kottke.org posts about science
In a recent Vlogbrothers video and in his newsletter, Hank Green talked about how we don’t take enough notice of the things that quietly keep us alive, healthy, and safe.
The tragedy of prevention goes like this: The most effective way to save lives (prevention) is the least noticeable, which leads us to undervaluing it in our individual choices, in what we celebrate, and in public policy. That undervaluing of prevention leads to a great deal of needless death and suffering.
But there’s a second tragedy here, which is that we spend way less time celebrating the accomplishments of humanity than I think we should. If every person who had their life saved by a vaccine, or an airbag, or a clean air regulation felt the same as a firefighter carrying an unconscious person out of a burning building, I think we’d feel a lot better about humanity, and maybe that would help us move forward more effectively.
This follows Green’s Bluesky post from early April:
A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.
Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.
In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote about a related concept: The Paradox of Preparation.
Preparation, prevention, regulations, and safeguards prevent catastrophes all the time, but we seldom think or hear about it because “world continues to function” is not interesting news. We have to rely on statistical analysis and the expert opinions of planners and officials in order to evaluate both crucial next steps and the effectiveness of preparatory measures after the fact, and that can be challenging for us to pay attention to. So we tend to forget that preparation & prevention is necessary and discount it the next time around.
In this video, musician Armin Küpper performs a saxophone duet with the echo of his past self by playing near the end of a large pipe. That’s pretty cool. And it’s also a learning opportunity! Hey wait, come back…you haven’t finished your bowl of physics yet:
What you hear after each note is an echo, a sound wave reflecting off the far end of the pipe and traveling back to him.
Sound travels at around 343 meters per second (1,235 km/h or 767 mph) through air. In this video, the echo takes about 1.5 seconds to return. That means the reflected sound traveled about 514.5 meters (1,688 feet) round-trip, so the end of the pipe is at around 257 meters (843 ft) away.
It seems more like a second to me (so ~563 feet), but whatever…still cool.
I’ve posted before about Charles Brooks’ fantastic series of photographs of the insides of musical instruments. Recently, Brooks had the opportunity to apply his technique to capture the innards of a particle accelerator.
Brooks says of the photo:
Despite being a scientific instrument, it behaves a lot like a musical instrument. Electrons pulse through this tunnel in tight, synchronized waves. The powerful magnets above and below make them undulate — just like the vibrating string of a fine cello — creating an intense X-ray beam used to probe hidden structures of our world.
As part of the project, accelerator physicist Eugene Tan converted the pulsing of the electrons in the chamber into sound, “letting us hear the movement of electrons at nearly the speed of light”.
Petapixel has a lot more on how this image was captured.
“This was an instant yes for me,” Brooks tells PetaPixel. “It ticked so many boxes: I’m always drawn to photographing hidden or complex spaces, and this was one of the most intricate objects I could possibly shoot.”
(via colossal)
We all recall the revelation last year that the ocean’s rebellious teenagers, orcas, have started wearing salmon on their heads. Again. (The official state animal of Connecticut is the sperm whale, which is wholly unrelated to this post, except insofar as whales were just mentioned in the previous sentence. It’s only I just learned this fact 5 weeks ago and can’t stop shoehorning it into every conversation.) And then the recent discovery of the carnivorous caterpillars crawling around spider webs wearing the desiccated carcasses of other bugs either as a defense or disguise, or because they think it looks really cool and who are you to say otherwise.
More recently, scientists announced a new discovery about the parasite Entamoeba histolytica which kills 50K-100K people a year by going through their colon to attack their liver before moving on to their brains and lungs. This parasite wears pieces of dead human cells to evade the body’s immune system, making it difficult for us to fight an invasion.
In 2022, Ralston discovered a major reason behind the parasite’s tenacity: the amoeba develops an ability to evade a crucial part of the human immune system known as complement proteins. These proteins are vital to identifying and eradicating foreign cells. To escape them, E. histolytica ingests specific proteins from human cell outer membranes, then places those proteins on its own outer surface. Two of those molecules block those important compliment proteins from attaching themselves and fighting back. Essentially, E. histolytica wears chunks of human cells as a disguise against its host’s immune system.
