Category: Science

This is the Best News Ever!!!!!!

No Comments

I’m an engineer, and I have seen way too many PowerPoint slides.

So I exult in the fact that the forum for the Large Hadron Collider at Fermilabs has banned PowerPoint slides in their presentations:

A physicist is more than the sum of his or her slides.

That’s why, about six months ago, organizers of a biweekly forum on Large Hadron Collider physics at Fermilab banned PowerPoint presentations in favor of old-fashioned, chalkboard-style talks.

“Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. “We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.”

In one recent meeting, physics professor John Paul Chou of Rutgers University (pictured above) presented to a full room holding a single page of handwritten notes and a marker. The talk became more dialogue than monologue as members of the audience, freed from their usual need to follow a series of information-stuffed slides flying by at top speed, managed to interrupt with questions and comments.

“We all feel inundated by PowerPoint,” Askew says. “With only a whiteboard, you have your ideas and a pen in your hand.”

If Zombie Osama bin Laden were to were to wage Jihad against PowerPoint, I would gladly join his evil minions.

Mixed Emotions

2 Comments

When something bad is happening to an group of truly awful people, I frequently experience schadenfreude.

When it in suggest negative implications for the rest of us, my feelings are more mixed.

Case in point, the defamation suit that may bankrupt the National Review:

National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955, has had an enormous impact on the nation’s politics. Its writers formulated the ideology that animated the quixotic Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, and then Ronald Reagan’s successful run for the White House in 1980. In the years since, National Review has often worked to keep Republican presidents focused on implementing its vision of conservatism, while bucking up the conservative troops when the movement has found itself out of power.

Today the magazine enjoys circulation roughly equivalent to that of The Nation, the American Left’s leading journal of opinion, and more than twice that of William Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, its primary competition on the Right.

And now, National Review may be fighting for its life.

Climate scientist Michael Mann is suing National Review and Mark Steyn, one of its leading writers, for defamation. It’s a charge that’s notoriously hard to prove, which is no doubt why the magazine initially refused to apologize for an item on its blog in which Steyn accused Mann of fraud. Steyn also quoted a line by another conservative writer (Rand Simberg) that called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” (Simberg and the free market think tank for which he works, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are also named in the suit.)

The lawsuit has not been going well for the magazine. In July, Judge Natalia Combs Greene rejected a motion to dismiss the suit. The defendants appealed, and last week D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg rejected the motion again, opening the door for the discovery phase of the lawsuit to begin.

That’s not all. On Christmas Eve, Steyn (who regularly guest hosts Rush Limbaugh’s radio show) wrote a blog post in which he excoriated Greene, accusing her of incompetence, stupidity, and obtuseness. As a result of this outburst, the law firm that had been representing National Review and Steyn (Steptoe & Johnson) has dropped Steyn as a client and reportedly has plans to withdraw as counsel for the magazine as well.

Part of me hopes that The National Review gets sued into oblivion.    It is a pernicious organization, and it has been since Buckley founded it, and filled it with Oh-So-Civilized support for segregation.

Part of me worries that the Kochs will start funding SLAPP suits against in an attempt to intimidate real news gathering organizations.

And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door – the lady, or the tiger?

H/t Salon.

95 Years Ago Today

No Comments

The Great Molasses Flood of Boston:

On January 15, 1919—an unusually warm winter day in Boston—patrolman Frank McManus picked up a call box on Commercial Street, contacted his precinct station and began his daily report. Moments later he heard a sound like machine guns and an awful grating. He turned to see a five-story-high metal tank split open, releasing a massive wall of dark amber fluid. Temporarily stunned, McManus turned back to the call box. “Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately,” he yelled, “there’s a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street!”

More than 7.5 million liters of molasses surged through Boston’s North End at around 55 kilometers per hour in a wave about 7.5 meters high and 50 meters wide at its peak. All that thick syrup ripped apart the cylindrical tank that once held it, throwing slivers of steel and large rivets in all directions. The deluge crushed freight cars, tore Engine 31 firehouse from its foundation and, when it reached an elevated railway on Atlantic Avenue, nearly lifted a train right off the tracks. A chest-deep river of molasses stretched from the base of the tank about 90 meters into the streets. From there, it thinned out into a coating one half to one meter deep. People, horses and dogs caught in the mess struggled to escape, only sinking further.

