text
stringlengths 0
105k
|
|---|
“No wonder Scalia never lets himself be recorded,” Stewart quipped. |
Watch video, via Comedy Central, below:<|endoftext|>New solar system objects used to be a distraction for Konstantin Batygin, a planetary scientist and theorist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Each discovery added another complication to his computer models of the solar system, which twirl planetoids around the sun. But now, Batygin is eager to find more of the objects himself, and missed opportunities pain him. In late September and early October, cloudy skies foiled a 6-night run at the Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. All you can do, he says, is “just sit quietly and wait for things to get slightly better.” |
What drew Batygin into the hunt is the ultimate prize: a new planet, the first to be added to our solar system in more than a century. Colloquially called Planet Nine, this distant hypothetical world could have 10 times the mass of Earth and take 15,000 years to go around the sun. This past January, Batygin and Mike Brown, a Caltech astronomer, proposed that the giant could explain the peculiarly clustered orbits of six icy bodies beyond Neptune (Science, 22 January, p. 330). Now, several teams, including Batygin and Brown's, are racing to spot Planet Nine directly. |
Curious clusters CREDITS: (DIAGRAM) G. GRULLÓN/SCIENCE; (DATA) SCOTT SHEPPARD/MICHELE BANNISTER |
Studies presented last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena are giving them extra encouragement. Researchers have found another three transneptunian objects (TNOs) that, like the first six, may corroborate Planet Nine's existence and help narrow down its putative orbit. The influence of the unseen giant could also explain the strange orbits of two more objects, perpendicular to the plane of the solar system. And it might explain why the sun is tipped slightly on its axis, astronomers say. |
The new evidence leaves astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., “probably 90% sure there's a planet out there.” But others say the clues are sparse and unconvincing. “I give it about a 1% chance of turning out to be real,” says astronomer JJ Kavelaars, of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, Canada. |
The trail of Planet Nine began in 2003, when Brown spotted one of the most farflung bodies in the solar system—an oddity known as Sedna whose orbit takes it out to more than 900 astronomical units (AU), the distance between Earth and sun. More important, Sedna doesn't come any closer than 76 AU—more than twice as far out as Neptune. That puts it beyond the gravitational influence of that last ice giant. Something else had to pull it into its strange elongated orbit: perhaps a passing star, or the gravitational tides of the Milky Way. |
Or maybe a giant planet. When Brown and Batygin found five more TNOs curiously clustered in the sky, they realized with extensive modeling that a giant planet's gravity would have flung any objects away from its path, leaving the orbits of the remaining objects huddled on the opposite side of the solar system. |
Now, additional objects may be adding to the pattern. At the conference, Sheppard and his colleague Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hilo, Hawaii, presented the first two new entrants: 2014 SR349 and 2013 FT28. “The big question is do they make the planet case better or worse,” Sheppard says. “And they make it better.” |
Hide and seek CREDITS: (DIAGRAM) G. GRULLÓN/SCIENCE; (DATA) SCOTT SHEPPARD |
The first, 2014 SR349, falls right in line with the earlier six objects. The second, 2013 FT28, is on the opposite side of the sky—well within the proposed orbit of Planet Nine, where computer modeling suggests it would be safe from gravitational kicks. L91—the third new TNO and one of the most distant objects in the solar system—looks as if it might fit in with the antialigned group, but astrophysicist Michele Bannister of Queen's University Belfast, who described the object at the meeting, cited modeling that suggests maybe it does not have anything to do with Planet Nine. |
Kavelaars thinks Brown and Batygin's clustering is unlikely to be real. To spot these objects at all astronomers have to look away from the bright Milky Way. It may be that the odd ones occupy similar parts of the sky because that is the easiest place to look. He expects that as additional distant bodies are discovered, their orbits will start to look more random. Kavelaars's collaborator Cory Shankman of the University of Victoria has created models with the exact orbits of the six distant objects but found that a massive planet would not maintain the telltale clustering for long periods. |
Not to be deterred, Planet Nine enthusiasts can now invoke two more lines of evidence. As they spin around the sun, the known planets, asteroids, and most TNOs stay in roughly the same plane, known as the ecliptic. But this year yielded some striking exceptions. One new object, known as 2016 NM56, has an orbit tilted so far out of the ecliptic that it essentially orbits backward. Another has a near-perpendicular orbit relative to the ecliptic. In a talk at the meeting, Batygin showed how Planet Nine might create these wonky trajectories. Through what's known as the Kozai mechanism, a massive object can induce a gravitational ratcheting effect that slowly changes the inclination of smaller worlds and “leads their orbits to flip upside-down,” he says. |