Further, gorillas and orangutans have inconclusively been seen wearing leaves in the rain, pom pom crabs carry sea anemone everywhere, dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia carry sea sponges around in their mouths, and, well, decorator crabs.
The NY Times has a nice feature on NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photography from his latest stay in space, a 220-day mission aboard the ISS.
Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video of Pettit’s experiment involving charged water droplets and a teflon needle:
I could watch that allllll day long.
More Pettit: Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this video except wow. Wow wow. It’s almost inconceivable that we live in a world of sights like this. Feels like science fiction but is actually real. Captured by NASA astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS.
TIL I learned about gravastars (aka a gravitational vacuum star), theoretical objects related to black holes. Both are massive & dense, but instead of a singularity surrounded by an event horizon, gravastars are made up of dark energy surrounded by a extremely thin shell of exotic matter.
The shell of the gravastar is utterly dark and the coldest thing in the universe, only a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. If we look at it in deep infrared, even the cosmic microwave background glows bright in comparison. It is made from an entirely new, unique and extreme matter that is at the very limit of what is physically possible in nature and doesn’t have a name yet. Actually, the shell is so incredibly thin that atoms seem truly gigantic next to it.
This is a great data-driven short documentary by Neil Halloran about how smallpox was eradicated from the face of the Earth. And what it took was humanity, through the use of science & humanitarianism, answering its own plea for something to be done about it.
Some philosophers believe there was a secondary humanitarian revolution that followed the scientific revolution. And I note this because the eradication of smallpox also had these two phases. The scientific breakthroughs of inoculation and the vaccine allowed many countries to become virtually smallpox-free — but not all countries. In fact, those 300 to 500 million deaths in the 20th century? They came well after the vaccine had been discovered. So clearly, for much of the world, something more was needed than medical innovation. And fortunately there’s reason to think that these two types of progress might be connected.
Part of being a human is contemplating why some of us get so sick. It’s a practical question and it’s more than that. As we learned about disease, the theory goes that we began to think a little differently about those who fell ill — to see that their suffering truly wasn’t meant to be. We stepped away from thinking it was up to a higher power and into the belief that, well, it was up to us.
See also How smallpox claimed its final victim (I’d never heard this story before watching Halloran’s video), How Children Took the Smallpox Vaccine Around the World, and No One Knows What’s Inside the Smallpox Vaccine.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 35 years ago and in celebration of that milestone, Alan Taylor collected some recent images from the Hubble, whose mission is still ongoing.
Silenced Science Stories is a collaboration between scientists and artists to tell the stories of scientific experts who have been affected by the Trump regime’s purge of their ranks.
We are organizing an illustrated series of portraits and stories of scientific experts whose work is being affected by federal budget cuts and mass firings.
We have over 30 science artists who are volunteering to create these features to communicate the careers and the important scientific research of federally employed and funded scientists.
If you’d like to get involved, they are looking for both artists and scientists with stories to tell. You can read more about the project in Physics Today. (via jonathan hoefler)
A cephalopod captured on video in March has been confirmed as a juvenile colossal squid, the first live colossal squid observed in its native habitat.
It’s been 100 years since the colossal squid was formally described in a scientific paper. In its adult form, the animal is larger than the giant squid, or any other invertebrate on Earth, and can grow to 6 or 7 meters long, or up to 23 feet.
Scientists’ first good look at the species in 1925 was incomplete — just arm fragments from two squid in the belly of a sperm whale. Adults are thought to spend most of their time in the deep ocean.
A full-grown colossal squid occasionally appears at the ocean’s surface, drawn up to a fishing boat while it’s “chewing on” a hooked fish, Dr. Bolstad said. Younger specimens have turned up in trawl nets.
Yet until now, humans had not witnessed a colossal squid at home, swimming in the deep Antarctic sea.
