If you've watched any World Cup games so far (and a record 15 million in the US watched Saturday's match versus Ghana, so statistically, ummm, 50,000 people in our audience have watched at least one) you may have heard an omnipresent buzzing sound and assumed it was a horde of mutant bees in the broadcast booth or a defect in your television.

It was neither.  Instead, it was a vuvuzela ("lepatata"), a B flat plastic horn that is loved by South African sports fans and hated by everyone else.  Seriously.  During that first World Cup match I watched it was so annoying I was convinced that if the people at Abu Gharaib had access to these things, terrorists would have caved in long ago.

While I'm busy building an instrument to convert the ionosphere to music, this NASA group has sonified the Sun. 

Astronomers at Univ. of Sheffield "found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument. [...] Using satellite images of these loops, which can be over 60,000 miles long, the scientists were able to recreate the sound by turning the visible vibrations into noises and speeding up the frequency so it is audible to the human ear. "

"It is a sort of music as it has harmonics."

Sample this 18 second flare music:

Arctic Ice July 2010

In about a week the National Snow and Ice Data Center - NSIDC - will be publishing its analysis of June's sea ice.  I expect them to report another record loss of sea ice.

My prediction for July is that Arctic sea ice loss will accelerate.


Measuring ice behaviour

Of the 27% of respondents who decided to go into the private sector, the majority went into the business or financial

Proteins are the workhorses of our existence.   These "helmsmen of the cell" are composed of amino acids, whose sequence is already defined by the heritable information in every living being and transport substances, convey messages and carry out vital processes in their role as molecular machines. 

The translation of this information during the production of proteins (protein synthesis) is determined by the genetic code and 20 amino acids form the standard set of which proteins are built.

Altitude training is a popular training method expected to improve the physical performance of athletes …and horses!  

Recently, several national football teams spent some time at altitude on the Austrian Alps in preparation for the World Cup.   Athletes from a number of endurance disciplines use altitude training as part of their yearly training program. However, scientific evidence is not clear at all as to whether altitude training is beneficial for human performance or otherwise.

Social networks are a great help for this kind of news: a new paper by a FB friend does not go unnoticed (at least by me) as it once would. I learned today that Garrett Lisi (picture below), the surfer and theoretical physicist, has deposited another paper in the Cornell arxiv. And it looks as a significant addition to his previous studies of the E8 group. He explicitly calls it "a companion" to the previous article, "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything".

23andMe, Inc., a direct-to-consumer personal genetics company, is arguably the most well-funded and therefore highest profile group out there (being married to a Google co-founder will do that) and by doing a somewhat humorous new study associating traits with single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs - a type of common DNA sequence variation), they may have spurred discussion of some new ethics guidelines to help future science policy.

Scientific Consensus


Some scientific ideas are so easily grasped that they are easily explained to the general public.  Other ideas can only be fully understood after a minimum level of training and studies in the relevant area.  A few ideas are so obscure, so far removed from everyday experience that only a very few specialists fully understand the topic.

Science is a landscape in which anyone may wander.  How pleasant to sit in the green pastures of accumulated knowledge and dip the fingers in a stream of certainty.  But how much more exciting it is to scuba-dive through flooded caves in search of the foundations of science: how much more satisfying it is to climb the highest peak and see the bigger picture.