In the Hole

A team of scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder have created a visual simulation of what it might look like to fall into a black hole. It’s based on a computer model of the general theory of relativity, and the virtual black hole is set to have about five million times the mass of the sun—about the mass of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Not pictured: the load you would have dropped in your space pants. For more info about what you’re seeing, click over to NewScientist.

Big Post-Big Bang Big Bang

Astronomers (with the help of NASA’s Swift satellite) have seen the most distant object ever recorded in space—the gamma ray burst from an exploding star thirteen billion light-years away. For those of you who are slow on the uptake, the distance of the explosion isn’t as significant as the time frame it represents, since we’re now seeing a stellar event from thirteen billion years ago. That’s just 630 million years after the Big Bang itself, and it shows us that even the early universe was probably full of stars and possibly even galaxies. Why do we care? Because knowing how long it takes for complex structures to form in the universe gives us a better idea of just what’s out there and what it’s been up to all these years. As always, though, there’s another possible explanation—that this “explosion” is really just God poking a thumbtack through the black paper dome that covers our flat Earth. Though only one of these hypotheses is likely. More details here.

What is the Impending Robot Uprising?

On Monday, the sexy, black-suited thugs who work at IBM announced the creation of a new supercomputer they’re planning on entering as a contestant on Jeopardy!. Actually, the supercomputer isn’t really the contestant. It’s the artificial intelligence program that will run on the computer. The creators of the program (called Watson after IBM’s Thomas J. Watson, Sr.) say that it’s capable of pulling contextually correct information from a set database of stored knowledge that it can then phrase into an appropriate response for Jeopardy!. The potential breakthrough here isn’t in the program’s ability to think so much as its ability to understand the subtleties of human language. For example, when given the answer “Bordered by Syria and Israel, this small country is only 135 miles long and 35 miles wide”, the program is able to respond with the correct question, “What is Lebanon?”, by contextualizing the information it already has. The Jeopardy! Producers hope to lure back all-time champion Ken Jennings to compete with Watson. So at the very least, we have a pretty good idea who the first casualty of the Robot Wars will be. More details here.

Obama Spreading His Hope and Change All Over Science

I've been pretty critical of Barack Obama so far in his presidency. I voted for the guy, but I can't but be disappointment in his tacit support of some of the more egregious Bush-era policies like suspension of Habeas Corpus, warrantless wiretapping, and legal immunity for government torturers. Like any presidential candidate, he made a lot of promises on his road to the White House, and he's broken plenty of them. Or at least, he's been waffling about making good on many of them. But one of his promises--to expand governmental support for scientific research--seems to be a real priority. As Phil Plait wrote about at his Bad Astronomy blog, Obama has revealed in a recent speech to the National Academy of Sciences that he's throwing a butt ton of federal dollars at the kind of research projects that really create the technological, environmental, and medical future of our world. Click on over to read more, including the caveat that amongst all this money throwing there seems to be a disturbing silence about the future of NASA.

Delicious, Delicious Space

Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy were scouring a dense region of space junk around a new star in Sagittarius B2 for signs of amino acids, the building blocks of life as we know it. But while they didn't find what they were looking for, they did discover ethyl formate, the molecule that gives raspberries their flavor. The gasses in this area of space absorb radiation from the star they surround and then re-emit it at frequencies that indicate their makeup. So by studying the radiation, astronomers can tell what kinds of molecules are in the gasses. Ethyl formate may not be a sign of life, but it is one of the largest molecules yet detected in space, so it's a good indicator that complex substances can be fairly common even in the middle of nowhere. Lest you hop in your warp bubble and try to take a bite out of this gas cloud, you should also know that they found propyl cyanide as well. So, it's probably a very delicious and refreshing poison. More details here.

Glowy Puppy

Scientists in South Korea have created the first batch of transgenic dogs; that is, dogs with modified genomes. They used a virus to inject fluorescent genes into the nuclei of beagles' fibroblast cells, then they transferred the nuclei of those cells to nucleus-free egg cells, which they fertilized. Later, the created embryos were placed into surrogate mothers. The resulting puppies now produce a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light. This is an important step in animal research in that dogs make for more useful disease models than test animals with shorter lifespans, like mice. So transgenic dogs may be useful in studying reproductive diseases that affect humans. On the other hand, the process is slow and expensive. Plus, only a small percentage of the dogs produced actually survive long-term. Which, as a beagle owner, gives me the willies. More details here.

Feng Shoe

An exhibition of wooden Dutch clogs has been rejected for display in a Hong Kong skyscraper over fears it would be bad feng shui. For those who are blissfully unaware, feng shui is an ancient Chinese superstition that involves arranging your life (and architecture, and furniture, and decorations) in such a way that they generate good luck. In other words, it's bullshit. But the management of the Cheung Kong Center believe in it so much that they've canceled the exhibition, which was meant to raise awareness of Dutch culture in Hong Kong and raise money for Chinese children. Apparently, the Cantonese word for "shoe", "hai", sounds similar to an exasperated sigh. No, this doesn't make any sense to me either. But that's a good sign, as it means we have critical thinking skills. Fortunately, another building has agreed to host the exhibition, so the citizens of Hong Kong will be able to soak in the culture of ludicrously uncomfortable footwear. More details here.