(via @davidgrann.bsky.social)
For the past 11 years, the Breakthrough Prize awards have “celebrated outstanding scientific achievements, honoring scientists driving remarkable discoveries in gene editing, human diseases, the search for the fundamental laws of the Universe and pure mathematics”. At this year’s awards, Edward Norton & Seth Rogen presented a prize in fundamental physics and Rogen took the opportunity to remind the audience — including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman — that the Trump regime is actively destroying the ability for people to pursue science in America.
And it’s amazing that others [who have been] in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science. It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr, very fast.
Rogen’s remarks were heard during the live presentation but have been scrubbed from the video on YouTube. I haven’t seen the uncensored video anywhere…drop me a line if you run across it?
Photographer Joshua Rozells on his photo of our increasingly crowded night skies:
The light pollution caused by satellites is quickly becoming a growing problem for astronomers. In 2021, over 1700 spacecrafts and satellites were put into orbit. Light pollution caused by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are the worst offenders because they are low Earth orbit satellites, and they travel in satellite trains. One can only assume the issue will exponentially increase in the next few years, with SpaceX alone intending to launch over 40,000 satellites in total. The space industry is almost entirely unregulated, with no limits on the amount of satellites that anyone is able to launch and there is currently no regulation in place to minimise the light pollution they cause.
In his latest video, Mark Rober shows how easy it is to fool Tesla’s self-driving capability (they use cheaper video cameras) when compared with other self-driving cars (which use lidar). Big Wile E. Coyote energy from the Tesla here.
Oh and he also uses lidar to map out the interior at Disneyland’s Space Mountain ride, which is entirely in the dark.
A few days ago, on March 2, the first lunar lander operated by a private company landed successfully on the Moon. The video of the landing is really something — I wonder if I will ever get accustomed to or tired of watching footage of spacecraft landing on other bodies in our solar system? The answer is a resounding NO so far…this is cool as hell.
You can read more about Firefly’s Blue Ghost on Wikipedia. The mission delivered 10 science and technology investigations to the surface of the Moon for NASA. (via phil plait)
I loved this short thread from Andrew Miller about how his pediatrician wife helps parents who are skeptical of vaccinating their children change their minds.
So my wife is a pediatrician and works in some hospitals with high vaccine and intervention hesitation (suburban ones). She has found *tremendous* success by just letting the families know she will have to document the higher risk of specific, and often fatal illness, in the chart of their child.
She explains that if their child goes to the ER, the ER might not think to ask about routine newborn care that the parents opted out of, so by putting it in the chart she might be saving the child from this very specific thing. But just as important it makes it feel REAL to the parents.
She identifies and describes the specific thing that their child is now more likely to die from. In detail, including symptoms to watch out for. It’s not abstract. It’s visceral.
From David Wallace-Wells, a reminder that those who were considered alarmists at the beginning of the pandemic were ultimately proved right — it actually was an alarming situation.
Today, the official Covid death toll in the United States stands at 1.22 million. Excess mortality counts, which compare the total number of all-cause deaths to a projection of what they would have been without the pandemic, run a little higher — about 1.5 million.
In other words, the alarmists were closer to the truth than anyone else. That includes Anthony Fauci, who in March 2020 predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths and was called hysterical for it. The same was true of the British scientist Neil Ferguson, whose Imperial College model suggested that the disease might ultimately infect more than 80 percent of Americans and kill 2.2 million of us. Thankfully, the country was vaccinated en masse long before 80 percent were infected…
I’m also going to point out that those who were labeled alarmists about the impact of Donald Trump’s presidencies were also “closer to the truth than anyone else”, certainly closer than all those centrist “pundits”. I’m particularly thinking of those who knew when they woke up on November 9th to a Trump victory that Roe v Wade was toast and that Americans’ civil rights would be taken away and were called “hysterical” (there’s that word again) for saying so.
Moon Lidar is a visualization of the data collected by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) mission. According to this factsheet, the visualization includes nearly six billion measurements.
LOLA data was captured by a polar orbiting laser altimeter. Think of it like the range finder you would use to measure how far away the hole is from your current position at a golf course, except you press the button six billion times, save the position from where you are measuring, save every distance measurement on a hard drive, and then phone that data back to earth.
