Monday Science Links

This week's science (late...)

• Check the gravity wells at xkcd. Pretty cool


• At Save Your Breath For Running Ponies bec takes on the veined octopus and its shells: Now while everyone might think this is really awesome and ingenious and everything, to me it all seems a bit much. I know Under the Sea isn’t always a bed of roses, but the other sea creatures get by okay without having to cart a couple of coconut shells around with them all the time, so I don’t see why the veined octopus thinks it needs to. Like, they’d all be hanging out, the veined octopus, the weedy pygmy seahorse and the nudibranch, trying to reconstruct the events of last night’s Christmas party whilst battling through their mad hangovers. (Yes, it's a bonus link)


• At Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait commemorates an anniversary: Five years ago today — on December 27, 2004 — the Earth was attacked by a cosmic blast. The scale of this onslaught is nearly impossible to exaggerate. The flood of gamma and X-rays that washed over the Earth was detected by several satellites designed to observe the high-energy skies. RHESSI, which observes the Sun, saw this blast. INTEGRAL, used to look for gamma rays from monster black holes, saw this blast. The newly-launched Swift satellite, built to detect gamma-ray bursts from across the Universe, not only saw this blast, but its detectors were completely saturated by the assault of energy… even though Swift wasn’t pointed anywhere near the direction of the burst! In other words, this flood of photons saturated Swift even though they had to pass through the walls of the satellite itself first!


• At Why Evolution Is True Jerry looks at birds sleeping with one eye open: The researchers found that birds sleeping at the end of a row engaged in [one-eye-open sleep] 31% of the time, as opposed to only 12% for ducks in the middle. Moreover, in “edge” birds, the eye facing away from the center of the group was open 86% of the time, as opposed to only 52% — not different from random — for “inside” birds. EEG recordings showed that this eye-closing indicated sleep on the opposite side of the brain. What is even more amazing is a fact documented in this wonderful Radiolab program on sleep rebroadcast yesterday (do listen to it if you have a free hour): the “edge” ducks occasionally turn themselves around 180 degrees. When they do this, the new outer eye is the one that remains open.


• At Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed gives us a thirteen-thousand-year-old tree: In California's Jurupa Mountains, there is a very unusual group of tree - a Palmer's oak. Unlike the mighty trees that usually bear the oak name, this one looks like little more than a collection of small bushes. But appearances can be deceiving. This apparently disparate group of plants are all clones of a single individual, and a very old one at that. By repeatedly cloning itself, the Palmer's oak has lived past the separation of Britain from continental Europe, the demise of the mammoths and saber-toothed cats, and the birth of human agriculture. It is among the oldest plants in existence, first sprouting from an acorn around 13,000 years ago.