124 posts · 125,307 views
Greg Fish is a computer science grad student and science blogger whose work appears on BusinessWeek, Discovery News, The Panda’s Thumb and other popular science sites and blogs. He specializes in writing about unusual cutting edge science and promoting skepticism and sound scientific education.
weird things
124 posts
Sort by Latest Post, Most Popular
View by Condensed, Full
- February 5, 2012
- 01:35 PM
- 41 views
why aliens might not need a stabilizing moon
by Greg Fish in weird things
Quite a bit of scientific literature on astrobiology is filled with references to very exacting criteria for exoplanets capable of sustaining alien ecosystems. They have to be just the right distance from their suns, have the right kind of atmosphere, fall in the right temperature range, and hopefully, have a large stabilizing moon to counter [...]... Read more »
Lissauer, J., Barnes, J., & Chambers, J. (2012) Obliquity variations of a moonless Earth. Icarus, 217(1), 77-87. DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2011.10.013
- January 25, 2012
- 04:55 PM
- 122 views
do decaying neutrons travel between universes?
by Greg Fish in weird things
According to string theorists, our universe is just one of many in an otherwise infinite cosmos and that all the different universes don't just sit quietly in a vacuum, but actively interact with each other when space and time bend and fold to create the right conditions for different forces and particles to jump between [...]... Read more »
Michael Sarrazin, Guillaume Pignol, Fabrice Petit, & Valery V. Nesvizhevsky. (2012) Experimental limits on neutron disappearance into another braneworld. n/a. arXiv: 1201.3949v1
- January 19, 2012
- 07:00 PM
- 112 views
performing an evolutionary feat in sixty days
by Greg Fish in weird things
One of the big predictions made by evolutionary theory is that if given the selective pressure to do so, colonies of unicellular organisms will combine into multicellular organisms and start forming divisions of labor. Going from single cell, to cooperative colony, to a macroscopic organism with differentiated cells had to happen over several billions years [...]... Read more »
Ratcliff, W., Denison, R., Borrello, M., & Travisano, M. (2012) Experimental evolution of multicellularity. PNAS. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1115323109
- January 15, 2012
- 12:40 PM
- 133 views
can we explore space with unmanned drones?
by Greg Fish in weird things
Drone patrols are nothing new. By now, they're fairly humdrum stuff come to think of it. But what about a drone patrol on an alien world, one that could potentially last for decades and bring us a constant stream of data on everything we wanted to know about the world in question? Well, that's the [...]... Read more »
Barnes, J., Lemke, L., Foch, R., McKay, C., Beyer, R., Radebaugh, J., Atkinson, D., Lorenz, R., Le Mouélic, S., Rodriguez, S.... (2011) AVIATR — Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance. Experimental Astronomy. DOI: 10.1007/s10686-011-9275-9
- January 14, 2012
- 12:35 PM
- 145 views
to boost data density, chill and apply magnetism
by Greg Fish in weird things
Chances are, your computer's current hard drive can store around 500 GB, and if you're a real video editing or graphics enthusiast, you either bought yourself, or customized your computer to have a 1 TB drive. But what if in the same space that your hard drive takes up now, you could host a multi-PB [...]... Read more »
Loth, S., Baumann, S., Lutz, C., Eigler, D., & Heinrich, A. (2012) Bistability in Atomic-Scale Antiferromagnets. Science, 335(6065), 196-199. DOI: 10.1126/science.1214131
- January 13, 2012
- 10:45 AM
- 143 views
counting exoplanets by their gravitational wells
by Greg Fish in weird things
Depending on who you talk to, planets around alien suns are either somewhat rare due to the chaotic nature of planetary formation around infant stars, or even more plentiful than the stars themselves. Since exoplanets are rather small and dim, lost in the glare of their host suns, spotting them takes a lot of time [...]... Read more »
Cassan, A., Kubas, D., Beaulieu, J., Dominik, M., Horne, K., Greenhill, J., Wambsganss, J., Menzies, J., Williams, A., Jørgensen, U.... (2012) One or more bound planets per Milky Way star from microlensing observations. Nature, 481(7380), 167-169. DOI: 10.1038/nature10684
- December 17, 2011
- 10:58 AM
- 244 views
why martian microbes won’t outnumber earth’s
by Greg Fish in weird things
A recently trumpeted paper on astrobiology did some very interesting modeling in a search for places on Mars where some very tough terrestrial microorganisms could survive and came to a very surprising conclusion. It appears that some 3.2% of the red planet could be habitable by volume, which would make it more friendly to life [...]... Read more »
Jones, E., Lineweaver, C., & Clarke, J. (2011) An Extensive Phase Space for the Potential Martian Biosphere. Astrobiology, 2147483647. DOI: 10.1089/ast.2011.0660
- December 14, 2011
- 06:00 PM
- 538 views
the dark monsters who will inherit our universe
by Greg Fish in weird things
