So what can marine animals actually hear? Seals are among the first to have their ears tested. They have developed different hearing mechanisms for land and sea and hear well in both environments. For example, seals have erectile tissue in their inner ear, which swells up with blood when they are underwater. “It’s like the penis of a man,” says Ron Kastelein at the Sea Mammal Research Company in Harderwijk, the Netherlands, who did the hearing tests. The blood in the engorged tissue helps conduct sound waves to the inner ear, allowing seals to hear a slightly greater range of frequencies in water than on land.
From New Scientist, 11 April 2015
All posts by Keith
Five Questions, Series 7 #3
And so, it has come to pass that the time is upon us when we need to answer the next of my Five Questions.
Question 3: How can you drop a raw egg on a concrete floor without cracking it?
You will need:
1 raw egg (species of dinosaur donor of egg immaterial)
an uncracked concrete floor
a hand (or similar holding device)
Method:
1. Grasp egg in hand.
2. Hold the egg above the concrete floor.
3. Release the egg.
4. Observe the effects of gravity.
5. Observe also that the egg hits the floor.
6. Clean any mess of egg from the floor.
7. Observe the floor.
Result:
1. One cracked egg.
2. As requested, one undamaged concrete floor.
Other methods may be possible but have not been verified experimentally.
Weekly Photograph
This week’s photograph is another from the archives and is specially for all those who know and love Dungeness — and especially for Katy! Dungeness is just such a wonderful place: open, bright, wind-swept, desolate and isolated. As one of the largest areas of natural shingle habitat in Europe it is also ecologically important.
This is Prospect Cottage, the late Derek Jarman’s cottage in the middle of Dungeness, with the minimalist garden he laid out amongst the shingle.
Prospect Cottage, Dungeness
Dungeness, August 2010
Click on the image for larger views on Flickr
Fruit Fly
I was looking at a fruit fly (actually probably more likely a fungus gnat or sciarid fly) a couple of days ago. It was about 2mm long walking up the side of my tea mug.
Aside from the ability of flies to walk up vertical, shiny surfaces (and indeed walk upside down on the ceiling) I marvelled at how Nature can make something so tiny which can function at all.
Look at the legs. They’re as fine as silk. How do you pack into such a tiny diameter an exoskeleton, muscles, nerve fibres and some rudimentary circulation? It defies belief.
And the antennae are much the same. And the wings.
What’s more … How on earth does anyone dissect such a leg or wing to understand the structure? I just cannot get my head round that. Just how do you do such delicate work?
It does make one see how people can believe in intelligent design — for surely engineering something this intricate just isn’t possible. And yet that is exactly the marvel Nature has achieved via evolution.
Incredible!
Ten Things #16
Like many of my days I spent yesterday glued to my desk. Such are the joys of retirement and being involved in running community groups. So while Noreen went to the supermarket, cooked tea and did various other domestic things, here are ten things that I did …
Ten Things I did Yesterday
- Worked on the draft “Terms of Reference” for the new PPG network group — which of course I have been fingered to chair!
- Read countless emails — and binned most of them
- Processed a bundle of Anthony Powell Society membership renewals — and despaired of people (mostly Americans) who can’t read the form
- Ate three meals and drank several buckets of tea
- Ordered Noreen a pair of earrings
- Prepared for this morning’s Healthwatch strategy group meeting
- Had a shower and my weekly-ish shave
- Chatted to the postman and the gardener
- Worked on Anthony Powell Society website — which needs far too many updates done
- Sent my doctor a request for a repeat prescription — done online, of course.
So a pretty typical day at the coalface really!
Something for the Weekend
I suspect a number of my friends will be able to identify with this (from one side or the other!) …
Five Questions, Series 7 #2
Let’s try and catch up a bit and answer the second of our five questions.
Question 2: What is your spirit animal?
Now everyone is going to expect me to say TIGER, especially as I was born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger. And according to the Chinese I’m actually a Metal Tiger — or as I prefer to think of it: Tin Tiger.
But is my spirit animal a tiger?
Well no, I’m not sure it is. But then I can’t say definitely what it is. And of course one isn’t able to choose one’s own spirit animal — it has to choose you. At least that’s what American Indian culture says. And your spirit animal may change throughout your life, depending on what lesson you’re supposed to be learning.
Tigers are creatures of scrubland as well as forest. Whereas in many ways I actually feel more drawn to the Jaguar, cryptic and silent, slinking through the forests of Central and South America.
How can you not like a lazy cat like that!
Jaguar are still large cats, actually the third largest after tigers and lions respectively. They weigh in at around 1.7m from nose to tail compared with a tiger’s roughly 2.5m. So you still wouldn’t want to pick a fight with one!
Perhaps I’ve gone off tigers because they’ve been over-exposed due to their endangered status, but I have certainly recently come to appreciate more the beauty of the jaguar compared with the raw power of the tiger.
In trying to answer this I have done a number of (apparently more serious) quizzes online. Most of them reckon my spirit animal is either an owl or a wolf. Neither of those feels intuitively right. But then the questions are stupid. And, as mentioned above, spirit animals have to choose you; they can’t be chosen or assigned.
Mind you, there is Tigger in Winnie the Pooh. Maybe Tigger is my spirit animal as I would like to be perpetually bouncy!
Or maybe just any cat will do; small domestic cats are just fine. Oh and I also like crows (all the crow family), parrots and fish.
So no, I really don’t know. Maybe I need some guided mediation the find the answer.
Oddity of the Week: Moon
Did you know that the moon has a tail? Turns out, it has two.
Data from NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), which spent seven months orbiting the moon in 2013 and 2014, has revealed a tail of nanoscale dust particles.
The finding follows the discovery of the first lunar tail in 1999, when ground-based telescopes spotted a faint stream of sodium gas stretching out behind the moon.
Anthony Colaprete, who leads LADEE’s spectrometer instrument, thinks the second tail is the result of dust particles thrown up when asteroids crash into the surface and are pushed away by the sun’s radiation pressure.
From New Scientist, 31 March 2015
Five Questions, Series 7 #1
Oh dear, so much for the best laid plans etc. There I was, 10 days ago, about to write an answer the question 1 of my latest Five Questions when the dreaded gastric flu lurgy struck. Still hopefully I’m OK now, back in the land of the (semi-)sane, and we can resume what passes for normal service.
So to our question …
Question 1: Does killing time damage eternity?
Crumbs, you do ask some difficult ones don’t you!
First of all we need to understand what time is and what eternity is. And we don’t. No-one has yet agreed. Even our top physicists really don’t have much of a clue what time is. See for instance physicist Sean Carroll and Wikipedia.
And if we don’t understand time, we cannot understand eternity. For eternity is just the infinite extension of time. And how to understand the infinity of something we don’t understand.
But there, we now have a connection between time and eternity. So anything which affects one of them can logically have an effect on the other. But what effect? We don’t know, because we understand neither time nor eternity.
But then again we have the wisdom of Terry Pratchett in Thief of Time …
Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, re-created anew. Therefore, he understood, there is, in truth, no Past, only a memory of the Past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.
And …
Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn’t live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.
We're on Hiatus
Apologies everyone, there’s going to be a (hopefully short) hiatus while I recover from this nasty gastric flu bug — complete with debilitating dizzy fits.
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.