The team at Howtown closed out 2024 by investigating the spice level (i.e. the Scoville ratings) of the lineup of hot sauces on the popular YouTube interview series Hot Ones while also teaching us about how hot peppers evolved and how pepper spininess is measured. (Spoiler: the sauces are not as hot as advertised.)
Cheers to Adam Cole for Peter Pipering this particular passage:
By picking peppers, they could pinpoint the precise percentage of each patch that was pungent, and some patches were more pungent than others.
Perfect.
The largest nuclear weapon ever tested was Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton device detonated by the Soviet Union in 1961. That made it “3,300 times as powerful” as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — an almost unimaginable level of potential destructive power. But Tsar Bomba wasn’t even close to being the biggest nuclear weapon ever conceived. Meet Project Sundial, courtesy of Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb, and his colleagues at Los Alamos:
Only a few months later, in July 1954, Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child’s play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, “the possibility of much bigger bangs.” At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a “primary” to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons.
10,000 megatons. In the video above, Kurzgesagt speculates that exploding a bomb of that size would result in a fireball “up to 50 kilometers in diameter, larger than the visible horizon”, a magnitude 9 earthquake, a noise that can be heard around the entire Earth, a 400 km in which everything is “instantly set on fire – every tree, house, person”, and, eventually, the deaths of most of the Earth’s population.
Sundial would bring about an apocalyptic nuclear winter, where global temperatures suddenly drop by 10°C, most water sources would be contaminated and crops would fail everywhere. Most people in the world would die.
Fun fact: Edward Teller was one of Stanley Kubrick’s inspirations for the bomb-giddy character of Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 film of the same name.
In this video, Sara Saadouni explains the three passive cooling techniques used by fellow architect Diébédo Francis Kéré in designing a school building in Burkina Faso, where temperatures can be quite warm all year. The roof is especially clever.
He introduced a curved double roof that created an air gap between the first and second roof. As the heat naturally rises and escapes into the gap, the prevailing winds quickly carry it away, accelerating this process and cooling the building more efficiently.
But that’s not all. The first roof is made up of perforated ceiling slabs, allowing the heat to escape more efficiently and therefore to be quickly transported by the wind.
The other genius idea was to also curve the roof, which allowed for the Venturi effect — a phenomenon where air speeds up as it moves through the narrower sections created by the curve and therefore boosting natural ventilation.
(via the kid should see this)
Oh wow, this is cool: an article in Scientific American about the Arecibo message, the first message purposely sent by humanity out into interstellar space. The piece is written by science writer Nadia Drake — the daughter of Frank Drake, who designed the message — and it digs into the details of how the whole thing came about.
I’ve somehow never read about the Arecibo message before. It was sent out from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico on November 16, 1974 towards global cluster M13. The message was in binary and when properly decoded upon receipt, should look like this:
The drawing on the right is Frank Drake’s recently discovered first draft of the message.
Dad targeted a globular cluster of stars called Messier 13 (M13), or the Great Cluster in the constellation of Hercules, because it would conveniently be overhead at the time of the ceremony (nestled in a sinkhole, Arecibo’s giant dish was not fully steerable). In about 25,000 years, Dad’s message will reach M13 — or at least part of it, because the majority of the cluster’s thousands of stars will have moved out of the telescope’s beam by then. But anyone who’s around to detect the Arecibo transmission, and who figures out how to decode it, will have a blueprint telling them a lot about us: what we look like, which chemical elements and biomolecules make up our DNA, what our planetary system is and how many of us existed in 1974. Dad’s transmission concluded with a binary encoded representation of the Arecibo dish itself.
Read the whole thing…it’s fascinating.
Btw, in addition to creating the Arecibo message, Frank Drake also designed the Drake equation (“a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy”), helped design the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, and generally kickstarted the whole SETI effort. (via @https://bsky.app/profile/astrokatie.com)
So we all know the color purple has always been associated with royalty because the dye used to make it was extremely limited because you could only get it from the Phoenician city of Tyre where a tiny snail lived. Dye makers had to “crack open the snail’s shell, extract a purple-producing mucus and expose it to sunlight for a precise amount of time,” and it took 250K snails to make an ounce of dye. But did we know purple isn’t like all the other colors?
