Showing all posts about science
Mental time travel makes time travellers of us all
12 November 2022
Do you often recall events from your past? Things that happened days ago, or decades earlier? Do you frequently visualise your future? This could involve thinking about where you’ll be living in five years, or where you might be working in twenty years time.
It’s a phenomenon known as mental time travel, and if your mind wanders back and forth through time, you wouldn’t be the only one. While mental time travel may seem like a waste of time, mere daydreaming, there can be an upside. For instance, if enough people had a positive outlook on the future, the future may well become the place we hope it will be.
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If the International Space Station orbited at 3000 metres
9 November 2022
What if the International Space Station orbited at a height of just three thousand metres? Benjamin Granville decided to find out. The answer to many “what-if” questions are often perfectly implausible, but some sure are worth asking. The scenario makes for quite the ride for those aboard the station…
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Not all work and no play as busy bumble bees play ball
31 October 2022
Researchers at London’s Queen Mary University have found bumble bees like to play, and accordingly, experience positive feelings. Despite there being no purpose to the activity, groups of bees rolled small wooden balls, sometimes repeatedly, around a chamber, for what researchers could only determine was fun.
Study first-author, Samadi Galpayage, Ph.D. student at Queen Mary University of London says that “it is certainly mind-blowing, at times amusing, to watch bumble bees show something like play. They approach and manipulate these ‘toys’ again and again. It goes to show, once more, that despite their little size and tiny brains, they are more than small robotic beings.”
This is reportedly the first instance of playful activity being observed in any insect species.
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The Taupo Volcano and supervolcanoes a Kurzgesagt dissection
20 October 2022
Last month the alert level for the volcano below Lake Taupō in New Zealand’s North Island was raised from zero to one. A swarm of relatively small earthquakes this year prompted geologists to make the adjustment. But as scientists monitoring the recent seismic activity noted, the change in alert status is more down to improved surveillance techniques. In other words it seems such activity is relatively normal, but has simply gone undetected previously.
Let’s hope there’s nothing to be concerned about, as supervolcanoes are truly a force of nature. An eruption at Taupō over twenty-six thousand years ago was the largest known volcanic eruption in the world in the past seventy-thousand years. With a rating of eight on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the blast caused temperatures across the entire southern hemisphere to plummet. If such an eruption were repeated today, we’d all notice the fallout no matter where on Earth we were.
It’s timely then Kurzgesagt’s latest video examines so-called supervolcanoes, and puts our minds at ease in terms of the likelihood of such an eruption anytime in the near-ish future.
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How can nothing unreal exist in a not locally real universe?
10 October 2022
In addition to Annie Ernaux being named the Nobel Prize literature laureate , John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger, received the Nobel for their contributions to physics this year. I studied physics in high-school for an ill-fated year, and struggled to make sense of any of it. Way too mathematical. And maybe way too weird.
All the more so, given the Nobel award winning work of Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger, effectively “overthrows reality as we know it.” This outcome spans the previous study of a whose-who of household names in the realm of physics, including John Stewart Bell, Boris Podolsky, Nathan Rosen, John von Neumann, and of course, Albert Einstein.
Quantum mechanics’ problem of nonlocal realism would languish in a complacent stupor for another three decades until being decisively shattered by Bell. From the start of his career, Bell was bothered by the quantum orthodoxy and sympathetic toward hidden variable theories. Inspiration struck him in 1952, when he learned of a viable nonlocal hidden-variable interpretation of quantum mechanics devised by fellow physicist David Bohm — something von Neumann had claimed was impossible. Bell mulled the ideas over for years, as a side project to his main job working as a particle physicist at CERN.
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Kurzgesagt explores the realm of the minute and subatomic
8 October 2022
Kurzgesagt ventures to the most extreme place in the universe… a whole ‘nother universe, or microcosm: the realm of the minute and subatomic.
The universe is pretty big and very strange. Hundreds of billions of galaxies with sextillions of stars and planets and in the middle of it all there is earth, with you and us. But as enormous as the universe seems looking up, it seems to get even larger when you start looking down. You are towering over worlds within worlds, within worlds — each in plain sight and yet hidden from your experience.
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DART helping to protect Earth from off planet threats
29 September 2022
It could be argued we’re not doing as much as we could to avert potential catastrophes on the planet. Climate change and global conflict would be two examples. When it comes countering possible threats from outside though, some progress is being made.
The test of an asteroid defence system, whereby a NASA probe was sent to collide with Dimorphos, a celestial object, to effect a change, albeit minor, in its trajectory, is one instance.
NASA did not send this probe to observe this asteroid or even scoop some samples from its surface to bring back to Earth, as other missions have done. The agency dispatched the spacecraft with the explicit hope of crashing it and changing the asteroid’s trajectory. This is a test run, but a future version of this mission could save Earth from a catastrophic impact by deflecting an asteroid on a collision course. A little bit of practice never hurts.
While Dimorphos does not pose a threat to Earth — at least not at the moment — another asteroid such as the one that brought about the demise of the dinosaurs, might in the future.
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Sydney to host the 2025 International Astronautical Congress
26 September 2022
With a number of planets, particularly Jupiter, dominating the eastern night sky of Australia at the moment, what better time to make mention that the 2025 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) will be held in the NSW capital, Sydney.
Founded in 1951, the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) is the world’s leading space advocacy body with around 460 members in 72 countries, including all leading space agencies, companies, research institutions, universities, societies, associations, institutes and museums worldwide. The Federation advances knowledge about space, supporting the development and application of space assets by promoting global cooperation.
The last time Australia hosted an IAC event was in 2017, when the International Astronautical Federation conference took place in Adelaide, South Australia.
On the subject of astronomical matters, check out If the Moon were only one pixel, by American interactive art director and designer Josh Worth. Now we can see why they call it space…
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astronomy, events, science, Sydney
UFO sightings surge in skies above Ukraine recently
16 September 2022
Astronomers in Ukraine have observed an uptick in unidentified flying objects over the country in recent months. While it seem obvious there would be more aerial activity with a war raging in the region, scientists are adamant what they’re seeing in Ukrainian skies are not military vessels.
Ukraine astronomers have reported a slew of UFOs observed in the country’s airspace. They’ve reported their findings in a preprint paper published by Kyiv’s Main Astronomical Observatory Ukraine’s National Academy of Science. Remember, UFOs don’t necessarily mean extraterrestrial spaceships from other planets. Perhaps they are advanced military aircraft from much closer to home, like even from one of Ukraine’s (ahem) neighbors.
All the more curious given recent reports from US Navy pilots who say they’ve seen unidentified flying objects during flight operations. Are unidentified flying objects drawn to areas where military craft are operating?
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Apollo Remastered, beautifully enhanced photos of the Apollo flights
5 September 2022
Image courtesy of NASA.
The above image is of Aquarius, lunar module of the ill-fated Apollo 13 Moon flight of April 1970.
Here it is seen moments after being jettisoned by the Apollo crew. For those who came in late, Aquarius acted as a “lifeboat” for much of the shortened Apollo 13 mission, after an explosion damaged Odyssey, the command module. Without Aquarius the crew may never have returned home.
I’m not sure though if it features in Apollo Remastered, the new book by British author and science writer Andy Saunders, which contains a veritable trove of photos from the Apollo missions. Saunders has spent the last few years enhancing four hundred previously grainy images, making them far sharper and clearer than those originally released.
Some before and after examples of the remastered photos can be seen in this BBC report by Jonathan Amos. And if you’re not familiar with the Apollo 13 story, American filmmaker Ron Howard’s 1995 feature of the same name is well worth a look.
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