Ask Mr. Cosmology

By: | February 14, 2020

On October 25, 2010, LWON welcomed a new occasional feature, “Ask Mr. Cosmology,” which invites readers to contribute to a mailbag full of questions about…The Wonders of the Universe! This entry comes from March 26, 2012.

Q: Can neutrinos travel faster than light?

Mr. Cosmology: Depends what you mean by “light.” Light, as in light rail? Yes. Light, as in electromagnetic radiation? Almost certainly not. Light, as in light beer? Definitely not; that stuff will zip right through you.

Q: You’ve met a lot of cosmologists. What are they like?

Mr. Cosmology: They sit around in their underwear all day, they’re drunk by 3 in the afternoon, and their idea of a good time is chasing squirrels off the garage roof with a baseball bat.

Q: Really?

Mr. Cosmology: Oh, wait. Sorry—Mr. Cosmology was thinking of the next-door neighbor when he was growing up.

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Update: Underwater Photography

By: | February 13, 2020
Yellow barrel sponge, underwater, surrounded by sand and soft corals.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about practicing underwater photography on the junk at the bottom of the public pool – band-aids, mostly – and my hope that I would find something better to photograph in Belize.

Good news: I did. I saw a ton of lovely fish, some sea turtles, and a lot of really neat sponges. And not a single rogue band-aid.

My photos aren’t the most spectacular underwater photos that have ever been taken, but they are the most mine, and I love them.

A Flamingo tongue mollusk on a bare stalk of soft coral.
A diver silhouetted behind a coral fan.
This feels like some kind of underwater cliche, but I guess I have to get through the cliches before I can take good pictures.
A fish looks out of a sponge.
Big sponge, grumpy fish.

Photos: Me.

The Ungovernable Rodent

By: | February 12, 2020

In the early 1930s, Britain found itself at war. The “invading armies” were “vicious (and) destructive,” threatened “man’s dominion of the earth,” and seemed capable of propagating at almost supernatural speeds. Politicians denounced the assailants in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Scientists, called in to manage the unfolding debacle, prophesied utter devastation. “No limits other than the coasts can now be put with certainty to the infested area,” lamented one observer.

And what was the vile alien hellbent on conquering the British Isles? As the environmental historian Peter Coates reports in a delightful recent paper, it was that most ferocious, indefatigable, calamitous of beasts: the North American muskrat. 

Muskrats — stout semiaquatic rodents, the size of teacup poodles, that excavate burrows, build lodges, and mark territories with their namesake scent — had been introduced to Britain in the late 1920s to provide cannon fodder for the fur industry. Although initially confined in a 60-acre pool behind mesh fencing, the critters (which aren’t actually rats) didn’t much tolerate captivity, and quickly gnawed their way to freedom. Soon wild ‘skrats were roaming Shropshire and Sussex, burrowing into canal walls and streambanks, and reproducing like, well, rodents. 

Commence public freak-out: The invaders, zoologists and journalists predicted, would undermine railroads, breach dams, destroy flood defenses, transmit diseases, and just generally smear the weird gross stink of America around the bucolic British countryside. Back in their native environs, scientists averred, they’d been constrained by carnivores and cold weather. By contrast, Britain’s mild climate and predator-free landscapes would create a perfect Petri dish. There were thousands at large; no, hundreds of thousands; no a million. The rodents, Coates writes, had been “reborn through self-release, producing an unpredicted, unsanctioned beastly place widely characterized as “muskrat country.”

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Sweaty Monkeys

By: | February 11, 2020

The people around me often have burning questions. (This happens to other People of LWON as well. ) These people are often very upset that I do not know the answer. Why do I not know, for example, exactly what would happen if the center of the earth explodes? Why do I not know how many light years it is from here to that star? Why do I not know what’s for dinner?

I have a backlog of questions, but I have finally found the answer to one I was asked four years ago. At the time, it was extremely urgent, at least until someone asked why Peter couldn’t come over to play. But now, I give you. . . do monkeys sweat?

Yes. At least, some of them do.

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Actually, Frankenstein was a baker

By: | February 10, 2020
Danger: Not only will this kill you, it will hurt the whole time you're dying
Is this sign about electricity or gluten-free bread?

Look, nobody *likes* gluten-free food. It’s a necessary evil for some, and there’s a whole conversation about how many people actually need to be eating it. Which I am absolutely swerving here today! Instead, today I’m going to tell you about the scientists who were so desperate to create edible gluten-free baked goods that they electrocuted their dough like it was Frankenstein’s monster.

