As it turns out, hell is actually populated by realists, not sinners.
- Palaeolithic rock art, similar to that found in the Lascaux caves in France, has been discovered in Upper Egypt.
- Wreckage of Spanish galleon yields treasure: a chest full of jewels, gold chains and more than 1,000 rare black pearls. More. How much of the Santa Margarita’s treasure remains unfound?
- Future shock: Many of our wildest speculations are becoming reality.
- Mainstream: Saturn’s ‘dead’ moons, Tethys and Dione, may be volcanically alive after all.
- Alternative: Saturn’s electric moons.
- Hannes Alfvén: A short biography of a scientific heretic.
- The Plasma Universe: Theory and background. Space plasmas.
- Revolutionary new treatment for neurological diseases uses an injection to tweak the way genes work in the brain.
- The Total Perspective Vortex: The typical person depends on three happy delusions for the self-esteem needed to function through a normal day. It’s when these fantasies start to unravel that problems arise.
- Circadian rhythms dominate all life functions by impacting the orchestration of gene oscillation. I’m feeling a sudden need for black-out curtains.
- Deprived bacteria grow up meaner. Enough deprivation makes everything meaner.
- ‘Extreme empathizers’ feel your pain – literally.
- What happens when nations fail to police the global pipeline of pharmaceutical ingredients?
- Why the pet food industry is killing our pets.
- Do dogs have a sense of humour? And other questions science hasn’t answered. Michael Hanlon’s Ten Questions Science Can’t Answer (Yet!) is available at Amazon US & UK.
Quote of the Day:
On our planet, we inhabit a calm little oasis of ordinary solids, liquids and gases that is immersed in a perpetually blowing, roiling, flaring erupting substance of a very different kind, called plasma. Sometimes called the fundamental state of matter to distinguish it from its tamer cousins, plasma makes up more than 99 percent of the visible universe. The plasma side of the cosmic ledger includes the seething atmospheres and interiors of stars, the wind of particles that our sun flings outward into space, Earth’s cocoon-like magnetosphere, the tenuous wasteland between stars and galaxies, and fantastically energetic displays such as quasars, supernovas and parts of the compact spinning stars that spray out beams of x-rays like some kind of hellish fire hose. (More here.)
Adapted from The Pervasive Plasma State, an essay written by James Glanz for the American Physical Society.
