Posts

April 01, 2013

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11:01 AM | Where Does April Fools' Day Originate?

Figuring out the origins of the holiday can be as tricky as getting to the source of a joke. ->

March 31, 2013

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4:50 PM | Happy Easter with a (fake) Dozen Dinosaur Eggs

Roy Chapman Andrews was not only an intrepid explorer and palaeontologist, but also a gifted promoter. The Central Asiatic Expeditions in search of fossils of mammals and dinosaurs were accompanied by movie cameras to film their work. As the conditions were most time prohibitive -sandstorms, burning sun and arid climate - many scenes showing the discovery and excavation of fossils were probably staged after the real work had be done. Many photos of the expedition-photograph John B. Shackelford […]

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7:00 AM | Nest eggs

The cartoonish notion of nicotine-scavenging sparrows is brought irresistibly to mind by a recent (very serious) Biology Letters paper ‘Incorporation...

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2:40 AM | Another video of the Kaye effect

I finally managed to get some video editing software to work, and I have put together a more polished video of the Kaye effect, including some slow-motion shots of the streams! (If the embed doesn’t work right now, try the … Continue reading →

March 30, 2013

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7:06 PM | March 30, 1759: The Four Layers of Earth

In a letter dated to March 30, 1759 the Italian mining engineer Giovanni Arduino (1714-1795) proposed to the physician and fossil collector Prof. Antonio Vallisnieri the subdivision of earth’s crust in various classes of rocks. Based on his observations along the foothills of the Alps, Arduino recognized a stratigraphic column with 4 classes: unstratified or [...]

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10:33 AM | Physics Week in Review: March 30, 2013

We have been Down Under in the Land of Oz all week, but Jen-Luc Piquant has been zealously compiling cool physics-y links for you anyway. By the time you read this, we will be landing in Los Angeles, arriving earlier than we left Sydney. Time travel! Of a sort…. Yowza! Scientists from Zhejiang University in [...]

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5:30 AM | Shroud of Turin to be Broadcast Live

The Shroud of Turin, the controversial piece of 14x4-foot linen that some believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, is to be shown on television for the first time in 40 years on Easter Saturday.

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2:05 AM | Physics demonstrations: A short discussion of the Kaye effect

I’ve been gearing up for the second year of the UNC Charlotte Science and Technology Expo, which will be happening on campus on Sunday, April 21st. I’ve been preparing a number of weird and unusual demos for the expo, and … Continue reading →

March 29, 2013

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5:03 PM | UFO Memo Tops FBI's Most-Viewed List

A 1950 FBI memo mentions a crashed UFO saucer and alien bodies -- but it is real? Yes and no. ->

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4:30 AM | Tunnel Vision: Probing the Physics of Fire Ants

“Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise. It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, Yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.” – Proverbs 6:6-8 The above proverb adorns the Web page of Nathan Mlot, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Institute [...]

March 28, 2013

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6:16 PM | Charting Our Poisonous Habits

I couldn’t resist sharing this newly posted graph from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which illustrates the steady rise of poisoning deaths in this country in the first decade of the 21 century The graph and an ...

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12:32 AM | Vimana: a sci-fi short film kickstarter

I’ve been quite busy with a lot of official work lately, so posting new science stuff has been light. There are a few posts in the works, but they require a bit more research before publishing. In the meantime, I … Continue reading →

March 27, 2013

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4:20 PM | Birds, bones and stones

The Archaeopteryx is possibly the most famous fossilised bird in scientific history. The plate above is taken from...

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6:00 AM | When Math Meets Nature: Turing Patterns and Form Constants

When I was in fourth grade, my teacher asked us each to write a short “Just So” story in the manner of Rudyard Kipling, author of the classic children’s book Just So Stories. My topic: “How the Mouse Got Its Tail.” I long ago forgot whatever elaborate theory I came up with to explain this [...]

March 26, 2013

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1:20 PM | Gays and the Law: A Bumpy History

Gay people have been a part of America since this nation's founding -- and long before that.

March 25, 2013

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10:24 PM | Pep up your sex life with a pinch of salt.

Is your sex life not up to scratch? Is your partner failing to deliver the goods? Are you not getting the satisfaction that you feel you deserve then follow the advice of the good Doctor Moffet and put your partner … Continue reading →

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6:44 PM | http://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com/2013/03/if-i-put-jurassic-park-in-title.html

In the midst of our recent Jurassic Park posts, I recollected this drawing of mine, which I now offer as my utterly trivial contribution to the discussion. Perhaps it panders too much to the 'Awesomebro' culture so aptly elucidated upon by John Conway, but for the present at least, I think it serves a small, if not especially profound, purpose. I posted this drawing over on Himmapaanensis and elsewhere last summer and under quite different circumstances, a while before David very […]

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4:52 PM | Just an (Eye) Drop of Poison

Earlier this month, California police arrested a man for spiking his girlfriend’s drink with poison following a quarrel. He didn’t deny it: the evidence included texts he’d sent to his buddies, bragging about his plan to make her pay for ...