Ultimately, the disaster killed 21 people and injured another 150. About half the victims were crushed by the wave or by debris or drowned in the molasses the day of the incident. The other half died from injuries and infections in the following weeks. A long ensuing legal battle revealed several possible reasons for the flood. The storage tank had been filled to near capacity on July 13 and the molasses had likely fermented, producing carbon dioxide that raised the pressure inside the cylinder. The courts also faulted the United States Industrial Alcohol Co., which owned the tank, for ignoring numerous signs of the structure’s instability over the years, such as frequent leaks.

The rest is even better, because they start to discuss things like Reynolds Numbers.

I got some serious geek on reading this.

Cows on Beano™

No Comments

Scientists are working to develop a flatulence free cow:

A new research project looks into the possibilities of adapting every aspect of cattle husbandry and selection processes to lower their greenhouse gas emissions.

You may think that climate change is being caused by burning oil, coal and gas. But not so fast! The emission of methane from cattle is a surprisingly important factor. Methane from cows — a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — makes up 20% of greenhouse emissions from agriculture, or about 1% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases. That’s according to Phil Garnsworthy, professor of dairy science at the University of Nottingham in the UK. He is also one of the project scientists of an EU-funded research project, called Ruminomics, which is using cutting-edge science to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cattle.

The key to the project, Garnsworthy says, is that cattle vary by a factor of two or three in the amount of methane their stomachs produce. It is therefore possible to imagine a dairy herd producing the same volume of milk for lower greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, different diets mean that cows can produce the same amount of milk with lower emissions. “It is possible to imagine cutting emissions from cattle by a fifth, using a combination approach in which you would breed from lower-emitting cattle as well as changing their diets,” Garnsworthy said.

Different genetic strains of cow emit different amounts of methane. “There are three issues: diet, genetics, and the microbiology of the cow’s rumen. We think that animal genetics may well influence their gut microbiology. However, this link has not been proved and we are still in the data collection phase,” explains Lorenzo Morelli, director of the faculty of agriculture at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Piacenza, Italy, who is a microbiologist and a project scientist.

Until now, the European cattle industry was mainly interested in improving aspects of livestock such as their fertility and their overall shape. But Morelli thinks that the market will soon add lower methane production to the list of desired cattle characteristics. Indeed, a herd that emits less methane is likely to be more productive. “The methane is lost energy that could go into producing milk. So if we can find the right genetic mix, we can find cattle that are less polluting, more productive, and more profitable for the famer,” Morelli said.

I, for one, welcome this effort to push back against bovine tyranny.

For F%$#’s Sake, Why?

No Comments

It appears that France is more evil than I had been believed.

Some scientists in Bordeaux have found a way to block the euphoric effects of marijuana:

Leave it to science to find a way to harsh the mellow of marijuana.

A French research team has discovered a natural chemical brake that can tamp down the effects of THC, the main intoxicant in marijuana. They believe it could lead to ways to protect against memory loss, torpor and other side-effects better known as being stoned.

“We have this built-in negative feedback mechanism, a brake” on cannabis intoxication, said University of Bordeaux neurobiologist Dr. Pier Vincenzo Piazza, principal author of a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The researchers were investigating the role of neurosteroids in addiction. These are a class of hormones produced in the brain, and they have been implicated in regulating mood and cognitive activities.

After getting rats and mice high on the active ingredients of cocaine, morphine, nicotine, alcohol and marijuana, the researchers measured the increase in pregnenolone, a precursor to all steroid hormones that was thought to be otherwise inactive.

Getting mice stoned is not as easy as you think. They tend to Bogart that joint.

But more seriously, marijuana is not physiologically addictive, so why are harshing our buzz?

What the f%$# is wrong with you guys?

