Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• From the utterly brilliant xkcd: the observable Universe, to log scale (start at the bottom, it's better that way)


• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science tells us about the secret signals of squids: Two strangers are having a normal conversation in the middle of a large crowd. No one else can see them. No one else can listen in. Thanks to advanced gadgetry, they are talking in coded messages that only they can decipher. These invisible conversationalists sound like they've walked out of a Bond film. But they are entirely real, and their skill at secrecy is biological, not technological. They are squid.


• Phil at Bad Astronomy discusses the latest Hubble Heritage Project photo: This month marks the tenth anniversary of one of the best ideas to come out of modern astronomy: the Hubble Heritage project. Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute knew that Hubble was taking fantastic images that the public weren’t seeing, because Hubble was taking them faster than they could release to the press. So they decided that on the first Thursday of each month they would release a gorgeous picture online. For their tenth anniversary, they present this beautiful image of detail in the nebula NGC 3324.


• Jennifer at Mind the Gap wonders about science reporting: But imagine, Dear Reader, what the world would be like if science were put under the same media scrutiny as sport. What if our every daily triumph or embarrassing gaffe was trumpeted for all to see in the tabloids and broadcasts of the world? What if people rang up radio phone-in programs to wax lyrical about the latest paper in Nature or to complain that the big grant had been awarded to some young, brash hotshot when it clearly should have gone to the more reflective and deserving woman down the corridor, or to take their favorite scientist to task for messing up a crucial maxi-prep just when the supporters needed that plasmid to be ready Friday for the Big Experiment?


• Kristjan at Pro-science points us at research showing cave paintings took a long time (and definitely follow the link to the original paper): While IT projects frequently takes years to complete, it turns out that that's nothing compared to other tasks in the past. Prehistoric cave paintings took up to 20,000 years to complete.

Enjoy!