twinkies. Many people responded much like Tallahassee in Zombieland, who made it his personal quest to track down the last box of Twinkies in the midst of a zombie apocalypse:

The good news for Twinkie fans is those last few boxes will likely last awhile before the tasty sponge cakes get stale — i.e., the cake loses moisture and hardens as it dries out, until it’s really only good for use as, say, projectile weapons should a zombie or a Twinkie-craving burglar break into your kitchen one night.

You can’t say the same for fresh-baked cakes, most of which have a shelf life ranging from one week to four weeks, depending on factors like temperature and relative humidity of the storage area. And that’s an optimistic assessment: for sponge cake, with its lighter texture, shelf life is closer to three to five days. (Refrigeration won’t help; it’ll just make the cake dry out faster. Try freezing sponge cake instead, if you can’t nom it all up immediately.)

It’s a simple enough task to test for freshness in the comfort of one’s own kitchen, but on a larger scale – especially on the scale of a Hostess manufacturing facility – it might be handy to have a non-invasive high-tech way to measure freshness. And that’s where science can help, according to a new paper by French scientists in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. They used various techniques to analyze lab-baked sponge cakes from Day One, when they were fresh, and monitored how their properties changed as they grew stale over 20 days.

Credit: Ally Brosh. From "The God of Cake," Hyperbole and a Half. http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/10/god-of-cake.html

Believe it or not, this sort of thing has been a subject of scientific study for over 100 years, although, the authors write, “From a molecular point of view, the mechanism of cake staling is not clear yet.”

First, let’s define our terms. What are the essential properties of “freshness”? To a physicist a sponge cake is more than a tasty treat: it’s a material, technically a kind of foam, which falls under the rubric of soft condensed matter. And like any material it has properties. The ones of most interest to food scientists when determining freshness are moistness and texture.

You can determine the moisture content by weighing sponge cake slices before and after becoming completely dried out after spending a couple of hours in a hot oven (130 degrees Celsius). For texture, you want to look at hardness — how much force it takes to “deform” the spongy mesh of the cake — and elasticity, which is how fast the sponge bounces back to its original shape after the deforming force is no longer being applied.

There are many tools for monitoring cake texture — baker compressimeters, texturometers, friabilimiters, penetratometers, and rheometers, to name a few — but they’re time-consuming (requiring a certain degree of skill to operate the equipment) and destructive, so food scientists would love non-invasive methods for assessing the quality of cake. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just shine some light on a cake sample and figure out if it was stale or not? So the French researchers’ thoughts naturally turned to fluorescence spectroscopy.

Spectroscopy techniques shoot light at a sample, and analyze the resulting scatter looking for unique spectra. Those spectra can tell scientists what chemicals are present, for example — it’s like an electromagnetic fingerprint. Fluorescence spectroscopy uses UV light, and when it hits certain compounds, they fluoresce, usually in the visible regime, although not always.

But could you really use this technique to analyze sponge cake? You betcha! The amino acid tryptophan — found in many foods, including red meat, cottage cheese, eggs, poultry, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, bananas and peanuts, chocolate, oats, milk and yogurt, to name a few — is one of those compounds.  Proteins are also vital components in sponge cake; many of those big protein molecules are fluorescent, especially those that contain residues of  tryptophan. That means it’s feasible to use the shape of the tryptophan fluorescence spectra as a kind of “fingerprint” to determine whether a sponge cake is fresh, still edible, or, um, past its prime.

The French researchers set out to test this hypothesis. Any savvy science writer will tell you that the methods section of a paper can be hugely entertaining. I personally love any paper with listed materials like wheat flour, crystal sugar, glucose syrup, liquid whole egg, powdered milk, and a dash of baking powder. The French scientists followed the standard sponge cake recipe, even noting the speed of the mixer (set at 60 rpm for two minutes) for posterity. This is an important part of the sponge cake baking process, since that moist, light texture is due to the air bubbles that get mixed into the fat and sugar during the initial “creaming stage” — so very important when it comes to beating in those critical air bubbles.

Per Guardian food blogger Andy Connelly, an American author of popular cookbooks named Miss Leslie observed in 1857 that creaming the butter and sugar was the most difficult part of the cake making process and advised, “Have this done by a manservant.” Or, you know, a lab assistant. Armed with an industrial mixer. (Connelly also points out that the fats coat the air bubbles, thereby reducing the formation of gluten. You want some gluten forming, you just don’t want too much of it!)

Then they added the egg, which contains proteins that help keep the fat-coated air bubbles from collapsing when baking in the oven; the expansion of the trapped air inside the bubbles is what makes the cake rise, along with a dash of baking powder.

Next they folded in the sifted powdered ingredients, mixing the batter at a lower speed of 20 rpm for one minute to avoid bursting all the air bubbles so painstakingly added during the prior step. And so forth.

Once the batter was ready, it was immediately folded into uniformly sized cake pans and baked in a pre-heated oven at 160 degrees Celsius for 37 minutes. The authors of the study took great care to keep the temperature uniform and the oven well-ventilated, because sponge cake is particularly sensitive to these kinds of variations. As Connelly notes, “If the oven temperature was too low, then the batter will have set too slowly, and expanding gas cells will have coagulated to produce a coarse, heavy texture, making the upper surface sink. If the oven was too hot then the outer portions of the batter will have set before the inside has finished expanding, which produces a peaked, volcano-like surface with excessive browning.”

Then the 28 sponge cakes were cooled for 40 minutes and vacuum sealed into individual plastic bags. The samples were stored at 20 degrees Celsius and 65% humidity, and various cakes were analyzed after sitting for one, three, six, nine, sixteen, and twenty days of storage.

Source: Botosoa, Eliot; Chene, Christine; and Karoui, Romdhane, 2013.

Now the real work began. First they prepared the samples, which entailed taking thin slices from the sample cake — not the ends, nobody likes those, but taken from about 2 cm in from either end. Then a circular “core sample” was taken from the center of each slice. The samples were mounted between two quartz slides, and zapped with light from the spectrometer. The resulting spectra was recorded and analyzed.

So what did they find? There was not much difference in terms of color among the samples. As for texture, there was an inversely proportional relationship between increases in hardness and decreases in elasticity — that is, the dryer and harder the sponge became, the less elastic it was; it just didn’t spring back with the same mouth-watering sponginess after being poked. Less moisture means more cross-linking between the starches and proteins in the cake, making it harder and less elastic.

The most significant changes in texture occurred in the first nine days; after that, the additional increases and decreases in hardness and elasticity were minimal.

As for the fluorescent tryptophan, there was a distinct red shift in the spectra as the cakes aged. Not only that, but the researchers used a multivariate statistical technique to show there was a clear distinction in the spectra of cakes aged at various times, and those differences correlated nicely to the tryptophan fluorescence spectra. So they could distinguish between the sponge cakes aged one, three and six days from those aged for nine, sixteen and twenty days. That correlation is key: the texture analyzer revealed the macroscopic properties, and these correlated to the molecular-scale structure revealed by the spectra analysis.

And there you have it: experimental proof of principle that this is a winning combination of tools for telling us something useful about the freshness of a piece of sponge cake — although I doubt we’ll all be installing bulky fluorescence spectrometers in our kitchens any time soon. Combine it with a texture analyzer in a miniaturized handheld device, however, and some savvy inventor could make a tidy fortune.

References:

Botosoa, Eliot; Chene, Christine; Karoui, Romdhane. (2013) “Monitoring Changes in Sponge Cakes During Aging by Front Face Fluorescence Spectroscopy and Instrumental Techniques,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 61: 2687-2695.

Erlander, S.R. and Erlander, L.G. (1969) “Explanation of Ionic Sequences in Various Phenomena X. Protein-Carbohydrate Interactions and the Mechanism for the Staling of Bread,” Starch 21: 305-315.

Gomez, M. et al. (2010) “Modeling of Texture Evolution of Cakes During Storage,” Journal of Texture Studies 41: 17-33.

Gray, J.A. and Bemiller, J.N. (2003) “Bread Staling: Molecular Basis and Control,” Compr. Rev. Food Sci. Food Saf. 2:1-21.

Karoui, R.; Downey, G.; and Blecker C. (2010) “Mid-Infrared Spectroscopy Coupled with Chemometrics: A Tool for the Analysis of Intact Food Systems and the Exploration of Their Molecular Structure-Quality Relationships – A Review,” Chemical Review 110: 6144-6168.

For the most part, it’s business as usual: the new data, which — every news report will tell you — “gives the most accurate and detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the universe,” pretty much confirms the major predictions of the standard model of cosmology. But there’s an asterisk, just to make things interesting.

Planck's "map" of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

It seems there are a few, er, “anomalies” in the data. The biggest is that we should see a random distribution of fluctuations in the data from the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Mostly, this is true. But prior surveys found hints of a not-so-random distribution in the amplitudes of those fluctuations (how bright they are), and the Planck data confirms it. Per Phil: “A simple model of the Universe says that shouldn’t happen. The Universe is lopsided on a vast scale!” That’s right: we live in a lop-sided universe.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN??? Well, the physicists are still sorting that out, via a very long list of papers, with plenty more to come, but as Matt Francis observed at Ars Technica, mostly it means that “the universe is still weird and interesting.” And that makes physicists very happy.

