your science briefing for 01.21.2015
How to get people to like science again, why our universe is still kinda broken, hope in the battle against spinal cord injuries, and more...
How do you get people who think science is just something “jerking them around and telling them what to do and making them feel stupid” to actually open their eyes, ears, and minds? You have to start creating connections and show them that no one is out to get them. Well, except all the scammers, populists, and influencers preying on their anti-science attitudes, of course… (The Guardian)
Okay, so we know that the universe is a little bit broken and our models don’t agree as well as they should with our observations. To wit, the cosmos looks like it’s expanding too fast, necessitating concepts like dark energy and the search for new physics. And no matter how much we look, we can’t figure out what we’re missing… (PhysOrg)
Learning more about space is good and yields useful insights. Renewable energy isn’t just great, it’s a necessity for the future of our warming world. But a new proposal for a hydrogen plant within walking distance of the Very Large Telescope complex on the summit of Mt. Paranal in the Atacama Desert in Chile would effectively blind the most advanced and productive observatory in the world… (Space.com)
With brand new, minimally invasive ways of wiring our nervous system for therapeutic electrical stimulation on the near horizon, patients suffering from spinal cord injuries have a new ray of hope. New research from Switzerland shows that electric pulses in the right areas of the brain, specifically the hypothalamus, allows the body to bypass damaged nerves and restore some degree of motion… (EPFL)
Astronomers studying the globular cluster Omega Centauri were expecting its roughly ten million stars to orbit a single black hole tipping the scales at 8,200 times the mass of our sun. The thought was that as a core remnant of a dwarf galaxy, the cluster will be organized around a central black hole. Imagine the surprise when they discovered that at least 2,200 of those solar masses belong to a swarm of black holes in a sort of cosmic pileup … (Yahoo News)