A joke in a related vein after the break:


Dr. Calvin Rickson, a scientist from Ohio State University, has invented a bra that keeps women’s breasts from jiggling and prevents the nipples from pushing through the fabric when cold weather sets in.

At a news conference, after announcing the invention, a large group of men took Dr. Rickson outside and beat the sh%$ out of him.

Your Bit of Religious Archeology Geek of the Day

No Comments

It appears that archaeologists have found a fabric fragment containing traces of Techelet, the blue dye mentioned in Torah:

In a rare discovery, scientists have confirmed that an almost 2,000-year-old piece of fabric found near the Dead Sea contains remnants of the Biblical blue color known as tekhelet.

It is only the third piece of fabric ever found to contain this precious blue dye derived from snail glands. In accordance with a Torah commandment, tekhelet was used in ancient times to dye the tassels, or tzitzit, attached to the four-cornered garment traditionally worn by men, as well as the clothing worn by the High Priest during the days of the temple.

The finding was revealed on Monday at a special conference held in Jerusalem to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of the doctorate of Rabbi Yitzchak Halevi Herzog, the former chief rabbi of Israel, on the subject of tekhelet. In attendance were many of the former chief rabbi’s grandchildren, including the keynote speaker, Isaac Herzog, the new chairman of the Labor Party.

Announcing the discovery, Dr. Na’ama Sukenik, a curator at the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the tiny piece of fabric had been discovered in the 1950s in a cave at Wadi Murba’at, where Jewish fighters hid during the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century. As part of her doctoral dissertation at Bar Ilan University, Sukenik recently tested the color found in the fabric and was able to determine that it was derived from the Murex trunchular, a mollusk widely believed to be the marine animal known as the khilazon in the Talmud — the source of the rare blue dye.

To this day, scientists and scholars have not reached a consensus on whether tekhelet was a light sky-blue color, as most modern day experts on the subject now believe, or a darker, more purple-hued blue. The shade discovered on the piece of fabric tested by Sukenik was sky blue. The tassels on the fragment were spun in a way that was common in Israel in ancient times, she said, demonstrating that the dye was locally produced.

The dye color varies with exposure to sunlight during the dyeing process, so it is unclear what color was actually applied in ancient times.

Kewl.

H/t Failed Messiah.

Our Loquacious Neanderthal Progenitors

No Comments

And yes, Neanderthal genes are in all of us, so they are in part our ancestors.

One of the enduring myths about Homo neanderthalensis (some would argue Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) is that they lacked the vocal structures to have our fluidity of speech.

30 years ago, the model that showed this was debunked because it was shown that it also prevented H neanderthalensis from swallowing.

The theory only barely passed the laugh test for about 5 years, but you still hear it coming up all the time.

One of the reasons for this is that the bone at the base of the tongue, the Hyloid is unattached to the rest of the skeleton, and fragile, so the fissile record is meager.

Well, they have found a Neanderthal hyloid, and it was very similar to ours, and now a group of scientist have modeled the Hyloid, and the surriounding soft tissues, and determined that they were very chatty folk:

An analysis of a Neanderthal’s fossilised hyoid bone – a horseshoe-shaped structure in the neck – suggests the species had the ability to speak.

This has been suspected since the 1989 discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid that looks just like a modern human’s.

But now computer modelling of how it works has shown this bone was also used in a very similar way.

Writing in journal Plos One, scientists say its study is “highly suggestive” of complex speech in Neanderthals.

The hyoid bone is crucial for speaking as it supports the root of the tongue. In non-human primates, it is not placed in the right position to vocalise like humans.

An international team of researchers analysed a fossil Neanderthal throat bone using 3D x-ray imaging and mechanical modelling.

This model allowed the group to see how the hyoid behaved in relation to the other surrounding bones.

Stephen Wroe, from the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia, said: “We would argue that this is a very significant step forward. It shows that the Kebara 2 hyoid doesn’t just look like those of modern humans – it was used in a very similar way.”

Personally, I think that it is difference in fecundity that led to Neanderthals being supplanted by modern humans, but I am not a paleoanthropologist.

