Sunday (not really) Science Sermon
Ok, so I overshot, but it’s still science fun!
Grandpa T-rex wants you kids off his lawn
The evolutionary tree of the predator family made famous by Tyrannosaurus rex has been pushed back to somewhere about 170 million years ago. The teeth, jaw and skull of this Proceratosaurus fossil have the distinctive markings of the family of dinosaurs that gave us T-rex and eventually became the modern bird. The results were published online November 4 in the Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society (ahhh, good old Linnaeus).
Dark Matter may not be Dark Matter, but It’s still lurking
Dark matter, that weird and wonderful and completely theoretical stuff of the universe, came into being in the 1930’s. It was theorized in order to explain the observed discrepancies in large-scale astronomical structures such as galaxies. The way that galaxies spin, move and even drift apart are inconsistent with their observed mass. Were we to calculate all the observable mass, for example, in our own galaxy, the milky way, it would not be enough mass to explain it’s spiral structure or it’s rotational speed. Physicists devised Dark Matter to explain this observational disparity. Dark Matter could account for more than 5 times the mass of observable matter.
But what if the theory of gravity is wrong? What if, rather than hiding a large amount of mass inside near invisible matter, we tweaked some of the models of gravity that describe what we are observing? Scientific American
reports on a review of these modified-gravity theories. The quick of it is that even the modified theories require something like Dark Matter to perform a mass hiding function in the universe and we are stepping up to attempt to gather more data on this invisible universal playa.
LHC; can’t keep a good particle accelerator down
Everything from delicious bagles to
time traveling God-particles has tried to destroy the LHC, but it’s a trooper. A little weekend LHC news says that the CMS, one of the main detectors at the LHC, has started observing sprays of particles from the accelerator.
Mars. Big.
I love the Big Picture. It always delivers exactly what it claims, big pictures. Last week they did a run on the terrain of The Red Planet.