ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 664

Swinging Between Extremes In Giving Scientific Credit Where Credit Is Due

Editor's Blog





Photo credit:

Nobels go to only three scientists max, while some papers have as many authors as members of this audience. © Nobel Media AB, Alexander Mahmoud

The headline on the first page of China Daily on October 6 was striking: China wins first Nobel prize in medicine. Actually, Dr Tu Youyou of the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine won the prize, not the country.

Rising Seas Threaten To Drown Important Mangrove Forests, Unless We Intervene

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Überraschungsbilder/Wikimedia

Mangroves are some of the world’s most important trees. They provide food and resources for people and animals, protect coasts, and store huge amounts of carbon. The world’s largest mangrove forest - the Sundarbans in the Bay of Bengal - supports millions of livelihoods. In terms of the services they provide, they are worth nearly US$200,000 per hectare per year.

The Blue Bottles Are Coming, But What Exactly Are These Creatures?

Plants and Animals





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An Indo-Pacific Man-o-war, AKA bluebottle. Michael Fried/Wikimedia

Blue bottles have been washing up on Sydney beaches by the bucketload recently. With their annual arrival, many questions and myths about these creatures seem to be drifting around as well.

What exactly are blue bottles? Are you really supposed to pee on their stings? How do you keep a day at the beach from turning into a real pain?

Let’s take a closer look at these mysterious sea dwellers.

What Are Blue Bottles?

Death Of A Landscape: Why Have Thousands Of Trees Dropped Dead In New South Wales?

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Ghost gum. Mark Roy/Flickr CC BY 2.0

Trees die – that’s a fact of life. But is the death of an entire iconic landscape of Eucalyptus in the Cooma-Monaro region of New South Wales natural?

For over a decade, large stands of Eucalyptus viminalis, commonly known as Ribbon Gum or Manna Gum, have been gradually declining in health, and now stand like skeletons in huge tree graveyards.

Pluto Mission Targets Next Kuiper Belt Object

“When we were first proposing the mission NASA called for not just a flyby of Pluto, but further study of ancient Kuiper Belt objects, the building blocks of the small planets of the solar system. And so we designed the spacecraft to be able to do that.”

Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons Mission that zipped past Pluto July 14th. He spoke October 11th at the ScienceWriters2015 meeting on the campus of MIT.

“Now we have to go to NASA with a funding proposal to make this real, but we’ve already found our targets…the extended mission that we plan to fly that we will propose next spring to NASA will result in a flyby of a small Kuiper Belt object on January 1st, 2019. We found these targets with the Hubble Space Telescope. They’re very faint, they’re very hard to do. You can’t find them from the ground. We had five potential targets, we ended up selecting the one that we want to fly to in August. And in fact, in just over two weeks we’ll be firing the engines on New Horizons to retarget in that direction for that flyby…

“It doesn’t have a real name yet, just a license plate. It’s called 2014 MU69. I promise we’ll do better before the flyby. But this is going to be a really fascinating target scientifically. Because this is an object about 10 times bigger and a thousand times more massive than the comet that Rosetta is orbiting. And that comet, by the way, is from the Kuiper Belt, it just came down into the inner solar system due to orbital dynamics. And this object that we’re going to fly by is also about a thousand times less massive than Pluto. So logarithmically it’s perched right in the middle between the comet that we’re studying with Rosetta and Pluto, the small planet that we just flew by and studied with New Horizons. And we’re going to hopefully be able to connect the dots of planetary accretion by studying this object and its composition. It’s been in this deep freeze for 4 billion years, and it should teach us a lot about the origin of the planets of the Kuiper Belt.”

—Steve Mirsky

(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)

Check Out This Drone Footage Of China’s Insanely Huge Radio Telescope

Technology





Photo credit:

China Central Television (CCTV+) /YouTube

China is in the final stages of building the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. The state-owned China Central Television has released drone footage showing their progress, as well as the vertigo-inducing size of it.

Incredible New Images Of Jupiter Reveal Details Behind Shrinking Great Red Spot

Space





Photo credit:

NASA

Jupiter: Are you ready for your close-up? A collection of images of the gargantuan planet, taken by Hubble, have been amalgamated into a planetary portrait, the first in a series of annual portraits of the gas giant members of the Solar System. Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot, its dramatic cloud cover, and even a new elusive wave-like structure comprised of gas have been documented in incredible detail by NASA.

Echoless Light Observed For The First Time

Physics





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EWS light modes inside an optic fiber / CUDOS

For the first time, scientists have observed an echoless state of light, something that could improve the quality of signals in technologies such as Wi-Fi routers, mobile phones, and lasers. On top of that, it could be used in several medical applications.

The phenomenon, known as Eisenbud-Wigner-Smith (EWS) states, was first theorized in 1948. A wave in this state will reach its destination unchanged, independently of the scattering it might have experienced during transmission.

Physicists Discover Particle Made Entirely Of Nuclear Force

Physics





Photo credit:

Particle Trails by starsandspirals, via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0

Scientists at the Technische Universität Wien (Vienna University of Technology) believe they have found a very elusive particle: a glueball. Glueballs are unstable particles made up entirely of gluons, the bosons that carry the nuclear force that makes protons and neutrons stick to each other inside atomic nuclei.

Cassini Starts Flyby Through Enceladus’ Ice Volcano Plumes

Space





Photo credit:

NASA

With Mars, Pluto and Ceres grabbing all the headlines at the moment, you’d be forgiven for having never heard of Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn.