Monday Science Links

Here's this week's science:

• Dave at Cognitive Daily asks how much influence do parents have on their children's behavior? How do you raise "good kids"? It's one of the questions that plagues parents even before their kids are born. ... How do we keep them from becoming delinquents, convicts, or worse? Unfortunately a lot of the research suggests that parents don't actually have much influence on their kids' behavior -- peers, other environmental factors, and genetics seem to have a larger impact. Yet as parents, we can't simply throw up our hands and give up. We exert whatever small influence we do have, and hope it doesn't backfire.
  


• Phil at Bad Astronomy describes the birth cry of a supernova. Very, very cool news today: for the first time in history, astronomers have unambiguously observed the exact moment when a star explodes. Whoa.
  


• David at Irregular Webcomic! writes an annotation explaining Heisenberg and Schrödinger and quanta.... Yes, an annotation to his comic: This sounds clearly ludicrous. Schrödinger used the argument of his cat to try to demonstrate that the Copenhagen interpretation of his equations was just silly, and therefore wrong. Einstein was evidently on his side too. The problem is, the Copenhagen interpretation actually works. Science is strange sometimes.
  


• Stephen at Quintessence of Dust talks about the development of bat wings: The wing of a bat is an amazing thing. It's not just a wing; it's clearly a modified mammalian limb. A bat looks like a lot like a rodent with really long, webbed fingers on elongated arms. Recent genetic analyses have yielded a fairly solid outline of the evolutionary history of bats, which have left a somewhat poor fossil record in which the earliest fossil bats look pretty much like modern bats. Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchIt seems that bats arose relatively quickly during evolution, acquiring their distinctive feature – powered flight – in a few million years. No transitional forms have yet been found, which is a shame, because this particular evolutionary transition is the kind that is otherwise reasonably approachable for the detailed study of how changes in form come about.
  


• And another one from David at Irregular Webcomic! - this one on the mountain range on either side of the Atlantic: In fact, the mountains of Scotland and Scandinavia are part of the same mountain range. This immense range of mountains was produced during an event known as the Caledonian orogeny. Caledonia is the ancient Roman name for Scotland, and orogeny is a technical term combining the Greek oros, meaning mountain, and genus, meaning generation. The generation of the mountains of Caledonia and Scandinavia occurred roughly 400 million years ago, at which time the continents of the Earth were in very different locations to where they are now. They were so different, that we can't even sensibly refer to them with our familiar names. At that time, there was an ocean known as the Iapetus Ocean. Don't go looking for it on a modern map, because it doesn't exist any more. On one side of the Iapetus Ocean was the continent of Laurentia. On the other side were two landmasses known as Baltica and Avalonia.
  

Enjoy!