Science Made Cool

Water Birth

Welcome a 162 pound, 5-foot-4-inch baby boy, born on Monday to Puiji, a beluga whale at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. He was a breech birth (that’s head-first, for a whale), but popped right to the surface for his first breath anyway. He got the hang of surfacing to breathe pretty quickly, but his swimming still needs work. As a rule, baby cetaceans are pretty floppy creatures (their bodies have to fold in half to fit inside the uterus – see the image below from Etnier, et al. 2008), but his tail should stiffen up in a few weeks and make him a far more efficient swimmer. 

Reference: Etnier, S. A., W. A. McLellan, J. Blum and D. A. Pabst 2008. Ontogenetic changes in the structural stiffness of the tailstock of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). J. exp. Biol. 211: 3205-3213. 

Another Story from the Twisted Imagination of Jim Cambias

I guess he's too shy or modest or something to post it here, but Jim has a story in the latest issue of Shimmer. It's called "The Wolf and the Schoolmaster," and it's a steampunk animal tale commissioned for their Clockwork Jungle issue. They've also published an interview with Jim about the story.

New Frontiers In Robotic Creepiness

At times I think Japan must have some secret Ministry of Stuff That Will Freak Out The Foreign Devils. How else to explain this: A Tokyo department store is now selling robot duplicates of people. That's right, for Christmas you can give that special someone an exact android replica. (Presumably their first U.S. outlet will be in Stepford, Connecticut.)

I don't know about the rest of you, but if my wife told me she was getting a robot duplicate of me made, I'd start brushing up on my robot combat tips at the very least. Or go hole up in a bunker in the mountains with Sarah Connor and the gang.

Probably the creepiest aspect of this incredibly creepy story is that apparently most of the buyers so far have bought robot duplicates of themselves. Either they're the world's worst narcissists, or they're such boring people they figure nobody else will be able to tell the difference anyway.

Huh?

This is one of the most bizarre philosophy-of-science ideas I've seen in a long time. It seems the ESA's Planck satellite is gathering an incredible amount of data on the cosmic background microwave radiation. A group of astronomers at Case are afraid that releasing this metric load of information will actually harm the science of cosmology.

The concern is that the Planck data is so comprehensive, and will be the state of the art for the forseeable future, so there won't be any new information to provide a reality check for any models based on the data. So, the argument goes, the ESA shouldn't release all of it at once, but rather at a slow trickle.

The trouble with this argument are that:  1) it negates the entire purpose of launching the Planck observatory in the first place, and 2) seems to contain a logical fallacy.

1:  The Planck satellite gathered an immense amount of high-quality information about cosmic background radiation; far more than previous instruments could have collected. The concerned trio of cosmologists want to release the Planck information very slowly -- which is to say, as if it was being collected by those older, less sophisticated instruments. Why bother launching Planck at all, then?

2:  The fear about theories not being testable with new data is based on a flawed assumption. If the data comes in over ten years instead of all at once, and each year some cosmologist comes up with a new theory which then gets invalidated by next year's data, then after ten years we've gone through ten revolutions in cosmology, each based on more and better data than before. The final theory (they seem to believe) would be the most robust, as it would be the product of ten iterations of test-and-revise.

Trouble is, the only reason we could tell that final theory is "better" than the first is that it fits the data better. Which means it would be the same as a theory based on the Planck data released in a huge lump. Plus it would save cosmologists the time and effort devising nine theories which aren't as useful at explaining the data.

So:  LET THE DATA FLOW LIKE A BURSTING DAM!

 

Fish Bots!

Japan is a country which one could fairly describe as being obsessed with robots, and obsessed with seafood. So perhaps it's only natural that artist and educator Masamichi Hayashi has combined the two great national passions by making robot fish.

He isn't the first to dabble in pisciform cybernetics. Nekton Research has been doing the same for years now, and is now part of the growing iRobot empire. Their fishbots even incorporate the same mechanical methods used by real fish.

There's an obvious end point to this:  an International Battle of the Robot Fish!