Weird Science

[Einherjar86]

So, I know there are a few threads dedicated to science, but they're all specifically for debating scientific issues, addressing scientific misconceptions, or addressing specific scientific questions. There isn't really a thread for science per se, or for new developments/discoveries in science.

As many here know... I'm not a scientist. But as many here also know, I'm obsessed with reading about science and have a particular fascination with unexpected, unsettling, or confusing scientific discoveries. I'll just go ahead and call this "weird science" for the fun of it (and yeah, for the sci-fi angle: https://io9.gizmodo.com/finally-a-novel-about-weird-science-thats-genuinely-w-1528348041)

This thread is intended to share and discuss the incredible, unbelievable, disturbing, confusing, and just fucked up discoveries from the sciences. I realize this topic could fit in the "News" thread or possibly in the "Dakryn" thread, but both of those tend to attract political and philosophical topics, and also tend to invite debate. I think this thread would be best served by keeping debates out of it. If debate does ensue, then I'd ask that those involved move it to another space (for instance, the scientific debate thread started by Cyth way back in the day; the Dakryn thread is also a fitting place to discuss disagreements in methodology, theory, and practice). This doesn't mean that we can't ask each other questions about methodology, theory, and practice in this thread; if you're unclear about how researchers are arriving at their findings, then feel free to say so and ask for more info. All I ask is that argument about methods and theories be moved to other threads.

Try to include a brief comment along with your link so people have an idea what the post is about. I'd suggest that we try to limit discussion to the hard sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, geology, climatology, oceanology, etc.), but I don't want that to be a strict rule (if you want to debate the difference between hard and soft sciences, then I'll see you in the Dakryn thread ). For example, it's fine if someone wants to share some strange or counter-intuitive finding in sociology or anthropology; but be warned that such findings often lend themselves to political debate more easily than those in the hard sciences.

As a final note, I realize that what some people find unbelievable or fucked up may not appear unbelievable or fucked up to everyone, especially those more familiar with the particulars of a given science. If you have more knowledge about a given science than someone else, don't berate them for not understanding it; just kindly and patiently explain things from your perspective (yeah I know, this is asking a lot--try to slow your rolls ladies and gents, jadies and lents, steers and queers, however you be).

I'll kick it off with a topic appropriate to a metal forum: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/01/crypt-keeper-wasps-parasites-new-species/

The article is from last year, but this is the first I'm hearing about it. Parasitic wasps creep the hell out of me, and this little fucker is just the absolute worst.

Hyperparasites are parasites that take advantage of other parasites, such as parasitic wasps that lay eggs in other parasitic wasps that in turn lay eggs in caterpillars. (See more pictures of impressively gruesome parasites.)

But a parasite (E. set) that manipulates the behavior of another parasite (B. pallida) that manipulates the behavior of its host (creating galls in oak trees)?

This kind of macabre Russian nesting doll is called hypermanipulation, and it’s much less understood.

 

[Dak]

Some low-hanging fruit to contribute:
https://www.livescience.com/61258-strangest-science-of-2017.html

An amputated flatworm fragment sent to space regenerated into a double-headed worm, a rare spontaneous occurrence of double-headedness.

"fatberg," a massive clump of kitchen oils, diapers and other flushed garbage that was plugging up a London sewer. At first, U.K. authorities weren't sure what to do with the fatberg, but in the end they announced it would be extracted and turned into biodiesel.

Biodiesels burn more cleanly than fossil fuels. The U.K. fatberg is expected to produce more than 2,000 gallons (7,500 liters) of fuel.

The two scientists showed that two tiny particles — called bottom quarks — could theoretically fuse together in a powerful flash.

This flash would lead to three things: to a larger subatomic particle, a spare particle called a nucleon and a giant mess of energy released into the universe. This "quarksplosion" would be more powerful than the nuclear fusion reactions that take place in the cores of hydrogen bombs, they found.

