Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Olivia Judson at The Wild Side on cloud-dwelling microbes: Clouds. It’s been known for ages that microbes — bacteria, algae, fungi, and other tiny organisms — can be found in clouds. This isn’t surprising. Microbes often get airborne. They can be lofted by the wind from the leaves of a plant; or thrown into the air when a bubble of water bursts, and then lofted by the wind.


• Chris at Highly Allocthonous on plate tectonics: This allows you to predict the broad style of deformation before you even look, because you already know whether the plates are moving apart, pushing together or sliding past each other. However, the details of how those relative motions are being accommodated at the boundary is not so easy to predict. Mid-ocean ridges, for example, consist of spreading segments separated by transform segments; two entirely different types of deformation accommodating exactly the same plate motions.


• Mark Liberman at Language Log on English words for physics: More generally, I wondered about the English words for quantities like velocity, distance and time. It seems likely to me that most of them -- maybe all of them - originally meant things having nothing to do with their meanings in Newtonian (or for that matter Aristotelian) physics, or were borrowed recently, or both. In many cases, the physics-related senses are originally extended or metaphorical ones, which were developed during the Enlightenment, when intellectuals focused their attention on such abstract concepts, and began to think and to write about them in the vulgar tongues of Europe.


• Heidi at HeiDeas on agreement on grammatical gender: Last week, Dalila Ayoun of the Department of French and Italian here at the University of Arizona, gave a talk in our linguistics colloquium series in which she dropped a bombshell: native French speakers don't know the genders of French nouns! Ok, that's not quite right. It would be more appropriate to say that native French speakers don't agree on the genders of French nouns. They really don't agree.
  


• Will at The Dragon's Tales on gorgons (the Permian kind, not the Greek) with gorgeous pictures: The remaining therapsids that I find so fascinating, gorgonopsids, are going to be the actual objects of this post's focus of attention. They are equally fascinating and interesting critters. They are not what you would expect at all. They are not reptiles. They are not mammals. They are something, fascinatingly unique. In some ways, it is really too bad that none of them made it past the Permian Extinction. They are a engrossing subject.

Enjoy!