Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Phil at Bad Astronomy asks how do you weigh a supermassive black hole?: Black holes are cool. They’re also scary, and weird, and exciting. But if there’s one word I’d use to describe them (besides, well, "black"), it’s mysterious. They twist our minds, and they push our math and science to the limit. After all, they’re like punctures in the fabric of space and time, and that has some inherent effects on our common sense. But maybe maddening would be a good word, too. Astronomers love black holes for the same reasons you do, but we also hate them, because they’re so frackin’ resistant to study. They’re black. They don’t give off any light, so that makes them pretty difficult to observe.
  


• Sean at Cosmic Variance is also looking at measuring things in the sky ... or actually, the whole sky: Nevertheless, there is a subtle way for the universe to break isotropy and have a preferred direction: if the tiny observed perturbations somehow have a different character in one direction than in others. The problem is, there are a lot of ways this could happen, and there is a huge amount of data involved with a map of the entire CMB sky. A tiny effect could be lurking there, and be hard to see; or we could see a hint of it, and it would be hard to be sure it wasn’t just a statistical fluke.


• Carl Zimmer at The Loom looks at how our brains control time: Whenever I lose my watch, I take my sweet time to get a new one. I savor the freedom from my compulsion to carve my days into minute-size fragments. But my liberty has its limits. Even if I get rid of the clock strapped to my wrist, I cannot escape the one in my head. The human brain keeps time, from the flicker of milliseconds to the languorous unfurling of hours and days and years. It’s the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Keeping track of time is essential for perceiving what’s happening around us and responding to it.


• Jennifer at The Infinite Sphere does some tree classification: Identifying trees is hard. Especially when they're so tall you can't access the leaves or see the fruit! But last weekend I did my best to collect samples from as many trees for my biological inventory project. My plant presses work great. The only problem is I filled them both up in about 3 hours. I guess I need to make a few more! (with pictures)


• Jennifer (not the same one) at Mind the Gap judges a science fair: My friend Alom Shaha is an amazing guy: not only is he a freelance science filmmaker, but he’s also a part-time physics teacher at the Camden School for Girls. It transpires that the official UK science curriculum is so heartbreakingly easy that his students had finished it weeks earlier with both hands tied behind their backs and were filling in the remaining year with more adventurous, creative endeavors, including the school’s first ever Science Fair. When I met up with Alom and his pupils on the fateful afternoon, I found them out in the sunny grounds, learning about the physics of bubble blowing. In addition to the novelty of hearing Alom called variously called ‘Sir’ and ‘Mr Shaha’ by a chorus of winningly enthusiastic girls, I bore witness to a few bubbles that definitely seemed to violate the laws of physics, and got to enjoy a genuine English school dinner.

Enjoy!