Monday Science Links

This week's (slightly late) sciency goodness:

• Michael at Palaeoblog tells us about animal burrows from 245 million years ago: For the first time paleontologists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about 245 million years ago.


• A guest blogger at Cosmic Variance talks about Isaac Newton and the Principia as literature: Exhibit A: last year I read the Principia for pleasure. That’s not exactly right– it is more accurate to say that in the context of writing a book on Isaac Newton’s role as currency cop and death penalty prosecutor, I found myself reading the Principia as literature rather than the series of proofs it appears to be. Just like John Locke, who had to ask Christiaan Huygens if he could take the mathematical demonstrations on faith (Huygens said he could), I read to see what larger argument Newton was making about the ways human beings could now make sense of material experience. (This is, by the way, the only connection I can imagine that Locke and I share.).


• Phil at Bad Astronomy talks about a strange planetary nebula (nice pictures too!): Planetary nebula are beautiful clouds of gas that form when stars like the Sun die. The star blows off a series of super-solar winds, ejecting gigatons of gas into space. As this happens, the star itself exposes its hot, dense core, which emits scads of ultraviolet light. This high-energy light ionizes the gas, creating what is essentially a cosmic neon sign a few trillion kilometers across.


• Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sigillata posts some info about Ted Kennedy's surgeon and surgery - and has a Duke joke! Turns out that the good Senator Edward Kennedy took a foray to the Town-That-Tobacco-Built to have his glioblastoma excised by Dr Dr Allan Friedman. The local fishwrapper covered this while I was away and noted that while Duke is big on tooting their own horns, they kept an unusually low profile with their high-profile patient. (No, that's not the joke.)
  


• Over at Neurophilosophy, six iconoclastic discoveries about the brain: But the human brain is an organ of bewildering complexity - it is often referred to as the most complex object in the known universe - which doesn't give up its secrets easily. After 100 years of scientific investigation, we still know very little about it. So it's no real surprise that in recent years, neuroscientists have made quite a few discoveries about the brain that overturn many of our dogmas about the brain, and caused us to reconsider what we thought we knew about how it works.