Thursday Throughput for 8/1/19
[ThTh1] Global warming is not a uniform process. There are years when it progresses slowly or even regresses. And there are years where it progresses rapidly. We’re currently in a cycle of very rapid advancement. Last week, the Greenland ice sheet shed a record-shattering 12.5 billion tons of ice in a single day. We are also on pace to break the 2012 record for the minimum in Arctic Sea Ice. You may remember that one because when it recovered very slightly in 2013, a bunch of climate skeptics proclaimed that we were setting record levels of arctic sea ice (we weren’t).
I’m not one of the “we have 12 years to save the planet” doomsayers. But it does feel like we are approaching an inflection point. We will survive; but our options for how we will survive are narrowing rapidly.
[ThTh2] Do you want to know what TV signals are currently being received by the nearest exoplanets? Twitter’s got you covered.
[ThTh3] Speaking of exoplanets, we’re getting cloer and closer to discovering Earth analogues.
[ThTh4] My mind is bent:
This arrow by mathematician and sculptor Kokichi Sugihara can't point left. Here's how it works: It's 3D-printed with a bunch of curves our brains don't register. pic.twitter.com/Xa32GrI7ii
— Khai (@ThamKhaiMeng) August 4, 2019
[ThTh5] Telomeres are little piece of DNA on the ends of your chromosomes that protect your DNA from disruption, kind of like the aglets on the ends of shoelaces. Shorter telomeres indicate greater cellular age. One way to keep you telomeres short and your cellular age young? Sex. At least for women. Although, I suspect it’s not the sex itself that’s keeping the telomeres short, but the lifestyle that is more conducive to having time for sex.
[ThTh6] There is a growing body of evidence that autism is genetic.
[ThTh7] I have not observed at these facilities but used to spend a lot of time in Chile at observatories. [H/T: Andrew]
[ThTh8] A film noir version of the video of comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
[ThTh9] Metaphor alert.
[ThTh10] We live in a warped and twisted galaxy.
ThTh11]
Thing I will never get over: just how thin Saturn’s rings are.
(Image from @CassiniSaturn; info here: https://t.co/WayHWhF75H) pic.twitter.com/tNP2kqscB0
— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) August 1, 2019
ThTh1 – you hit the proverbial nail on the head. Adaptation and mitigation (to say nothing of eliminating emissions in the first place) will take time. They will take effort. They will take political will. and all three are in short supply at the moment.
And sadly science won’t incontrovertibly know we have passed an tipping point until its well and truly gone.Report
ThTh6: The problem I pointed to in the study last week stems from this:
So it doesn’t rule out that up to 74.9% of autism in Finland could be environmental, or that 0.0% of autism in Israel is environmental. That seems highly unlikely, if not inexplicable.Report
[ThTh10] — Well that’s odd.
So what the fuck? Why is our galaxy warped like that?
We talk a lot about the “hidden order” of nature, but I think perhaps someday we’ll hit a real limit on what we can model. What I mean is, there are perhaps forces so subtle and deep that they can only be observed either on the galactic (or more) scale, or else as “weirdness” at the Planck scale. In either case, we might be able to observe the effects, but never really piece together the underlying dynamics” In other words, we’ll never have a bunch of differential equations that describe a “closed system” that include the hidden effects. We’ll just know they are there, because the closed systems we can model never get the correct answers.
I’m not sure what to think of this.Report
There are other warped galaxies. Note that the study Michael referenced is a much more accurate confirmation of previously existing observations of the Milky Way. One hypothesis that was put forward in the past is the Magellanic Clouds interacting with the Milky Way’s dark matter.
When in doubt, blame dark matter.
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It’s what I do when I do something that annoys my wife.Report
A “drum like” resonance behavior makes a lot of sense.
It emits very low frequency gravitational waves! I mean, very low frequency.
Deep in the void, Azathoth is rocking out to the Milky Way’s sick beat!
To my broader point: if dark matter is “really stuff,” and if it only interacts via gravity, then over time I expect we will come to understand it. It would be hard to observe, obviously — which is kind of the point. But we could observe it precisely via it’s gravitational effect. It would just be a kind of stuff, and “it only interacts via gravity” would be the entirety of its physics. That’s it. That’s all it is. That would be kinda cool.
However, imagine if dark matter can interact with other dark matter in complicated ways. Now, imagine if these interactions are usually too small to have any effect that can be observed through gravitational changes, but every so often, cumulatively, they have an effect.
If that happens, it is plausible that physicists will never be able to tease out those forces. In other words, whatever field equations we can write down to describe the whole of the universe, those terms will never show up, since we cannot “see inside them.” Instead, every so often, weird shit would happen.
(This is probably an obvious thought to real-life scientists, but it’s fun to think about.)Report
ThTh4: Here is a similar object with a viewer so you can rotate the object in 3-space and see what’s going on. The page includes links to downloadable files so you can print your own.Report
The lighting has to play a huge role in how that works. Move the shadows around and the effect will change.Report
If I were going to print one, I’d do it in black.
Once you know it’s “strange” and you look at the 3D rendering, you notice that the shadow that the object casts doesn’t match up with the shape you think you’re seeing.Report
And in a material that has a matte finish.Report