The recent floods in Australia have provided new hunting ground for bull sharks. Recently, two bull sharks have been spotted swimming past the McDonald’s restaurant in Goodna.
“It’s definitely a first for Goodna, to have a shark in the main street.”
“It would have swam several kilometres in from the river, across Evan Marginson Park and the motorway,” Cr Tully said.
Technological advancement moves in strange ways. It’s often the technologies that come from just outside our mainstream field of vision that change things the most radically.
The properties of semiconductors were well known decades before anybody thought they’d be a great way to shrink vacuum tubes into transistors and then microchips. The implications of a really big network where everybody you know is plugged into it with PCs and mobile devices was a hard concept for anybody to fathom.
I’d like to tell you about a technology on the horizon that could be bigger than anything else we’ve seen before and make possible all sorts of crazy things like Doctor Who-like Tardis boxes that are bigger on the inside, matter replicators and line-of-sight teleportation.
It’s a technology that’s already been proven in small forms in the laboratories and now faces the challenge of finding out if it can scale without ridiculous amounts of energy.
The concept began with a theory by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein about what happens when matter gets really, really cold. Quantum physics informs us that we can never know the precise position and velocity of a particle. This means the more you know about one, the less you can know about the other. If you slowed down a particle enough and looked at it under some special microscope it would look like a blur. The act of slowing it down means that its exact position has to become literally fuzzy.
In laboratories we can see this fuzziness by creating a Bose-Einstein condensate; a bucket of atoms supercooled to the point that they behave like one uber-atom and quantum effects are magnified. One of the cool applications of this is the atom laser (it’s called a laser even though it’s not made of light).
An atom laser works by using a Bose-Einstein condensate to cool a group of atoms and then using a technique like magnetic fields or an actual laser to propagate (emit) the matter in some kind of beam. In the image you can see what a beam of sodium atoms looks like when emitted from a magnetic trap.
The potential for this is immense. It’s very much in its infancy and hard to tell what will actually become of it, but when you can reliably get matter to behave like light, amazing things are possible.
An awesome particle beam
You could use this to create an incredibly powerful particle beam that would be even more precise than a laser and create smaller microprocessor components and be used to etch out things like nano-scale devices out of solid matter.
Tardis boxes
The fact that you can change matter’s position to such an indeterminate state means that you could theoretically have two particles in the same space. This could allow for matter compression where you could squeeze a large amount of matter into a confined area. Like Doctor Who’s Tardis, this would give a box that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Keeping molecules and complex structures from falling apart would be very big challenge however.
Teleportation
The ability of a matter laser to “project” beams of atoms means that a form of line-of-sight teleportation is theoretically possible. The image of the atom laser above shows a kind of crude form of that. If you could contain the beam over long distances through some other means or use a matter equivalent of a fiber optic cable, you could shoot atoms at near the speed of light from one point to another. At the receiving end the atoms are returned to a high temperature and reassembled, er somehow (see below).
Matter replicator
A Bose-Einstein condensate also makes interesting chemistry possible. You can cool down two different types of atoms and merge them to create molecules. You could theoretically do the same with an atom laser. Crossing beams could be used to create molecules and maybe even assemble more complex structures and build things out of scratch like the matter replicators on Star Trek.
It’s anybodies guess how far off any of these things are or even if they’ll ever happen in a way that makes it into day to day use. The biggest complications are often the unseen ones after you’ve proven what you thought was the most difficult part. That said, when the first laser was fired off in a laboratory, people could think of only a few applications for what was at that time an unwieldy technology. Decades later we can mass produce lasers for pennies apiece and use them in everything from Blue Ray players, to satellites to key chain toys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_laser
http://cua.mit.edu/ketterle_group/Animation_folder/Atom_laser.htm
Northwestern University scientists have have created a robotic fish (GhostBot) that mimics the swimming motions of the black ghost knifefish found in the Amazon. Ghostbot can move from swimming forward and backward to swimming vertically almost instantaneously by using a sophisticated, ribbon-like fin.
One day you’re floating in your backyard above ground pool. Sipping on a Costco purchased pre-made margarita listening to C&C Music Factory. Life is good.
You head to sleep with dreams of another day of aquatic lounging splashing around in your head.
Wake up the next morning, slap on your trunks only to find an empty husk of pool sadly standing as a monument to disappointment in your backyard. All the water is gone, with no sign of a crack or a seam and all the surrounding grass dry as a whistle.
The solution for many who have had this problem? Aliens.
