The Many Worlds Wiener Sausage is the first step in understanding the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox. However, there are still three steps missing until we can resolve the EPR paradox correctly. One important step: Although it is a many-worlds model, with parallel universes and all that, and although it can reproduce certain quantum factors, it is not yet a quantum world!

History Mysteries #2 - The Sawdust Coast

According to Peter Freuchen, writing of his travels in Siberia, circa 1936,  the tundra coast near Tiksi in the Lena Delta was fringed with logs and the sea bottom contained "hundreds of thousands of years of sawdust".  To the best of my knowledge, this remarkable phenomenon - a Siberian 'sawdust coast' - has never been studied scientifically.


Peter Freuchen

Peter Freuchen was a scientist.  However, for much of his life he was known to various people according to the various talents which make him seem like a character from a work of fiction.

Once upon a time, tool use was considered to be a uniquely human feature, setting us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But, when Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees using sticks to ‘fish’ for termites (see video 1) in the 1960’s, this idea received a serious blow. Since then, tool use has been observed in a variety of animals, ranging from the usual primate suspects, to less expected critters, such as crows, dolphins, elephants, otters and even octopuses (see video 2).

Video 1: Chimpanzees using tools to 'fish' for termites.

(Source: BBC documentary 'Cousins')

Life is hard when you're cutting edge.  Coming up with a good topic and title for a Science 2.0 article is not easy.  Today I tried to conceive of a unique and insightful piece about a little-talked about topic.  Specifically, the topic of the last space shuttle flight, which just occurred today.

But what title could really capture this epic yet unreported event?  'The Day America Cried'?  Or maybe 'The Day America Shrugged', or perhaps 'The Day America Clicked on FB for, like, the 50th Time Today' might work better.  But perhaps that issue itself is too niche.  In the end, I abandonded that topic in favor of a new article.  But what to write about?

I've long said that what NASA needs is not a James Webb Space Telescope but an actual James Webb for the 21st century.

Webb, if you are not familiar with NASA lore, was a bold leader rather than a bureaucrat tasked with perpetuating funding, and it was due to his leadership that NASA launched 75 missions into space, including putting a man on the Moon.

Apparently, the female ancestor of present-day polar bears was a brown bear, living in what presently corresponds to Ireland. An international research team has used mitochondrial DNA (see figure 1) to trace back the polar bears (maternal) ancestry. And it turns out that, 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, they interbred with brown bears.

Figure 1: During fertilization, the sperm cell does not contribute mitochondria to the egg.

(Source: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/emfpu/genetics/explained/mitochondrial)