Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• On Language Log, a guest post by Professor Jamie Pennebaker, Dept of Psychology at the University of Texas, on the use of "I" in conversation: In the last few months, a number of pundits have been analyzing the language of Barack Obama in an attempt to uncover who he really is. The words that are attracting the most attention is his use of first person singular pronouns, or I-words. As Mark Liberman and many others have noted, surprisingly few people have actually counted Obama’s use of 1st person singular pronouns and even fewer have stopped to think what “I” means.


• Jessica at Magma Cum Laude talks about some things she saw in Italy: One of my favorite features of the pyroclastic deposits that I saw in Italy were degassing structures. A good field description of these features would be "fines-depleted pipes", since it doesn't make any assumptions about their origins (something to be avoided in the description section of your field notes!) These pipes are formed when gases trapped in freshly-deposited pyroclastic material rise to the surface of the deposit as overlying material settles and compacts. The gases usually take fines (ash and small lapilli) with them, leaving behind tubes where clast size is larger than the surrounding deposit, and forming fumaroles on the surface of the pyroclastic deposit. The pipes can branch and join, and the ones I've seen range in size from a centimeter or two across to almost half a meter.


• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science tells us that ants rescue their own: In a French laboratory, a team of ants is attempting a daring rescue. One of their colony-mates is trapped in a snare - a nylon thread that dastardly researchers have looped around its waist and half-buried in some sand. Thankfully, help is at hand. A crack squad of rescuers work together to dig away at the sand, expose the snare, and bite at the threads until their colleague is liberated.


• Mike at Mike's Brown's Planets posts on a storm on Titan: Look in your newspaper this Saturday, and you may see a paragraph about Saturn’s moon Titan and a giant storm that moved across the surface last May and what that means. With luck they’ll even print it with a tiny little picture of Titan to catch your eye. Your response, if you have one, will likely be “huh.” It’s OK. I’m not offended. It’s hard to distill the richness of a full scientific paper into a paragraph. And it’s even harder, still, to distill the richness of a decade of scientific inquiry into a short scientific paper. But if you’re curious about what that little paragraph means, and how it came to be in your newspaper, and what we’ve been doing for the past decade, read on. It’s a long story, but that’s somewhat of the point.


• Stefan at Back Reaction talks about news from other worlds: This week, I came across some quite amazing news about planets at other stars in our galaxy. But it's not just the stories of planetary collisions and retrograde orbits that have fascinated me: It's also how all this has been learned, by closely analyzing light curves and spectra. So, here are a the plots behind the news.

Enjoy!