Musings

By Ryan Whitwam From everything we’ve been able to tell, the Milky Way is a fairly typical galaxy. It’s a medium-large spiral with several smaller satellite galaxies, and the disk spans some 120,000 light-years. It can be hard to tell what the galaxy looks like from the inside, though. A new analysis focusing on a class of very bright stars indicates the Milky Way might be stranger than we thought with a warped and uneven central disk. More

By John Timmer General trust, but partisan skepticism, and worries about conflicts of interest. Ecole Polytechnique / Flickr Yesterday, the Pew Research Center released an analysis of polling results on Americans' views of science. In general, the poll was good news for the research community, showing a gradual-but-steady rise in the public's view of scientists. But there were a few areas of concern within the data, which showed that the public still worries about issues like scientific misconduct and conflicts of interest. And the numbers reveal a partisan divide on the situations where scientists are trustworthy. More

By Ryan F. Mandelbaum Mammalwatcher (Wikimedia Commons) A modern-day female zebu in Sri Lanka. Scientists have found evidence of Bronze Age human civilization written into ancient cattle DNA, according to a new study. More at Gizmodo

By eLife CC0 Public Domain Research results on drug-gene interactions are much less likely to be replicated if they are performed by hierarchical communities or close-knit groups of frequent collaborators who use similar methods, instead of independent groups of scientists using different methods, suggests a paper published last week in eLife. More at Phys.org Opinion: "Decentralising science" is repetitive redundancy. By definition, science is decentralized. Any attempt to restrict it is anti-science. Don't stop where the ink does.

By Tom Abate, Stanford University CC0 Public Domain The global population is expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—but how will we feed all these people? Roughly one-third of the world's arable land suffers from lack of accessible iron, rendering it inhospitable to staple crops like maize and soybeans. More at Phys.org

By Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres F. von Blanckenburg Zermatt in the Western Alps. There have been long periods of cooling in Earth's history. Temperatures had already fallen for more than 10 million years before the last ice age began about 2.5 million years ago. At that time, the northern hemisphere was covered with massive ice masses and glaciers. A geoscientific paradigm, widespread for over 20 years, explains this cooling with the formation of the large mountain ranges such as the Andes, the Himalayas and the Alps. As a result, more rock weathering has taken place, the paradigm suggests. This in turn removed more carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, so that the greenhouse effect decreased and the atmosphere cooled. This and other processes eventually led to the ice Age. More at Phys.org

By Brian Kahn Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag. Click here to view original GIF College of DuPage Earth had itself a day yesterday. Chile and Argentina got a prime look at a total solar eclipse while the Pacific Ocean played host to Hurricane Barbara, the strongest storm on Earth at the moment. More at Earther - Gizmodo

By Emma Shaw, University of Cambridge CC0 Public Domain We've all done it, offered an excuse for our poor behaviour or rude reactions to others in the heat of the moment, after a long commute or a tough day with the kids. Excuses are commonplace, an attempt to explain and justify behaviours we aren't proud of, to escape the consequences of our acts and make our undesirable behaviour more socially acceptable. More at Phys.org

By Santa Fe Institute Mesa Shumacher/Santa Fe Institute Illustration of marine fossils that have existed since the Cambrian. Represented taxa include brachiopods, trilobites, ammonites, bivalves, and decapods. Throughout life's history on earth, biological diversity has gone through ebbs and flows—periods of rapid evolution and of dramatic extinctions. We know this, at least in part, through the fossil record of marine invertebrates left behind since the Cambrian period. Remarkably, extreme events of diversification and extinction happen more frequently than a typical, Gaussian, distribution would predict. Instead of the typical bell-shaped curve, the fossil record shows a fat-tailed distribution, with extreme, outlier, events occurring with higher-than-expected probability. More at Phys.org

By Lincoln Larson, S. Scott Ogletree, The Conversation The relationship between parks and crime remains the subject of debate. Shutterstock Contact with nature reduces stress and aggression, one reason scholars say urban green space may reduce violence. Some scholars say parks and other urban green spaces prevent violence. When vacant lots and deteriorating urban spaces are transformed into more appealing and useful places for residents, violence and crime typically decline in the immediate vicinity. More at Phys.org

By Ryan F. Mandelbaum ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center Raikoke volcano on the Kuril Islands erupting on June 22, 2019. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station caught the spectacular eruption of the Raikoke volcano off of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula over the weekend. More at Gizmodo

By Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science Image: NASA Clouds from deep convection over the tropical Pacific ocean, photographed by the space shuttle. Such convective activity drives the Hadley circulation of the atmosphere. For decades, scientists studying a key climate phenomenon have been grappling with contradictory data that have threated to undermine confidence in the reliability of climate models overall. A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, settles that debate with regard to the tropical atmospheric circulation. More at Phys.org

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful operational rocket, is set to launch on June 24, 2019 at 11:30 PM EDT. On it is the most diverse payload that holds the key for the future space exploration. More

By Jonathan O'callaghan, From Horizon Magazine Image: Universität Ulm / Heiko Grandel Quantum sensors could transform a range of areas from atomic clocks and the way we measure electromagnetic radiation. Image credit - Heiko Grandel for the institute of quantum optics from Ulm. When you hear the word 'quantum," you may imagine physicists working on a new ground breaking theory. Or perhaps you've read about quantum computers and how they might change the world. But one lesser-known field is also starting to reap the benefits of the quantum realm—medicine. More at Phys.org

By Jennifer Ouellette Just arrange a series of cascading triggers so players no longer have any choice. Image: Gordon Chibroski/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images Assemble just the right deck, and draw just the right cards, and you'll get the equivalent of a universal Turing machine within the game, a new study finds. That makes it the most computationally complex real-world game yet known. Consider this hypothetical scenario: Bob and Alice are playing a game of Magic: The Gathering. It's normal game play at first, as, say, Filigree robots from Kaladesh face off against werewolves and vampires from Innistrad. But then Alice draws just the right card from her customized deck, and suddenly Bob finds himself caught in the equivalent of a Turing machine, the famed abstract device that can simulate any computer algorithm. Thanks to the peculiarities of the rules of Magic, Bob can now only finish the game when he meets whatever condition Alice has programmed her in-gam...

By IVAN DE LUCE, BUSINESS INSIDER Image: why kei/Unsplash If you've ever felt your eyelids droop for just a fraction of a second during some mundane task — like staring at a computer screen or driving down the highway — you've experienced a phenomenon known as "microsleep." More at Science Alert

By John Timmer An enigmatic, cup-shaped animal probably grew in groups to make feeding easier. The result of a fluid mechanics simulation with multiple Erniettas. Go back to Earth's earliest animals in the Ediacaran, however, and things get much, much harder. There's only one species known so far that appears to have the right body plan to act as a predator of sorts. Beyond that, it's all a collection of soft-looking fronds and segments that are difficult to ascribe any obvious function to. Faced with a lot of questions without obvious answers, biologists turned to an unlikely source of help: physicists and engineers who understand fluid mechanics. More at Ars Technica

By Robert Sanders Image: UC Berkeley image by Edward Molter and Imke de Pater Composite image of Uranus’s atmosphere and rings at radio wavelengths, taken with the ALMA array in December 2017. The image shows thermal emission, or heat, from the rings of Uranus for the first time, enabling scientists to determine their temperature: a frigid 77 Kelvin (-320 F). Dark bands in Uranus’s atmosphere at these wavelengths show the presence of molecules that absorb radio waves, in particular hydrogen sulfide gas. Bright regions like the north polar spot (yellow spot at right, because Uranus is tipped on its side) contain very few of these molecules. The rings of Uranus are invisible to all but the largest telescopes—they weren't even discovered until 1977—but they're surprisingly bright in new heat images of the planet taken by two large telescopes in the high deserts of Chile. More at Phys.org

By CLARE FIESELER, THE WASHINGTON POST Image: spukkato/iStock In 2015, a Swiss graduate student departed from the Zurich airport with a suitcase filled with empty wallets, loads of cash and 400 spare keys. The authorities stopped him with questions. It was for a science experiment, he explained. More at Science Alert

By Max Planck Society Image: Guillermo Restrepo, MPI for Mathematics in the Sciences A periodic table of chemical bonds: Each of the 94 circles with chemical element symbols represents the bond that the respective element forms with an organic residue. The bonds are ordered according to how strongly they are polarized. Where there is a direct arrow connection, the order is clear: Bonds of hydrogen, for example, are more polarized than bonds of boron, phosphorus, and palladium. The same applies to rubidium in comparison to caesium, which has particularly low polarized bonds and is therefore at the bottom of the new periodic table. If there is no direct arrow between two elements, they may still be comparable – if there is a chain of arrows between them. For example, the bonds of oxygen are more polarized than the bonds of bromine. Bonds represented by the same colour have the same binding behaviour and belong to one of the 44 classes. More at Phys.org