It Ain't That Funny... is it?

 

Skeleton

 

Northern Lights

Iceland and Norway may dazzle with northern-lights displays, but you don’t have to go abroad to enjoy a night beneath auroras. These kaleidoscopic swirls dance above the U.S.’s northernmost states—and we’re not just talking about northern-lights hunting in Alaska.

If and when the conditions are right, you can catch auroras in most northern-border states such as Maine or Montana. And catching the lights here isn’t merely a pipe dream: In early October 2021, northern lights painted the skies from New Hampshire to Glacier National Park. One month before that, aurora hunters caught them in North Dakota. And they danced as low as Muskegon, Michigan, in the spring.

Aurora experts say there’s more where that came from. The sun sparks northern lights during solar storms, when it emits charged particles that collide with Earth’s atmosphere, creating the glowing green, purple, and even red displays that top travelers’ bucket lists. In December 2019, the sun entered a new cycle of solar activity—and this transition bodes well for those eager to spot auroras.

“The solar cycle is associated with an increase in solar activity,” says Mike Shaw, an astrophotographer and co-founder of the annual Aurora Summit. Each solar cycle is roughly 11 years long; the mid-point, roughly five years in, is the peak of northern-lights activity, known as solar maximum. “A new cycle correspondingly increases aurora activity, so the next several years will be much better than the last several years,” Shaw says.
How (and where) to find U.S. northern lights

Whether it’s Norway or North Dakota, the same aurora-hunting guidelines apply: Look for a place with dark, clear skies and minimal obstructions to the north, where auroras appear. And unlike high-latitude locales like Iceland, the lower 48 enjoys nighttime darkness all year—that means aurora sightings can happen year-round. READ MORE...

Consciousness

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. 

The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells – known as neurons – each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections.

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. 

How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.

For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious inner world of consciousness – it was not taken to be a fitting topic for “serious science”. Things have changed a lot, and there is now broad agreement that the problem of consciousness is a serious scientific issue. 

But many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce consciousness.  READ MORE...

Bike Riders

 

Masquerading as Fish Tongue

Mouth dwelling isopods in different fish species. (Nico Smit, Int. J. Parasitol, 2014)

An unsuspecting worker at Galveston Island State Park on the western Gulf Coast in Texas found a fish with a surprise.

Within the Atlantic croaker's (Micropogonias undulatus) gaping mouth, where its tongue should have been, instead sat far too many legs for any mouth, or fish. These legs came with eyes, too.An isopod from the genus Cymothoa had replaced the croaker's tongue. Females of this group of crustaceans migrate up from the fish's gills, pinch, and siphon off the blood supply to the tongue until the organ withers and falls off. They then attach themselves onto the remaining fleshy stub, continuing to feast on their captive's blood for years.

"[It] happens to be the only known case where a parasite functionally replaces a host's organ," the park workers shared on their Facebook page.

Mark Fisher, science director at Texas Parks and Wildlife explained that these parasites are quite common in some fish species, like the spotted seatrout. While he'd never before seen one in an Atlantic croaker (Micropogonias undulatus), one 2015 study found the isopods were relatively fond of this particular host.

While the parasite, which can reach up to 8 mm long (0.3 inches), doesn't seem to change feeding habits of some of the fish it infects, it can lead to a reduction in their growth, a 2013 study found.

The researchers suggested this may be due to respiratory stress produced by receiving less oxygen over the long term, because the massive parasite clogging the mouth doesn't allow the fish to take up and filter as much oxygen from the water. Others attribute this decline to the parasite's draining of nutrients.

These findings were specific to the C. borbonica species infecting the Trachinotus botla fish. We're not sure which species has infested the mouth of the Atlantic croaker, although C. excisa is thought to have high host specificity towards this fish.  READ MORE...

 

Moving Clouds

 

The NFL and Slavery

Colin Kaepernick likens NFL process to slavery in Netflix special

“Colin in Black & White” aims to show the former NFL quarterback's life from high school to his current work as an activist

Colin Kaepernick's Netflix special drew scrutiny this week as the former NFL quarterback who hasn't played a down of football compared the NFL Draft process and training camp to slavery.