Batygin and Brown's proposed orbit for Planet Nine is itself rather slanted, poking out about 30° relative to the ecliptic. Their graduate student, Elizabeth Bailey, showed how the tilted orbit could potentially explain a curious feature of the sun: Rather than being pointed perpendicular to the ecliptic, its north pole is off by about 6°. Researchers have tried to explain the anomaly, discovered in the 19th century, by invoking interactions between the early sun's magnetic field and the disk of gas and dust that gave rise to the solar system. Bailey's simulations showed instead that, over the course of the solar system's history, the lopsided orbit of Planet Nine would have exerted a gravitational force on the sun that could have pushed it almost exactly 6° to one side. Astronomer Rodney Gomes of the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro and his collaborators independently came up with the same idea in July. |
Few will believe in Planet Nine until it is seen directly. Planets spend the most time in the most distant part of their orbit, where they travel slowest. For Planet Nine, that would put it somewhere in the constellation Orion, which is just where astronomers are searching with the largest, widest angle telescopes they can find. Batygin, Brown, Sheppard, and Trujillo are all using the 8-meter Subaru Telescope, because its Hyper Suprime-Cam can cover large parts of the sky with each shot. After their recent run in late September, which covered 10% of the most distant part of Planet Nine's putative orbit, Batygin believes “there's a 10% chance it's in the bag.” |
Sheppard's team has also been awarded time on two telescopes in Chile, where Orion is also visible: the 4-meter Blanco Telescope and the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes. He says his team should scrutinize about a third of the outlying parts of Planet Nine's proposed orbit this year and feels there's a good chance they might see it by the end of 2017. Computational astrophysicist Peter Nugent of the University of California in Berkeley is taking a different tack: His graduate students will trawl through archival data from a survey begun in 2009 on the venerable 5.1-meter telescope on Mount Palomar in California to see whether it happened to spot the planet. |
To the victors will go the glory of discovering a new planet. “We're trying to keep it friendly,” Sheppard says, but adds that it's definitely a race. Early on, the different groups talked about sharing their intended search fields, so as to avoid duplicative efforts on the sky—but now “we each want to be the one to find it,” Sheppard says. And should that happen, what then? “I'd basically retire at that point,” he says, laughing.<|endoftext|>The leopard seal (Hydrurga leptonyx) is one of Antarctica’s top predators. It kills penguins and smaller seals by biting them with sharp canine teeth and repeatedly smashing them against the ocean surface to flay and dismember them. But it now seems that this seal is also equipped to tackle smaller prey. |
David Hocking from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues have shown that the leopard seal eats krill like a whale, by sucking them into its mouth and sieving them through special teeth. Other scientists had predicted this behaviour from the shape and arrangement of the seal’s teeth, but this is the first time that it has been observed and filmed. The researchers' results are published in Polar Biology1. |
By switching between two feeding styles, the leopard seal can dine from both the top and bottom of the Southern Ocean’s food web. “This is equivalent to a lion hunting down zebras, but also regularly feasting on ants or termites,” says Erich Fitzgerald from Museum Victoria, Melbourne, who was involved in the study. |
“You’d expect that leopard seals would sacrifice something in not specializing on either large or small prey, but the authors persuasively argue that it is a dual specialist,” says Alexander Werth, a biologist from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. “This helps to explain why leopard seals are so successful.” |
From whale to seal |
Hocking, Fitzgerald and Alistair Evans from Monash University studied leopard seals because the animals' trident-shaped postcanine teeth are similar to those of ancient fossil whales, such as Janjucetus, and the researchers were interested in the feeding habits of these whales. Because the seals were thought to use their postcanine teeth to strain krill from the water, it seemed possible that prehistoric whales did too. But as Hocking searched the literature to confirm this, “it became apparent that nobody had ever actually observed leopard seals underwater [while they fed] on small prey like krill.” |
