Climate Catastrophe Change In A Chart

UK climate data scientist has charted the monthly/yearly change in global temperature from 1851 to 2020. We have always known it is not good news and here is the chart...

https://twitter.com/neilrkaye

The True Size

UK climate data scientist Neil Kaye has animated a map of the world that shows the distorted sizes of countries due to the Mercator Projection, and then their true sizes. For example: in reality, Greenland is not larger than Africa...

https://twitter.com/neilrkaye/status/1464874387698552832

BEAUTY: Photography--Jessica Wynne

The images photographer Jessica Wynne captures of mathematician's chalkboards are amazing...

Currently on view at the Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City, her Do Not Erase series has an accompanying press release which explains these documented designs beautifully.

Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to announce our inaugural exhibition of artworks by Jessica Wynne (American, b. 1972), on view from 2 September – 9 October 2021. The show includes medium- and large-scale photographs from the artist’s newest body of work, images of mathematicians’ chalkboards and the formulas scribbled and erased on them.

Do Not Erase contemplates the meaning, emotion, and energy of symbols. Her photographs— which can easily be mistaken for three-dimensional chalkboards— illuminate the narrative, linguistic, and visionary elements of these representations, providing timeless meditation on the abstraction and intimacy of visual expression.

Wynne studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and Yale University before moving to New York City in 1999. She was first introduced to the beauty of chalkboards through her neighbors Amie Wilkinson and Benson Farb, mathematics professors from the University of Chicago. Intrigued by the imagery she saw on these boards, Wynne directed her focus on capturing—rather than deciphering—the meaning and beauty of these symbols. Reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s “blackboard” paintings and Brice Marden’s serpentine Letters canvases, Wynne’s blackboards illuminate the power of the whirling web of shapes, numbers, and calculations scribbled in the heat of discovery.

For Wynne, the poetic and the rational are not mutually exclusive. While the formulas on each board are communicated in highly specialized languages from abstruse subfields such as knot theory, combinatorics, and ergodic theory, Wynne's work embraces the visual sensuality and intuitive impression of these complex calculations, linking them to the timeless lineage of artistry and writing: cave paintings, hieroglyphics, and graffiti.

Mathematicians "see images first, not words. They see pictures before meaning," Wynne observes. This relationship between image and thought is one of the primary areas of investigation for her work. It is striking that mathematicians, unlike many scientists, continue to work on chalkboards rather than computers, and Wynne's art explores the aspects of their communication that visual artists have shared throughout time: primal, intimate, and transcendent exchange.

Each mystery unravels itself through unique formal qualities. In some of the chalkboards Wynne represents, the black expanse is riddled with Greek letters, punctuation notations, and sinuous scrawls and loops, evocative of a patterned tapestry or calligraphic scroll. Others meditate on a single, pared down shape or orderly sequence of lines. Foggy mists left behind by an eraser provide a recurrent theme throughout the series, the puffs of opaque powder testifying to the rhythmic bursts of thought and explosions of clarity. Despite the formal and intellectual diversity Wynne's work showcases, each of her chalkboards is united through an exploration of the relationship between form and expression.

https://jessicawynne.com/
https://www.houkgallery.com/exhibitions/85-jessica-wynne-do-not-erase/works/

Pale Blue Dot

As we enter this new year, I feel a great need for us--as a species--to reflect on the classic words of the great Carl Sagan in his sobering "Pale Blue Dot" passage from his book of the same name...these important words are more relevant now than ever.

http://carlsagan.com/

R.I.P. Stephen Hawking

We lost one of the most brilliant minds in history. He died on pi Day...seems fitting.

We Are Stardust

"The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust."
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

"The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff."
--Carl Sagan

"Everything we are and everything in the universe and on Earth originated from stardust, and it continually floats through us even today. It directly connects us to the universe, rebuilding our bodies over and again over our lifetimes."
--Iris Schrijver, author of LIVING WITH THE STARS: HOW THE HUMAN BODY IS CONNECTED TO THE LIFE CYCLES OF THE EARTH, THE PLANETS, AND THE STARS

"We are stardust/ We are golden/ And we've got to get ourselves/ Back to the garden"
--Joni Mitchell

Images produced by Lematworks
https://lematworks.myportfolio.com/

Proven: Black Holes and Gravitational Waves!

This is fantastic news. Just think: if we could come to an understanding of dark matter, there's no telling what we could accomplish and create.

Gravitational waves from black holes detected
By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity.

They have observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth.