"Colin in Black & White" explored the former NFL star’s life from high school to the events that supposedly led him to become an advocate for social justice. One clip that had gone viral on social media showed Kaepernick comparing the scrutiny players receive from coaches to that of slavers

"What they don’t want you to understand is what’s being established is a power dynamic," Kaepernick says while walking through a staged NFL practice field. "Before they put you on the field, teams poke, prod, and examine you searching for any defect that might affect your performance."

Dancing

 

Hidden World - Earth's Inner Core

Earth's "solid" inner core might actually be a bit mushy, researchers now find.  For over half a century, the scientific community thought that Earth's inner core was a solid ball of compressed iron alloy surrounded by a liquid outer core. But new research, published Sept. 20 in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, suggests that the firmness of the planetary ball ranges from hard to semisoft to liquid metal.

"The more that we look at it, the more we realize it's not one boring blob of iron," Jessica Irving, a seismologist at the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "We're finding a whole new hidden world."

In some ways, Earth's inner core remains as mysterious as it was when Jules Verne published his fanciful "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 1864. Though scientists have known since the 1950s that our planet isn't hollow as Verne predicted, the planet's interior is still unexplored; the immense heat and pressure are simply too great for any human or human-made probe to travel there. "Unless something awful happens to our planet, we will never have a direct observation of Earth's core," Irving said.

Instead, geophysicists rely on seismic waves generated by earthquakes. By measuring these massive vibrations, scientists can reconstruct a picture of the planet's inner workings in a way that's "akin to a CT scan of a person," Irving said. These waves come in two main flavors: straight-line compressional waves and undulating shear waves. Each wave can speed up, slow down or bounce off of different mediums as it travels through the ground.  READ MORE...

Waves

 

Quantum Computing Primacy

The Pan team’s optical quantum computer uses a 144-mode interferometer to solve a Gaussian boson sampling problem with a factor-of-1024 speedup in computational time relative to a classical computer. Credit: Chao-Yang Lu/University of Science and Technology of China, via Physics.

Two teams in China are claiming that they have reached primacy with their individual quantum computers. Both have published the details of their work in the journal Physical Review Letters.

In the computer world, quantum primacy is the performance of calculations that are not feasible on conventional computers—others use the term "quantum advantage."

Over the past several years, several teams working with quantum computers have claimed to have reached primacy, but thus far have been met with skepticism due to questions about whether the algorithm used was the best choice possible, including the one used by Google. In this new effort, both teams are claiming that their computers leave no room for doubt.

Both of the teams in these new efforts were working at the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China, and both were led by physicist Jian-Wei Pan, who has become well known for his work with quantum entanglement.

In both efforts, the goal was to build a quantum computer capable of calculating the output probabilities of quantum circuits—a task that is relatively simple for a conventional computer to perform when there are just a few inputs and outputs. It grows increasingly difficult as the numbers rise until it becomes unfeasible.  READ MORE...

Rockets Away

 

Electric Vs. Gas Vehicles

Last year, Patrick Anderson went electric: He got a Porsche Taycan EV in dark blue.

Anderson, who is CEO of East Lansing-based economic consulting firm Anderson Economic Group, loves the zippy acceleration and "exciting" features the car offers. He also gets satisfaction in knowing that driving an EV benefits the environment, he said.

But Anderson's joy comes with a dark side.

"They are a wonderful driving experience. But at the same time, they're an enormous burden in time and in energy in finding chargers and getting them charged," Anderson said. "And you’re not really saving much in terms of charging costs ... you may be paying more.”

Costs to drive an EV compared with a gasoline car are detailed in a report Anderson Economic released Thursday called "Comparison: Real World Cost of Fueling EVs and ICE Vehicles."

The study has four major findings:

• There are four additional costs to powering EVs beyond electricity: cost of a home charger, commercial charging, the EV tax and "deadhead" miles.
• For now, EVs cost more to power than gasoline costs to fuel an internal combustion car that gets reasonable gas mileage.
• Charging costs vary more widely than gasoline prices.
• There are significant time costs to finding reliable public chargers — even then a charger could take 30 minutes to go from 20% to an 80% charge.

It is the first of a series of reports Anderson Economic Group will release. It started the project — an independent report — more than six months ago.  READ MORE...

Ride & Glide

 

Halloween

 

Halloween

 

A SNL Halloween

 

Halloween

Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago, mostly in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1.

This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.

In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes.

When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

Did you know? One quarter of all the candy sold annually in the U.S. is purchased for Halloween.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the 400 years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of bobbing for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.