Monthly Archives: May 2017

Larpenteur Ave, St. Paul, today:

The snow isn’t vivid, but it’s there.

Paleoburrow:

A few years earlier, and about 1,700 miles to the southeast, another Brazilian geologist happened upon a different, equally peculiar cave. Heinrich Frank, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, was zipping down the highway on a Friday afternoon when he passed a construction site in the town of Novo Hamburgo. There, in a bank where excavators had eaten away half of a hill, he saw a peculiar hole.

Local geology doesn’t yield such a sight, so Frank went back a few weeks later and crawled inside. It was a single shaft, about 15 feet long; at its end, while on his back, he found what looked like claw marks all over the ceiling. Unable to identify any natural geological explanation for the cave’s existence, he eventually concluded that it was a “paleoburrow,” dug, he believes, by an extinct species of giant ground sloth.

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as paleoburrows,” says Frank. “I’m a geologist, a professor, and I’d never even heard of them.” [“Get Lost in Mega-Tunnels Dug by South American Megafauna,” Andrew Jenner, The Crux]

He didn’t get the part for Punch ‘n Judy.

It’s a Danish monster movie! Reptilicus (1961)  (I believe we saw the American version, cut for TV; there’s also a Danish version, which may differ slightly from the English version, according to Wikipedia) kicks off the very earnest fun by finding blood and reptile parts in in the effluvia brought up by a drill operation looking for oil. Returned to the Danish lab in Copenhagen, the small parts begin to regenerate under the care of the scientists. Eventually, amidst a storm of sarcastic comments from my Arts Editor and yours truly, they have a tail that continues to slowly grow.

Then, during a violent electrical storm presumably ordered up by Victor Frankenstein, the tail suddenly exhibits a growth spurt reminiscent of those experienced by thirteen year old boys, and the resultant monster, merely glimpsed by the scientists, gendarmerie, and comic relief (I kid you not!) – in a rare good decision by the movie makers – kills one of the scientists (it’s so hard to find good gratitude these days) and escapes to the sea. Despite the best efforts of the military, it comes back ashore, where the last good decision is dropped and we get to view the monster in all his amateurish armor-plated glory.  In the most memorable scene of the movie, it kills the father of an innocent fishing family, eating him alive.

A human makes the pills go down easier!

My Arts Editor shrieked something about Monty Python at this juncture, while I just giggled madly as the victim, outlined in a neon light, went down the gullet.

The movie lurches along from there. At one point, depth charges are used to jolt it out of the sea after it had been barbecued, but this causes panic in the scientific community, as they fear that blowing it into, say, N pieces might result in N monsters – that regeneration thing, doncha know. Eventually, the monster begins to spout neon-green slime (the movie makers seemed to really like the neon palette) which is apparently an acid; however, no one actually runs from it, so we decided it must merely be rough on folks’ aesthetic senses.

After a good ravaging (or perhaps ravishing, depending on your point of view) of Copenhagen, the military is faced with the problem of “Now we have it trapped, what do we do with it?” After all, explosives are Right Out. Naturally, it’s the off-the-cuff remark concerning drugs that carries the day, and the ladies step forward to make up the poison (a gallon’s worth), while the general himself shoots it into Reptilicus’ mouth in an amazing shot. And so all’s well that ends well, so long as you don’t live in Copenhagen.

Except there’s that foot blown off Reptilicus during the depth charging.

We did not see the MST3K version, but I understand they did a fine job with Reptilicus. I strongly suggest you watch this with a fortifier of some sort in hand. Or several.

NewScientist (15 April 2017, paywall) interviews Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian, who recently received the honor of having element 118 named after him. I found this Q&A interesting:

How much higher will the periodic table go?

There has to be a limit, and I think it will come from relativistic effects. When the positive charge of the nucleus increases, the velocity of the electrons increases too, bringing them closer to the speed of light. We are already close. For example, the innermost electrons of element 112 travel at seven-tenths of light speed. Bringing the velocity of the outermost electrons even closer to light speed may change an atom’s chemical properties, breaking periodicity.

That’s an interesting thought. But he also mentions another topic that fascinates me, if only because I’m so ignorant:

What are you looking forward to now?

To see closer to the top of the “island of stability“. Theorists predict that there should be some superheavy atoms, with certain combinations of protons and neutrons, that are extremely stable. We have a “continent” of stable elements that ends with lead, element 82. As we go heavier than lead, we have a “peninsula” created by the likes of thorium and uranium, which are radioactive and so decay over time into lighter elements. Superheavy nuclei are highly charged matter. The repulsion of positively charged protons prevents the formation of large nuclei and this moves us into the deep water of the “sea of instability”, where elements break down ever faster. It looks like the end of the material world, but I don’t think it is.

The island of stability is a controversial idea. You think it could exist?

If it didn’t, we could not synthesise elements heavier than element 112. Their lifetimes are extremely small, but if neutrons are added to the nuclei of these atoms, their lifetime grows. Adding eight neutrons to the heaviest known isotopes of elements 110, 111, 112 and even 113 increases their lifetime by around 100,000 times. This is because we are heading inland on the island of stability and I feel we are now on firm ground, but we are still far from the top of the island where atoms may have lifetimes of perhaps millions of years. We will need new machines to reach it.

Since I have no concept as to why some elements are radioactive and thus decay relatively rapidly over time, this doesn’t entirely make sense to me.

My lovely Arts Editor directs my attention to Steve … the low Earth orbit phenomenon. From Smithsonian.com:

Image: Raymond J. Stinson, Alberta Aurora Chasers

Facebook is a place to share dramas and dog pictures, hit “like” and watch weird events unfold live. But for a group of amateur skywatchers, the social network is also a place to share information about what people spy in the sky. And thanks to a group of Canadian aurora enthusiasts, an entirely new type of atmospheric phenomenon has been documented.

It’s called Steve, and its origins are a bit more exciting than its straightforward name would suggest. The Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group first spotted the phenomenon last year, reports Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky, and has been collecting photos of Steve sightings. The name Steve reflects their confusion about the phenomenon’s origins, Dvorsky writes, and reminded someone of the movie Over the Hedge “in which a character arbitrarily conjures up the name Steve to describe an object he’s not sure about.” …

[Eric] Donovan [of the University of Calgary] was able to pinpoint Swarm data taken while a [Swarm] satellite flew through the Steve phenomenon, according to an ESA press release. The data didn’t show a proton aurora. Instead, it showed something that had never been observed before: a temperature spike of over 5400 degrees Fahrenheit in a spot about 186 miles above Earth’s surface combined with a gas ribbon over 15 miles wide that was flowing west more slowly than the other gases that surrounded it.

An upcoming paper supposedly will give an explanation – or at least a hypothesis.