Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• The always-funny bec at Save Your Breath for Running, Ponies spins a tale of an assassin bug who's not very good: Now this is all very elaborate and apparently successful, but we all know spiders are not that stupid. Lord knows if one asked me to do something, I sure as hell wouldn’t refuse, so they’ve definitely got something there. Plus we all know spiders talk,* which could make life pretty difficult for those assassin bugs I’d imagine. Because you can’t be an assassin if your victims can see you and your wide-open bag of tricks coming, right? So poor Assassin Bug would finally get an assignment, which is awesome because he’s just been sitting at home doing fuck-all for months because the pickings are slim when there are so many other assassin bugs around. It’s like, “Hey, so I heard an Achaearanea extridium moved in down town?” “Yeah, Lindsay already picked him off last week.”


• John McKay at archy tells the tale of the Wellington avalanche: One hundred years ago, it was snowing in the North Cascade Mountains. By itself, there was nothing unusual about that fact. It always snows in the Cascades around this time of year. We depend on it. The ski resorts need snow to stay open. The cities of Puget Sound rely on the snowpack laid down during the late winter for their water supply during the summer. Farms and orchards on the east side of the mountains depend on that same melting snowpack to water their crops. The salmon who have been spawning in Cascade streams since the end of the last ice age need that same meltwater to make their final journey. But the late February storms of 1910 were something different.
  


• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy blogs on two galaxies seen by WISE: NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, only launched a couple of months ago, and has already done spectacular work. Gulping down huge tracts of sky every day, it has already discovered over 2000 asteroids — not seen, but actually discovered — including several that pass near the Earth (none on track to hit us, happily). It’s discovered four comets, too, and by the end of the mission in a few months will see far more. But since it’s a survey instrument, and it sees in the far infrared, the views it gets are nothing short of spectacular! Like this one... There is a lot to see here! First, the colors: all of this is far infrared, with blue being the IR wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns combined (5 and 6.5 times the wavelength the human eye sees), green is 12 microns, and red 22. Green is dominated by warm dust and big organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The glowing gassy stuff is part of the Heart Nebula, which I’ve posted about before (guess what date). But take a look a bit to the left of all that gas, and look much, much farther in distance...


• At Skulls in the Stars, a post on perpetual motion: With that in mind, it is worth pointing out that perpetual motion has been considered impossible — and treated with scorn — for a long, long time. When I dug up the first volume of The Harmsworth Magazine, dated 1899, to seek out a story by Winston Churchill, I also found a popular article on perpetual motion. It is not kind to the concept, or the people who pursue it.


• Ed Young at Not Exactly Rocket Science posts on the the weirdness that is chicken sex genetics: The animal on the right is no ordinary chicken. Its right half looks like a hen but its left half (with a larger wattle, bigger breast, whiter colour and leg spur) is that of a cockerel. The bird is a 'gynandromorph', a rare sexual chimera. Thanks to three of these oddities, Debiao Zhao and Derek McBride from the University of Edinburgh have discovered a truly amazing secret about these most familiar of birds - every single cell in a chicken's body is either male or female. Each one has its own sexual identity. It seems that becoming male or female is a very different process for birds than it is for mammals.

Enjoy!