Saturday Science Roundup #2

So that baby blanket didn’t materialise last weekend, but I did finish hemming a skirt that will hopefully make an appearance on the blog soon. Because the yellow scrapmachine is good for more than just papercraft. Now if only the baby would stop growing so fast. At this rate, by the time I’m done he’ll be much too big for such a thing.
In the meantime, here are some science pieces to add some sparkle to your weekend and distract me from the ever-increasing pile of unfinished objects.

• Cicada wings shred bacteria: This is awesome. The tiny nano-spikes in the wings of the cicada tear any bacteria that land on them to pieces. Now we just need to figure out how the spikes grow, and if we can reproduce them, and we can maybe start making antibacterial fabrics. You wouldn’t want to use them all the time, but they’d be great for face masks and gowns in hospitals.
• You don’t Have to blow up the universe to be cool, by AstroKatie (not AstroCate): This article is a good explanation of Dark Energy, which is the weird stuff pushing the universe apart. We know that it’s out there, and that it makes up roughly 75% of everything, but what is it, and what does it mean that there’s an anti-gravity out there? Katie throws an equation out there, but you can skim over the scary maths image and focus on her words instead. At least, I hope so. (I think it’s at a NewScientist level of detail, but on a topic they don’t usually like to dabble with.) Don’t worry, the rest of these links are less cosmological.
• What if the Hubble Telescope was pointed at Earth?: The What if? blog by Randall Munroe of xkcd is one of my favourite examples of a physicist gone mad with power using said power to improve the world. He takes simple questions like the one above, answers them using easy physics and maths, and then turns it all the way up to eleven. A few months ago, he figured out what kind of laser pointers one would need to blow up the moon. Oh, and the answer to the question above is “not very much”.
• Scientists and their emotions: the highs … and the lows: This one isn’t about a singular scientific result. It’s about the process of doing science, and how it brings you up and tears you down. I love being a scientist, when it works. One of the factors in my depression is just the fact that this stuff is hard, and some days it’s hard to get up and go into work when you know that next week you’re going to find a better way of doing the same task and you’ll have to start all over again. So it’s reassuring to find that other people feel the same way.
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• Curiousity kicks butt!: You knew I had to bring this one up, as it’s the most exciting announcement of the last few months. Evidence from the Curiousity Rover on Mars has shown that Mars at some point in the very distant past met most of the criteria for supporting life. There was running water, a nice temperature, and an atmosphere that was thin but composed of the right amount of oxygen to keep a lot of bacteria happy. We haven’t found fossils yet, nor have we found anything alive right now, but we have found a bunch of rocks that show it wasn’t too salty or sandy on Mars’ beaches three billion years ago. Which is pretty exciting when you think about it. (Unless you’re @SarcasticRover, in which case your response is: “DISCOVERY! Mars was once able to support life, not unlike how the economy was once able to support jugglers and mimes.”)
• New Fossil Whales: While digging up and expanding a highway in California, the project’s archaeologist (how cool is it that they’re required to have an archaeologist on hand during these digs?) found four new species of whale. They’re filter feeders (like whale sharks, for the Octofans among us), which means they don’t use their teeth to chew, but rather to filter the water around them and keep out anything big while letting little things like krill in.
• The world’s oldest portrait: This isn’t new, but I’d not seen it before: a 26-thousand year old carving of a woman, made from a mammoth tusk. She’s strangely beautiful.

This week’s science roundup has been brought to you by the boredom of repeating everything you did “for the last time” three weeks ago, because it turns out there’s a very slightly better way of doing it. I felt so clever for a while there.