Falling faster than gravity

Tags

chain, Free fall, freefall, gravity, Popular science, science, weird science

In 2011, a team of physicists at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York showed that when a falling chain hits something (say, a table), it might, contrary to all intuition, speed up and fall faster than it would if it fell freely.  By carefully studying its mechanics, they showed how the impact could actually pull the remainder of the chain downwards.  As this picture from their experiment shows, they were right.  The two strange-looking chains were dropped from the same height at the same time, but the one on the left, which fell into a pile on a table, fell faster than an identical chain falling past the table.

What brought you here?

Tags

blogging

This morning I read a wonderful post on Alex Brown’s excellent blog, Do You Speak Science?, in which he addresses the questions that people search for before landing on his blog.  I liked the idea so much that I decided to write a similar post over here at Inspiring Science.  Let me know what you think of it — if you like the idea, I might make it a (semi-)regular feature!

Found while foraging (April 2, 2013)

Tags

art, bees, electric field, Erin Brockovich, gender, intersex, israel, Palestine, photography, plasma, Popular science, rape, science, science and society, Science in Society, sexism

It’s certainly been too long since my last Found while foraging!  Since I haven’t been posting as frequently as I’d like, I’ve preferred to post about scientific topics when I had a chance to post.  In the meantime, I’ve let my collection of links grow…so I decided to start the week with a Found while foraging and hopefully end it with a “proper” post.  Anyway, here’s what I’ve come across in the last couple of months — hopefully it’s not an overwhelming collection!  As always, feel free to add more links in the comments.

An amazing critter with seven sexes!

Tags

biology, Mating type, Popular science, science, sex, Tetrahymena, Unicellular organism

If you’ve never heard of Tetrahymena thermophila, your world is about to get much stranger.  This little beauty, a single-celled creature that’s been at the heart of many major discoveries, has seven sexes that can mate with each other!  In a paper just published in PLoS Biology, a team of scientists have described the intricate dance of DNA editing and rearrangement which determines the sex of a new T. thermophila.

Planck looks back at the first billion, billion, billionth of a second

Tags

Big Bang, CMB, Cosmic Background Explorer, Cosmic microwave background radiation, cosmology, ESA, European Space Agency, physics, Planck, Popular science, science, universe, WMAP

This morning, the European Space Agency (ESA) released the results from the Planck mission, a satellite designed to peer back at the earliest fraction of a second of the universe. It’s not our first glimpse of those early moments, but it’s the best look we’ve had to date. While the data from the Planck mission doesn’t overturn our understanding of the universe, it’s a treasure trove for theoretical physicists and brings some exciting questions to the fore.

Northern lights!

Tags

Aurora, aurora australis, aurora borealis, earth, Helsinki, Magnetic field, northern lights, Popular science, science, solar flare, southern lights, space weather, sun

Early on the morning of March 15th, there was a massive explosion on the surface of the sun.  Magnetic field lines came together and reconnected, releasing immense amounts of energy in a coronal mass ejection which electrically charged particles hurtling out into space.  Fortunately, the CME was on the Earthward face of the sun.  Better still, it seemed to be directed straight at us.

Skybugs: ecosystems above and below

Tags

biology, Caribbean Sea, Cloud, ecosystem, hurricanes, microbes, Popular science, science

I’ve already written several times about the bacteria in the clouds and what they do up there; now, a new study from the Georgia Institue of Technology in Atlanta has described the communities formed by the bugs in the sky.  In a paper published in the journal PNAS, the researchers detailed the communities of skybugs and how their composition is affected by storms, giving us a better understanding of life in the sky. Not only might this help us better understand atmospheric chemistry, but it may also shed further light on how microbes spread, which could impact the dynamics of everything from ecosystems to diseases.

Rats with (not quite) telepathy

Tags

animals, biology, brain, Miguel Nicolelis, Popular science, Rat, science

Ten years ago,  Professor Miguel Nicolelis and his team at Duke University made history.  They implanted electrodes — sensors — into a monkey’s brain and trained her to control a robotic arm with her thoughts. That may sound like the stuff of science-fiction, but his latest work is even more incredible.  In a paper recently published in Scientific Reports, Professor Nicolelis and his team used similar technology to enable a pair of rats to communicate — one brain to another — even when they were a continent apart.  If you’ve read some of the news coverage of this story, you may have gotten the idea that it’s some kind of telepathy, mind control or mind meld. It’s not, but the truth, though more down-to-earth, is no less exciting.

Words of science: interstitial

Tags

etymology, language, Popular science, science, vocabulary, words, Words of Science

Like many other fields, science has its own style of communication full of specific jargon and guided by unwritten rules.  Most of the posts on this blog focus on breaching this barrier to the public’s understanding and appreciation of science.  In this series, I’d like to take another approach by highlighting scientific words which have escaped the confines of jargon to reach a broader appeal because of their sound or their evocative power as metaphors.  Today’s word is interstitial. [Previous words of science were petrichor, alluvium, nychthemeron, and crepuscular.]

What makes our intelligence heritable?

Tags

biology, G factor (psychometrics), Genetics, Genome-wide association study, GWAS, heritability, Human, intelligence, Intelligence quotient, People, Popular science, science, science and society

A study from the University of Edinburgh claims to have found the basis of our intelligence in thousands of genes scattered throughout our genome. Although the discovery was made possible by a new statistical method and modern sequencing technology, how the results are interpreted hinges upon a century-old debate about what intelligence is and how we measure it. Will we ever be able to measure something so indefinable or discover the genes behind it?