Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science tells us how bees tell each other not to go dangerous places: Bees can communicate with each other using the famous "waggle dance". With special figure-of-eight gyrations, they can accurately tell other hive-mates about the location of nectar sources. Karl von Frisch translated the waggle dance decades ago but it's just a small part of bee communication. As well as signals that tell their sisters where to find food, bees have a stop signal that silences dancers who are advertising dangerous locations.


• Martin at Aardvarchaeology is fascinated by Maori wetlands archaeology: I'm studying sacrificial deposits made by people of a lo-tech culture in Sweden 3000 years ago, largely in wetlands. This was long before any word relevant to the area was written. The objects were mainly recovered during the decades to either side of 1900. Yesterday while trawling through back issues of the Journal of Wetland Archaeology I came across a really cool paper on a similar theme. It's about wetland deposits made by lo-tech people and excavated during the 20th century. But in this case the stuff was still being deposited in the 19th century AD, the objects are perfectly preserved, and the ethnic group in question is still around with an unbroken oral tradition.


• Bee at Backreaction looks at funny physics names: I'm currently reading Sean Carroll's book "From Eternity to Here" and stumbled over this remark: "In Newtonian mechanics, the space of states is called "phase space" for reasons that are pretty mysterious." A mystery that hadn't occurred to me before, probably because the German word "Zustandsraum" means literally "state space," so no mystery there. Stefan and I were guessing Gibbs, who introduced the word, might have generalized the terminology from the harmonic oscillator where the location in phase space does indeed tell you the phase of the oscillation. In any case, this caused me to ponder what other words with funny origin physicists like to use. (Both funny ha-ha, and funny peculiar.)


• Jessica at Magma Cum Laude offers us a meditation on winter and lots of shots of Niagara and other watery spots in winter's ice: Of course, local for me means Niagara Falls. I took a trip up on Saturday to get myself outdoors for a little while, and while I'm pretty sure no important parts of me were permanently frozen, it was effing cold up there. (Not very snowy, though. It's pretty ironic that I moved away from the Washington DC area, and they're now poised to get more snow than Buffalo this year. I think Buffalo's at about 60 inches, and if DC gets another foot or so with today's storm, they'll have us beat. Not that Buffalo is the snowiest place in New York by any means - that's Syracuse. But I digress.) One interesting thing I found out about Niagara Falls in the winter is not only is it cold, it's damp. This is a direct result of all the spray from the Canadian and American Falls. It looks like the US gets the worst the spray off Horseshoe Falls, since the prevailing winds blow from west to east. Anyway, it makes for a somewhat hazardous visit, because everything is covered with ice.


• And at Bad Astronomy, Phil shows us the birth of a star: Oooo, pretty! Sharpless 2-106 is about 2000 light years away, located in a region of the galaxy known for birthing stars. The nebula is only about two light years across — small for a star-forming region, but still over 2,000 times bigger than our entire solar system. Deep in the middle of the cloud is a star struggling to be born.

Enjoy!