If you find yourself bored on this fine Saturday evening, feel free to check out some of my coolest recent posts:
Poke around, enjoy, and thanks for following!
-Jeff
What a nice treat, after just having finished the miserable chemistry GRE.
NASA probe allows for visualization of solar storms
You’re looking at a computer simulation of a solar cyclone, constructed using data from the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory and a Swedish-based solar telescope. The cyclone is composed of plasma swirling among the solar magnetic fields.
These solar cyclones may help to answer a question that scientists had long wondered about: why is the sun’s atmosphere more than 300 times hotter than its surface? Scientists previously thought that the heat came from the surface of the sun, but how it traveled to the surface was unclear. Now, researchers think that these solar storms, as many as 11,000 at once, funnel heat from the sun’s surface to the corona, as they reported in Nature.
Breaking Dinosaur News!
Paleontologists discover that T-rex’s ate the well-protected Triceratops by ripping its head off.
You may now return to your normal scheduled programming.
Science-ify your breakfast with a Möbius bagel
You’ve probably heard of a Möbius strip before - it’s a continuous shape that only has one side and one edge. You can make one pretty easily by cutting a strip of paper, giving it a half twist, and taping the ends together to form a loop. However, if you want to really impress, make a Möbius bagel. By following the instructions, you can cut your bagel (or your donut!) into two interlocking bagel halves. From now on, eat your breakfast like a Scientist!
The nine circles of scientific hell
This graphic is awesome. Be sure to read the accompanying article from Perspectives in Psychological Science.
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri is a classic of world literature and was the first major work in the Italian language. In the first book of the trilogy, Inferno, Dante offers a tour of the nine increasingly horrible levels of Hell, in which the wicked are tormented forever in ways corresponding to their sins. But Dante lived before the era of modern science. Perhaps it is necessary to update his scheme to explain what happens to those guilty of various scientific sins, ranging from the commonplace to the shocking
A bioluminescent Parapandulus shrimp
Beautiful image, right? Oh, by the way, that blue stuff is shrimp puke.
To produce these van Gogh-like swirls, the shrimp vomits up chemicals that react together to produce light. This particular shrimp was photographed in the Bahamas, during an expedition in the Johnson-Sea-Link submersible near the sea floor. The mission? To poke sea creatures and see if they would glow.
Carl Linnaeus and his Autoscopic Double
Carl Linnaeus is most famous for being the father of modern taxonomy. But as chronicled in his new book Hallucinations, Dr. Oliver Sacks describes how Linnaeus is notorious for something quite different - he saw himself in double.
Linnaeus suffered from migraine attacks, and according to neurologist Macdonald Critchley, when his headaches came on, he’d hallucinate. A second, phantom Carl Linnaeus would often appear — seen only by the first — and would float about, doing whatever Real Carl was doing. So Linnaeus would be in his garden, checking out a plant or plucking a flower, and he could see, at a respectful distance, the Other Carl stooping and plucking the same way at the same time. Linnaeus didn’t fear his phantom; in fact he got used to it.
As Critchley describes it, the phantom might sit in Linnaeus’ seat at his library desk, and Real Linnaeus, would, presumably, ignore him. One time, Professor Linnaeus was lecturing at his university and decided to run down to his office to fetch a specimen to show the class, and Critchley says, he got to his office, “He opened the door rapidly, intending to enter, but pulled up at once saying, ‘Oh! I’m there already.’ “
Sacks describes this totally-not-made-up condition as something called autoscopy, and though it’s obviously not common, there is quite a bit already known about autoscopic doubles. For example, autoscopic doubles are always mirror images, so one’s right side is transposed onto the left side and vice versa. Sacks also explains how “the double is a purely visual phenomenon, with no identity or intentionality of its own. It has no desires and takes no initiatives; it is passive and neutral.” Autoscopic doubles are also accompanied by unpleasant symptoms like migraines, epilepsy, post-traumatic disorders, and other brain issues. But man, wouldn’t it be fascinating to have a double for just a day or two?
![Afraid of math? That may be because for some, facing math is physically painful
For many people the thought of these kinds of problems is horrible. Painful, even. A study by psychologists Ian Lyon and Sian Beilock has shown that that’s not hyperbole — some people who dislike math do so because the thought of working out things with numbers is experientially similar to physical pain. For people with “high levels of mathematics-anxiety” (HMAs), maths hurts. […]
Since it’s the anticipation of mathematics that seems to get people the most, rather than the actual sums themselves, it might be worth investigating whether there’s a different way of teaching maths in schools. It could also mean taking the time to simplify the process for returning a tax return, for example. Governments often wring their hands over how many adults are effectively mathematically illiterate after leaving school, but maybe it’s not their fault they couldn’t concentrate in class. They might well have just been scared of the number seven (because, after all, seven ate nine).
I always knew that mathematicians were masochists…](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_md5pzrq2cO1qgfmcuo1_500.jpg)
Afraid of math? That may be because for some, facing math is physically painful
For many people the thought of these kinds of problems is horrible. Painful, even. A study by psychologists Ian Lyon and Sian Beilock has shown that that’s not hyperbole — some people who dislike math do so because the thought of working out things with numbers is experientially similar to physical pain. For people with “high levels of mathematics-anxiety” (HMAs), maths hurts. […]
Since it’s the anticipation of mathematics that seems to get people the most, rather than the actual sums themselves, it might be worth investigating whether there’s a different way of teaching maths in schools. It could also mean taking the time to simplify the process for returning a tax return, for example. Governments often wring their hands over how many adults are effectively mathematically illiterate after leaving school, but maybe it’s not their fault they couldn’t concentrate in class. They might well have just been scared of the number seven (because, after all, seven ate nine).
I always knew that mathematicians were masochists…