Bizarre things are lurking out there in our universe. Titanic beasts born as space and time shatter under more than enough energy to be felt across thousands of light years, beasts with the power to devour stars whole as they whip the very fabric of reality around their gaping maws like their plaything and dictate [...]... Read more »
McConnell, N., Ma, C., Gebhardt, K., Wright, S., Murphy, J., Lauer, T., Graham, J., & Richstone, D. (2011) Two ten-billion-solar-mass black holes at the centres of giant elliptical galaxies. Nature, 480(7376), 215-218. DOI: 10.1038/nature10636
- December 13, 2011
- 04:05 PM
- 560 views
eliminating dark matter with an intuitive culprit
by Greg Fish in weird things
Few things are as reviled on popular science and physics comment sections as dark matter and dark energy because aside from indirect observations, we’ve never actually detected either. We can see that something is pushing galaxies apart from each other while another invisible force holds these galaxies together, but there have been many attempts to do away with both in a theoretical sense. [...]... Read more »
Carati A. (2011) Gravitational effects of the faraway matter on the rotation curves of spiral galaxies. n/a. arXiv: 1111.5793v1
- December 4, 2011
- 07:31 AM
- 202 views
why computers can’t predict revolutions
by Greg Fish in weird things
Back in September, news worldwide reported the results of a paper which claimed that a supercomputer had a knack for predicting revolutions and key global events, able to pick up on the events of Tahir square in Cairo and even get a fix on Osama bin Laden’s location. After reviewing the paper in question, I [...]... Read more »
Leetaru, K. (2011) Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting large-scale human behavior using global news media tone in time and space. First Monday, 16(9). info:/
- December 1, 2011
- 07:07 AM
- 194 views
so what’s the fine for breaking relativity?
by Greg Fish in weird things
Since the science world is abuzz with news of experiments detecting neutrinos making a 732 kilometer trip in record time, 60 nanoseconds ahead of light itself, I have two questions. First is how big of a speeding ticket to give the neutrinos in question, and second is whether these neutrinos could now go back in [...]... Read more »
Cohen, A., & Glashow, S. (2011) Pair Creation Constrains Superluminal Neutrino Propagation. Physical Review Letters, 107(18). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.181803
- May 18, 2011
- 09:24 AM
- 705 views
gliese 581d gets the nod for habitability
by Greg Fish in weird things
At the rate we’re going, it seems that the first target for one of our future interstellar spacecraft will just have to be the Gliese 581 system. Beyond the initial hype generated by the announcement of planet 581g and a very deflating set of calculations showing that it may have just been a mirage, there [...]... Read more »
Wordsworth, R., Forget, F., Selsis, F., Millour, E., Charnay, B., & Madeleine, J. (2011) Gliese 581d is the first discovered terrestrial-mass exoplanet in the habitable zone. The Astrophysical Journal, 733(2). DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/733/2/L48
- May 16, 2011
- 09:15 AM
- 619 views
cyclical cosmology debate keeps on cycling…
by Greg Fish in weird things
Since we last discussed the universe according to Roger Penrose, I thought the physics community wasn’t going to dedicate more time to the theory of cyclical cosmology, but apparently, I was wrong. It seems that the theory still lives and is being debated by scientists trying to figure out whether the concentric circles that could [...]... Read more »
Moss, A., Scott, D., & Zibin, J. (2011) No evidence for anomalously low variance circles on the sky. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2011(04), 33-33. DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2011/04/033
- May 15, 2011
- 08:09 AM
- 784 views
and once again, biology puts up a fight…
by Greg Fish in weird things
Sometimes I can only sympathize with the kind of frustrating setbacks experienced by biologists. Whereas an entire area of STEM disciplines can rely on formulas and basic theory to get them at least close to where they need to be, biology seems to change its mind on a dime, and what seem like very straightforward [...]... Read more »
Zhao, T., Zhang, Z., Rong, Z., & Xu, Y. (2011) Immunogenicity of induced pluripotent stem cells. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature10135
- May 9, 2011
- 10:03 AM
- 731 views
how to slowly go insane in the mainframe
by Greg Fish in weird things
If you got the reference in the title, take a moment to pat yourself on the back. Just like Fry and Bender, you’re about to take a brief trip into the mind of a machine driven insane by its handlers to simulate schizophrenia, a more or less umbrella diagnosis for a number of breakdowns in [...]... Read more »
Hoffman, R., Grasemann, U., Gueorguieva, R., Quinlan, D., Lane, D., & Miikkulainen, R. (2011) Using Computational Patients to Evaluate Illness Mechanisms in Schizophrenia. Biological Psychiatry, 69(10), 997-1005. DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.12.036
- May 5, 2011
- 10:25 AM
- 798 views
finding aliens by the black holes they make?
