Smithsonian.com

How did Stephen Hawking leave his signature on the Big Bang? (Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team)

Scientists have released their latest, most detailed map of the cosmic microwave background–that faint glow of radiation left over from the Big Bang–and Stephen Hawking’s initials are still there. The S and H have been spotted in previous versions of the image, which is sometimes known as WMAP for the spacecraft that is responsible for the picture. It’s as if the universe is playing a joke on all of us, hiding the signature of one of the world’s greatest cosmologists in the radiation signature of its own birth.

But as New Scientist notes, there are plenty of other familiar things that can be seen in the image–a deer and a parrot, for example. They have even set up an interactive image so that readers can point out their own finds.

It seems that people are often finding interesting images in what looks like random noise. In the November issue of Smithsonian, Jackson Pollock biographer Henry Adams claimed that the artist’s name could be found in his groundbreaking 1943 work Mural. And who hasn’t seen familiar shapes in the clouds?

It’s the faces, though, that get the most press. You may have seen the potato chip lady visiting Johnny Carson with her collection of chips shaped like the heads of famous people such as Bob Hope and Alfred Hitchcock. There was the grilled cheese sandwich with the face of the Virgin Mary that sold on eBay for $28,000. The face on Mars. The face of Jesus in a bruise. American Express has even capitalized on our tendency to see faces in everything with their latest commercial.

A study of facial recognition from a few years ago found that when presented with images that only bear a passing resemblance to a face, the brains of macaque monkeys sometimes lit up in the same way they did when the animals saw a real face. Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the University of Bremen in Germany, explained to the New York Times:

“Nonface objects may have certain features that are weakly triggering these face cells,” she said. “If you go above a certain threshold, the monkeys might think that they’re seeing a face.” In the same way, she said, objects like cinnamon buns, rocky outcroppings and cloud formations may set off face radar if they bear enough resemblance to actual faces.

I wasn’t able to find any similar research into why humans find other familiar forms in the random noise of images. Perhaps it’s simply that we’re always searching for the familiar, trying to find a bit of comfort in the unknown, intimidating bits of our experience, whether its a groundbreaking piece of art or the remnants of the birth of our universe.

Birds flock to a bird feeder, courtesy of Flickr user Macfanmd

There’s nothing like 30 inches of heavy, sticky snow to concentrate a flock of birds at a bird feeder.  I’ve seen more than a dozen different species at my backyard feeder since the storm hit. I like to think all that seed and suet is helping them survive a miserable winter, but is it true?

Apparently so. A study from Wisconsin a few years ago showed that black-capped chickadees are more likely to survive the winter if they have access to feeders. (Black-capped chickadees, in case you haven’t heard, are the Perfect Bird.) But feeders don’t make them soft and lazy: according to another study, birds that had access to feeders in the past are still perfectly able to feed themselves once the feeders are taken away.

Bird feeders are the focus of two ongoing citizen science projects:  Project Feeder Watch and the Great Backyard Bird Count (this year’s count will be held next weekend). The data from these counts, like the data from the 110-year-old Christmas Bird Count, are pretty noisy, but they’re a reliable-enough way to monitor population trends.

One of the most dramatic examples of how bird feeders can affect birds’ behavior comes from a study of European blackcaps. The birds usually fly to Spain or Portugal for the winter, but lately a subpopulation has been wintering in Great Britain, drawn by the abundance of bird feeders. Because birds that winter together tend to breed together, the species appears to be splitting in two, all because British bird lovers are generous with their bird seed.

These new images of Pluto from the Hubble Space Telescope’s are the most detailed ever made of the dwarf planet. They may be a little blurry, but what do you expect when your camera is more than two and a half billion miles from its subject?

NASA aimed the HST at Pluto to get better images of the dwarf planet in preparation for the arrival of the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. New Horizons will provide even better photos starting about six months from when it makes its Pluto flyby. The flyby will be a quick one, though, and New Horizons will get to image only one hemisphere in detail; with so little time, NASA scientists need to plan out their approach to the imaging in advance to get the most out of their brief opportunity.

Pluto is proving to be even more of an oddball object in our solar system than astronomers realized. We already knew of its tilted, elliptical 248-year orbit around the Sun. Repeated imaging of the dwarf planet has now shown that its north pole has brightened and its south pole has darkened over the last few decades. In addition, the planet is getting redder. Astronomers don’t yet know what is causing these changes. Perhaps New Horizons will provide some answers. We’ll just have to wait.

Neuroscience has always been a scary topic for me. I studied ecology and marine science and viewed brain science as another language, another world, kind of how John Cleese “explains” it in this video. Enjoy!

(Hat tip: Boing Boing)

The lowly plastic bag--a necessary item or an ugly bit of pollution? (courtesy of flickr user frankservayge)

Would you pay for a plastic or paper bag to haul your groceries home? On January 1, residents of Washington, D.C., began paying five cents for every one of these bags when shopping at stores that sell food, including grocery stores and carry-out restaurants. The alternative: bring your own.

Washington is not the first place to institute a bag tax or ban. Ireland did so in 2002, charging 15 cents per plastic grocery bag (the price has since risen). Their bag consumption dropped by 90 percent in a year. China prohibited shops from providing plastic bags to customers for free and banned super-thin plastic bags entirely in 2008 (reducing usage by 66 percent in a year), and Kenya and Uganda have also banned the bags. The head of the United National Environment Programme has even called for a global ban. (A UNEP report calls plastic “the most prevalent component of marine debris, [which] poses hazards because it persists so long in the ocean, degrading into tinier and tinier bits that can be consumed by the smallest marine life at the base of the food web.”)

In the United States, proposals to tax or ban bags have had uneven success. San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags in 2007, and a ban will go into effect in Los Angeles later this year. And the Swedish home store Ikea began charging 5 cents per disposable bag back in 2007 and encouraging shoppers to purchase reusable blue bags. But a bag tax was rejected in Seattle and Baltimore, as was a bag ban in Philadelphia.

Not surprisingly, the plastics industry is not a fan of these taxes and bans. They say that these programs do not reduce plastic usage and that people turn to paper as an alternative thinking it’s greener when it’s not. (Washington taxes both kinds of bags, so that’s not really an issue here.)

Here in Washington, reaction to the tax has been a mixed bag (if you’ll excuse the pun). Store owners are still figuring out how to institute the tax. And some people are so annoyed they say they’ll drive to Virginia to buy groceries, likely spending more money on gas and sales tax than they would on the bag tax. Others are pleased by a program that will reduce bag usage and provide much needed money to clean up our poor polluted Anacostia River (a third of the river’s trash is plastic bags).

I’ve been carrying around a nylon grocery bag, one that folds into a little pouch, in my purse for the past couple of years. I didn’t like how many plastic bags I was throwing away and found the reusable bag a great alternative for most of my shopping, as I tend to buy in small quantities. And now, when I need a paper bag to collect my recyclables or some plastic bags for pet waste, I don’t mind shelling out a few nickles; it’s going to a good cause.

It’s not as if we haven’t made do without paper and plastic bags in the past—my mother still hangs onto my great-grandmother’s wicker shopping baskets. However, the biggest benefit of these measures might be in our heads, helping to change people’s mindsets and get them thinking about the little ways to alter their lives and keep the planet cleaner.

 Loading ...