Mind Memes for April 4: Black Holes, Dark Matter and More
1. Living on the Edge: 2,000 Black Holes
At the center of the Milky Way galaxy there is a supermassive black hole that everything else has formed around. But it’s not as nice and neat a picture as that. Over time, merging galaxies created gravitational waves capable of throwing smaller black holes to the fringes of the galaxy. Computer simulations by UCSC researchers predicted that between 70 and 2,000 of these smaller black holes might be lurking out there.
Read more here.
2. 2013: The Year of the Comeback
Is 2013 the ‘Year of the Comeback’? Tommy Haas, the German-American tennis star who is 35 pulled off the upset of the year so far by dismantling Novak Djokovic in the fourth round of the Sony Ericsson Open.
Haas has defied injury and age in shooting up the men’s singles rankings. Lance Armstrong has perhaps a steeper hill to climb. The disgraced cyclist has been banned from events sanctioned by U.S. Anti Doping Agency, but that won’t stop him from competing in the Masters South Central Zone Swimming Championships this weekend at the University of Texas.
Read more here.
3. Supercomputers Reconstruct Dinosaur Mechanics
Biologists and palaeontologists have long wondered how exactly these big guys moved around. How fast could they run? A collaboration with computational scientists called the BigDino project has been producing dinosaur simulations for 10 years. The group is now employing machine learning algorithms to sort through data from multiple simulations and understand the underlying patterns of how dinosaurs walked.
Read more here.
4. Not Ready For Nuclear Primetime
The North Korean dictator Kim Jong un has apparently selected specific cities in Texas that he would like to obliterate, but he is having trouble keeping his own house in order. Defense analysts say there are hints that Kim may be losing his hold on the military.
He’s also lost his hold on social media, as North Korean state media’s Twitter account was hacked, along with its Flickr account, resulting in the release of this unsanctioned official image:
Read more here.
5. Dark Matter, We Know You’re Out There…
Dark Matter might be invisible, but it may not be hiding for too much longer.
A $1.6 billion cosmic ray experiment on the International Space Station has yielded results.
An instrument called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has detected an abundance of high energy particles that could be colliding particles of dark matter.
Of course, we are still a long way off from pinning down the “missing mass” that holds galaxies together, and being able to fully explain its origins in the Big Bang.
As Dr. Michio Kaku says in this video, “There is a shelf full of Nobel Prizes waiting for you — waiting for anyone — who can come up with a convincing and experimentally verified explanation of the origin of dark matter.”
To get the basics on dark matter, check out this infographic from Space.com.
