Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

Cthulhu Calling

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The Bloop, which has its own Wikipedia page (OK, what interesting subject doesn’t, the Wikipedia Paradox notwithstanding?)

Aaaaanyway …

[T]he sound is believed to be coming roughly from 50oS; 100oW. After reading that, I wondered how close that was to the coordinates given in “The Call of Cthulhu”. Allow me to quote: “Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47°9′, W. Longitude l23°43′, come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror – the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.”

Also: NOAA: A Collection of Sounds from the Sea

Spectrographs of underwater sounds, including The Bloop

Gypsum, Tramps and Thieves

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The Deadliest place on Earth? Surviving Cueva de los Cristales – The Giant Crystal Cave

Cueva de los Cristales is the incarnation of our most awesome science fiction imaginations – Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. At about the same time as humans first ventured out of Africa, these crystals began to slowly grow. For half a million years they remained protected and nurtured by a womb of hot hydrothermal fluids rich with minerals.

Undisturbed, one can only guess how big they may have eventually grown. Yet when mining began here over a hundred years ago, the water table was lowered and the cave drained. The crystals seemingly interminable development was frozen forever leaving them as aborted relics of the deep earth. It wasn’t until 2001 that miners, searching for lead, eventually penetrated the cave wall and brought it to light. The very act of discovering and witnessing them has triggered their slow decay and now no one knows what their fate will be. Once the mine ceases to operate it could be flooded by polluted mine water and abandoned forever, and that’s if ambitious mineral sellers don’t get to them first and rip them out to sell around the world – a plight of other smaller crystal caves in the area.

I Do Appreciate You Being Round

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The Circular Logic of the Universe

A sphere is also tough. For a given surface area, it’s stronger than virtually any other shape. If you want to make a secure container using the least amount of material, Dr. Liebovitch said, make that container round. “That’s why, when you cook a frankfurter, it always splits in the long direction,” he said, rather than along its circumference. The curved part has the tensile strength of a sphere, the long axis that of a rectangle: no contest.

Nothing to do with Tom Hanks

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The Loom: The Origin of Big

Goldbogen and his colleagues found that big fin whales are not just scaled-up versions of little fin whales. Instead, as their bodies get bigger, their mouths get much bigger. Small fin whales can swallow up about 90% of their own body weight. Very big ones can gulp 160%. In other words, big fin whales need more and more energy to handle the bigger slugs of water they gulp. As their body increases in size, the energy their bodies demand rises faster than the extra energy they can get from their food.

This scaling may explain some of the weird diving patterns found in lunge-feeding whales. Blue whales are twice as big as humpback whales, for example, but both species dive for the same period of time (about eight minutes) and to the same depth (148 meters). All things being equal, you’d expect that blue whales would be able to dive deeper and longer, because they could store more oxygen in their bigger bodies. Blue whales also make fewer lunges than humpback whales (6 versus 15). It’s possible that the gigantic blue whales are hard up against a size limit. They need so much energy for their lunges that they can’t afford to hold their breath longer, and they can only manage to make a few lunges before they run out of reserves and have to head for the surface.