To do that, Hocking travelled to Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, the only institution in the world that houses leopard seals. Once there, he presented the resident seals, Casey and Sabine, with four small fish sticking headfirst out of a plastic box. At her very first go, Sabine sucked a fish out and expelled the excess water through the sides of her mouth. Hocking called up his team: “Yep, they do it, all right!” |
Casey and Sabine repeatedly used the same technique. Their thick lips allowed them to create suction, and their interlocking trident-shaped teeth imprisoned ingested fish or krill when the animals blew out the ingested water. California sea lions lack such complex teeth — when the same fish-primed box was presented to them, they often blew their prey out of the sides of their mouth along with the water. |
There is indirect evidence that wild leopard seals behave in the same way as the two captive seals. The team examined the skulls of 26 wild-caught adults and found that, whereas their gripping canines were often worn down, the postcanines showed fewer signs of wear, consistent with their role as sieves. |
Although the team saw the captive seals sucking only one fish at a time, it seems likely that the animals could ingest krill en masse by using their flexible necks to strike at the heart of a shoal. Krill can constitute up to 83% of a leopard seal's diet in regions in which larger prey are in short supply. One individual that was dissected was found to have more than 10,000 freshly caught krill in its stomach. “That’s a lot of krill to catch one at a time!” says Fitzgerald. |
The researchers now plan to observe the same behaviour in wild leopard seals. “A trip down to the ice is in order,” says Hocking.<|endoftext|>The debate has raged, on Battle.net and around the counter at comic book stores, since '98: Terran, Zerg, or Protoss? But finally, in the eyes of two researchers in Edinburgh, a conclusion has been reached. Science has spoken. And the winner is... |
Terran! In your face! |
Allow me to explain. The study, detailed in Wired , used a percolating model. It's the same sort of algorithm used to predict which bacteria will win when you introduce a bunch of asymmetrically-equipped colonies to a single environment. The six "colonies" used were created from analysis of hundreds of professional StarCraft II matches, and represented each race playing a couple of different strategies: Macro (Long Game/Economic) Terran, Micro (Fast Rush) Terran, Macro Zerg, Micro Zerg, Macro Protoss, and Micro Protoss. |
Terran Micro came out on top, claiming the most territory in a simulated portion of the Milky Way that stood in for the fictitious Korprulu Sector. Chalk one up for Raynor's Raiders and their fast, hit-and-run tactics. Protoss Macro also did very well, while the Zerg in general proved surprisingly impotent. The full study is freely available for your perusal, if you like colorful graphs and terms like "Mean Stellar Colonisation Occupancy." |
To my fellow Terrans: Well done, and happy "I told you so"-ing.<|endoftext|>Consider the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s one of America’s oldest (and most beautiful) bridges, and thousands of people cross it every day with no thought at all. 125,000 cars, 4,000 pedestrians, and 2,600 cyclists make the journey from Manhattan to Brooklyn (or the other way around) on average each day. Before its status as a New York City icon was sealed, the bridge was the center of some pretty fascinating stuff. Even today, it remains a site for legends, a place for provocative art pieces and, of course, is a must-see for any tourist. |
Freak accidents and dangerous conditions |
The bridge is super structurally safe, but getting there was a dangerous process. In 1869, while taking final, pre-construction compass readings on the East River, architect and designer John Roebling was the victim of a freak accident. A rogue boat smashed the toes on one of his feet, and three weeks later, he was dead from tetanus. His son, Washington, took over… but he wasn’t safe from the bridge, either. The foundation of the bridge, below the water, was dug out by “sandhogs”. These were immigrants who rode in metal airlocks down below the underwater caissons, which kept water out while they blasted out the foundation. |
Working inside the caissons was uncomfortable; the pressurized air and stuffy, hot conditions gave sandhogs headaches, bloody noses, and slowed heartbeats, but the journey back up in the airlocks was downright deadly. As the airlocks resurfaced, many sandhogs fell victim to “the bends”. Resurfacing from underwater too quickly dissolved gases in the blood at a dangerous rate. Symptoms included brutal joint pain, speech impairments, acute numbness, convulsions, paralysis, and even death. Washington Roebling was paralyzed from this during the construction and had to watch progress with a telescope while his wife, Emily, took the reins. Sounds kind of like the Roeblings were cursed! And this isn’t even counting those who died during other accidents (collapses, fires, explosions) while the bridge was being built. All in all, an estimated 27 people died during construction. |
Rumors of collapse |
