Supernova
blast waves are
oblate, not spherical (the headline says "egg-shaped", but the story and
links describe an oblate spheroid). Not only is this information cool, it affects the
use of 1A supernovas as standard candles for distance:
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Supernova
blast waves are
oblate, not spherical (the headline says "egg-shaped", but the story and
links describe an oblate spheroid). Not only is this information cool, it affects the
use of 1A supernovas as standard candles for distance:
Wang's group saw polarized light from a typical supernova called SN2002el with the Very Large Telescope in Chile. This showed that the shell of gas around the dying star is oblate.All supernovae like SN2002el - called type 1a - have the same brightness and so are used to infer cosmic distances; they appear fainter the farther away they are. But if a star explodes unevenly, its brightness depends on the direction from which you look at it.
The asymmetry may also be a hint about supernova causes.
Argentina has
repealed its amnesty
law that had protected people accused of torture and murder during the "Dirty
War" of the 1970s and 1980s. Hundreds of former military officers may now go on
trial for torture and murder.
Update: A
comment thread in
Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Electrolite suggests that Wednesday's story about uranium
cores is most likely about someone trying to scam would-be terrorists. I hope they're
right.
The Sunday Herald (Scotland)
is reporting that the uranium cores from an Iraqi nuclear reactor
are being offered for
sale in the Basra souk.
The Sunday Herald source, who cannot be named for fear of reprisals, was approached by black marketeers in Basra and asked if he would help sell the material. He said: "The cylinders are about a foot long, grey in colour with a red band around the top. The skull and crossbones warning logo, and the label ‘pure uranium oxide’ are clearly marked in English." He added that it is thought to have come from the al-Tuwaitha complex, which is 15 miles southeast of Baghdad.Wasn't the alleged point of the invasion to stop terrorists from getting their hands on dirty bombs? Are we supposed to believe that bin Laden et al. couldn't find $50,000?
Serendipity: the FDA has approved a
powder that stops bleeding
when applied topically. The scientist who discovered it was working on water
purifiers. He cut his hand while experimenting with a potassium salt, and discovered
that it stopped the bleeding. According to the manufacturer, it works on
hemophiliacs and people who are taking anticoagulant drugs. (This article is an
odd combination of "cool new discovery" and "local company expanding".)
Mothers of hemophiliacs--women who are
known to carry the gene for hemophilia, and make less clotting factor--have a
significantly lower
rate of death from heart problems. They also have a higher risk of brain
hemorrhage.
As with sickle cell anemia, this may be part of why the gene persists in the population.
According to the UPI,
the congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks has found that
there
was no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. In case you've lost track
in all the fog and lies, the claim that Iraq was responsible for those
attacks was the other excuse for the US invasion, along with the (equally
dubious) assertions about "weapons of mass destruction."
So, are we now going to be told that Bush "has moved beyond" caring about the destruction of the World Trade Center?
This is elegant:
analysis of
the cosmic microwave background is additional evidence for dark energy.
Without dark energy, photons should gain energy as they enter galactic clusters,
then lose it when they leave. In the observed universe, they come out with
slightly more energy than they started with.
A new Justice Department report
admits to
serious abuses under the Patriot Act. Many of the accusations were dismissed
as either not credible or "impossible to prove"--the criteria for the latter
aren't given here--but the credible cases range from charges of beatings to
a prison doctor who told a suspect that he wanted to execute him.
The New York Times notes that
The inspector general's report, which was presented to Congress last week and is awaiting public release, is likely to raise new concern among lawmakers about whether the Justice Department can police itself when its employees are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants and others swept up in terrorism investigations under the 2001 law.
Yes, this
polar
bear really is purple. A very good purple, too. It's a medication side effect,
and I find myself wondering if I can get some of that medicine, and what other
effects it has.
Jon Carroll
waxes lyrical about
sunlight
and what painters do with it.
The
Hubble Space Telescope has found a
planet
orbiting a pulsar in the globular cluster M4, with an estimated age of
13 billion years. Previously, astronomers had thought that planets couldn't have
formed that early in the history of the universe, for lack of heavy elements.
