Category: Science

NASA has a FLickr account where you can find an album of recent photos from the artemis mission.

Go and grab some great photos for your desktop!

The Ig Nobel prizes are out! The ones that stand out to me are

Peace prize: “The governments of India and Pakistan, for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door.”

Management prize: to “five professional hitmen in Guangxi, China, who managed a contract for a hit job (a murder performed for money) in the following way: After accepting payment to perform the murder, Xi Guang-An then instead subcontracted the task to Mo Tian-Xiang, who then instead subcontracted the task to Yang Kang-Sheng, who then instead subcontracted the task to Yang Guang-Sheng, who then instead subcontracted the task to Ling Xian-Si, with each subsequently enlisted hitman receiving a smaller percentage of the fee, and nobody actually performing a murder.”

Big news this week. You may have seen the image. It looks like a hole. But it is 2.6 times larger than the actual object, and there is much more information contained in the image than a quick glance without much thinking reveals.

It is wonderfully explained here.

And the same channel produced a follow up video on the day of the announcement.

You probably know someone using a fitness tracker. Recent models track daily heart rate and sleep. With just a few years of such models in the market, the companies collecting these data anonymously can provide insights that we simply did not have the data for just 5 years ago.

Here is such a summary from fitbit data.

Among the highlights are that 7 and a bit hours of sleep seem optimal for having a low standing heart rate, that Italians have a very low resting heart rate after controlling for daily activity while Indians have a very high, and life events (like surgeries or family gatherings) can be identified by looking at resting heart rate variation throughout the year.

Here](https://youtu.be/nkvVR-sKJT8) is an essential video that distils a lot about geometry, that anyone finishing school should know.

A bit of history, a bit of philoophy, a bit of math, from ancient Greece all the way to our modern understanding of spacetime and the universe.

Well worth the time of watching the whole series.

I was reminded in the Natural History Museum in New York that the Mediterranean sea was dry at some point.

If the connection to the Atlantic Occean was cut off, it would dry again. That is why it is so salty, especially in the East, it evaporates more than it can be replenished from rivers.

It did not take too long to go from there, to this video with graphics and some speculation about the consequences of no water in the Mediterranean.