Skulls in the Stars

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

• Measuring Gravity: Ain’t Nothin’ but a G Thing. Gravity is one of the fundamental forces of nature, but also one of the most difficult to measure precisely; a recent experimental measurement of the gravitational constant has shown significant deviation from the accepted value. Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles looks at a variety of recent gravitational measurements, and explains the implications of the recent discrepancy.
• Snapshots of magnetic fields. While we’re talking about things that are hard to measure, let’s talk about magnetic fields! Magnetic fields are extremely difficult to measure with nanoscale precision and in the time domain, in marked contrast to measurements of other quantities. Joerg Haber of All That Matters discusses recent techniques for measuring such fields.
• Spices as antiseptics… maybe. Spices can add lots of “zing” to your food, and make some people suffer while eating it, but do they serve an even more important biological function? Thomas Kluyver at Thomas’ Plant-Related Blog looks at the evidence that the use of spices has served an antiseptic purpose in food preparation, and the limitations of that evidence.
• Tauromaquia Today. And now for something completely different! Bécquer Medak-Seguín of Hispanic Studies Forum discusses a dispute in the interpretation of artist Goya’s collection of etchings on bullfighting, La Tauromaquia.

Check back next Monday 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.

• Unmasking Eoanthropus dawsoni, The First Englishman. This post was too late for the special “fools, failures and frauds” edition of The Giant’s Shoulders history of science blog carnival, but it is a perfect researchblogging post! Krystal D’Costa of Anthropology in Practice discusses the infamous discovery of “Piltdown man”, and how national pride, among other things, muddled the field of anthropology for decades.
• Cylons and Smelloscopes: False Positives and False Negatives in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. In recent years, the search for extraterrestrial life has heated up with the ability to search for Earth-like planets outside our solar system. At his eponymous blog, The Astronomist describes the techniques for searching for life on other planets, and the pitfalls of such techniques.
• What’s the point of the semantic web? Anyone who has been around long enough to remember web searching pre-Google knows how far the quality has improved. But can it be done even better, and how? David Bradley at Sciencebase explains the limits of current search engines, and describes how the “semantic web” could fix those limitations.
• Friday(ish) Focal Mechanisms: Samoa’s hidden rupture. Though our understanding of earthquakes has increased tremendously in modern times, there is still much to learn and many subtleties in every recorded event. Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous discusses research that indicates that last year’s Samoan earthquake was much more complicated than previously appreciated.
• Whatever Happened to Seismosaurus? Finally, Brian Switek of Dinosaur Tracking takes a look at a dinosaur that drew a lot of attention in the 1990s — Seismosaurus — and explains why we don’t hear anything about it any more!

Check back next week for more miscellaneous suggestions!

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

Late posting of editor’s selections this week — life’s events, including an emergency vet trip with a sick kitty (she’s fine) — delayed things!

• Some snails prefer doing it anti-chiral. In our bawdiest post of the week, Kevin Zelnio of The Online Laboratory of Kevin Zelnio talk a bit about how snails procreate — it turns out that one species of snail prefers to find mates that have shells that twist opposite to their own! *gasp!*
• Why did the Tasmanians stop eating fish? Who doesn’t love a mystery?  In an intriguing post, Greg Laden of his eponymous blog investigates what happened when early human inhabitants of islands were slowly cut off from the mainland by changing sea conditions.  The connection to fish eating is explained!
• Amateur impact hypothesis makes it into major archaeology journal. Does an ancient Greek legend refer to a massive meteor strike in antiquity?  Martin Rundkvist of Aardvarchaeology looks at a recent paper making the case, and argues that the evidence isn’t really what it’s cracked up to be.

That’s it for this week!  Next Monday, I’ll hopefully be back on schedule!

Hear ye, hear ye — the 26th edition of The Giant’s Shoulders, labeled the “Fools, failures and frauds” special edition, is available for perusal at Neurotic Physiology!  In this edition of the carnival we take a special look at those who committed scientific fraud, who performed experiments that failed, and folks who were just plain wrong and/or crazy!  Thanks to Scicurious for putting together a most excellent edition of the carnival!

The next edition of the carnival will be held at Entertaining Research, and the deadline for entries is September 15th.  Entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!