Here's a big discovery that was made using some very simple tools:

The Milky Way is twice the size we thought it was

We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses," Professor Gaensler said. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

It took just a couple of hours using data available on the internet for University of Sydney scientists to discover that the Milky Way is twice as wide as previously thought.

Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has found that our galaxy - a flattened spiral about 100,000 light years across - is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years that had been previously thought.

Proving not all science requires big, expensive apparatus, Professor Gaensler and colleagues, Dr Greg Madsen, Dr Shami Chatterjee and PhD student Ann Mao, downloaded data from the internet and analysed it in a spreadsheet.

The team came to this new conclusion by measuring how much the output of pulsars slows as it is traveling through the galaxy's warm ionized medium -- the sea of electrons which lies between the stars and various other galactic objects. The team came to its more accurate picture of the galaxy's width by rejecting a number of data points, concluding that the pulsars that le above or below the galactic plane provide more precise measurements than those in the middle.

How interesting that there are such significant discoveries to be made just by looking at existing data in a spreadsheet. I wonder what startling facts are lying in piles of collected numbers and waiting to be discovered?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Lets pay a little game. Below you will find several headlines from the now-defunct Weekly World News. For those who never had the privilege of standing in a US grocery store checkout line during the 80's or 90's, let me explain that the WWN was a schlocky tabloid publication that eschewed the normal celebrity gossip in favor of the most randomly bizarre, outrageous, and absolutely preposterous "news stories" you can imagine. Tucked in the middle of all that nonsense is a real headline from an actual current news story.

Your mission is to see if you can identify the real news story:

Seeing Eye Squirrels For Blind Dogs

Blind Man Regains Sight After Doctors Implant Son's Tooth in His Eye

Groom Freezes at Nudist Wedding

Severed Leg Hops 75 Feet!

Scientist Invents 'Reverse Lightbulb' that Makes Room Darker

Doctors Reattach Siamese Twins

Think you've got it figured out? Well, click here to see which one is actually news.

How did you do? If presented with that list, I believe I would have gone for the freezing nudist groom or the hopping severed leg. But, no.

The procedure is called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis. It is described thusly:

McNichol’s son Robert, 23, donated a tooth, its root and part of his jaw for his father’s surgery. McNichol’s right eye socket was rebuilt, and a lens was inserted into a hole drilled in Robert’s tooth. The procedure required two surgeries lasting a total of 15 hours.

How wonderful that a man's eyesight has been restored. But what is more striking to me about this is -- even if you guessed correctly -- how well that headline fits in with the others. We live in an age of such robust possibilities that it is getting difficult to make a claim that is so outrageous that it is rejected at face value. Maybe this is why the WWN went out of business; they just couldn't compete with the real news any more.

A world in which real news is as outrageous as faux news becomes risky if we allow our sense of credulity to grow at the same pace that possibilities are increasing. I think the key is to continue to be startled by, and to push back against, claims that sound outrageous.

With that in mind, is anyone prepared to tell me that the headline linked above is, in fact, a hoax? If it is, I am hardly the first to fall for it.

As Paul Simon put it:

It's a turn-around jump shot
It's everybody jump start
It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
Thats dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Dont cry

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Zero-g Alka-Seltzer:

Via GeekPess.

UPDATE: Michael Darling seems to want to turn every posting on this blog into an episode of Tales of the Paranormal (see comments). I think what he's missing out on, here, is that we don't buy in to every crackpot theory that shows up in the blog comments section. We need compelling evidence before we are moved to take a stand on any paranormal phenomenon.

So with that in mind, here is the "face" that shows up at 4:35 on the Youtube video, above:

I'll grant Michael one thing -- it doesn't look much like my dog!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

It isn't just new species of insects and bacteria that are being discovered. Every once in a while we get something like this:

New Species of Mammal

A new species of mammal has been discovered in the mountains of Tanzania, scientists report.

The bizarre-looking creature, dubbed Rhynochocyon udzungwensis, is a type of giant elephant shrew, or sengi.
The cat-sized animal, which is reported in the Journal of Zoology, looks like a cross between a miniature antelope and a small anteater.

It has a grey face, a long, flexible snout, a bulky, amber body, a jet-black rump and it stands on spindly legs.

The story goes on to tell that these creatures are called shrews because their smaller cousins were thought to resemble shrews when first discovered. Personally,I don't think they look like much of anything.

A little aardvarkish, I suppose. But only a little. Anyway, these creatures are more closely related to elephants and rhinos (and, it turns out upon further reading, aardvarks) than they are shrews. The story concludes:

Tanzania's Udzungwa Mountains are biodiverse-rich. In addition to this new species, a number of other new animals have been found there, including the Udzungwa partridge, the Phillips' Congo shrew, and a new genus of monkey known as Kipunji as well as several reptiles and amphibians.

Dr Rathbun [who discovered the new species] said it was vital the area and its inhabitants in this biodiversity "hotspot" were protected.

Hera, hear. Let's hope there are many more such finds to be made.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have green eyes, while my parents and all my siblings have blue eyes. I always thought that my eye color was the same as theirs, just tinted slightly differently. But the way I read this story, that is simply not the case:

ALL BLUE-eyed people can be traced back to one ancestor who lived near the Black Sea 10,000 years ago.

Human beings had brown eyes until a single mutation in a gene called OCA2 arose by chance in one individual, Professor Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen said.

The mutation "turned off" the mechanism that produces brown melanin pigment and "diluted" brown eyes to blue.
Most likely occurring in the north-west part of the Black Sea between 6000 and 10,000 years ago, the gene was dispersed in the rapid waves of migration to northern Europe that followed the end of the last ice age.

Professor Eiberg said the finding, published in the journal Human Genetics, helped to explain why Europeans were far more likely to have blue eyes than any other ethnic grouping.

Europeans also had a far greater range of skin tones and hair colours living in the one community than the rest of the world, where people are almost uniformly dark-haired and dark-eyed.

The researchers examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed people in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey.

Variation in the eye colour from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.

"They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA," the professor said.
"From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor."

So it seems that my green eyes are actually a slight variation on the original human eye color -- brown -- while the rest of my family have this much newer trait that only showed up 500 generations or so ago.

Not that it matters, of course, it's just interesting. It has been established that there is a mitochondrial Eve who is the ancestor of every human being alive on the planet. That is, we all inherited the unique mitochondria that she carried. Variations on that trait have been eliminated from the species.

So maybe there a was blue-eyed Eve? (or Adam?) The mitochondrial Eve lived some 130,000 years before the blue-eyed ancestor. It's possible that that individual, too, is a common ancestor for much of the world's population. But since blue eyes are a recessive gene, many of the blue-eyed ancestor's descendant's (like me) don't have blue eyes.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)