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4:00 AM | Primal Rage

Carnage of one kind or another has long been a staple of our fascination with dinosaurs. Give a child two dinosaur toys and you can be reasonably certain that within a few minutes they’ll be banging them together and making growling noises, spilling imaginary blood and viscera onto an imaginary, primordial landscape. It was only a matter of time until the dinosaur toys turned pixilated, and thus we got what I consider to be the pinnacle of (the admittedly small) group of dinosaur beat’em-up […]

March 24, 2013

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7:41 PM | The Dying Symbolism of Jurassic Park

I've been thinking about dinosaurs, monsters, and Jurassic Park.Recently, the director of Jurassic Park 4 tweeted two words that have unsettled a lot of us over here at LITC: "No Feathers." I suspect he was trying to reassure anxious fans who were worried their precious monsters would be defanged and made cuddly by the addition of plumage. Unfortunately, I think in the process he completely undercut the facet of Jurassic Park that gives that film (and to lesser extant its sequels) […]

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6:49 PM | Tiny Plants Creating Big Rocks

Often enough the rocks determinate the presence and distribution of plants (as shown in the wonderful blog "In the Company of Plants and Rocks"), but sometimes it's the plant shaping the rocks. Plate showing the deposition of travertine around single algae cells (ca. 1935). The high content of carbonic acid (white circles) dissolves carbonate (shown as schematic rhombohedra-crystals). Plants (like this alga) use the carbon dioxide for their metabolism and the water becomes less […]

March 23, 2013

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8:07 PM | March 23, 1769: William Smith – Pioneer of Applied Geology

“William Smith Never saw a coccolith But using macrofossil data He ordered all the English strata” An anonymous clerihew dedicated to W. Smith William Smith, born March 23, 1769, introduced in his “Strata – Identified by organized Fossils” (1816) the “principle of faunal succession” into stratigraphy. Geological maps before Smith mapped and catalogued rocks based [...]

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3:08 PM | Physics Week in Review: March 23, 2013

The big physics news this week was the latest results from ESA’s Planck mission, but there was plenty of other good stuff circulating around the Interwebz. While everyone else was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with ruminations on beer and snakes and all that jazz, Matt Francis decided to celebrate the accomplishments of an Irish mathematician: [...]

March 22, 2013

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9:30 PM | Mathematical Impressions: An Exploration of Symmetric Structures [Video]

From Simons Science News ( find original story here ). [More]

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8:51 PM | How Dry I Am: When Is That Sponge Cake Past Its Prime?

I adored Twinkies as a kid, vastly preferring them to Ding-Dongs or SnowBalls, and my folks used to give me a box every Christmas. Jokes about eternal shelf life notwithstanding, I gobbled the spongy crème-filled cakes down greedily, naively confident that Twinkies would always be in stock for next Christmas. So even though I no [...]

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7:49 PM | Senate Budget Plan to Include Keystone XL Pipeline Approval

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Republican lawmaker said he expects a symbolic measure to approve the Keystone XL pipeline will be attached to the Senate's budget plan Friday, and that it will build support for a similar bill likely to be voted on later in the year.Senator John Hoeven, from North Dakota, told reporters his amendment to allow Congress to approve the pipeline would be selected from hundreds of others for a vote, and that it had at least the 51 backers needed to pass.TransCanada Corp's […]

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7:16 PM | Largest Liberian Palm Oil Project Is Failing Locals: Study

By Richard ValdmanisDAKAR (Reuters) - Liberia's largest palm oil company, Golden Veroleum, needs to review its social and environmental policies after its workers damaged graves, cleared existing crops and polluted creeks, according to an independent study it commissioned.The findings from The Forest Trust (TFT), a non-profit environmental consultancy, follow complaints from activists that the Singapore-controlled firm is violating commitments it made as a member of the Roundtable on […]

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5:50 PM | 2,400-Year-Old Myths of Mummy-Making Busted

Egyptians probably didn't remove mummy guts using cedar oil enemas, new research suggests.

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5:00 PM | MIND Reviews: Mastermind

Elementary Mind-Set: Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova Viking Adult, 2013 ($26.95)Long before science revealed that synapses fire in patterns, literature endeavored to map the cognitive landscape. From Odysseus restraining himself against the Sirens' song to Tom Sawyer conning his way out of painting fences, fictional characters have captured many nuances of human psychology. Perhaps no character has articulated the science of thinking as […]

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4:15 PM | U.S. Starts Massive Forest-Thinning Project

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. -- The smell of wood-burning stoves seems to permeate this gateway to the Grand Canyon and pit stop on the legendary Route 66. [More]