[NY Times link, will probably want the usual registration]
Another
reason
the rhythm method doesn't work: menstrual cycles aren't a good predictor of ovulation
cycles. This is one initial study, but daily ultrasounds on 63 women with "normal"
menstrual cycles found that "Of those 63, only 50 had normal ovarian cycles."
The other 13 women ovulated more than once within a single menstrual cycle.
Forty percent of the women who did have normal cycles had two or more waves
of activity by their ovarian follicles, and any of the waves could produce
an egg.
Pierson's team plans longer-term studies to see if the women's patterns are consistent from month to month."We don't know what's causing it -- we don't know if it is the weather or exposure to men or grapefruit juice or what," Pierson said.
The findings, which were first seen in cattle and horses, help explain some things that have puzzled obstetricians, Pierson said.
"It really explains how we get fraternal twins with different conception days," Pierson said. "Clinically, we see this all the time. We see women come in with twins and when we do an ultrasound we see one is at one 10 weeks development and another at seven."
If it's been seen in cattle and horses, we can probably eliminate the grapefruit juice hypothesis.
Another generalization yields to a gorgeous fact. [Thanks to Joelle van Dyne.]
Solar sails may be
fundamentally
flawed--physicist Thomas Gold says that they won't work, for thermodynamic
reasons.
The Planetary Society is unconvinced, and if all goes well will be testing a solar sail in September. I hope they're right--solar sails are a gorgeous idea, and one of the cooler SF staples.
Two teams of physicists have succeeded in assembling
pentaquarks--exotic
particles consisting of five quarks. All previously known particles
consist of either two or three quarks, but theorists had been looking for
a five-quark object.
Some of the
best and most desired Renaissance pottery used
nanomaterials
to produce its luster. That's a 21st-century label for the technique,
which used carefully controlled quantities of different metals: in the sixteenth,
iridescence was seen as a form of alchemy.
The U.S. Supreme Court has
overturned the
Texas law against sodomy on privacy grounds. A 6-3 ruling: five judges, or a simple
majority, on privacy grounds, plus O'Connor concurring but with different reasoning.
This isn't exactly a surprise, but neither was I counting on it. A court with the respect for privacy that this shows would, I thought, have ruled the other way on requiring filters on library Internet computers.
The state had urged the court to draw a constitutional line "at the threshold of the marital bedroom."We can only hope, now that the line has been drawn at the threshold of all of our bedrooms, married or not.[NY Times link, registration required or try annoying/annoying]Although Texas itself did not make the argument, some of the state's supporters told the justices in friend-of-the-court filings that invalidating sodomy laws could take the court down the path of allowing same-sex marriage.
I think this mostly reflects their good nature:
81
percent of Canadians still think Americans are good neighbours, even though
more of them think the US is bad for the Canadian economy than think it's beneficial.
I was over there looking for the story about Chretien's announcement that, rather than appealing the court decisions, the Canadian government is introducing legislation to recognize same-sex marriages, rather than appealing the decision. Our northern neighbours look better by the day.
Paleontologists working in
Ethiopia have found the oldest known human
skulls. The two adults and one child date to 160,000 years ago, and are seen as
support for the Out-of-Africa theory of human origins. Because of slight
differences from modern humans--the skulls are larger and have more pronounced
brow ridges--they have been assigned to a subspecies,
Homo sapiens idaltu.
Darkhawk has some pithy remarks about
people who
flaunt their sins in public.
The city of Toronto is now issuing
marriage
licenses to same-sex couples, in response to an Ontario court decision
that limiting marriage to mixed-sex couples violates the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms.
The Ontario premier is making "yes but" noises, saying that the province won't be following suit.
He said he has no objection to same-sex marriages, but believes there are legal concerns about how children would be affected."What two people do in a relationship with each other is really none of anybody else's business," he said.
"Now there are other issues of course that are involved with that and some of them are fiscal or monetary and some of them involve children. Those are different matters."
Mr. Eves says it's up to the federal government to decide if same-sex marriages should be legalized in Canada.
He may be right that this should be a federal decision, but the fiscal or child custody issues are the same as in a mixed-sex marriage.
Copyright 2003 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.