Why High Frequency Sucks Part 86

No Comments

Some high frequency traders in Chicago made a lot of money by having 7 milliseconds advance notice of the recent Fed decision:

In the wake of an unusual trading pattern after the Federal Reserve’s decision to continue economic stimulus last week, Fed officials have contacted certain news organizations to discuss rules and procedures for the central bank’s advance release of sensitive information, CNBC has learned.

On Sept. 18, the Federal Reserve shocked the financial world with its decision not to scale back its level of support to the economy as most market participants expected.

Financial markets reacted at the speed of light, pushing stocks dramatically higher in just moments. But it looks like the speed of light just wasn’t fast enough for some traders.

Some traders in Chicago appear to have had access to the Fed’s decision before anyone else in the Windy City. According to trading data reviewed by CNBC, they began buying in Chicago-traded assets just before others in that city could possibly have been aware of the Fed’s decision. By one estimate, as much as $600 million in assets changed hands in the milliseconds before most other traders in Chicago could learn of the Fed’s September surprise-a sharp contrast to the very low volume of trading ahead of the Fed’s decision.

………

The precise timing of the release is crucial because information can only travel as fast as the speed of light-a physical reality first laid out by Albert Einstein. Information-like a Fed decision-released in Washington takes as much as 7 milliseconds to travel to Chicago, where futures and other assets are traded. And because high-speed trading firms are now able to execute trades at the millisecond level, there is a brief window of time in which information can be publicly available in Washington but is still traveling to Chicago, where computers won’t receive it until milliseconds later.

Thanks to modern technology, that window is long enough for some to profit if they know which direction the market is about to go and can place millisecond-level trades accordingly. None of this trading would typically involve a human being-it takes slow-moving humans about 300 milliseconds just to blink an eye, making them much too slow to react to news at the millisecond level. Instead, high-speed data feeds are plugged directly to algorithmic trading computers, which in turn analyze the news as it comes in and execute pre-programed trading strategies.

What apparently happened is that a reporter who was given the information ahead of time, the Federal Reserve does this in a locked room (really) under sequester.

The reporters can prepare their reports, but they cannot release any information before 2:00 pm.

Someone cracked the system, and used the speed of light to gain a competitive edge.

The bitch is, I am not sure that this was illegal.

Whoever did this did not act on non-public information, it had been released publicly at 2:00pm EDT, which is when they traded, they simply beat the information going down the wires .

It should be illegal, and I’d love to see someone prosecute these motherf%$#ers.

Buh Bye!

No Comments

Voyager 1 is now officially in interstellar space:

By today’s standards, the spacecraft’s technology is laughable: it carries an 8-track tape recorder and computers with one-240,000th the memory of a low-end iPhone. When it left Earth 36 years ago, it was designed as a four-year mission to Saturn, and everything after that was gravy.

But Voyager 1 has become — thrillingly — the Little Spacecraft That Could. On Thursday, scientists declared that it had become the first probe to exit the solar system, a breathtaking achievement that NASA could only fantasize about back when Voyager was launched in 1977, the same year “Star Wars” was released.

………

The lonely probe, which is 11.7 billion miles from Earth and hurtling away at 38,000 miles per hour, has long been on the cusp, treading a boundary between the bubble of hot, energetic particles around the solar system and the dark region beyond. There, in interstellar space, the plasma, or ionized gas, is noticeably denser.

Dr. Gurnett and his team have spent the past few months analyzing their data, trying to nail down whether what they were seeing was solar plasma or the plasma of interstellar space. Now they are certain it was the latter, and have even pinpointed a date for the crossing: Aug. 25, 2012.

Kewl!

SCOTUS Strikes Down Human Gene Patents

No Comments

In yet another smack down to the increasingly patent crazy United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Patent Court), the Supreme Court has ruled that the contents of the human genome are a discovery, not an invention, and so they cannot be patented:

Pronouncing what may seem like a patent truism, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday that biotech researchers have to create something to get monopoly protection to study and apply the phenomenon. Because Myriad Genetics, Inc., “did not create anything,” the Court struck down its patent on isolating human genes from the bloodstream, unchanged from their natural form. Because Myriad did create a synthetic form of the genes, however, that could be eligible for a patent, the Court concluded.

