This new study is an adventure in understanding understanding: “Can Rodents Conceive Hyperbolic Spaces?” Eugenio Urdapilleta, Francesca Troiani, Federico Stella, Alessandro Treves, arXiv1502.02435, February 9, 2015. Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at SISSA in Trieste, Italy, explain: “The grid cells discovered in the rodent medial entorhinal cortex have been […]
Tag: space
Forgotten Hardware: How to Urinate in a Spacesuit
Pretty much everyone asks, at one time or another, “How do astronauts pee?” Hunter Hollins [pictured here] exerted considerable scholarship to provide a good answer, which you can read in Hollins’s study: “Forgotten Hardware: How to Urinate in a Spacesuit,” Hunter Hollins, Advances in Physiology Education, vol. 37, 2013, pp. 123-128. The author, at the National Air […]
Holes in donuts – the philosophical implications (part 2)
In 2001, professor Achille C. Varzi, of Columbia University, New York, very probably became the first philosopher to author a paper focusing specifically on the ramifications of holes in donuts (that’s ‘doughnuts’ in the UK), as we reported. But the paper wasn’t, in the literal sense, the last word on donut holes. In 2012 the subject […]
Holes in doughnuts – the philosophical implications (part 1)
Achille C. Varzi, who is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York, is interested in the philosophical implications of holes and voids, prompting a unique investigation into a special subset of hole-bearing entities – namely doughnuts (that’s ‘donuts’ US). “A doughnut always comes with a hole. If you think you can come up with […]
A Brief History of Fridge Magnets [video]
The Tripe Marketing Board presents A Brief History of Fridge Magnets: BONUS: The history continues past that point, of course. Part of it is documented in this study: “Design, manufacture, and test of an adiabatic demagnetization Refrigerator Magnet for use in space,” Steve Milward, Stephen Harrison, Robin Stafford Allen, Ian D. Hepburn, Christine Brockley-Blatt [pictured […]
Wassersug and the frogs in space
Jason Goldman, writing in The Guardian, today tells of the long history of frogs being sent (by humans) into space for scientific purposes: “Frogs in space: one giant leap indeed“. Ig Nobel Prize winner Richard Wassersug [pictured here] has an intimate relationship with the history of frogs in space. Among his publications in that realm: “Emesis and […]
Best space music videos: Hadfield/Bowie & Coleman/Anderson/Bach
These are our picks for best space music videos of the past few years. In our view, they qualify as being improbable in all the best senses of that word. Both videos show performances done by musician-astronauts in spacecraft orbiting the earth. Chris Hadfield performs David Bowie‘s “Space Oddity”: Cady Coleman and Ian Anderson (of […]
Worm-generated wormholes record history in space and time
Wormholes — what are they good for? This study suggests one possible answer: “Wormholes record species history in space and time,” S. Blair Hedges, Biology Letters, vol. 9, no. 1. February 2013. The author, at Penn State University, reports: “I show that printed wormholes in rare books and artwork are trace fossils of wood-boring species […]
Eminent space-dinosaurs self-plagiarism headline
Today’s Headline of the Day appears in the Nature newsblog: Eminent chemist denies self-plagiarism in ‘space dinosaurs’ paper (HT Ed Yong)
Tidy Swiss garbage collector up, up in the sky
Just as certain computer scientists and engineers dream of doing better garbage collection in computers (for a dream come true, see Microsoft’s “Fundamentals of Garbage Collection“), scientists and engineers at Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne dream of doing better garbage collection in space. Dead satellites. Detritus from collisions between now-dead satellites and whatever slammed into them. Junk that […]