NGC 1187, a spiral galaxy about 60 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus (The River), may look tranquil but it's home to some violent events. NGC 1187 has hosted two supernova explosions during the last thirty years, the latest one in 2007.
NGC 1187 was discovered in England by William Herschel in 1784 and can be seen almost face-on, which gives astronomers a good view of its spiral structure. About half a dozen prominent spiral arms can be seen, each containing large amounts of gas and dust. The bluish features in the spiral arms indicate the presence of young stars born out of clouds of interstellar gas.
A number of recent web-notables all seem to revolve (eccentrically) around the question of human evolution. Whether it continues. Whether there is such a thing as "selection in groups." Whether our technological (cyborg) augmentations and/or increasing numbers of "non-neuro-typical" society members portend a new splitting of human destiny. And it looks as if I should have set Existence just five years in the future, instead of 35!
If the legend is true, Aesop lived during the sixth century B.C. He was born a slave but was given his freedom as a reward for his wit and intelligence.
He never wrote anything down but the stories people remembered were so intriguing virtually every moralistic fable before him (and after) got attributed to him. Now Aesop's Fables number in the 600s.
One of them, "The Crow and the Pitcher", highlights the 'necessity is the mother of invention' concept. A thirsty crow can't get his beak far enough down into a pitcher of water to drink, so he drops stones in until the water level rises.
Modern lifestyles are quite different from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. That seems obvious. People looking to apply blame for the obesity rise focus on their own agendas, be it lobbying against GMOs, high fructose corn syrup or video games. Or contend it is because we don't spend our days picking berries.
But what does science say? There's no way to know but anthropologists are at least taking a shot at it. A new analysis, of modern hunter-gatherers anyway, found that there is no difference between their energy expenditure and Westerners, casting doubt on 'we don spend all day picking berries' hypothesis for obesity.
ATLAS has just
released a note which summarizes the searches for the standard model Higgs boson in 7-TeV and 8-TeV data. Since July 4th the main improvement is the addition of the WW channel, which had not been shown back then. With it, the combined local significance of the 126 GeV Higgs boson excess in the WW, ZZ, and γγ channels grows to 5.9 standard deviations. In the words of a Facebook friend who's in ATLAS: "if this is not a discovery, I don't know what is".
The Tevatron experiments have jointly
published on the arxiv two days ago a paper which is titled "
Evidence for a particle produced in association with weak bosons and decaying to a bottom-antibottom quark pair in the search for the Higgs boson at the Tevatron collider". You can get the paper in the arxiv.
Do you work in genetics? If so, you are out to ruin the brains of children, according to a claim at Alternet.org.
Want to get in a fight in Scotland?
Okay, just about anything will get you into a fight in Scotland but if you want a guaranteed way to get a headbutt and then kicked when you are on the ground, tell them they did not invent golf, the world's most frustrating pastime.
Crotchety old men seem to have won this argument.
Modern pop music is too loud and does sound all the same, just like angry old types have been saying for 70 years.
A team from Spain analyzed music from a 55 year period, using an archive known as the Million Song Dataset, and found that songs have indeed become both louder and more homogenized in terms of chords and melodies.
Man has been killing man and beast since whatever critter of common descent crawled out of the primordial ooze. And likely before, there's just no way to know it.
But some things can be known and one of them is this; you don't manufacture poison unless you intend to kill something with it. And ancient man was interested in using the best applied science they could find.