The decision was a major blow to a company that believed it had a right to be the sole user and analyst of two human genes, mutations in which show a high risk, for women found to have them in their blood, of breast and ovarian cancer. But the ruling will give medical and scientific researchers, and family doctors, greater opportunity to help women patients discover their potential vulnerability to those types of cancer.

………

The scientific and legal key to the Court’s denial of patent protection to isolated, natural forms of DNA were these sentences: “It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The location and order of the nucleotides existed in nature before Myriad found them. Nor did Myriad create or alter the genetic structure of DNA.”

While that was not disputed, because the legal controversy focused rather on what Myriad claimed it did to locate and then isolate the forms of genetic DNA, those agreed-upon factors were enough to convince the Court that “Myriad did not create anything.” As Justice Thomas commented further: “To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention. Groundbreaking, innovative, or even brilliant discovery does not by itself satisfy the [patent law] inquiry.”

I think that one of the reasons that this was a unanimous ruling was that it was a very narrow ruling, hence the caveats about their explicitly saying nothing about synthesized genetic material.

Still, it is a good ruling, and yet another much needed bitch slap to the Patent Court.

EU Bans Neonicotinoid Pesticides

No Comments

They are cioncerned that these pesticides are causing colony collapse disorder:

Environmentalists hailed a “victory for bees” today after the European Union voted for a ban on the nerve-agent pesticides blamed for the dramatic decline global bee populations.

Despite fierce lobbying by the chemicals industry and opposition by countries including Britain, 15 of the 27 member states voted for a two-year restriction on neonicotinoid insecticides. That gave the European Commission the support it needed to push through an EU-wide ban on using three neonicotinoids on crops attractive to bees.

Tonio Borg, the EC’s top health official, said they planned to implement the landmark ban from December. “I pledge to do my utmost to ensure that our bees, which are so vital to our ecosystem and contribute over €22bn annually to European agriculture, are protected,” he said.

Britain was among eight nations which voted against the motion, despite a petition signed by 300,000 people presented to Downing Street last week by fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett. The Independent has also campaigned to save Britain’s bee population.

Four nations abstained from the moratorium, which will restrict the use of imidacloprid and clothianidin, made by Germany’s Bayer, and thiamethoxam, made by the Swiss company, Syngenta. The ban on use on flowering crops will remain in place throughout the EU for two years unless compelling scientific evidence to the contrary becomes available.

More than 30 separate scientific studies have found a link between the neonicotinoids, which attack insects’ nerve systems, and falling bee numbers. The proposal by European Commission – the EU’s legislative body – to ban the insecticides was based on a study by the European Food Safety Authority, which found in January that the pesticides did pose a risk to bees’ health.

The argument against this is that the evidence is not sufficiently conclusive.

Hopefully, the two year ban should provide some good data, though the Wiki indicates that the pesticide can persist in the environment for more than two years.

Science, Makes Indiana Jones Its Bitch

No Comments

Specifically, the crystal skulls have been shown to be a fake:

Humans seem to have a predilection for fake quartz-crystal Aztec skulls. Since the 1860s, dozens of skull sculptures have appeared on the art market purporting to be pre-Columbian artifacts from Mesoamerica, that is, created by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century. Three such skulls have graced the collections of major museums on both sides of the Atlantic: the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the British Museum in London, and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

 ………

 So the team took a closer look at the skulls’ surfaces. As a benchmark, they borrowed a legitimate Mesoamerican crystal goblet from the Museum of Oaxacan Cultures, in Mexico. Then they used scanning electron microscopy to compare these surfaces.

 It turns out that the surface of the authentic goblet has irregular etch marks, a sign that the pieces were carved with hand-held tools. But the surface of the suspect skulls have regular etch marks, evidence that they were made with rotary wheels and hard abrasives, which appeared only after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Walsh says.

 Looking even closer at the British Museum’s skull, the team discovered green, wormlike inclusions in the rock. Raman spectroscopy revealed that the inclusions were an iron-rich chlorite mineral. Although this kind of trace impurity is found in rock crystal from Brazil or Madagascar, it is not found in Mexican crystal, Walsh says.

