Wisdom of the West: Science

Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts

20 May 2009

Time Travel

Say hello to Darwinius masillae! Her friends call her Ida.

She is a remarkably well-preserved 47 million year old fossil of an early primate.

"[S]he is the most complete and best preserved primate fossil ever uncovered. The skeleton is 95% complete and thanks to the unique location where she died, it is possible to see individual hairs covering her body and even the make-up of her final meal – a last vegetarian snack.

"This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals; with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters," said Sir David Attenborough who is narrating a BBC documentary on the find. "The more you look at Ida, the more you can see, as it were, the primate in embryo."

"This will be the one pictured in the textbooks for the next hundred years," said Dr Jørn Hurum, the palaeontologist from Oslo University's Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team to study the fossil. "It tells a part of our evolution that's been hidden so far. It's been hidden because the only [other] specimens are so incomplete and so broken there's nothing almost to study."

Here's a feature-chocked, explanatory Flash of the above picture. Here's a slide show.

Fossils are one of the ways we have to "travel" back in time. Ida gives us a snapshot of a creature that roamed the planet an unfathomably long time ago—for many people, their backwards time-horizon is somewhere between five and ten thousand years. Still, what if we could travel in time? What sort of protocols would we have to follow? In honor of the new Star Trek movie, this blogger over at Discover has tried to think it through:

0. "There are no paradoxes.
1. Traveling into the future is easy.
2. Traveling into the past is hard — but maybe not impossible.
3. Traveling through time is like traveling through space.
4. Things that travel together, age together.
5. Black holes are not time machines.
6. If something happened, it happened.
7. There is no meta-time.
8. You can’t travel back to before the time machine was built.
9. Unless you go to a parallel universe.
10. And even then, your old universe is still there."

03 January 2009

Retrospective

This picture from the Hubble Deep Field has been called the most important image in human history. You can play around with it here. Or here.

At year's end, we get a lot of 'best of' lists. I've compiled a few on the science/technology front. It's important—perhaps even wise—to pay attention to advances and discoveries in the sciences even if you are not a scientist. I'm not, but this stuff fascinates me no end. Important as well is to communicate scientific issues in understandable terms.

Here are the top 100 science news stories according to Discover magazine.

Here, according to National Geographic magazine, are the top ten archaeology finds of 2008. Archaeology Magazine has a different list.

Here is Cosmos Magazine's top ten news stories of 2008. The New Scientist lists its top ten articles about Cosmology. Tool around on their site; they have year-end reviews in other areas as well.

Generally: Here's USA Today's look back at the year in science. This is Science A GoGo's list of most interesting science news stories.

On a forward-looking note, here's Technology Review's look at ten emerging technologies. And, last but certainly not least, from The Edge.org's world question center is the Edge's annual question for this year, with answers aplenty: "WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" Lots of good, interesting, important information here.

Best to all for the New Year!
Jim H.