 

[Carpe Mortem]

I ended up on a clickbait rabbit hole from Elon Musk's hot young girlfriend announcement, and found the Roko's Basilisk theory interesting. Not because it's believable whatsoever but because even tech focused high thinkers still find a way to shove punishment and reward into their destinies.


Https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

 

[unknown]

was hoping this would be a thread about the movie. One of the main stars, Ilan Mitchell-Smith, was one of my professors in grad school. Super cool guy

 

[Dak]

A wild unknown appears!

 

[unknown]

Shit!

 

[Einherjar86]

This stuff is so cool. Article is from last year, but this is the first I'm hearing about it. I got to see the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (no idea what condition it's in now) and it was incredible--so massive. A global radio telescope is a pretty awesome feat, and hopefully yields some new results.

I'm also fascinated by black holes, so there's that.

Regular telescopes can’t see a supermassive black hole—not because it’s too dark, but because it’s way too light. The gravity of black holes causes orbiting matter to travel at rip-roaring speeds, approaching the speed of light. The immense friction between particles in the hot gas generates a bright glow, which prevents us from seeing the shadow of the light-eating Unicron itself. The interstellar matter between us and the black holes, as well as the Earth’s own atmosphere, can also blur or dim incoming light waves, depending on their properties, said Doeleman. That means there’s a goldilocks frequency of light thatblack hole hunters allow into their telescopes. Rather than using visible, ultraviolet or infrared light, the EHT filters out everything except radio waves, longer light rays whose wave peaks have around a milimeter of space between them. For comparison, visible lights waves have about a thousandth to a ten thousandth that distance between their peaks.

But individual radio telescopes can only get a limited amount of information. That’s where VLBI comes in. This technique combines information from the pairs of telescopes, called baselines, clocking the infinitesimal difference in the amount of time it took the light to arrive at either, and correlating the radio wave signals with the time as measured by the atomic clocks. All those baselines essentially create one enormous telescope with a giant light-collection area—but rather than light waves meeting in one place as they do in a regular telescope, their data meets at a supercomputer later. Software lines up the shapes of the light waves as if they were all collected at the same time,a bit like how DJs use sound editing software to sync up music through a process called interferometry—the garbage cancels out, and the important stuff adds up, boosting its signal. That allows scientists to get hyper-fine resolutions. The updated EHT will be able to resolve a volume of space around Sagittarius A* with a radius equal to the distance between Mercury and the Sun, Tremblay said. That’s pretty good for something more than 25,000 light years away.

https://gizmodo.com/scientists-are-turning-earth-into-a-telescope-to-see-a-1793019946

 

[Einherjar86]

A breakthrough in the study of ghostly particles called high-energy neutrinos that traverse space, zipping unimpeded through people, planets and whole galaxies, is giving scientists an audacious new way to expand our understanding of the cosmos.

Researchers on Thursday said they have for the first time located a deep-space source for these ubiquitous subatomic particles. They detected high-energy neutrinos in pristine ice deep below Antarctica’s surface, then traced their source back to a giant elliptical galaxy with a massive, rapidly spinning black hole at its core, called a blazar, located 3.7 billion light years from Earth in the Orion constellation.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...s-new-understanding-of-universe-idUSKBN1K229S

 

[Einherjar86]

This is fucking incredible:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2...ed-in-cbc-documentary-inseparable_a_23267420/

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8169

Krista and Tatiana are ordinary girls with extraordinary abilities. As craniopagus twins — conjoined twins attached at the head — they are one in 2.5 million. They share a "thalamic bridge" that connects their brains, allowing them to see through each other's eyes, taste what each other eats, and even know each other's thoughts without speaking.

"The abilities they have that no one else could imagine having are just incredible," Hogan said. They play together, and without saying a word, get up when one decides she wants to do something else.

We know they’re diabetic and epileptic. We know they’re cognitively delayed. We know that their emotions are always in sync; whatever chemicals provoke joy or grief or anger cruise through that conjoined system without regard for which brain produced them. We know Krista likes ketchup and Tatiana doesn’t. We know— and if we don’t, you can be sure the documentarians at CBC will hammer the point home at least twice more before the next commercial break— that they’re God’s Little Fucking Miracles.

