Skulls in the Stars

The Giants’ Shoulders #29 is now up at Heterodoxolgy, and it is an “esoteric sciences special”! The carnival focuses on the strange, alien and counterintuitive in the history of the sciences.  Thanks to Egil for putting together a lovely carnival!

Giants’ Shoulders #30, A (Scientific) Christmas Carol, will be hosted by the Ghost of William Whewell in person at his very own blog on 16^thDecember 2010 and is a celebration of the science of the 19^th century. Submissions should be made to Rebekah Higgitt or to the Giants’ Shoulders Blog Carnival by 15^th December.  (I’ve already got the perfect topic for my post!)

“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.

• The demon is out of the bottle. No, we haven’t regressed to a superstitious era of witches and demons — we’re talking about Maxwell’s demon, a hypothetical Second Law of Thermodynamics-violating creature!  It is well-known now that this “demon” can’t violate the Second Law, but Joerg Heber at All That Matters describes an experiment that demonstrates explicitly the relationship between the demon and energy.
• Could “hairier” crops help mitigate climate warming? Humankind plays such a large role in our planet’s ecosystem that it is easy to forget that unusual and offbeat changes can affect the climate in significant ways.  Phil Camill at Global Change describes one of these odd possibilities — changing the reflectivity of the planet’s surface by using “hairier” crops — and the pros and cons of such an approach.
• Mini frog packs a powerful punch. In a wonderfully written piece, Grrlscientist of Punctuated Equilibrium introduces us to a newly-discovered species of poisonous tree frog — and the efforts to determine how it achieves its toxic “punch”.
• The Mines of the Future and of the Past. A disastrous 1527 Spanish expedition left only a handful of survivors who traveled across the Southwest for years to find save haven.  Along the way, some natives gave them a gift made of copper that sparked a mystery — where did the copper come from?  At Gambler’s House, teofilo looks into the origins of the copper artifacts used by the Southwest natives, and what those origins can tell us about our future.

Check back next week for more “miscellaneous” selections!

“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.

• Life in the dark. Most of us live in areas of near-endless light —  night is filled with the glow of man-made illumination.  In a fascinating post, Greg Downey of Neuroanthropology discusses the effects — physiological and cultural — of living in in a region of genuinely dark nights.
• A galaxy far, far away… While we’re thinking about peering out into the darkness, Kelly Oakes of basic space describes the observation of the most distant object yet in the universe — so distant, in fact, that it formed in an era when galaxies and stars were just forming!
• Finding science in my mother’s jewelry box. Remarkable natural phenomena can be seen all around us, sometimes in the most unlikely of places!  Starting from her mother’s jewelry, Kelly Grooms of Promega Connections takes us 50 million years into the past to learn about our planet’s ancient geology.
• C is for Cookie: Cookie Monster, Network Pressure, and Identity Formation. Alas, poor Cookie Monster — he isn’t the same sugar-gobbling beast that he was when I was a kid!  Now that he only eats a cookie after filling up on vegetables, Krystal d’Costa of Anthropology in Practice explains how we can learn about social network pressure from his change in diet.

Check back next week for more “miscellaneous” selections!

There’s only 7 days left before the deadline of the next edition of The Giant’s Shoulders history of science blog carnival!  It will be hosted by Egil Asprem at Heterodoxology, and will be another themed edition:

To the layman, the natural sciences have become increasingly “esoteric” in the sense of being hard to access and difficult to understand. Throughout its history, science has been esoteric in other senses as well, connected with attempts to unravel the secrets of the book of nature, the understanding of occult properties and forces, and the quest for absolute, higher knowledge. This edition of Giants’ Shoulders is dedicated to all those esoteric pursuits of knowledge; a celebration of all strange, alien, and counterintuitive methods that have been attempted to dissect, read, or tame nature’s secrets, from renaissance natural philosophy to present-day Grand Unified Theories – whether cleverly inventive, hopelessly megalomaniac, or simply misguided.

Of course, we’re also still accepting more general posts on the history of science, so get writing for the November 15th deadline; entries can be submitted directly to your host or to the Giants’ Shoulders blog carnival.

“Dr. SkySkull” selects several notable posts each week from a miscellany of ResearchBlogging.org categories. He blogs at Skulls in the Stars.

It’s the day after Halloween, but I can’t resist sharing a few posts that are of a more creepy nature!

• Friday Weird Science: SLIME MOLD TAKES TOKYO.  The ever-entertaining Scicurious of Neurotic Physiology takes on fascinating slime molds, which have been shown to rampage very efficiently through Tokyo! (Not as scary as it sounds!)
• Of Fossil Ghosts and Hippos Past.  We know a lot about living hippos, but we know relatively little about where hippos came from — their more recent ancestors are still missing, and are “fossil ghosts”.  Brian Switek of Laelaps explains the details.
• The Vampire in the Plague Pit.   Vampires stories today are a source of cheap thrills and even titillation, but in days long past vampires were a widely believed and frightening threat.  At Contagions, Michelle Ziegler describes a skeleton excavated in a 15th century Venice plague pit that highlights that belief.
• Meteorite tea, and the failures of genius.  Just because a theory is ugly doesn’t mean that it is wrong, and just because a theory is clever or beautiful doesn’t make it right!  Lab Lemming at The Lounge of the Lab Lemming describes a very clever theory that didn’t pan out regarding Jupiter’s moon Io.

Check back next week for more (miscellaneous but probably not spooky) selections!