Weird Sand Sculptures

Sand pillars decorate the shore by Lake Michigan at Tiscornia Park, with the North Pier Lighthouse in the

 background, in St. Joseph, Michigan. (Image credit: Terri Abbott)

Bizarre sandy sculptures rising from the beach by Lake Michigan caught the eyes of at least two photographers in early January, who posted their images of the nature-made marvels online.

But what are these sandy statues and how on earth did they come to be?

Their construction depends on several factors, including sand-to-water content and wind conditions, said Daniel Bonn, a physicist and head of the van der Waals-Zeeman Institute at the University of Amsterdam.

The pillars, sometimes called hoodoos, were different heights, anywhere from 3 to 20 inches (7.6 to 51 centimeters) tall, said Terri Abbott, a nature photographer who lives in northern Indiana. Abbott was visiting Tiscornia Park in St. Joseph, Michigan, on Jan. 8, when she noticed the stunning shapes on the snowy beach.

"Laying on the ground and shooting through these sculptures made it seem like a different planet," Abbott told Live Science in a Facebook message. "They were frozen and hard to the touch. The intricate and ever-so-sharp edges made them each amazing in their own way."

Abbott had never seen sculptures like this before. "I could not believe how perfectly chiseled they were," she added.  READ MORE...

Laws of Logic

Physicists are translating commonsense principles into strict mathematical constraints on how our universe must have behaved at the beginning of time.  Patterns in the ever-expanding arrangement of galaxies might reveal secrets of the universe’s first moments.

M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit III (1959). M.C. Escher

For over 20 years, physicists have had reason to feel envious of certain fictional fish: specifically, the fish inhabiting the fantastic space of M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit III woodcut, which shrink to points as they approach the circular boundary of their ocean world. If only our universe had the same warped shape, theorists lament, they might have a much easier time understanding it.

Escher’s fish lucked out because their world comes with a cheat sheet — its edge. On the boundary of an Escher-esque ocean, anything complicated happening inside the sea casts a kind of shadow, which can be described in relatively simple terms. In particular, theories addressing the quantum nature of gravity can be reformulated on the edge in well-understood ways. The technique gives researchers a back door for studying otherwise impossibly complicated questions. Physicists have spent decades exploring this tantalizing link.

Inconveniently, the real universe looks more like the Escher world turned inside out. This “de Sitter” space has a positive curvature; it expands continuously everywhere. With no obvious boundary on which to study the straightforward shadow theories, theoretical physicists have been unable to transfer their breakthroughs from the Escher world. orld, the fewer tools we have and the less we understand the rules of the game,” said Daniel Baumann, a cosmologist at the University of Amsterdam.  READ MORE...