Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• DrugMonkey rips into a prams are good, strollers are bad "study": A recent post up at the Frontal Cortex points approvingly to a study of strollers, prams, toddlers and parental conversation. Jonah Lehrer concludes: "It would be nice to see this research filter down to stroller manufacturers, so that even cheap plastic strollers allow the infant to interact with the parent." Very interesting. Must be strong evidence, no? And after all, we all want our little wackaballoons to be as smart and advanced as possible, do we not?


• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology blogs about boobies - the birds, of course: Extant sulids - the gannets and boobies - are admittedly pretty uniform (greater diversity existed among fossil forms, as we'll see at some stage), but they still differ in many subtle ways. In the previous sulid post we looked at the gannets: we now turn to the boobies.


• David at Irregular Webcomic! does one of his aperiodic informational annotations, this one starting with the color black, and ending up with gravity and the universe: Blackness is the absence of light. We perceive an object as black if it reflects very little of the light that falls on to it. An ideal, completely and utterly black object would reflect none of the light that hits it. No real object on Earth does this, but some materials can come pretty close. There is, however, an object that indeed reflects absolutely none of the light that hits it. We call these things black holes. A black hole is a region of space which contains enough matter, compressed into a small enough volume, to make the gravitational field of the matter strong enough that something would have to be moving faster than the speed of light to get away from it. Stepping back a bit, imagine you throw a ball into the air. What happens? It comes back down to the ground. It does so because the mass of the Earth exerts a force of attraction on the ball - the Earth pulls the ball back towards it. We're all familiar with this phenomenon in our everyday lives: if you drop something, it falls. It's such a normal, commonplace thing, that we take it completely for granted. But ask yourself: Why do things fall? You can often reach profound understandings of things by questioning what seems obvious.


• Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East blogs about a newly discovered Egyptian queen: This is all that is left of the body of Queen Sesheshet -- a skull, legs, pelvis, and scattered bones, once carefully wrapped in linen. Sesheshet was the mother of Teti, first pharaoh of the 6th Dynasty (r. 2323 - 2291 BC). Her new pyramid was found at Saqqara last November. Although now topless, it had once been as high as a five-storey building. As Zahi Hawass (Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities) whooped: You can discover a tomb or a statue, but to discover a pyramid, it makes you happy. And a pyramid of a queen -- queens have magic.


• Carl Zimmer (of The Loom) writes on the origin of life on earth for Darwin Year: An Amazon of words flowed from Charles Darwin's pen. His books covered the gamut from barnacles to orchids, from geology to domestication. At the same time, he filled notebooks with his ruminations and scribbled thousands of letters packed with observations and speculations on nature. Yet Darwin dedicated only a few words of his great verbal flood to one of the biggest questions in all of biology: how life began.

Enjoy!