So, what is this cosmic microwave background radiation, some of you may be asking? (Not everyone follows cosmology closely, after all.) It’s basically the afterglow from the Big Bang. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the CMB in the 1960s, quite by accident. At the time, the physics community was divided into two camps on the question of the universe. The dominant view was that the universe was unchanging and would remain in a steady state forever. A few mavericks argued in favor of the Big Bang model, based on Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that the galaxies are moving away from each other.

In this view, the universe was once infinitely dense, with all matter emerging in a single cataclysmic explosion. But in order for that model to be correct, there should be the equivalent of a cosmic afterglow of about 3 degrees K, per the prediction of Princeton physicist Robert Dicke. And no one had been able to detect it experimentally.

Penzias and Wilson with their horn-shaped antenna.

It’s a classic example of scientific serendipity. Penzias and Wilson weren’t looking for the CMB; they were using a 20-foot horn-shaped antenna (salvaged from an obsolete satellite transmission system) as a radio telescope to amplify and measure radio signals from the Milky Way and other galaxies.

They just couldn’t get rid of all the interference in order to make precise measurements: there was an irritating hissing noise in the background, like static. It was a uniform signal, in the microwave frequency range, and it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

They tried everything, even installing a pigeon trap to oust roosting birds and removing the accumulated droppings, but they couldn’t get rid of the hissing. So they consulted with Dicke, who confirmed the discovery: “We’ve been scooped,” he told his Princeton colleagues. (The lowly pigeon trap is now part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum.)

The CMB’s discovery made the Big Bang the dominant model for the early universe but scientists were still a bit fuzzy about why there would be stars and clusters of galaxies instead of an evenly distributed dust cloud. They figured there had to be minute temperature fluctuations in the CMB, variations in the density of matter in the early universe.

This is known as “anisotropy”: small variations in different directions, in this case, variations of temperature in the CMB in different directions. Lots of things can be anisotropic, even something as basic as the polarizing lenses in sunglasses: if you hold the lens in one direction, polarized light streams through, but hold it in a different direction, and that light is blocked. Since the lens behaves differently depending on direction, it can be said to be anisotropic. Plasmas can have anisotropic properties, too: they may have a magnetic field oriented in a preferred direction.

Another key concept is blackbody radiation. Emitted radiation by the early universe (for our purposes, the “body”)  should be distributed between the various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the shape of that spectrum depends entirely on temperature. So if we know the temperature of such a “blackbody” (technically, a perfect emitter and absorber of radiation, not literally “black”), we can precisely predict what the resulting spectrum should look like.

NASA launched the COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite on November 18, 1989, and got the first results after a mere nine minutes of observations. The accumulated data points formed a perfect blackbody spectrum — the universe is a perfect emitter and absorber of radiation. It was such an exact match with theory that, when the resulting curve was first shown at the 1990 American Astronomical Society meeting, there were audible gasps in the assembled scientists, followed by a standing ovation.  Check it out:

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Isn’t it a thing of beauty? It’s a rare event indeed when experimental data matches the predictions of a theoretical model so perfectly. From this, the team was able to measure the minute temperature fluctuations in the CMB, and therefore where matter in the universe began to aggregate.

That “map” of the early universe produced by COBE was announced at the 1992 APS April Meeting in Washington, DC — one of the first official physics conferences I attended as a young science writer. The press conference was standing room only, with TV cameras from all the major news networks, as well as radio and print reporters, and it was easy to get swept up in the excitement, especially since the gist of what they found could be easily grasped: a snapshot of the universe in its infancy, and an explanation for the origin of galaxies and stars.

COBE was the first experiment sensitive enough to detect those tiny fluctuations, even though the variations were at the level of parts per hundred thousand. COBE also provided the most precise average temperature of the universe to date: 2.726 degrees K. When COBE measured faint fluctuations in the CMB’s temperature, it lent considerable support for the Big Bang model of the universe’s birth. That’s why Stephen Hawking called the COBE results “the greatest discovery of the century, if not of all time.”

The story didn’t end with COBE. The Boomerang and DASI detectors added even more detail to the microwave background, and most recently (around 2008) the WMAP project supplied the best values known thus far for such critical cosmological parameters as the actual age of the universe; the curvature of spacetime; and when the first atoms, stars, etc. began to form.

An artist's concept of the Planck spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

And that brings us back to the Planck mission and today’s big announcement. Planck is the successor to COBE and WMAP. I loved the press release quote by JPL scientist Krzystof Gorski describing Planck as “the Ferrari of cosmic microwave background missions. You fine-tune the technology to get more precise results,” he said. “For a car, that can mean an increase in speed and winning races. For Planck, it results in giving astronomers a treasure trove of spectacular data, and bringing forth a deeper understanding of the properties and history of the universe.”

