Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• We'll start with a bit of art mixed with science, as Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East is drafted into reviewing a painting at the Tate's "Lure of the East" exhibit: The burning question in 'Lure of the East' is whether the painters who were lured east faithfully represented the people, cities and landscapes they encountered -- or reflected, as Edward Said argued in his influential work Orientalism, a quest for Western superiority and control over them: Orientalism is a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them"). A colonialist mind views the East as 'mysterious'. Presumably, despite new railroads and steamships, artists should have stayed at home, portraying the 'unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible' at English fox hunts. Or, if they did travel east, painted the people with sympathy, as if they were British under the skin. Fascination = phooey! On the other hand, it does not do to be too faithful to the subject: an essay in the catalogue roundly condemns the Brits as "content to paint a static world of exquisite surface" (Rana Kabbani). I suspect it's the word static that convicts them of Orientalism.


• Okay, back to science. Well, sorta. John at archy celebrates the Tunguska centenary: At a little after seven in the morning, settlers near the north end of Lake Baikal saw something bright appear in the sky, crossing to the northwest leaving a trail behind it. As it touched the horizon, it was transformed into a column of black smoke in which flames could be seen. Soon after, they felt a thump in the ground and heard a series of bangs that they compared to artillery in the distance. Other villagers to the west of them gave similar descriptions. Later scientific expeditions would locate the ground zero of the explosion in a remote area among the tributaries of the Podkamennaya (Stony or Lower) Tunguska River. Seismic stations around the world recorded the ground movement and set the time at precisely 07:17:11 AM. The closest people to ground zero were Evenki reindeer herders camped along the Chambe River forty kilometers away. They reported being thrown in the air by the shock, along with their tents and belongings. They saw trees broken off by the shock and the forest set on fire. Several herders were injured, but the only reported death was an old man who probably had a heart attack. One herder, Ilya Potapovich, later reported that his brother was so shocked by the explosion that he didn't speak for years after. Their herds were scattered and many reindeer perished in the fire.


• And then he takes on Indians and mammoths and mastodons: Legends are hard to make sense of, but luckily, Adrienne Mayor has written an entire book about Native Americans and fossils (Fossil Legends of the First Americans). Indians on both American continents were aware of fossils and recognized that they were from animals that no longer roamed the land. What's more, in many cases they reassembled the bones and recognized their similarity to existing species. In the case of mammoths and mastodons, they recognized that these were from animals unlike any they knew. Clearly they were monsters. Almost everyone who lived near fossil deposits had a legend of a heroic ancestor or friendly god who banished the giants and monsters at the beginning of history, making the world safe for the true people.


• Phil at Bad Astronomy discusses the Fourth of July aphelion: The Earth does not orbit the Sun in a perfect circle. The orbit is slightly elliptical. If you were to draw the Earth’s orbit on a piece of paper, you’d need a sharp eye to detect its non-circularity, but deviant it is. What this means in real terms is that the Earth ranges from about 148 to about 152 million kilometers from the Sun over the course of six months (which is how long it takes to get from one side of the orbit to the other, of course.


• And we'll wrap up with some truly astonishing news relayed by Emily at Planetary Society -there's water on Mercury!: As MESSENGER flew past the night side of Mercury in January, its Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS) scooped up ions from an atmosphere so tenuous that it's usually called an "exosphere." FIPS measured the expected amounts of ions like sodium, potassium, and calcium that had previously been detected in Mercury's exosphere, but to the science team's great surprise there was also water present, and in large amounts. "Nobody expected that. I don't know a single person that did. We were astonished, just astonished," said MESSENGER science team member Thomas Zurbuchen.