Note the Difference between the surfaces of thehand carved goblet (r) and the skull

Not surprised.

When you find artifacts that create this kind of “Ancient Astronauts” type hysteria, they are almost always bullsh%$.

Another Cherished Myth Shattered

No Comments

It turns out that gold shirt crew were statistically more likely to die that red shirts:

Yep, I know, you are wondering how it is safer to be a red shirt than a gold shirt.

The pretty picture seems to indicate otherwise, until you realize how many of the crew were red shirts:

A pie chart was created using Minitab to graphically view the data. It is obvious from the pie chart in Figure 1 that redshirts suffer most of the casualties. However, raw casualty figures are not very informative without knowing how many people were in each uniform. According to the Joseph’s Star Trek Blueprints, the only set of Enterprise blueprints endorsed by Paramount Pictures, the Enterprise’s 430 crew members consisted of 55 command and helm personnel, 136 science and medical personnel and 239 engineering, operations and security personnel. This means 16.4% of casualties were in command and helm, 5.4% were in science and medical and 10.0% were in operations, engineering and security. Of the remaining 27.3% of casualties, 12 were killed by contact with the galactic barrier or Rigelian fever, which could have affected personnel regardless of duty assignments.

It should be noted that the relative safety of red shirts varies with tasking though:

Based on an analysis of casualties that considers the overall total number of personnel in each color of uniform, wearing a redshirt may not be the automatic death sentence that it is popularly considered to be. On the other hand, 18 of the redshirt casualties were security personnel out of a total population of 90; 20% of the security department were casualties. Although wearing a redshirt may not of itself be particularly hazardous, personnel in a redshirt who are members of the security department should expect to pay a high premium on their life insurance.

So, engineering/operations, pretty safe.  Security, not so much.

We Are Doomed

No Comments

It appears that data from the Large Hadron Collider shows that we will be swallowed up by an alternate reality in the next 10 billion years or so:

Scientists are still sorting out the details of last year’s discovery of the Higgs boson particle, but add up the numbers and it’s not looking good for the future of the universe, scientists said Monday.

“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, told reporters.

Lykeen spoke before presenting his research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.

“It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out,” said Lykken, who is also on the science team at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.

………

“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there’ll be a catastrophe,” Lykken said.

“A little bubble of what you might think of as an ‘alternative’ universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us,” Lykken said, adding that the event will unfold at the speed of light.

Scientists had grappled with the idea of the universe’s long-term stability before the Higgs discovery, but stepped up calculations once its mass began settling in at around 126 billion electron volts – a critical number it turns out for figuring out the fate of the universe.

The calculation requires knowing the mass of the Higgs to within one percent, as well as the precise mass of other related subatomic particles.

“You change any of these parameters to the Standard Model (of particle physics) by a tiny bit and you get a different end of the universe,” Lyyken said.

Or maybe not.

It’s kind of irrelevant to most of us, except perhaps theologians.

Astronomical Headline of the Year

No Comments

Tell me that this was not the product of much giggles by the editorial staff:

Uranus takes a pounding more frequently than thought

 Uranus isn’t just gassy, it’s also tilted completely sideways, such that instead of rotating like a spinning top, it rolls around the plane of the solar system more like a giant ball. Now astronomers think they know how this happened, and it means that Uranus has been pounded really, really hard not once, but twice.

 Uranus’ axial tilt of 98 degrees means that it’s got one pole pointed almost directly at the sun, and one pole pointed out into space. As the planet revolves around the sun, these poles slowly switch places, meaning that if you lived there, you’d get 42 years of sunlight followed by 42 years of darkness, with a short time in between where things would seem almost normal.

 Needless to say, this sort of behavior is a bit strange for Uranus, although nobody’s quite been able to determine how it happened. New simulations from astronomers at the Observatory of Côte d’Azur in Nice, France may have just figured it out, and the answer seems to be that Uranus has suffered from not one but two giant impacts..

H/t LD at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.