Link Banana

The Large Hadron Collider has already begun some test runs, and will soon be getting down to real science. Cosmic Variance offers a list of what the device is looking for and an obviously arbitrary estimation of how likely it is to find it. Everyone’s favorite possibility:

Stable Black Holes That Eat Up the Earth, Destroying All Living Organisms in the Process: 10^-25%. So you’re saying there’s a chance?

(via kottke)

The psychologists said [taekwandoe] competitors wearing red were awarded an average of 13 percent more points and the points seemed to increase after the blue athlete was digitally transformed into a red athlete and decrease when the red competitor turned blue.

I remember something similar going around about red cars getting more traffic tickets, but Snopes claims that that was false.

(via clusterflock)

Some Australian scientists think they’re a natural replacement for beef. Patrick Fitzgerald explains:

Unlike sheep and cattle, kangaroos emit little methane, which accounts for 11 percent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. The study suggests that increasing the kangaroo population to 175 million while simultaneously decreasing the the number of other livestock would lower emissions by 3 percent over the next 12 years. The plan would have added benefits for soil conservation, drought response, and water quality as a result of reducing the number of hard-hoofed livestock.

Today’s good news: a new study found that there are many more western lowland gorillas in Congo than anyone expected. I found this line somewhat ironic:

“The message from our community is so often one of despair,” he said. “While we don’t want to relax our concern, it’s just great to discover that these animals are doing well.”

If this — the Large Hadron Collider that some on the fringe fear will create a black hole to swallow everything — is how the world ends, at least we’ll know we saw the truly amazing pictures.

Ten things the New York Times think you’re worrying about, but shouldn’t be:

1. Killer hot dogs.
2. Planet-destroying A/C. (This is only vehicular.)
3. The carbon footprint of exotic fruits.
4. Cellphones giving you brain cancer.
5. Evil plastic bags.
6. Bisphenol-A.
7. Killer sharks!
8. Declining Arctic Ice. (With this caveat: “You can still fret about long-term trends in the Arctic.”)
9. The unverse’s missing mass. (This boys and girls, is what is known as padding.)
10. Unmarked wormholes. (This boys and girls, is what is known as padding.)

Scientists figured out why the Northern Lights flitter around:

The satellites confirmed that the storm was caused by a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection in which solar energy stretches the Earth’s magnetic field lines until they reach their limits and snap back into equilibrium. Like an earthquake in the sky, this releases enormous amounts of energy, and charged particles go flying into the atmosphere.

Scientists think they may have found the ideal reservoir for all CO₂ America needs to remove from the atmosphere.

The answer, say Columbia researchers, lies in huge reservoirs of basalt off the coast of the Pacific northwest. That basalt is buried underneath hundreds of feet of sediment, and that in turn lies thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface.

The basalt, located on the San Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, could store about 150 years’ worth of the United States’ yearly load of 1.7 gigatons of emissions.

It’s also worth noting, as this story does, that there are more than a few people who think the whole idea of carbon sequestration is a waste of time and resources.

This is rather old, but it was news to me: when taught to use currency, monkeys pay for sex.

(via Wired Science)

These two bits are a touch incongruous but I feel I must shoehorn them together:

• This video of oobleck on a speaker has been everywhere, it remains awesome. (FYI: Oobleck is the combination of cornstarch and water. It’s creates a non-Newtonian fluid.)
• This video using Skittles as a synthesizer is rather neat. Like BB Gadgets, I think the colors should also affect something.

Announced with less than a tenth the fanfare of the ice on Mars, scientists now believe there is water on the moon. Add this to the near-invisible announcement of water in Mercury’s atmosphere, and it’s beginning to look like water’s far more prevalent in the solar system than we’d thought.

Tyler Cowen points to another astounding fact from this book:

Behavioral scientist Ellen Langer and her colleagues decided to put the persuasive power of this word to the test.  In one study, Langer arranged for a stranger to approach someone waiting in line to use a photocopier and simply ask, “Excuse me, I have five pages.  May I use the Xerox machine?”  Faced with the direct request to cut ahead in this line, 60 percent of the people were willing to agree to allow the stranger to go ahead of them.  However, when the stranger made the request with a reason (“May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), almost everyone (94 percent) complied…

Here’s where the study gets really interesting…This time, the stranger also used the word because but followed it with a completely meaningless reason.  Specifically, the stranger said “May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”

The rate of compliance was 93 percent.

A few months ago, a team from Rensselaer and Rice Universities made a surface the blackest black that was ever called black.

(via kottke)

Sometimes interesting things come consecutively from an interesting site with an unlikely theme. This is one of those times.

• Israeli scientist grew a tree from a 2000 year old seed. Alexis Madrigal wonders if such a tree could be a “native plant” or if it’s actually a seed without a country. (Yes, I do think it’s rather fitting that Israeli scientist conjured the thought of someone “without a country.”)
• Also, a solar-thermal demo plant has been completed in Israel. I’m a little surprised. I thought such things would forever exist only in memory.

Are we obligated to protect any life forms we find on Mars? One thought:

All of a sudden, it’s a judgement call. And that really hadn’t occurred to me until I heard Randolph talk of protecting extraterrestrial life — and though his arguments invoke religious parables, it doesn’t really require religious beliefs. He strikes the same vein as Methodist environmentalist Bill McKibben, who’s found a secular audience among more old-fashioned progressives.

“Fundamentally, the question is what it means to be a space-traveling species, and what counts as being an ethical space traveler. What sort of obligations if any do we owe to any extraterrestrial life that we encounter, whether it’s intelligent or not?” he asked.

Plants can do way more than you thought. Consider, for example, this:

If the sea rocket detects unrelated plants growing in the ground with it, the plant aggressively sprouts nutrient-grabbing roots. But if it detects family, it politely restrains itself.

A recent study found that an afternoon nap is the best way to prevent you from… taking an afternoon nap? Maybe it’s just me, but this seems like an absurd study:

When the volunteers did nothing, they fell asleep within nine minutes on average when tested at 3:30 in the afternoon. Sleeping late kept people awake only a minute longer on average than did doing nothing. Caffeine worked better, keeping people awake for about 12 minutes longer on average.

But nothing beat a nap. After a 20-minute nap, people nearly doubled the amount of time it took to fall asleep when tested later in the afternoon, indicating that they were no longer sleepy. None of the measures impaired people’s ability to fall asleep at night.

(via Boing Boing)

Darshak Sanghavi makes an interesting point:

The greatest medical advances depend mostly on small but consistent improvements in the use of old drugs.

This fact seems to be the key to “optical illusions” which seem to be moving when they are not:

In an experiment originated by Dr. Nijhawan, people watch an object pass a flashbulb. The timing is exact: the bulb flashes precisely as the object passes. But people perceive that the object has moved past the bulb before it flashes. Scientists argue that the brain has evolved to see a split second into the future when it perceives motion. Because it takes the brain at least a tenth of a second to model visual information, it is working with old information. By modeling the future during movement, it is “seeing” the present.

PS: This is the 1000th post on this blog. Just thought you should know.

For some reason, I’ve watched this video every time it’s shown up in my feedreader (which has been a lot). There’s something great about it.

(originally via Kottke)