Bread is apparently the most difficult food to make without gluten. You may have had experiences with GF breadstuffs, but if not, let the people of LWON tell you. “I have eaten gluten-free muffins twice,” says Ann. “The first time because they had stuff in them that I liked, the second time because I couldn’t believe they would be that bad. But they were. They really are not food, they are muffin-shaped despair.” Okay so muffins are out, but what about bread? “I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to try any other gluten free food.”

“I have tried gluten-free bread,” volunteers Jennifer. “No taste, texture all wrong, sand and rubble wrapped in a hand towel, nothing really good about it.”

“Gluten-free bread is super good in relation to eating cardboard,” says Erik, a self-described “glutard” (their word, not mine). “But it’s not so good when compared to actual bread.” This may explain why, he says, “we glutards swap our favorite bread brands like rare baseball cards. Because deep down we are all under the delusion that we might find one that doesn’t suck.”

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Dinner at the Nursing Home

By: | February 7, 2020

Under institutional lighting, the chopped chicken in BBQ sauce is like oily pet food on a doughy white bun, and its juice runs into the glistening orange fruit from a can and the scoop of too-sweet slaw that nobody ordered. The woman across the table, Linda, who has a Scottish accent and is a low talker, admits she has “episodes” of not remembering, then she has one, right then, loses her train of thought while talking about losing her trains of thought. She is so tragically lonely. And there is Lynette, most of her teeth gone, Chicago Bears sweatshirt too tight and deeply stained. She has such a big smile, is chatty, loud, kind. She forks up the food, no qualms.

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Guest Post: Weird Rock, Weirder Story

By: | February 6, 2020

“There is an aspect to this story that is weirder than you can imagine.”

That sentence was e-mailed to me by a geologist, Jan Kramers, at the University of Johannesburg in the waning days of 2017. I had e-mailed him about a paper of his in Geochimica et Cosmochmica Acta. The title of the paper had caught my eye: “Petrography of the carbonaceous, diamond-bearing stone ‘Hypatia’ from southwest Egypt: A contribution to the debate on its origin.”

I think it was the name, “Hypatia.” It struck me as celestial, mysterious. Hypatia, I learned as I scrambled and stumbled by way through the paper’s dense geochemistry, is the name of  pieces of what was once a single stone, found in southwest Egypt in 1996 by an Egyptian gem hunter and writer named Dr. Aly A. Barakat.

As stones go, it’s a strange one, although you wouldn’t tell by looking. Its fragments are drab, jagged, crumb-sized bits of rust-flecked gray. It was found in a nearly featureless, windswept desert and its mineral makeup didn’t match anything in the nearby geology, hinting that it might have landed there as a meteorite. Yet even for an extraterrestrial object, its makeup is unusual. It possesses enormous amounts of carbon and relatively little silicon, which is the reverse of what’s typically found in meteorites.

In 2013, Kramers and colleagues announced in Earth and Planetary Science Letters that it was actually a tiny piece of comet nucleus that had fallen to Earth some time long ago. Their 2017 paper revealed that much of its carbon was made of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the stuff interstellar dust is made of. The intense heat and pressure generated as this alien rock hurtled toward and hit the Egyptian desert transformed some of those PAHs into microdiamonds, forming a kind of sooty diamond crust around the stone that protected it from the withering desert until Barakat dug it up. The impact may also have been responsible for the numerous tiny, jewel-like pieces of glass strewn throughout western Egypt and eastern Libya known as Libyan desert glass.

The University of Johannesburg issued a press release accompanying the paper, which claimed Hypatia’s specific geochemical ratios suggested it predates the creation of our solar system, and that’s the headline that a few media outlets picked up on. But it was a throwaway mention in the paper, omitted from the press release, that intrigued me: “At the time of writing, the whereabouts of less than 4 g of Hypatia’s matter are known to us.”

So that’s why I first e-mailed Kramers in December 2017, asking where the rest of it had gone. He asked me to Skype him. When I did, he told me one of the craziest damn stories I’ve ever heard.

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Variations on a Vegetable

By: | February 5, 2020
Romanesco: My dinner, my muse, my photo

Tonight I contemplate this head of Romanesco broccoli, soon to be cut up, slathered in olive oil, and roasted. As you can see, its edible flowers, weirdly known as curds, form a pyramid of identical, spiraling turrets. It’s a classic example of fractal geometry: a shape that, like a fiddlehead fern or lightning bolt, can be broken down over and over again into smaller parts, each a miniature version of the whole.

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being,” writes aesthetics scholar Elaine Scarry in her 1998 essay “On Beauty and Being Just.” “It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.”

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