by Greg Fish in weird things
As the world keeps moving forward, our energy requirements are constantly increasing. Our cities and towns are consuming terawatt after terawatt, and as new technology comes online and old technology improves, the rate of consumption only grows. Surely, an incredibly advanced alien civilization that had a fairly sophisticated infrastructure for the last few million years [...]... Read more »
Clement Vidal. (2011) Black Holes: Attractors for Intelligence?. n/a. arXiv: 1104.4362v1
- April 20, 2011
- 07:39 AM
- 805 views
rethinking petroleum a little too hard, redux
by Greg Fish in weird things
Uh oh. Just when you thought that we were once again safe from the abiogenic oil theory I had to debunk last year, there’s now some theoretical chemistry which says that maybe, possibly, methane could form chains of hydrocarbons about 70 miles down, at pressures past 50,000 atmospheres and temperatures of 1,227 °C or greater. [...]... Read more »
Spanu, L., Donadio, D., Hohl, D., Schwegler, E., & Galli, G. (2011) Stability of hydrocarbons at deep Earth pressures and temperatures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1014804108
- April 15, 2011
- 09:19 AM
- 795 views
that’s not what we meant by computer scientist
by Greg Fish in weird things
A while ago, there was some buzz on the pop sci circuit about scientists using machines to catch up with the constantly growing body of published papers and asking whether the machines could ever qualify as actual scientists proposing hypotheses of their own. Now there seems to be an affirmative answer since a robot- aided [...]... Read more »
King, R., Liakata, M., Lu, C., Oliver, S., & Soldatova, L. (2011) On the formalization and reuse of scientific research. Journal of The Royal Society Interface. DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2011.0029
- April 9, 2011
- 12:38 PM
- 695 views
who’s afraid of the big, bad alien invaders?
by Greg Fish in weird things
Another day, another proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox, which asks where are all the aliens if the skies are just filled with extraterrestrial empires. Yesterday, my good frienemies at the arXiv blog shone a light on a paper by a quantum theorist which tackles the possible interactions between alien species from evolutionary points of [...]... Read more »
Adrian Kent. (2011) Too Damned Quiet?. n/a. arXiv: 1104.0624v1
- April 4, 2011
- 07:13 AM
- 816 views
could we see how aliens mine asteroids?
by Greg Fish in weird things
Whenever skeptics talk about the probability of an alien invasion, we often like to point out that attacking very distant worlds is totally unnecessary thanks to asteroid belts, which contain countless tons of resources of virtually every sort and won’t require an armada to subdue before extraction can begin. But, wonders a duo of astrophysicists, [...]... Read more »
Duncan Forgan, & Martin Elvis. (2011) Extrasolar Asteroid Mining as Forensic Evidence for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. n/a. arXiv: 1103.5369v1
topics
join us!
Do you write about peer-reviewed research in your blog? Use ResearchBlogging.org to make it easy for your readers — and others from around the world — to find your serious posts about academic research.
If you don't have a blog, you can still use our site to learn about fascinating developments in cutting-edge research from around the world.
News
Editor's Selections: Programmed cell death in unicellular parasites, a novel gene transfer agent from Baronella, and full-contact herpes gladiatorum
Editor's Selections: Family medical histories, a grave in the Bahamas, medieval malaria, and macaques
Editor's Selections: Blood Tests for Depression, the Axolotl, Dopamine, and The Bachelor
