Philematologists, the scientists who study kissing, aren’t exactly sure why humans started locking lips in the first place. The most likely theory is that it stems from primate mothers passing along chewed food to their toothless babies. The lip-to-lip contact may have been passed on through evolution, not only as a necessary means of survival, but also as a general way to promote social bonding and as an expression of love.
But something’s obviously happened to kissing since the time of the chewed-food pass. Now, it’s believed that kissing helps transfer critical information, rather than just meat bits. The kissing we associate with romantic courtship may help us to choose a good mate, send chemical signals, and foster long-term relationships. All of this is important in evolution’s ultimate goal—successful procreation.
In a series of coordinated announcements at several US laboratories, researchers said they believed they had captured dark matter in a defunct iron ore mine half a mile underground. The claim, if confirmed next year, will rank as one the most spectacular discoveries in physics in the past century.
Tantalising glimpses of dark matter particles were picked up by highly sensitive detectors at the bottom of the Soudan mine in Minnesota, the scientists said.
CERN announced early Monday that the Large Hadron Collider has become the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator.
The LHC pushed protons to 1.18 TeV (trillion electron volts — GREAT SCOTT!!!), surpassing the previous record of 0.98 TeV.
But it’s not stopping there…eventually the LHC is heading towards a universe crushing 7 TeV!!!
Next, the intensity of the beams will be increased for about a week, and then collisions to calibrate the machine will be carried out through December.
Perhaps the time travelers that are supposed to be mucking up the works are on holiday this week.
For decades, physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics. Other forces of nature, like electromagnetic forces, can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons. But when you attempt to work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity.
But now Petr Hořava, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks he understands the problem. It’s all, he says, a matter of time.
Einstein famously overturned the Newtonian notion that time is absolute—steadily ticking away in the background. Instead he argued that time is another dimension, woven together with space to form a malleable fabric that is distorted by matter. The snag is that in quantum mechanics, time retains its Newtonian aloofness, providing the stage on which matter dances but never is affected by its presence. These two conceptions of time don’t gel.
The solution, Hořava says, is to snip threads that bind time to space at very high energies, such as those found in the early universe where quantum gravity rules. “I’m going back to Newton’s idea that time and space are not equivalent,” Hořava says. At low energies, general relativity emerges from this underlying framework, and the fabric of spacetime restitches, he explains.
Can Hořřava gravity claim the same success? The first tentative answers coming in say “yes.”
Female water striders don’t like the bad boys and they don’t even have to reach the age of 30 before they wise up about choices in males.
Water striders are those insects commonly seen skittering hurriedly across the surface of streams but when it comes to romance, male water striders who played it cool mated with more females than did groups of aggressive males, according to a study led by Omar Tonsi Eldakar of the University of Arizona’s Arizona Research Laboratories.
Previous studies have found that more sexually aggressive males are the most successful at reproducing, said Eldakar, now a postdoctoral research associate in UA’s Center for Insect Science, but in the previous studies he says the females were not able to leave areas populated by sexually aggressive males.
By simulating a more natural situation, the current study showed that female water striders moved away from areas where they were being harassed by males. The females preferred to hang out in locations where the males did not pursue females relentlessly.
Remember, remember,
The 5th of November,
Nineteen hundred and fifty five.
Dr. Emmet Lathrop Brown,
Fell down on his crown,
And his dream of time travel came alive.
Take a capacitor with flux,
The doctor did mux,
Add one twenty-one gigawatts of power.
Soon the good doctor heeded,
A velocity was needed needed,
Of precisely eighty-eight miles per hour.
And so thirty years past,
Good fortune at last,
In a parking lot of the mall, pines twin,
The doctor succeded,
His Deloran indeed did,
Travel forward through time and back again.
People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to Lord Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank and now I. G. Patel Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics.
He predicts that people’s attitudes will evolve until meat eating became unacceptable. “I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said. “I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”
Lord Stern is deeply concerned that popular opinion had so far failed to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address climate change, or of the importance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen from December 7 to December 18. “I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary,” he added.
The super-rich may evolve into a separate species entirely in the future due to enhancements in biotechnology and robotic engineering, American futurologist Paul Saffo has said.
Mr Saffo’s comments reflect claims by American scientist Ray Kurzweil who only a few months ago said immortality was only 20 years away due to the speed of advancements in nanotechnology.
Dr. Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Dr. Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, a pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson particle, which physicists hope to produce with the Large Hadron Collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.
A new study by researchers at the University of Southampton has found that sea levels have been rising across the south coast of England over the past century, substantially increasing the risk of flooding during storms.
The data shows that both average sea levels and extreme sea levels have been rising at a similar rate through the 20th Century. The rate of rise is in the range 1.2 to 2.2 mm per year.
THAT’S PER YEAR, FOLKS!!!! 2.2 millimeters per year.
Better start packing the sandbags now because in 100 years you’ll need a 9″ dyke.
Which reminds me of a joke…A tiny lesbian walks into a bar…
Friday, January 8
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Philematologists, the scientists who study kissing, aren’t exactly sure why humans started locking lips in the first place. The most likely theory is that it stems from primate mothers passing along chewed food to their toothless babies. The lip-to-lip contact may have been passed on through evolution, not only as a necessary means of survival, but also as a general way to promote social bonding and as an expression of love.
Was Einstein Wrong?
Remember, remember,