The phenomenon is explained in depth (no pun intended) on the Inexplicata blog. Interesting stuff.
Imagine a tale of suburban terror in the Upstate New York town of Batavia in the Mad Men-era year of 1960.
Several youths report banshee-like screaming while crossing a town bridge. Days later the kids investigate and later tell authorities that they saw a gigantic hairy beast which left distinctive footprints. Although cops find the prints, there is no sign of the River Monster.
A few days later, the kids were busted as hoaxers. How did their plan fall apart? According to local paper The Daily News Online the kids got a little greedy.
City Hall officials found similar footprints made of white paint leading up to their front door on August 2nd. No one knows if they kids were looking to expose themselves as pranksters or genuinely thought they could convince the once-hookewinked authorities that the River Monster genuinely had business with the local government.
The footprints and impression left by the monster were also later debunked by a wildlife official after he realized the indentations were too deep to be created by an creature of reasonable size.
The lesson to future hoaxsters? Don’t push your luck, specifically if part of your plan is to insinuate a creature who lives amongst local marsh was trying to apply for a building permit.
Male splendid fairy-wrens flirt using fear and sing a special song each time they hear the call of one of their predators, the butcherbirds. Although this behaviour exposes their position and puts them in danger, it has been determined that this “vocal hitchhiking” on the predator calls is extremely useful for grabbing the attention of the ladies.
“We have shown that females do, in fact, become especially attentive after hearing butcherbird calls,” said Emma Greig, PhD, first author of the study and currently a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. “So, it seems that male fairy-wrens may be singing when they know they will have an attentive audience, and, based on the response of females, this strategy may actually work!”
I don’t know how this got by us in 2006, but apparently scientists have finally figured out what makes Rice Krispies snap, crackle and pop. It turns out that the fact that they’re made by frightening little Lebensborn demon elves has nothing to do with it and the crackling sound is *not* the burning cinders of hellfire like we were told by our older brother when we were 8.
There’s a scientific explanation involving science and possibly chemistry. You can read more here and explain it to us in the comments: What Makes Your Cereal Go Snap, Crackle and Pop
Researchers studying nine patients who survived swine flu during the H1N1 pandemic have noticed that they produced a wide range of antibodies that could be used to fight off other strains.
Currently they’re looking to see if they can use this to make a universal vaccine that could fight off any type of influenza – even the ones we’re most concerned about here on Weird Things:
We’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope it doesn’t give us an immunity to the bad-ass day walker virus.
One man is on a mission to bring woolly mammoths back from the dead. A technique for successfully recovering frozen cells to use in creating clones was pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology. Now Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, plans to use the results in a quest to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.
“Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
Professor Iritani estimates about 2 years to successfully implant an embryo into an elephant, followed by a 600-day gestation period. He will be travelling to Siberia this summer in search of specimens.
No one knows exactly why the sun rose roughly 48 hours ahead of schedule in the remote Greenland town of Ilulissat which like many arctic circle towns spends prolonged periods in total darkness.
Some say global warming has melted the ice caps that surround the town so far that the sun snuck over quicker.
However some have suggested a mischievous astronomical shift is to blame.
We are going to pin the blame on someone incorrectly programming the town’s only clock.
Along the west coast of Florida, fisherman have been swapping stories for years about a monster hammerhead shark that goes by the name of “Old Hitler”. He is said to be between 20 and 25 feet long and lurks in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico between the Boca Grande Pass and the Sunshine Skyway Bridge near the entrance to Tampa Bay. However, there are reports of Old Hitler showing up from Homosassa to the Florida Keys. Running into Old Hitler is likely to end with cracked hulls, mangled propellers, and the loss of the 200 lb game fish you had on your line.
A standard great hammerhead shark (Sphyrna mokarran) can grow up to 20 feet long and weigh up to 1,000 pounds and their average life span is 20 to 30 years, but scientists have found some to live beyond age 50. The world record for the great hammerhead caught with rod and reel is 1280 lbs and 14 ½ feet, although there are other reports of larger sharks being pulled out of these Florida waters.
“The largest hammerhead ever pulled from these waters was a 17-foot, 1-inch, 1,386-pound monster that was caught using a chain, rope and an inflatable intertube off the Rod & Reel Pier on Anna Maria Island by Frank Cavendish and Ralph French in 1973. The shark, dubbed “Spiro,” was caught using a 14-pound manta ray as bait.”
