http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC7Sg41Bp-U
Some time between 1932 and his death in 1955, someone recorded Albert Einstein briefly explaining the principle of mass-energy equivalence, described by the equation E = mc².
Northwestern’s Science in Society talks to Ravi Allada, a neurobiology and physiology professor, about fruit flies:
Do flies really sleep?
Yes, really. They exhibit all of the behaviors that we associate with sleep—they stop moving, become unresponsive to stimuli, and so on. In fact, if you deprive a fly of sleep one day, it will try to make up for it the next. So why do we all need sleep? This is the big question. And a better understanding the mechanisms behind sleep will help answer it.
Interview’s fairly short, but really good.
Get Ready, Because Voyager I Is *This Close* to Leaving Our Solar System
Rebecca J. Rosen for The Atlantic:
Last week, in the corners of the Internet devoted to outer space, things started to get a little, well, hot. Voyager 1, the man-made object farthest away from Earth, was encountering a sharp uptick in the number of a certain kind of energetic particles around it. Had the spacecraft become the first human creation to “officially” leave the solar system?
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We’re not quite there yet, Voyager’s project scientist and former head of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Edward Stone, told me. The spacecraft is on its way out — “it’s leaving the solar system” — but we don’t know how far it has to go or what that transition to interstellar space will look like.
We launched Voyager I in 1977, and it’s still operational and transmitting data.
‘Depraved’ sex acts by penguins shocked polar explorer
I unfortunately had no choice but to click this BBC News piece by Matt McGrath:
Accounts of unusual sexual activities among penguins, observed a century ago by a member of Captain Scott’s polar team, are finally being made public.
Details, including “sexual coercion”, recorded by George Murray Levick were considered so shocking that they were removed from official accounts.
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He was shocked by what he described as the “depraved” sexual acts of “hooligan” males who were mating with dead females. So distressed was he that he recorded the “perverted” activities in Greek in his notebook.
Necrophilia is now hooliganism. Also I like the idea of being so upset by something that you start writing in Greek.
Stephen Morris of the University of Toronto presents this short video on the physics of dominos falling.
A domino can knock over another domino about 50% larger than itself. A chain of dominos of increasing size makes a kind of mechanical chain reaction that starts with a tiny push and knocks down an impressively large domino.
Original idea by Lorne Whitehead, American Journal of Physics, Vol. 51, page 182 (1983).
Yes, this is referencing a real paper published in a real journal.
Livermorium and Flerovium join the periodic table of elements
Anne M Stark for Phys.Org:
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) today officially approved new names for elements 114 and 116, the latest heavy elements to be added to the periodic table.
Scientists of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)-Dubna collaboration proposed the names as Flerovium for element 114, with the symbol Fl, and Livermorium for element 116, with the symbol Lv, late last year.
Elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 are still nameless.
Cracking The Egg Sprinkler Mystery
If you spin a hard-boiled egg in a pool of milk, the milk will wick up the sides of the egg and spray off at the egg’s equator. Engineer Tadd Truscott, of Brigham Young University, along with Ken Langley and others, launched an investigation to figure out why this happens — complete with a custom-built spinning apparatus, billiard balls and high speed video cameras.
SCIENCE
The Loneliest Whale in the World
Nicola Twilley, writing for Good:
According to a 2004 New York Times article on the subject, this particular baleen whale has apparently been tracked by NOAA since 1992, using a “classified array of hydrophones employed by the Navy to monitor enemy submarines.” It sings at 52 Hertz, which is roughly the same frequency as the lowest note on a tuba, and much higher than its fellow whales, whose calls fall in the 15 to 25 Hertz range.
The upshot of that is that the other whales don’t respond to it, so it’s just chillin’ out there all by itself. Poor lil’ dude.
Blond hair evolved separately in Europe and the South Pacific
Karen Kaplan for the Los Angeles Times’s Booster Shots blog:
Though the indigenous people of the Solomon Islands all have dark skin, about 5% to 10% also have naturally blond hair – and a new study finds that the genetic quirk responsible for this is different from the one that produces blond hair in people of European ancestry.
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Many Westerners had assumed that encounters with European explorers and traders over the years had introduced a blond gene into the Melanesian gene pool.
Evolution is weird.
How a book about fish nearly sank Isaac Newton’s Principia
Ian Sample wrote a piece for The Guardian on how a book about fish nearly bankrupted the Royal Society, nearly resulting in Isaac Newton’s hugely important Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which stated Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, never being published.
Though Ray and Willughby’s masterpiece delayed the publication of Newton’s Principia, it was saved from obscurity by Edmund Halley, then Clerk at the Royal Society, who raised the funds to publish the work, providing much of the money from his own pocket. The Principia was eventually published in 1687.
After publishing the work, the Royal Society told Halley it could no longer afford his salary and offered to pay him in unsold copies of the Historia Piscium instead.
