Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• At Starts with a Bang, Ethan celebrates photos of Saturn (and shows us some gorgeous ones): Looking at one picture like this, what strikes me is just how much we can learn about our giant, ringed neighbor just by looking at this shot. First off, the rings of Saturn are seen edge-on, and you can learn -- almost immediately -- that they are incredibly thin. Saturn's rings, as you're probably familiar with them, are huge and expansive, stretching out to be well over 200,000 km in diameter!


• At The Loom, Carl Zimmer muses on the tiny ever-surprising swine flu: Last March a new kind of flu came on the scene–the 2009 H1N1 flu, a k a swine flu. Hatched from an eldritch mingling of viruses infecting humans, birds, and pigs, it swept across the world. Here in the United States, the CDC estimates that between 41 and 84 million people came down with swine flu between April and January. Of those infected, between 8,330 and 17,160 are estimated to have died. This flu strain has been nothing if not surprising. It was lurking around in humans for several months, undetected, before becoming a planetary infection. And before that, the ancestor of the virus was circulating among pigs for a decade, again unknown. And while the new swine flu has killed some 10,000 people in the United States alone and many more abroad, it has proven to be relatively low key–as flu goes. Some 30,000 people die in the United States every year from seasonal flu, the cocktail of flu strains that show up year in and year out. Now the swine flu is surprising us once more.


• At Tetrapod Zoology, Darren runs a series on babirusas - those pigs with the giant curling teeth: So... what's with the bizarre curving tusks? Present only in males (females lack canines entirely), they grow continuously throughout life, and their growth, anatomy and function are all odd. The lower canine is normal in position and anatomy, it's just that it becomes particularly long during growth, overlapping the outside edge of the snout as it grows. The upper canine is another story. Initially growing downwards - like any normal mammalian upper canine - it is then rotated as the alveolus itself turns to force the tooth upwards, and it eventually emerges from the dorsal surface of the snout. The most anterior part of the spiral parallels the long lower canines. As mentioned earlier, we're mostly familiar with those babirusas where the upper canines curl in a circle as they grow, forming a spiral over the animal's forehead.


• Bec at Save Your Breath For Running, Ponies looks at ants who go off to die: Now while this might seem like an unusually selfless act, I’m willing to bet those dying ants won’t budge until they’ve milked every ounce of sympathy, gratitude, extra helpings of discarded milkshake and so on from the colony first. Or they’ll sulk like mad until they realise no one will miss them and then eventually clear off. But either way, it kind of renders any claim to altruism pretty much void in my books. Like, they’d all be happily marching towards some three-day-old chicken wing, playing whatever the new politically-correct name for Chinese Whispers is, “I have light bulbs made of dirt in my underpants and this email smells like a purple fax machine… LOL!!!!!1!” when one of them suddenly clutches his side all like, “Erm, you guys go ahead, I’ll just be a minute.


• And Matt at Built on Facts looks at the physics of curling: Unfortunately it's rarely on TV more than once every four years, but I have to say I've really gotten to curling. Not only is it interesting to watch, it looks like it's actually a sport that could be played for fun at the beginning level. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of curling in Texas for some reason, so I have to content myself with watching. And thinking about the physics.

Enjoy!