Boca Grande Pass is located at the south end of Gasparilla Island and it is the deepest natural inlet on the Gulf of Mexico, reaching depths to approximately 80 feet. Aside from already being the deepest inlet on the Gulf, the Pass has some interesting geography including the Lighthouse Hole and the Coast Guard Hole. There are also supposed to be numerous ledges that undercut the rock and provide shelter and hiding spots.
The hammerheads pour into the Pass starting in April chasing their favorite meal and fishing’s favorite prize, the Atlantic tarpon (Megalops atlanticus). Tens of thousands of tarpon congregate in the area from April through August, feeding day and night, as they prepare to spawn offshore. Boca Grande Pass attracts the tarpon due to the abundance of food and available cover, and they crowd into the deep holes in the pass by the hundreds. The giant schools of tarpon then attract an even bigger predator, hammerhead sharks. As anybody fishing for tarpon in Boca Grande Pass will attest, hammerheads love to steal tarpon from the anglers.
More Old Hitler after the jump!
Read the rest of this entry »
The question of how the law should hand real life super heroes is a very interesting one. On one hand, they are mostly well-intentioned citizens who deter crime in a neighborhood. After all, if you were going to mug someone would you want to do it near the dude in a suit of molded rubber, or move a few blocks down the road. Then maybe while walking down the road you see a Little Caesars and totally agree to split a pizza. Then you forget about the mugging stuff whilst stuffing your face and laughing about the last episode of the Jersey Shore.
But on the other hand, tacitly approving vigilante justice can lead to situations like Phoenix Jones, who had his nose broken while being held at gunpoint last week.
A few of the Weird Things staff members (most notably Andrew Mayne whose production company produced the series) created an episode of G4 Underground about his very topic. You can check it out on iTunes.
From PZ Meyer’s Pharyngula blog. Click through to see the full picture. This could, without alteration, be the cover of a metal album.
Weighing in at over 6 billion times the mass of our solar system, astronomers have found the most massive black hole yet at the center of galaxy M87. Three times large than Pluto’s orbit, it’s very, very big.
Not to be outdone, chubby loving astronomers have their eyes on one that may even be even bigger than that one at 19 billion times the mass of our solar system. Woop woop.
The greatest minds in Sasquatch research will gather in British Columbia this April to best asses where we are in the long hunt for the crypto creature and to honor those who have done significant work in the field to track down and identify the elusive beast.
The event will be a gathering of Bigfoot researchers, authors and enthusiasts brought together to celebrate the life and contributions of John Green. Friday, April 8th will start with registration opening at 4 pm, and continue into the evening with light snacks and a no-host bar at an informal ‘Meet & Greet’ reception. Later there will be Round Table Discussions with well-known authors and investigators, a chance to catch up with friends, and time to browse amongst the vendors tables.
Tickets are running at $80 for the conference at Harrison Hot Springs, BC.
We very much wonder what kind of information can be gathered when so many who have searched so long of Sasquatch are put in the same room. At the very least there has to be some awesome stories about creative living in the forrest during stake outs. And possibly a great recipe for baked beans cooked over a campfire.
What would you hope to get out of the Sasquatch Summit?
Over at CrunchGear they have a nice overview of why Minecraft matters. For the uninitiated, Minecraft is a fun sandbox game that lets you build things out of virtual blocks. The blocks have different properties and can be made into materials like glass. Think of it as the Matrix meets Legos. The game is hugely popular and shows how much we like to build and create. Some folks have gone as far as making deck by deck replicas of the starship Enterprise and actual working mechanical computers. Think about that one for a second.
One of the fascinating premises of movies like Tron and the Matrix is the idea of a computer powerful enough to simulate life itself. Although some process (like protein functions) are way beyond our current capabilities, replicating them virtually is an engineering problem and not an insurmountable scientific one. Sooner or later we’re going to see a research paper about a virtual bacteria that behaves precisely like its real world counterpart. From there it’s all a matter of scale before we’re creating virtual Olivia Wilde’s that have cellular chemistry every bit as complex as our own.
Aside from creating super intelligent AI, imagine if you took the 100 smartest people in the world and made virtual versions of them – and then you overclocked the computer. You’d be able to compress 100 years of scientific discovery into minutes. This is why concepts like the singularity give people the willies. It means that all those things we think of as being 1,000 years off in the future could be really just weeks away once you reach a certain level of computational ability.
Games like Minecraft and Sim City are the starting point to a very interesting journey. I hope we’re part of it.
A brief explanation of why Minecraft matters
Building mega objects in Minecraft