Apart from the aforementioned anomalies, Planck gives us a new recipe for the makeup of the universe — or rather, even more precise measurements of how much of each “ingredient” there is. To wit (per the folks at Symmetry):

“The map reveals that dark matter makes up about 26.8 percent of our universe, an increase from the previously measured 24 percent, while normal matter makes up 4.9 percent rather than 4.6 percent. The results also indicate that dark energy makes up 68.3 percent of the universe rather than the 71.4 percent previously estimated.”

We also have a new estimate for how fast the universe is expanding (a.k.a. Hubble’s constant): 67.15 plus or minus 1.2 kilometers/second/megaparsec. (One megaparsec = around 3 million light years). That is a slightly less expansion rate than those derived from previous data collected by NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, which employ different measurement techniques. It means the universe is also a teensy bit older than previously measured: 13.82 billion years old, to be exact, compared to an even 13.8 billion years (cosmologists care about those extra decimal places, even as the rest of us prefer to round up or down).

So, you know, science marches on. We’ll have the complete results from Planck next year, adding even more precision to these measurements. And after that? Who knows?

Portions adapted from an October 2006 post on the archived Cocktail Party Physics blog.

Speaking of Pi, John Ptak ferreted out the first use of the symbol for Pi in 1706, while Steven Strogatz (via Twitter) provided a link to Einstein’s proof, at age 11 (!), of the Pythagorean theorem. Meanwhile, Maria Popova of Brain Pickings remembers when Einstein met the philosopher Rabindranath Tagore.

Controversy swirled around the announcement of algae-like structures inside a Sri Lankan meteorite, which some astrobiologists claim are clear evidence of panspermia, the idea that life exists throughout the universe. Phil Plait wrote earlier this year about another paper by the same scientists claiming to have found diatoms in a meteorite. His take on their latest work? “They try to show the samples are meteorites, but the evidence they present is in many ways even worse than the outrageous claims they made in the first paper.” Physics Buzz also declared the claims to be “highly dubious.”

Providing more of a historical/cultural take, Meteorites & Asteroids looked at how objects from space slamming into Earth have inspired art throughout of human history. (h/t: The Finch and the Pea)

Via The Finch and the Pea, we learned of a Webcomic called The Abominable Charles Christopher by Karl Kerschl, notably Kerschl’s amusing take on the physics of an otter slide.

Remember when avid readers of yore used to personalize the books in their libraries with bookplates, known as ex libris? Albert Einstein was no exception: his ex libris was of his own doodling design.

Sean Carroll (a.k.a. The Time Lord) takes a closer look at a new paper on partially interacting dark matter. “The idea is that most of the dark matter is vanilla and boring, but some fraction of it is atom-like.”

Bifringement in a fork and spoon. Credit: Tom Swanson

Via Tom Swanson, we learned that the glowing “sunstone” of Viking legend — which, when held up to the sky, disclosed the position of the Sun on a cloudy day — may have some basis in truth. Tom explored some of the underlying optics, and also to post photographs of his own making (right), illustrating stress-induced birefringent materials viewed with polarizing filter and a polarized source.

Atomic Age Artifacts: So what exactly was in all those old fallout shelters?

Silent alarm: here’s a battery-powered bell which has rung inaudibly for 173 years. Per Frank Swain: “A clapper on a pendulum rocks from side to side between two metal spheres, driven by electrostatic forces. The bell is powered by a pair of mysterious batteries, the composition of which is unknown.” That might get pretty irritating so it’s a good thing it’s behind sound-proof glass.

Rhett Allain always asks the interesting questions. This week on Dot Physics: How fast would the Earth have to spin to fling people off? The post — and Sid the Science Kid — promoted Chad Orzel to muse on fictitious forces and frictionless surfaces.

In other news, fluid dynamics continues to be awesome. This is what happens when you run water through a 24hz sine wave. “How is this even possible? Because science!” Also, check out this nifty high-speed video showing a liquid crystal (nematic) vibrating on a tuning fork (288 Hz):

Over at the SciAm Guest Blog, Kyle Hill had another excellent physics-themed post, this one exploring the mechanics of the pull-up, arguing persuasively that yes, women can do them, too. Because SCIENCE! But it probably will take us longer to work up to it.

Spritz luminol on your pennies and they’ll glow. Don’t worry! It’s not blood — your penny’s just been framed.

The BBC and the Open University are producing two television programs about Richard Feynman.

Do the Rossby Wave! ‘Hot spots’ ride a merry-go-round on Jupiter. My SciAm Scibling Caleb Scharf has the video.

Apparently there’s something in physics called the Lazarus Effect: Per io9: “Semiconductor particle detectors can get worn down until they’re useless and dead. …Or are they? Scientists found a simple trick that can bring them back to life.”

