Monday Science Links

This week's heaping helping of sciency goodness:

• Phil at Bad Astronomy explains why there are no green stars: Go outside on a dark, moonless night. Look up. Is it December or January? Check out Betegeuse, glowing dully red at Orion’s shoulder, and Rigel, a laser blue at his knee. A month later, yellow Capella rides high in Auriga. Is it July? Find Vega, a sapphire in Lyra, or Antares, the orange-red heart of Scorpius. There are no green stars!In fact, any time of the year you can find colors in the sky. Most stars look white, but the brightest ones show color. Red, orange, yellow, blue… almost all the colors of the rainbow. But hey, wait a sec. Where are the green stars? Shouldn’t we see them?


• Jennifer at The Infinite Sphere talks about the Southeast's ongoing drought: I didn't realize that the drought this year is almost as bad as last year's until this past week. I visited a cave in northeast Alabama that usually has a nice stream running through the entire cave, even in the summer. In fact, there's one section that if you go in the entrance shown below, you have to wade through at least knee-deep water. The entire stream was completely dry this past weekend.


• Jen at Cocktail Party Physics had a root canal. So of course she blogs about it: Root canals are one of the most dreaded dental procedures, so I figure I'm performing a public service, as well as cathartically venting my pain. Because damn, it was painful -- not the procedure, thanks to the generous application of Lidocaine (lovely, lovely Lidocaine!), but the death throes of my expiring tooth that led up to the procedure. It's easy to forget that teeth are not just static bits of bone embedded in our jaws; they are a crucial functioning part of the human body. They're hollow, for starters, and contain a mass of soft tissue known as pulp that includes nerves and blood vessels and connective tissue. The pulp is vital to maintaining tooth health, since it keeps the tooth supplied with nutrients and moisture. And it alerts the body when something goes horribly wrong: a cavity, or an infected abscess, for example. Pain is a message from the body saying "FIX ME!"


• Kim at All My of My Faults Are Stress-Related blogs about the LA earthquake, with maps: It's not on a mapped fault, but that isn't surprising: the thrust earthquakes in LA (such as the 1994 Northridge EQ) tend to be on "blind" thrusts - faults that don't cut the surface. (They do, however, tend to raise the ground surface and create hills and mountains. Notice the topography around the aftershocks.)


• And Amanda, aka Dr Astropixie, gives us the August sky: this month provides many nice planetary alignments and the perseids meteor shower: usually the best of the year! five planets will be visible with the naked eye this month: mercury, venus, mars, jupiter, and saturn!!

Enjoy!