You know how it’s illegal to yell “fire!” in a crowded place because it’ll cause a dangerous stampede? That kind of happened on the Brooklyn Bridge. It had only been open for 6 days before a tragic misunderstanding led to a deadly mob. Apparently what happened was a woman tripped on the stairs, and another woman saw and started screaming. Everyone on the bridge heard the second woman’s cried and panicked, thinking the bridge was collapsing. This caused a huge rush for the narrow staircases, where frightened bodies piled up. Some people cut open the iron fence and many escaped onto the streetcar tracks below. Pickpockets used the confusion to rob terrified pedestrians. When the dust finally settled, 12 people had died, trampled while trying to get down the staircase. A year later, famed showman P.T. Barnum led a parade of 21 elephants across the bridge to prove its sturdiness; in fact, the bridge can withstand the weight of 2,500 elephants. |
Selling the Brooklyn Bridge |
Famous con man George C. Parker was best known for “selling” NYC landmarks (including the Brooklyn Bridge, several times) that he didn’t own to unsuspecting immigrants. The NYPD even reportedly had to remove several of his victims from setting up toll booths on the bridge, trying to make a profit on what they thought was their property. Other landmarks “sold” by Parker included Madison Square Garden, the Met, Grant’s Tomb and the Statue of Liberty. He was convicted of fraud three times (and escaped arrest by dressing up as a cop once) and ultimately received a life sentence at Sing Sing for his crimes. In prison, he was a popular inmate, thanks to his many interesting stories of his misadventures as one of history’s most infamous con men. |
Hidden rooms |
Inside one of the giant stone arches below the bridge’s main entrance on the Manhattan side is a hidden Cold War bomb shelter, packed to the gills with supplies in case of a nuclear attack on New York City– but the exact location had been kept a secret for safety reasons. |
In 2006, a routine structural inspection revealed the previously-forgotten vault, which was stockpiled with Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Crackers (yum, right?), paper blankets, water, and even medication like Dextran, which was used to treat shock (because, as you can imagine, one might be a tiny bit shocked after potentially surviving a flipping nuclear holocaust in New York City). Many of the boxes of supplies were stamped with two very telling dates– 1957 (when the Soviets launched Sputnik) and 1962 (the Cuban Missile Crisis). |
Crazily enough, that bomb shelter isn’t the only room inside the bridge– on the Brooklyn side, there are 8 massive rooms (I’m talking 50-foot cathedral-style ceilings) framed by the piers that support the bridge. The cavernous area was done in a Gothic style similar to the bridge itself. This space, known as the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, isn’t open to the public anymore, but the bridge’s architect, John Roebling, had originally envisioned them as being shopping arcade-type spaces. Sadly, that never panned out– they were used for municipal storage (and the occasional art exhibition or event) until they were closed for security reasons in 2001. |
And, of course, there are the wine cellars, vaults that were opened and used to store cases of wine. The consistent 60-degree temperature in the rooms made perfect wine-storing conditions. Back in the day, the wine cellars were known as the “Blue Grotto”, as there was a shrine to the Virgin Mary near the entrance. When the New York Times revisited the wine vaults in the 1970s, they found a fading inscription that read “Who loveth not wine, women and song, he remaineth a fool his whole life long.” |
White flags |
One of the more recent conspiracy theories about the bridge comes from 2014. One July morning of that year, New Yorkers discovered that the American flags atop the bridge had been mysteriously turned white. Jokes about Manhattan or Brooklyn surrendering to the other, or it being the work of Dido aside, it was a bit of a concern to some, especially given that the bridge is a high-profile landmark. Two Berlin artists eventually claimed responsibility, saying that they hand-sewed white fabric over the flags as a way to celebrate the beauty of public spaces and commemorate the anniversary of the death of German-born John Roebling. |
And this isn’t the only weird and mysterious art project that Brooklyn Bridge has played party to, either; earlier that year, a grand piano showed up on the riverbank below the bridge. It made for a haunting scene… that visitors eagerly Instagrammed. |
Header image via Pexels/Lex Overtoom |
More mysteries to uncover…<|endoftext|>In his latest health push, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is proposing a bill that would require retailers to keep tobacco products out of sight. |
“Such displays suggest that smoking is a normal activity,” the mayor said. “And they invite young people to experiment with tobacco.” |
The legislation would require retailers to keep tobacco products hidden in a cabinet or drawer. The mayor said Iceland, Canada, England and Ireland have similar laws. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.