The Galaxy Garden in Paleaku Peace Gardens Sanctuary, Kona, HI. Source: PNAS.

The lush south side of Hawaii Island’s Mauna Loa volcano is home to the Galaxy Garden, where visitors can stroll through a living model of the Milky Way at 1,000 light years per foot. Raven Hanna writes that this is the first model of the Milky Way that is “composed of living plants, a nod to the growing, evolving, and dying properties of stars and star systems. In the garden, plants symbolize stellar features.”

Zombie economics? Why not? Blood, Brains, and Benjamins: Economists are gathering undying economics about the undead.

Small-world networks and the flowering of ancient Greek civilization: interesting review of Irad Malkin’s A Small Greek World, in the journal Classical Review.

There have been many versions of the famous double-slit experiment, beginning with Thomas Young in the 19th century, but the methodology described by Richard Feynman in his 1965 Lectures on Physics has stumped would-be experimentalists seeking to replicate it in the lab — until now!

And here is a video of Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining the timelessness of photons.

Building unbreakable codes: Quantum satellites may beam down powerful data encryption keys.

Here’s a strange bit of space history: Leading up to Yuri Gagarin’s historic Vostok 1 flight, the Soviet Union launched two missions with a man-like mannequin, Ivan Ivanovich, on board.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal mocks women’s sizing metrics. It is mockery well deserved. “Size 0 women exist in one dimension of space given by height…. either that or women’s sizing metrics are absurd.”

Via Geek Tyrant we learned of a terrific short film, Timeless Man. It’s Back to the Future meets Bill & Ted by way of Quantum Leap. Per the filmmaker, Brian O’Neill: “Have you ever imagined that you could go back in time and meet your heroes? Benjamin Hewson has. He has traveled back from the year 2330 to meet his hero, legendary rock god Jonny Murtagh. But in his bid to witness history in the making, has Benjamin put Jonny’s future in jeopardy?” Watch the film to find out!

* * * * *

In Phillip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, fictional Oxford physicist Mary Malone finds she can communicate with the mysterious, conscious “Dust” using the yarrow casting methods of the I Ching (it’s also possible to use coins and other symbolic units). For those who scoff that a physicist would never express any appreciation for a pagan method of divination, consider this: when he was knighted, Neils Bohr included the tai chi symbol in the design for his coat of arms, to reflect his appreciation for the I Ching’s ingenious use of probabilistic concepts.

Mary Malone’s divination method actually has a real-world counterpart in one of the oldest problems in geometrical probability, known as Buffon’s Needle. This experiment in probability was the brainchild of a French naturalist and mathematician named Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.

Portrait of Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1753). Musée Buffon, Montbard. Public domain.

Buffon had quite the interesting life as the son of Benjamin Leclerc, lord of Dijon and Montbard. Born and raised on the Cote d’Or, the young George-Louis started off studying law before getting sidetracked by mathematics and science. It’s not clear that he ever earned a degree, however, because he was forced to leave the university after getting tangled up in a duel. He toured Europe for awhile, only returning when he heard his father had remarried — not so much out of familial devotion as concern over his inheritance of the title and estates.

Buffon fils is best known for writing the Histoire Naturelle, a whopping 44 volumes of encyclopedic knowledge that covered everything known to date about the natural world (originally there were 36 volumes; 8 more were published after Buffon’s death). A full 100 years before Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Buffon noted the similarities between humans and apes and mused on the possibility of a common ancestry, concluding that species  must have evolved since that common point.

He never progressed beyond those musings to propose an actual mechanism for this evolution, but his tome was translated into numerous languages, and certainly influenced Darwin, who described Buffon — in the foreword to the 6th edition of Origin — as “the first author who in modern times has treated it in a scientific spirit.”

But we’re more interested in a paper he published in 1777 entitled, Sur le jeu de franc-carreau, in which he first considered a small coin (an “ecu,” for all you crossword puzzle buffs) thrown randomly on a square-tiled floor. It was all the rage in Buffon’s social circles to place bets on whether the coin would land entirely within the bounds of a single tile, or across the boundaries of two tiles right next to each other. Buffon had a bit of an advantage  over his peers thanks to his mathematical interests. He realized he could figure out the odds of the wager using calculus — making him the first person to introduce calculus into probability theory.

Buffon was a pretty sharp cookie: he knew his geometry, noting that the coin would land entirely within a tile whenever the exact center of the coin landed within a smaller square — and that smaller square’s side was equal to the side of a floor tile, minus the diameter of the coin used in the toss. Ergo, he concluded that the probability of the coin landing entirely inside a single tile could be expressed mathematically as the ratio of the area of the tile to the area of the smaller square.