Most of you here probably know that our perception of color comes down to physics. Light is a type of radiation that our eyes can perceive, and it spans a certain range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Individual colors are like building blocks in white light: they are subdivisions of the visible spectrum. For us to perceive an object as being of a certain color, it needs to absorb some of the subdivisions in the light that falls on it (or all of them, for black). The parts it reflects (doesn’t absorb) are what gives it its color. But not so for purple, because it is a non-spectral color.
Hahahah. Yessssss. Pound sand, Harold!
I am predisposed to like videos about meteorite craters but this was even more interesting than I anticipated.
A nice example of a crater 2-3 km wide is Rotor Kamm in southern Africa. I should mention that we’re easily into city killer impacts here, in case you’re wondering.
You can explore the Earth Impact Database on their website. (via @michaelhobbes.bsky.social)
A pair of physicists from MIT and Jefferson Lab and an animator have created a new visualization of the atomic nucleaus.
For the first time, the sizes, shapes and structures of nuclei in the quantum realm are visualized using animations and explained in the video.
The video also establishes what appears to be a new unit of measure with an adorable name, the babysecond:
To better define the velocities of particles at such small distance scales, we establish the baby second as 10^-23 seconds. A photon moving at the speed of light crosses three femtometers (a bit more than the radius of oxygen-16) in one baby second.
From the NIH, a collection of 2,000+ public domain science and medical art visuals (molecules, plants, viruses, proteins, brushes for repeating items like DNA, fungi, equipment…). High-resolution, free to use — scientists on social media seem pretty pumped about this.
See also PhyloPic, a collection of 10,000 “free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms, available for reuse under Creative Commons licenses”. (via @waldo.net)
From 1980 to the present, a timeline map of every earthquake in the world with a magnitude of 5 or above. You can play around with different parameters and data, so you can see where the different tectonic plates are, just see where the biggest earthquakes occurred, or add in volcanic eruptions. You can also draw a cross section and it will show how deep the quakes occurred along that line.
Wow, check out this just-released image from the JWST team of star cluster NGC 602.
The local environment of this cluster is a close analogue of what existed in the early Universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionised gas also suggest the presence of ongoing star formation processes. This cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine star formation scenarios under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighbourhood.
It is very worth your time to click through and look at this image in all of its massive celestial glory. I found this image via Phil Plait, who calls it “one of the most jaw-droppingly mind stomping images I’ve seen from JWST” and, directing us back to the science (remember the science?!), notes that NGC 602 is actively forming stars (it’s only about 5 million years old) and that it depicts “the first young brown dwarfs outside our Milky Way”. Cool!
Out today from National Geographic is Infinite Cosmos, a gorgeous-looking book by Ethan Siegel (intro by Brian Greene). It’s about the history of the JWST, humanity’s biggest ever space telescope, a machine that allows us to peer deeper & clearer into the universe than ever before, and some of the amazing results obtained through its use.
Siegel wrote a piece about the book for Big Think, which includes an excerpt. Gravitational lensing is so cool:
Even with its unprecedented capabilities, JWST’s views of the universe are still finite and limited. The faintest, most distant objects in the cosmos — including the very first stars of all — remain invisible even in the longest-exposure JWST images acquired to date. The universe itself offers a natural enhancement, however, that can reveal features that would otherwise remain unobservable: gravitational lensing.
Whenever a large amount of mass gathers together in one location, it bends and distorts the fabric of the surrounding space-time, just as the theory of general relativity dictates. As light from background objects even farther away passes close to or through that region of the universe, it not only gets distorted but also gets magnified and potentially bent, either into multiple images or into a complete or partial ring. The foreground mass behaves as a gravitational lens. The amount of mass and how it’s distributed affect the light passing through it, amplifying the light coming from those background sources.
Infinite Cosmos is available for purchase at Amazon and Bookshop.
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