Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:

• From Greg at Greg Laden's Blog, more on magpies and mirrors: A typical adult human recognizes that the image one sees in a mirror is oneself. We do not know how much training a mirror-naive adult requires to do this, but we think very little. When a typical adult macaque (a species of monkey) looks in the mirror, it sees another monkey. Typical adult male macaques stuck in a cage with a mirror will treat the image as a fellow adult male macaque until you take the mirror out of the cage.
  


• Phil at Bad Astronomy talks about a picture of the heart of the W5 nebula: W5 is a nebula, a giant cloud of gas roughly 6000 light years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia. It’s enormous, spanning about 2 x 1.5 degrees of the sky (15 times the size of the full Moon on the sky), and is actively cranking out stars. The valentine-shape is actually an enormous cavern, a hollow carved out of the gas by the winds and fierce ultraviolet light flooding out from massive young stars in its… well, its heart. It’s like these stars are blowing a vast bubble in the middle of the cloud.


• Cosmos, Carl Sagan's groundbreaking tv series, is now available on iTunes. At The Loom, Carl Zimmer downloads, watches, and reflects:I’ve downloaded the first two episodes, which I don’t think I’ve seen since they first aired 28 years ago. I remember watching every episode intently as a 14-year old at the end of the Carter administration. The passage of time has revealed some hokiness around the edges. The music, much of it by Vangelis, sometimes makes me think I’ve walked into a crystal shop. Sagan is fitted in corduroy blazers and what seems to be the precursor of the Members Only jacket. Some of the images still look good–like Sagan’s calendar of the cosmos–but there are also painfully long pans across a cardboard diorama of ancient amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. We are so spoiled today by Jurassic Park...But as I was tallying up the shortcomings of the show, something funny happened...


• Sean at Cosmic Variance posts on the first quantum cosmologist: Many of you scoffed last week when I mentioned that Lucretius had been a pioneer in statistical mechanics. (Not out loud, but inwardly, there was scoffing.) But it’s true. Check out this passage from De Rerum Natura, in which Lucretius proposes that the universe arises as a quantum fluctuation.


• Pamela at Star Stryder talks about anecdotes and evidence: One of the running jokes in physics/astronomy departments is that astronomers consider 4 instances of anything as statistically significant. In fact, the story goes, two points is enough to define a trend, and 1 is enough to form a theory. Take for instance our solar system. Up until 1995 it was the only one with a normal sun we knew of (there were some pulsar planets found earlier). Based on it, and it alone, we built an entire detailed nebular theory of solar system formation that we think is mostly true. This isn’t the only place in research where instances of “observation” lead to “understanding.” With observational astronomy we at least have the option to go out and search for new data. And sometimes we even find it. Sometimes. And until that sometimes is realized, most astronomers are more than willing to say “This is based on 1 example - we’re looking for more.”

Enjoy!