FRONT EARS OF SCIENCE
Kim Il Sung, Didn’t He?
Mark notes that the astro-aquatic North Korean would-be satellite, terror to aliens and fish of the North Pacific alike, is named ‘Kwangmyongsong.’
From this he infers that the next project will be named ‘Singyourownspecialsong’ or ‘Shammalammadingdong,’ in the first instance extending the astro-oceanic theories of the Mamas and the Papas, and in the second the suborbital projections of Otis Day and the Knights. Rolling Stone will become the premier political journal of the Manchurian peninsula.
Using the influence he’s acquired with his Obama lawn sign, Mark is planning to propose a missile system named ‘Kingkongsingsalongsong.’
Who’s Smarter, the Chinese or the Arabs?
Seven thousand years ago, Chinese farmers in the Yangtze River valley led a desperate existence, living in fear of wild rice led by lieutenant kernels in spiked helmets trampling their villages and goring the non-existent farm animals they had not yet learned to domesticate.
Or perhaps we’ve misinterpreted the latest field research.
Prevailing opinion has been that the Chinese were the first to farm food crops when they domesticated rice some 10,000 years ago. Now archaeologists have found residue of wild rice in 6,600-year-old dwellings along the Yangtze.
This would seem to indicate that they were still eating wild rather than cultivated rice in China long after people in the Middle East had domesticated their grains – wheat and barley – and learned how to farm around 8000 years ago.
But bragging rights are still up for grabs. The 10,000 year date was reaffirmed as recently as 2006 by such impartial observers as Leping Jiang, and Li Liu of the Zhejiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and the new paper disputing that claim is being dismissed as simplistic by Yan Pan of Fudan University in Shanghai.
You got a problem with that?
A Thoroughly Unendangered Species
Shades of Jonathan Swift, who saw all this coming 300 years ago.
Prof. Roger Hendrix of Pitt says that while you may be infected by bacteria – which are too small to be seen except by other bacteria – those tiny creatures are themselves infected by a form of viruses called phages.
And how small is a phage? If you had a better tweezers, you could stick two billion of them to the back of a postage stamp. Dr. Hendrix estimates that there are a quadrillion quadrillion phages – the most numerous creatures on earth. If each were enlarged to the size of an average beetle, earth would be covered by phages to a depth of 30,000 miles.
And Swift? Long before we knew about bacteria, viruses, or phages, he explained:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em
And so proceed ad infinitum.
‘IBM Withdraws Bid for Sun’
Greedy bastards. The above headline appeared on the Monday front page of the Times — a signal that the era of overweening corporate ambition has crested. Now, we know they claim they were talking about acquiring Sun Microsystems, not the home star of our solar system. But we only have their word for that and, anyway, “sun microsystems” is an oxymoron, thus by definition non-existent, which is why its stock is selling for $4.
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The Year 102009
What will life be like for your descendants 100,000 years from now?
(Before you forget, put $10 in the bank for them right now. In 100 years it will be worth $34 million, and in 100,000 years, they can buy their own galaxy.)
Two astronomers have taken the long view in a book that’s been well received by a big-name reviewer (Giovanni Bignami) in the AAAS journal Science. The book is Surviving 1,000 Centuries, by Roger-Maurice Bonnet and Lodewijk Woltjer.
Barring catastrophes (asteroids, toxic volcanoes, gamma ray bursts, failure to deal with global warming), our 11 billion descendants will be 10 feet tall and live to 130 years but despite their size and numbers will still have enough to eat, and nuclear fusion will keep the lights on.
Here at Front Ears, we’ve studied the problem using fruit flies in our simulation to accelerate the passage of generations by fucking their brains out. What did we find? (all together, now…)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
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The Black Arts
Just when everything seems darkest, Science rides to the rescue and invents what? The darkest material in the universe.
In theoretical physics a “black body” would be a totally light-absorptive material that reflects none of the waves that strike it — so it would send no reflected light or color to your eye. It’s the absolute zero of brightness.
This week a team of Japanese nanotechnologists announced that they’ve come very close to that theoretical limit. Their material is a sheet of carbon nanotubes that captures virtually all of the photons striking it. There’s no light at the end of their tunnels.
Now if only they can find it.
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Bloodsucker Batteries
It’s not their usual occupation, but yeast cells like the ones that make your bread and your beer could also make a good living feeding on your blood.
That’s not a threat; it’s a promise. Researchers at the University of British Columbia have constructed a tiny prototype battery powered by blood-eating colonies of yeast. The promise: this could make it possible to power pacemakers, sensors, and other implants indefinitely without any need (or surgery) to change the batteries.
It’s nowhere near ready for commercial application, but at least they’ve proved the principle. Let’s hope they’re careful about garbage disposal, so the rejects don’t go forth and multiply and then come back in force, hungry for blood.
I mean, how do you drive a wooden stake through the heart of a yeast cell?
Dept. of Useless Statistics
If Shakespeare were still alive, and if he had forgotten all this time to trim his nails, they would be 86 feet long. He would be very hard pressed to write any more plays or to wear shoes.
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Errata
Our March 13 backgrounder on astronomy should have referred to “the 1781 discovery of Uranus.”
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LOVE them graphics!
Comment by Clive Barnes — April 10, 2009 @ 10:57 am
Thanks, Clive. You should know — oh, and sorry to read your obituary. All of our graphics are grown in our labs using graphite fibers, spinning magnets, and mucilage. Mark wrote some neural software that reads the stories and creates an interpretive template which guides the magnetic stylus, thus avoiding the costs of hiring temperamental artists.
Comment by Al — April 10, 2009 @ 7:53 pm