The international team says the first detection of these gravitational waves will usher in a new era for astronomy.

It is the culmination of decades of searching and could ultimately offer a window on the Big Bang.

Being able to detect gravitational waves enables astronomers finally to probe what they call "dark Universe" - the majority part of the cosmos that is invisible to the light telescopes in use today.

Not only will they be able to investigate black holes and strange objects known as neutron stars (giant suns that have collapsed to the size of cities), they should also be able to "look" much deeper into the Universe - and thus farther back in time. It may even be possible eventually to sense the moment of the Big Bang.


Read the full article here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35524440

"All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists" by Lawrence M. Kruss

From The New Yorker.
Thank you, Lawrence!


SEPTEMBER 8, 2015
All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists
BY LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS

As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more broadly. Sometimes, I refer to the fact that religion and science are often in conflict; from time to time, I ridicule religious dogma. When I do, I sometimes get accused in public of being a “militant atheist.” Even a surprising number of my colleagues politely ask if it wouldn’t be better to avoid alienating religious people. Shouldn’t we respect religious sensibilities, masking potential conflicts and building common ground with religious groups so as to create a better, more equitable world?

I found myself thinking about those questions this week as I followed the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who directly disobeyed a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and, as a result, was jailed for contempt of court. (She was released earlier today.) Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.

The Kim Davis story raises a basic question: To what extent should we allow people to break the law if their religious views are in conflict with it? It’s possible to take that question to an extreme that even Senator Paul might find absurd: imagine, for example, a jihadist whose interpretation of the Koran suggested that he should be allowed to behead infidels and apostates. Should he be allowed to break the law? Or—to consider a less extreme case—imagine an Islamic-fundamentalist county clerk who would not let unmarried men and women enter the courthouse together, or grant marriage licenses to unveiled women. For Rand Paul, what separates these cases from Kim Davis’s? The biggest difference, I suspect, is that Senator Paul agrees with Kim Davis’s religious views but disagrees with those of the hypothetical Islamic fundamentalist.

The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That’s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal. Davis is free to believe whatever she wants, just as the jihadist is free to believe whatever he wants; in both cases, the law constrains not what they believe but what they do.

In recent years, this territory has grown murkier. Under the banner of religious freedom, individuals, states, and even—in the case of Hobby Lobby—corporations have been arguing that they should be exempt from the law on religious grounds. (The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage.) The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But “religious freedom” advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.

The Kim Davis controversy exists because, as a culture, we have elevated respect for religious sensibilities to an inappropriate level that makes society less free, not more. Religious liberty should mean that no set of religious ideals are treated differently from other ideals. Laws should not be enacted whose sole purpose is to denigrate them, but, by the same token, the law shouldn’t elevate them, either.

In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in 1934. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” It’s ironic, really, that so many people are fixated on the relationship between science and religion: basically, there isn’t one. In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature—just as it’s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law.

Because science holds that no idea is sacred, it’s inevitable that it draws people away from religion. The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems. Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world. Even so, to avoid offense, they sometimes misleadingly imply that today’s discoveries exist in easy harmony with preëxisting religious doctrines, or remain silent rather than pointing out contradictions between science and religious doctrine. It’s a strange inconsistency, since scientists often happily disagree with other kinds of beliefs. Astronomers have no problem ridiculing the claims of astrologists, even though a significant fraction of the public believes these claims. Doctors have no problem condemning the actions of anti-vaccine activists who endanger children. And yet, for reasons of decorum, many scientists worry that ridiculing certain religious claims alienates the public from science. When they do so, they are being condescending at best and hypocritical at worst.

This reticence can have significant consequences. Consider the example of Planned Parenthood. Lawmakers are calling for a government shutdown unless federal funds for Planned Parenthood are stripped from spending bills for the fiscal year starting October 1st. Why? Because Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue samples from abortions to scientific researchers hoping to cure diseases, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. (Storing and safeguarding that tissue requires resources, and Planned Parenthood charges researchers for the costs.) It’s clear that many of the people protesting Planned Parenthood are opposed to abortion on religious grounds and are, to varying degrees, anti-science. Should this cause scientists to clam up at the risk of further offending or alienating them? Or should we speak out loudly to point out that, independent of one’s beliefs about what is sacred, this tissue would otherwise be thrown away, even though it could help improve and save lives?