It marked the beginning of “geometric probability,” wherein one could determine probabilities by comparing measurements, instead of the tediously time-consuming method of identifying and counting all the other alternative, yet equally probable, outcomes or events — a specific hand in poker, for example, or a roll of the dice in craps.

Source: Wolfram MathWorld. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BuffonsNeedleProblem.html

You can perform the same basic experiment using a sewing needle and a checkerboard — hence the name “Buffon’s Needle.” Drop the needle onto the checkerboard, and one of two things happens: either the needle crosses or touches one of the lines, or it doesn’t cross any lines. (It’s worth noting this is an idealization, and it assumes parallel lines or squares spaced about 1 inch apart, and the use of a needle 1 inch long.)

Buffon dropped the needle over and over again, keeping track of how the needle randomly landed each time. Buffon’s key insight was that the probability that a dropped needle (or tossed coin) would cross a line  is basically 2 divided by Pi.

He simply divided the number of crossing needles by the total number of needles, and realized that the more times one drops the needle, the closer one would approach the value of the probability — i.e., the closer one would come to the value of Pi.

There’s tons of online versions of the experiment, employing the Monte Carlo method, wherein the user can repeat the “toss” as many times as s/he wishes: 500, 1000, even 100,000 times.

The essence of probability theory is that the more times you repeat the experiment — the more hands of poker you play, or the more times you roll the dice at the craps table, or spin the roulette wheel — the more closely you will approach the calculated textbook probability.

There may be winning or losing streaks in the short term, but the more you play, the more predictable things become. It’s just a quirky little oddity that the value relates to Pi. In fact, with an infinite number of tosses, the value will be exactly Pi assuming one could ever reach infinity. The mathematician Pierre La Place definitively proved this in 1812. This is also the essence of what Mary Malone discovers in The Amber Spyglass.

So there you have it: a seemingly random scattering of needles (or yarrow sticks) over a sheet of lined paper can nonetheless give you a very precise number. Such is the power of calculus. And via the wonderful YouTube series, Numberphile, we now have a more modern (and delicious!) method of calculating pi — using actual pies (and note the length of the video):

Oh, you want to see it for yourself, do you? You can watch the full video of the entire line, or check out the animated GIFs featured at io9, courtesy of the Twitter account of Errolson Hugh. Jen-Luc can totally see herself in the dress below.

Courtesy of Errolson Hugh, via io9

Fantastic as these dresses are, they’re actually a bit tame for Chalayan, who never fails to impress with his ingenuity. He’s a self-described techno-geek who tries to bring together technology, science culture, and fashion in some really intriguing ways.

Back in 2008, he designed dresses with frickin’ laser beams for Swarovski — yeah, you heard me, hundreds of little lasers were embedded into the dresses along with crystals to better reflect the light.  Lady Gaga is a fan: she made a splash in February 2011 by debuting her version of a shape-shifting “living dress” inspired by Chalayan’s designs.

Chalayan’s work was all the rage in Paris back ins the fall of 2006, too, when he debuted his “One Hundred Eleven” collection, designed in collaboration with a company called 2D3D. That line gave nods to 111 years of fashion in just five dresses, using technology to morph from, say, an 1895 look to something more common in 1900, and finally into a Roaring 20s flapper sheath.

The Hour-Glass Dress morphs from a style reminiscent of Dior in the 1950s to a 1960s metallic sheath, and the grand finale during the 2006 Paris show featured a dress that disappeared entirely into a wide-brimmed hat, leaving the model pretty much naked on the runway (see video below).

Chalayan has remained at the top of the field ever since with increasingly outre designs; it’s the haute couture version of wearable electronics. 2D3D director Rob Edkins described some of the underlying technology for Technology Review back in 2006:

“Basically, the dresses were driven electronically by controlled, geared motors. We made, for want of a better term, little bum pads for the models. So on their buttocks were some hard containers, and within these containers we had all the battery packs, controlling chips–the microcontrollers and microswitches–and little geared motors. The motors we used were tiny, about a third of the size of a pencil and nine millimeters in diameter. Each of the motors had a little pulley, and the pulley was then attached to this monofilament wire which was fed through hollow tubes sewn into the corset of the dress.

Corset with machinery for Chalayan's Hourglass Dress. Credit: 2D3D

“Some of the corsets were very complicated. They had 30 or 40 of these little tubes running everywhere, carrying these little cables, each doing its little job, lifting things up or releasing little linked metallic plates. There was a huge amount of stuff going on beneath the clothes.”

My personal favorite of Chalayan’s creations is his “Big Bang” dress, which debuted during the 2008 Paris Fashion Week. It’s another mechanical dress, except this one projects moving spots of light to symbolize the birth of the universe.

Check out a video of the dress in action over at Adam Wright’s website (he collaborated with Chalayan on the dress). [Click "Fashion" on the right side, then click on "Hussein Chalayan: Big Bang."]

