Monday Science Links

This week's yummy science:

• Over at THe Loom Carl Zimmer looks at "slow-cooked" science and its value: Chimpanzees get AIDS. This is an important discovery, but what intrigues me most about it is how the discovery was made. It is a story of two kinds of science, both of which are essential to getting a deeper understanding of life, but which today are staggeringly out of balance. In the 1960s, Jane Goodall carried out some of the first long-term studies on chimpanzees in the wild. Goodall made important observations, noting that chimpanzees can be surprisingly cooperative but also quite violent, with troops engaging in war-like conflicts. Goodall’s research was part of a long tradition of going to where the animals are, and tracking them for years on end. Goodall didn’t take giant crates of lab equipment with her to Tanzania; instead, she brought patience and careful observation.


• At Cosmic Variance Daniel posts on bending light: A few hours ago the longest total solar eclipse of the Century swept across Asia. And a few days ago Evalyn Gates provided a wonderful guest post on gravitational lensing. This seems like an opportune time to note that gravitational lensing and total solar eclipses are inextricably linked..


• At Why Evolution Is True Jerry Coyne posts on toucan bills: If you’re like me, you’ll have asked yourself many times, “Jerry, why do toucans have such ridiculously big bills?” (See Figs. 1 and 2.) The first answer that might strike you is that the bill — like bodies, plumage ornaments, and other traits in birds — was driven to extreme size by sexual selection. But that won’t wash because male and female toucans have identical-sized bills, and if the male’s bill is brightly colored, so is the female’s. (There are several dozen species of toucans in five genera, all Central or South American.) The next most obvious hypothesis is diet: maybe toucans eat a type of food that requires large bills to handle. But that doesn’t seem likely, either...


• At Backreaction Stefan and Bee (together! yay!) post on making new elements: Besides the fun it brings to slam together heavy things, these experiments have the scientific purpose of better understanding the structure of elementary matter. Eventually, you know, physicsts want to derive all chemistry from QCD, but we're far away from that. The heavy ion beams produced at the GSI have also been used since 1997 for cancer treatment.


• And at Dynamics of Cats Steinn talks about how things keep hitting Jupiter: Now, the interesting thing is that we can assume we are essentially complete in out observations of current Jupiter impacts, and we infer sub-km impactors are hitting every decade or two, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than previous estimates of one every few centuries, up to the small number statistics we have at this point. This suggests, very tentatively, that the flux of the most worrying planetesimals - those large enough to do serious damage, or "continent killers" as we like to call them, but which are also hard to see, is high.

Enjoy!