You could have knocked me over with a shopping cart

Are these portraits not very similar? I got these likenesses from Wikipedia and they are in the public domain I believe. Anyway--Thomas Browne, 17th century doctor and essayist, T. C. Boyle, novelist,  and Arthur Phillips, novelist (2011-The Tragedy of Arthur). All of the gentlemen illustrate an unusual degree of originality in their writing. How interesting then to see a similarity in their physiognomy.



Portrait of Sir Thomas Browne
Born 19 October 1605,Died 19 October 1682 (aged 77)

T. C. Boyle. born 1948



Arthur Phillips
Born 1969

Quartz--it's not just for jewelry anymore

A review of an article in the current issue of  Nature, an article that focuses on why mountains form in certain areas of the earth's crust and not in others, outlines valuable insights. We excerpt this one point here, trusting you will check the whole review (the article costs money if you don't have a subscription to Nature):

Marta Pérez-Gussinyé from Royal Holloway, University of London, and Tony Lowry from Utah State University suggest that the common mineral quartz, familiar from sandy beaches, may hold the key to the persistent zones of weakness along which the Earth's continents deform.

Because quartz is the weakest mineral in the earth's crust. Makes sense.

Looking Back Listening Forward

Edward Stone was project manager for the Voyager expeditions from 1972. Now Voyager 1 is 11 billion miles away, and approaching the boundary of interstellar space. It is

Running on dwindling plutonium, using antiquated computers and recording data on eight-track tapes that get sent to Earth on faint radio waves....

The Voyagers discovered
(1986)... Uranus, with a tilting, off-center magnetic field that was previously unimaginable. [and]
(1989...Neptune, with winds kicking up to 1,400 mph and a moon, Triton, speckled with geysers spewing nitrogen...

Today Stone says "What a journey, what a thrill," [while]... sitting at his spotless, unadorned desk. "It seemed like everywhere we looked, as we encountered those planets and their moons, we were surprised....Science has created models of deep space, but no one can say for sure what it is like - its temperatures, its composition or the speed of its interstellar wind. Most important, no one knows exactly how deep space relates to the formation of Earth.

Extraorigami

A new theory that reconsiders basic propositions of cosmology has been outlined according to a review at physorg.com, of a paper published in Physical Review Letters. The idea of Dejan Stojkovic and Jonas Mureika, is that the universe began with just one dimension, and even now, in our three dimensional world, may already be developing a fourth dimension. Quoting the review:

The core idea is that the dimensionality of space depends on the size of the space we're observing, with smaller spaces associated with fewer dimensions. That means that a fourth dimension will open up -- if it hasn't already -- as the universe continues to expand.

The originators of this idea, say their ideas are testable:

If high energies do correspond with lower-dimensional space, as the "vanishing dimensions" theory proposes, researchers working with the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in Europe should see planar scattering at such energies.

Their idea, if supported, would help resolve certain problems with current cosmological theory, such as:

Currently, ...[relativity theory and quantum mechanics] are considered incompatible; but if the universe, at its smallest levels, had fewer dimensions, mathematical discrepancies between the two frameworks would disappear.

The mystery of the universe's accelerating expansion. Physicists have observed that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, and they don't know why. The addition of new dimensions as the universe grows would explain this acceleration.

The need to alter the mass of the Higgs boson. The standard model of particle physics predicts the existence of an as yet undiscovered elementary particle called the Higgs boson. For equations in the standard model to accurately describe the observed physics of the real world, however, researchers must artificially adjust the mass of the Higgs boson for interactions between particles that take place at high energies. If space has fewer dimensions at high energies, the need for this kind of "tuning" disappears.

The physicists proposing this say, 

What we're proposing here is a shift in paradigm,"..."Physicists have struggled with the same problems for 10, 20, 30 years, and straight-forward extensions of extensions of the existing ideas are unlikely to solve them."
"We have to take into account the possibility that something is systematically wrong with our ideas," he continued. "We need something radical and new, and this is something radical and new."

On the Shoulders of Mice

We excerpt, from a report on this research, which illustrates a combination of creative and destructive forces necessary for healthy neuron activity, Not one or the other, but both, are necessary. Of course one can hardly expect scientists to appreciate the possibility of three currents:

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered in mice a molecular wrecking ball that powers the demolition phase of a cycle that occurs at synapses — those specialized connections between nerve cells in the brain — and whose activity appears critical for both limiting and enhancing learning and memory.

The newly revealed protein, which the researchers named thorase after Thor, the Norse god of thunder, belongs to a large family of enzymes that energize not only neurological construction jobs but also deconstruction projects. The discovery is described in the April 15 issue of Cell.....

“Change in the strength of the connections between two nerve cells forms the basis of our ability to learn and remember,” Dawson says. This phenomenon, called synaptic plasticity, depends upon a balanced alternation of excitation and inhibition of receptors,

Star formation evidence contradict theories on how universe formed

News this week that astronomers believe they have found a galaxy older than their theories predicted. Here is a small excerpt:

[A] team of astronomers have identified and studied a galaxy so far away we see it as it was less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Viewing this galaxy through the gravitational lens meant that the scientists were able to discern many intriguing features that would otherwise have remained hidden, including that its stars were unexpectedly old for a galaxy this close in time to the beginning of the Universe.....Johan Richard, the lead author of a new study says: "We have discovered a distant galaxy that began forming stars just 200 million years after the Big Bang. This challenges theories of how soon galaxies formed and evolved in the first years of the Universe. It could even help solve the mystery of how the hydrogen fog that filled the early Universe was cleared."

Mysterious blast from outer space

Wired.com has picked up a story that is all over the science news. Nearly 4 billion light years from us, there is a on-going blast which defies the expectations of scientists. Gamma ray bursts is the categoy they are using but in fact those typically  last for 30 seconds. The source of the radiation our instruments are detecting has gone on for11 days. And the light reaching us is still streaming.

Searching for----what....

This excerpt is from a SETI blog. The explanation, so clear, so sweet, is about how those scientists go about looking for earth like planets, on the assumption that is a good place to start looking for extra-terrestrial life.

An Earth-size planet's radius is about 1/100 the size of a Sun-like star. We're looking for one part per 10,000 drop in brightness caused by this tiny planet blocking a small fraction of the light from the star. In order to confirm our findings, we need to observe at least three transits - three times when the star is blocked by the body of the planet crossing in front of it. This can take several years. The time interval between these transits tells us what the orbital period of the planet is, and the fractional drop in brightness tells us the size of the planet relative to its star.

And also, from the same blog, Life at the Seti Institute---

"Stars are like bells - they ring. They are big balls of fluid and gas so they tend to oscillate. When stars are singing songs as they oscillate and pulsate, they actually change their shape. This shape change causes an apparent change in brightness, which we can measure very well. As we study the brightness variations in time, we can essentially hear the songs of the stars. By then studying the tones, or the notes the stars are singing, we can learn about the star's interior structure and work from models to estimate the size and the age of the star."