If you look closely at the video footage, you can glean a bit more. The twins never say “we”. I frequently heard one or the other refer to “my sister”, but if they ever referred to each other by name, that never made it into the broadcast edit. They sometimes refer to each other as “I”. They must have a really interesting sense of personal identity, at the very least.

 

[Dak]

Very interesting, but I don't share Watts' "squeeing" on it. My first reaction is "damn that is unfortunate." All of the issues of being conjoined, and then throw diabetes etc on top of it, and then you have researchers (or voyeurs) who want to treat you like a piece of meat.

 

[rms]

Yeah, rough on th miracle part lol

 

[Einherjar86]

Watts isn't much for sentimentality.

As far as it being unfortunate, I've often found that disabled people and those with debilitating conditions prefer not to be pitied. I share in Watts's excitement even while I hope the girls aren't treated in disrespectful ways. Researchers can balance scientific interests with ethics concerns; they just need to be thoughtful. Given that there is so little media coverage, it seems their family has managed to secure some considerable degree of privacy.

If there's some insight to be gleaned from the study of their brain, then I hope it is.

 

[Dak]

https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/career-hot-streaks

Not sure if this qualifies but it is interesting.

 

[CiG]

Vintage weird pop-science.

I love these old CSIRO videos from decades ago.
I used to have a VHS with a bunch of these taped from TV when I was a kid, CSIRO videos are so boring now.

 

[rms]

 

[Einherjar86]

yasssssss. Good stuff.

I remember reading about the storms on Saturn and Jupiter when I was young. The geometry of these things is insane. I really wish that I could have been both a literature scholar and a physicist, because I enjoy thinking on these topics but don't have the skills in differential equations and chaos math to really wrap my brain around them.

My wife and I were chatting this morning about the expansion of the universe (which she occasionally entertains me on). This is just the opening gambit from wikipedia, which I still have trouble internalizing:

The expansion of the universe is the increase of the distance between two distant parts of the universe with time.[1] It is an intrinsic expansion whereby the scale of space itself changes. The universe does not expand "into" anything and does not require space to exist "outside" it. Technically neither space, nor objects in space, move. Instead it is the metricgoverning the size and geometry of spacetime itself that changes in scale. Although light and objects within spacetime cannot travel faster than the speed of light, this limitation does not restrict the metric itself. To an observer it appears that space is expanding and all but the nearest galaxies are receding into the distance.

Put another way, the metric of expanding spacetime actually can move faster than light, meaning there are some objects whose light will never reach us (hence the limit of what astronomers and physicists call the "observable universe"). This is fascinating to me. Also fascinating that the universe doesn't expand "into" anything.

 

[rms]

astronomy really is the bomb. and the limitations to which they use mathematical properties is awesome as well

 

[Bloopy]

Put another way, the metric of expanding spacetime actually can move faster than light, meaning there are some objects whose light will never reach us (hence the limit of what astronomers and physicists call the "observable universe"). This is fascinating to me. Also fascinating that the universe doesn't expand "into" anything.

The implications of length contraction & time dilation are also quite mind-blowing. The closer to the speed of light an explorer can travel, the shorter the distance to a destination becomes from their perspective. So in theory even with current life expectancies it could be possible to send astronauts to stars 100+ light years from Earth with a good chance that they're still alive when they get there. Though in reality I imagine aging is the easier challenge to conquer.

 

[The Ozzman]

it could be possible to send astronauts to stars 100+ light years from Earth with a good chance that they're still alive when they get there.

That blows my mind man. Astrophysics and all that shit is amazing. What really brought it home to me is when it was explained that any given star I can see in the sky may have already gone supernova because what you're seeing is an old image of the star because of the distance and we womt know it went nova for years or decades.

 

[CiG]