Ultimately, when we hesitate to openly question beliefs because we don’t want to risk offense, questioning itself becomes taboo. It is here that the imperative for scientists to speak out seems to me to be most urgent. As a result of speaking out on issues of science and religion, I have heard from many young people about the shame and ostracism they experience after merely questioning their family’s faith. Sometimes, they find themselves denied rights and privileges because their actions confront the faith of others. Scientists need to be prepared to demonstrate by example that questioning perceived truth, especially “sacred truth,” is an essential part of living in a free country.

I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine the very basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.

If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.

Lawrence M. Krauss is the foundation professor and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the chair of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His books include “The Physics of Star Trek” and, most recently, “A Universe from Nothing.”


Original article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-should-be-militant-atheists

The Large Hadron Collider Discovered a NEW PARTICLE!

A diagram of one possible layout of the five quarks that compose the newly discovered pentaquark

The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have discovered yet another new particle! This one is called a pentaquark and has been postulated and searched for over the last 50 years. The discovery of this new form of matter further enables our understanding of how the universe is put together, and could eventually lead to our complete understanding of the workings of reality. This is quite exciting!

An alternate layout of a pentaquark showing it composed of a meson particle (one quark and one antiquark) and a baryon (three quarks).

LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson commented: "The pentaquark is not just any new particle… It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over fifty years of experimental searches. Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we're all made, is constituted."

The original findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03414

Sun and Blue Skies...ANYWHERE

Since the atmosphere of our little planet is made up of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% other gases, the sunlight that passes through the atmosphere has a very specific and identifiable quality and color...and creates our familiar and comforting blue sky. And now, physicist Professor Paolo Di Trapani of Insubria University at Como, Italy has created a revolutionary technological discovery that brings sunlight and blue skies to any space, no matter where it is. Even underground. After a decade of research and development, Professor Di Trapani uses an LED light source filtered through several layers of nanoparticles (which function as the layers of nitrogen, oxygen, and miscellaneous gases in our atmosphere) to mimic exactly the sun as an orb of light in a blue sky. The results are simply jaw dropping--look at the photos below that CoeLux assures us are not Photoshopped. They are raw photos of the actual product.

In November 2014, CoeLux was crowned “Light Source Innovation of the year” at the Lux Awards, and rightly so. The implications for this invention are staggering and will change interior architecture forever. Subterranean homes and businesses, parts of the world that don't see much sunlight for reasons of latitude or pollution, or areas of buildings where a roof line or second story will not permit a skylight will all benefit tremendously from this marvel.

CoeLux is currently offered in three levels, each with a regional, or geographical cast. CoeLux 60 creates sunlight at a 60 degree angle to create near-equatorial tropical light. For light with a Mediterranean feel, CoeLux 45 delivers a 45 degree beam. And CoeLux 30 features a 30 degree angled beam of light reminiscent of Nordic light. But the company is at work producing a commercially feasible version for regular applications.

Watch this short video about the product. It is just mind boggling...keep in mind that you are not seeing sun and sky but an artificial light source that seems to be anything but.

http://www.coelux.com/

Antibiotic Breakthrough

Oh, by the way, did you see this story about a new breakthrough in antibiotics? For a while now, we have been hearing from the scientific community about how antibiotics were abused over these last many decades and as a result, many classes of the drug no longer work on new, resistant bacteria. This very important discovery could change everything and it is great news!

From BBC:

Antibiotics: US discovery labelled 'game-changer' for medicine
By James Gallagher
Health editor, BBC News website

The decades-long drought in antibiotic discovery could be over after a breakthrough by US scientists.

Their novel method for growing bacteria has yielded 25 new antibiotics, with one deemed "very promising". The last new class of antibiotics to make it to clinic was discovered nearly three decades ago.

The study, in the journal Nature, has been described as a "game-changer" and experts believe the antibiotic haul is just the "tip of the iceberg".

The heyday of antibiotic discovery was in the 1950s and 1960s, but nothing found since 1987 has made it into doctor's hands. Since then microbes have become incredibly resistant. Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis ignores nearly everything medicine can throw at it.

The researchers, at the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, turned to the source of nearly all antibiotics - soil. This is teeming with microbes, but only 1% can be grown in the laboratory. The team created a "subterranean hotel" for bacteria. One bacterium was placed in each "room" and the whole device was buried in soil. It allowed the unique chemistry of soil to permeate the room, but kept the bacteria in place for study.

The scientists involved believe they can grow nearly half of all soil bacteria. Chemicals produced by the microbes, dug up from one researcher's back yard, were then tested for antimicrobial properties.

The lead scientist, Prof Kim Lewis, said: "So far 25 new antibiotics have been discovered using this method and teixobactin is the latest and most promising one.