Chalayan has also designed a series of LED dresses, in which light-emitting diodes are incorporated into the fabric. Pop singer Katy Perry recently wowed the crowds when she showed up at the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a stunning LED gown.

Oh, but Chalayan didn’t stop with morphing outfits and LED dresses; he also put together an architecturally inspired collection in 2009 featuring chairs and tables that transformed into wearable (at least in theory) garments. When was the last time you saw a tiered wooden skirt that doubled as a table? Chair covers that can turn into dresses?

Chalayan is not the only designer to find inspiration in architecture. Neri Oxman earned her PhD in design computation at MIT, and per io9, she specializes in

“reactive architecture: surfaces, furnishings, and structures that change their own properties according to different stimuli. Her resin floors grow thicker where they need to support more weight; her composite walls rearrange their windows and stress lines based on local weather conditions. One of her best-known works, a chaise lounge called “Beast,” can adjust its shape, flexibility and softness to fit each person who sits in it.”

Chalayan's Big Bang Dress. Source: http://www.geeksugar.com/Hussein-Chalayan-Creates-Big-Bang-Mechanical-Dresses-1083576

Oxman incorporates so-called smart materials into her pieces. So does designer Marielle Leenders, who weaves wires containing shape memory alloys (like alloys of nickel and titanium) into her clothing to create, say, fabrics that contract under heat.

So if you walk outside in a long-sleeved shirt, and it’s warmer that perhaps you might expect, there’s no need to roll up your own sleeves: the garment will respond to the increase in temperature and roll up itself.

No kidding. No need for all those intricate cables, wires, motors and microcontrollers featured in Chalayan’s designs! (Cracked.com has a problem with this concept. What’s their problem? “You’re an incredible lazy ass, that’s the problem! What, you can’t roll up your own sleeves?”)

It’s still pretty ingenious on Leenders’ part, and certainly preferable to Spray-On Fabric, or “Fabrican,” which (according to the good folks at Cracked.com) “uses a pressurized formula that, when sprayed from an aerosol can, creates fibers that adhere to any surface and bind to create a piece of non-woven fabric. It can be sprayed onto a … model, for example, to instantly create an entire dress or outfit right onto her body.”

Then there’s the tantalizing prospect of incorporating glitter-sized solar cells into fabrics to create clothing that produces electricity — just the thing for charging your iPhone when you’re on the go. At least those mechanical dresses would have a built-in power source to keep Chalayan’s laser dresses all fired up… so long as it was a sunny day.

[Adapted from a much longer May 2010 post on the Cocktail Party Physics archive.]

*Be sure to check out my Slate profile of Caltech chemical engineer Frances Arnold, who figured out how to use “directed evolution” to breed all kinds of exciting new proteins and enzymes.

*On Wednesday, I moderated a panel discussion at the Petersen Automotive Museum here in Los Angeles on “How Much Does Math Matter,” organized by Zocalo Public Square. Perhaps you recall an infamous Op-Ed last year by political scientist Andrew Hacker arguing that algebra was completely unnecessary and we should make it a requirement for high school graduation anymore. Massive uproar ensued; you can read my own bloggy response here (with links to a lot of other relevant discussion on the subject). Our panel included Washington Post education columnist, Jay Matthews, Sarah Armstrong, a math teacher from Orange County, and Caz Pereira, a workforce expert with the nonprofit Growth Sector.

*Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Lonely aging physicist meets young bikini model online, then travels to South America to meet her in person and bring her back to the US as his wife. He just needs to bring her this one suitcase. Suitcase turns out to contain drugs, the actual model has never heard of him, said physicist is arrested and tossed into an Argentine jail, all the while proclaiming his innocence.

This actually happened to University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill physicist Paul Frampton, who was ultimately convicted of drug smuggling. Maxine Swann has penned a masterful account in the New York Times Magazine of the whole affair. Is Frampton the innocent victim he claims to be, just a lonely man with poor social skills who fell prey to an online scam? Or was he privy to the plan all along?

*The Ocarina of Time Travel, Extra Dimensions and Branching Universes. Who says there’s no physics in The Legend of Zelda? Not Kyle Hill!

Over at Quantum Frontiers, Iram Parveen Bilal says, “That’s right, I did say, ‘A High Fashion Shoot for Geeks!’”

*Check out these lovely (and impossible!) wallpaper designs that appear to have five-fold rotational symmetry, created by mathematician Frank Farris, of Santa Clara University in California.

*Suddenly my poky little red Prius feels inadequate. Ferrari unveils all-new hybrid supercar — and calls it LaFerrari.

*io9 lists The 10 Least Competent Time Travelers.  #6: Everybody on Lost. “If your plan is ‘Let’s explode an atomic bomb and hope for the best,’ you seriously need to think up a better plan.”

*Attention gamers! Researchers at Edinburgh’s Royal Observatory used percolation modeling to predict which StarCraft race will conquer space. “Will it be Zerg? Terran? Protoss?” Make science the core of your gaming strategy.

*German researchers have been studying the “stretchiness” of blood (or rather, blood plasma). It flows like a liquid, but blood is also similar to the consistency of ketchup.

The always relevant Randall Munro's witty take why physicists struggle with threesomes.

*For three centuries, physicists have only been able to devise three solutions to the so-called three-body problem: Can you predict how three objects will orbit each other in a repeating pattern?

This week, a couple of physicists announced their discovery of 13 new families of solutions, thanks to computer modeling (they reverse-engineered an existing solution, tweaking the parameters until the model produced a new kind of orbit). This is a big deal, because the three-body problem dates back to Isaac Newton and the 1680s. Let Jon Cartwright of Science explain:

Newton had already shown that his new law of gravity could always predict the orbit of two bodies held together by gravity—such as a star and a planet—with complete accuracy. The orbit is basically always an ellipse. However, Newton couldn’t come up with a similar solution for the case of three bodies orbiting one another. For two centuries, scientists tried different tacks until the German mathematician Heinrich Bruns pointed out that the search for a general solution for the three-body problem was futile, and that only specific solutions – one-offs that work under particular conditions—were possible.

It’s an excellent piece that makes an arcane topic easily accessible.

*Dennis Overbye and the New York Times put together a stunning multimedia feature (online exclusive!) on the Higgs boson; at Download the Universe, Sean Carroll gives his assessment on how well it worked.

*Speaking of which: the latest data analysis on the “Higgs-like particle” discovered at the Large Hadron Collider last year hints that it might, indeed, be a bona fide Higgs boson, and that its properties (most notably its spin) fit nicely with the predictions of the Standard Model. So why aren’t physicists happier about this? They’re all, “Eh, it’s kind of vanilla, and we were hoping for something more exotic, like Chunky Monkey.” Ian O’Neill explains this “strange juxtaposition — a profound discovery that’s also an anticlimax.”

*Not everyone’s griping. Sarah Demers argues that high-energy physics is still a worthwhile investment.

*The Case for Curiosity: Mario Livio’s TEDx MidAtlantic talk is worth your time. “Curiosity doesn’t kill cats, it’s the best remedy for fear.”

*”Looking at a good physics lab is like staring at an explosion seconds before it happens.” Stephen Granade tells the entertaining tale of this one time that physics tried to kill him.

*Swimming with spacemen: Ars Technica has a terrific feature on training for spacewalks at NASA’s giant pool.

*The geology of sinkholes. “What is karst? It’s what you end up with after rocks spend a lot of time dissolving.” The unfortunate Florida man who was swallowed by a sinkhole in his bedroom inspired not one, but two SciAm blog posts about the underlying science.

*Physics and Green Beer Bottles. Rhett Allain has a new beer rule: Avoid beer in green bottles.

Glowing neon skull by Portland Artist Eric Franklin

*I was blown away by this trio of neon glass skulls lit internally by ionized neon, krypton, and mercury, by Portland artist Eric Franklin. Per the folks at This Colossal: “The structure of each human skull is deviously complex, made from a network of glass tubes that have to be perfectly sealed to create the vacuum necessary to light them, a process that leaves the figures somewhat misshapen and admittedly a bit creepy.”

*The Secrets of Black Holes: Meet NuSTAR, NASA’s New X-Ray Mission. The Atlantic‘s Rebecca Rosen on the new space telescope that is going to look at black holes and the power they have over the objects around them.

*The webcomic Scenes from a Multiverse hits another home run. “Enchanting is for weenies who can’t handle tech.” Generate a pocket universe instead.

*The acoustics of elephant trumpets: “it is quite easy to imitate elephant trumpet calls with a trombone” (except for the infrasound!). And check out these videos of a trombonists’s mouth, seen from without and within.

*Roll Over, Galileo: A new generation of citizen scientists takes discovery out of the ivory tower and onto the street.

*The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber uncovers a fantastic bit of history in Tower of Light: “Before streetlights became the standard way to light cities, town leaders looked to “moonlight towers” to provide mass illumination.”

*”With a little work, you can make a penny glow – but only if it was minted before 1982.” Want the details? “Modern pennies are mostly zinc, with only 2.5 percent copper. Earlier pennies were 95 percent copper with just a little extra zinc added. And copper is indispensable for this reaction.”

*Finally, Wired tells you (with video!) How Your Blender Uses Physics to Make a Smoothie– It’s all about the cavitation, baby!