"[The study shows] uncultured bacteria do harbour novel chemistry that we have not seen before. That is a promising source of new antimicrobials and will hopefully help revive the field of antibiotic discovery."

Tests on teixobactin showed it was toxic to bacteria, but not mammalian tissues, and could clear a deadly dose of MRSA in tests on mice.

The researchers also believe that bacteria are unlikely to develop resistance to teixobactin. It targets fats which are essential for building the bacterial cell wall, and the scientists argue it would be difficult to evolve resistance. "Here is an antibiotic that essentially evolved to be free of resistance," said Prof Lewis. "We haven't seen that before. "It has several independent different tricks that minimise resistance development."

There are limits to the discovery of the antibiotic teixobactin, which has yet to be tested in people. It works on only Gram-positive bacteria; this includes MRSA and mycobacterium tuberculosis. It cannot penetrate the extra layer of protection in Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli. But even if their method does mark a new era of antibiotic discovery there are big questions. Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, warned of the dangers of resistance back in his Nobel prize speech in 1945. Yet even now prescriptions in England are rising, with half deemed "inappropriate" and contributing to the problem.

But can we be trusted with new antibiotics? Or will we make the same mistakes again?

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30657486

Laniakea

This is amazing scientific news. In a recent study for Nature, scientists R. Brent Tully, Hélène Courtois, Yehuda Hoffman, and Daniel Pomarède at the University of Hawaii mapped thousands of galaxies in the immediate vicinity of our own Milky Way, and discovered that we are part of a truly massive "supercluster" of galaxies that they named Laniakea (which means "immeasurable heavens" in Hawaiian).

They also mapped galaxies expanding outward and galaxies which are being pulled toward each other. After mapping their trajectories, they discovered these galaxies, including our own, are being pulled toward a mysterious, super-dense area called "The Great Attractor."

And in another mind-boggling leap, our supercluster structure Laniakea borders another supercluster structure called Perseus-Pisces! I think it is astounding how the structures almost mirror each other, as though a supercluster of galaxies naturally take a certain shape...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7516/full/nature13674.html#videos

Evolution Really Happened

I am currently watching the new "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" with astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson on the National Geographic Channel, a follow up to the original "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage" with Carl Sagan. This new version is produced by Seth MacFarlane and Ann Druyan who is Sagan's widow.
Such a worthy show... both of them.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/cosmos-a-spacetime-odyssey/
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/

Fight Ignorance

Happy Birthday, Pierre!

A very happy birthday to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin! Born today in 1881, in the Château of Sarcenat at Orcines in central France, de Chardin was a French philosopher, Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and geologist who took part in the discovery of Peking Man and Piltdown Man. Teilhard conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky's rather Jungian concept of Noosphere. He believed that "evolution is an ascent toward consciousness" and the Noosphere is expressed as a kind of collective consciousness.

I can forgive him for being a Jesuit priest since his life was dedicated to the sciences. From 1905 to 1908, he taught physics and chemistry in Cairo and traveled extensively in Asia working in the fields of geology and paleontology. Teilhard de Chardin wrote many groundbreaking and influential books in the course of his life but it was his first book, THE PHENOMENON OF MAN, which angered the Catholic Church and his Jesuit order for his scientific approach to views of history, evolution, and humanity. They felt that Teilhard de Chardin undermined the myth of original sin developed by Saint Augustine. I say anyone who pisses off the Catholic Church is doing some good work. During his life, the Church required him to stop lecturing, ordered him to leave his teaching position in France and to sign a statement withdrawing his controversial statements regarding the doctrine of original sin, refused to publish his writings, banned what books were published, forbade him to lecture or teach on philosophical subjects, forbade him to take a teaching post at the College de France, and in 1955 it forbade him to attend the “International Congress of Paleontology” despite the fact that he had been named to the French Academy of Sciences just a few years earlier. Even with all the forbidding and huffing and puffing from the Church, Teilhard de Chardin thankfully managed to use his brain (something the Church frowns upon) to become a highly respected, admired, and influential scientist, evolutionist, and philosopher.

Thank you for your contributions toward the betterment and advancement of humanity and the human experience, Monsieur Teilhard de Chardin. Happy birthday!

Here are some marvelous Teilhard de Chardin quotes to enjoy.

"The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed."

"It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway."

"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience."

"Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation."

"In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened."

"Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth."

And I really love this passage form his book HYMN OF THE UNIVERSE in which he seemingly describes, through the third person, his own views of the Church and their campaign against him:

"So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness."