Extinction caused by changes in earth'r rotation tilt?

No big meteorite striking Earth anymore then? What do we make of the iridium stratus in Gubbio, then?

wait a minute, the paper is talking only about mammals: If rodents in Spain are any guide, periodic changes in Earth’s orbit may account for the apparent regularity with which new species of mammals emerge and then go extinct, scientists are reporting today.

and it only consider the last 22 million years... So, BIG catastrophic extinction are safeguarded. The one they're talking about now are 'single species' extinctions, explaining the already known average period of 2.5My for a single species' time on Earth. you know, Australopithecus isn't here anymore, same for prehistoric horses and so on... nothing so exciting...

anyway, one more piece of the puzzle slots in.

cheers...

No Comments anymore...

I don't know if nobody is commenting anymore just because I'm plain boring, or because they're encountering difficulties as I did until a few days ago... Now it seems to have been fixed for me... so, why is nobody posting a even freaking "Sod Off" in my blog? mah...

GalacticaBlog

And a new blog under the spotlights!!!

This time it's about the most discussed sci-fi series of this years, battlestar Galactica. Insights and discussion on the most recent hot-topics...

;-)

Oh, No, Not Again!!!

Once again, I've been given some weird food... the chef really seems to be in some sort of meat+fruit trance, this week...

today was rabbit hamburger(!) with prunes...

picture is coming :-|

Taste wasn't bad, rabbit didn't taste as good as wild english rabbit though... and after eating all the prunes and potato croquette I was pretty much nauseated... URGH...

Again on Virtual Spaces...

Becoming less and less Virtual... Sony, Sun and opther big corporate follow the example of reuters and set up shop in Second Life... I don't know how this may affect the mood of people there... what kind of escapist fantasy is supposed to be, when contaminated by all aspects of the real world? and what about competition? would Sun win over a virtual-based corporate founded by what is in the real world a housewife?

Nissan has taken a creative approach to this: Beginning a promotional venture in a virtual world is still a relatively inexpensive proposition compared with the millions spent on other media. In Second Life, a company like Nissan or its advertising agency could buy an “island” for a one-time fee of $1,250 and a monthly rate of $195 a month. For its new campaign built around its Sentra car, the company then needed to hire some computer programmers to create a gigantic driving course and design digital cars that people “in world” could actually drive, as well as some billboards and other promotional spots throughout the virtual world that would encourage people to visit Nissan Island.

I guess the other will do similar things...

and where there's money, here comes the vultures... On Tuesday, a Congressional committee said it was investigating whether virtual assets and incomes should be taxed.

(from the NY Times)

Andromeda went bang at the dinosaur's time...

It was punched through by another nearby galaxy, known as M32...

Just imagine the two galazies getting closer, slowly being distorted by their reciprocal gravitational attractions, and shockwaves of matter and energy being blasted all around at terrific speeds...

dust ripples from the collision have been discovered in the infra red...



and this isn't all...

Since Andromeda is "only" 2 million Light Years away, and we (aboard the Milky Way) are heading straight to it, in a few billions years we'll have another big impact... the two galaxies will merge into an elliptical one... :-) I wish I were there to see the event... may be a bit accelerated, since a collision which takes some ten million years to happen may become a bit boring after a while...

An american family in paris...

ah ah I'm jump-blogging again...

actually I haven't stopped since yesterday...

here's a blog form an american family who's moved to paris... usual jokes and such, but it's decently written so it makes for a good read from time to time... and for an italian it's always fun to see people making fun of french, even when who does so is an american... ;-)

I love Gmail

it's the best web-based e-mail service I've ever tried. Ever. Full stop.

I love the concept of discussion and the way it's implemented, I love the labels, I love the interface and the seamless integration of chat and e-mail. I love the automatic recording of my chats, and the search-through-them function... I do have some gripe with its filters, but ehy, one can't be perfect... and may be it's just me who doesn't know how to use it properly. is there a search keyword like Contains: ? that would be useful.

and multiple condition for a single filters would greatly improve the experience, too... :-P

I'm never one hundred percent satisfied...

Sombrero...

Since space is a main theme today, here we go, one of the nicest galaxies around...


commonly known as Sombrero... you can guess why... it is a big (800 billion stars or so) spiral galaxy, part of the Virgo supercluster, some thirty million light years away. It is seen almost from the revolution plane. The dark line is composed of dust clouds all around its rim, rich not only in dust (like my home) but also in young stars (unlike my home ah ah)...

Science Shots

Ehy, I never saw this one before...

short news from Science...

first one: getting a tattoo can decrease your sense of touch (duh!) did they really need to perform the experiments? what next? eating too much could diminish your appetite for the next few hours?

second news, a wonderful piccie of the Antennae, a couple of galaxies crunching themselves into a blaze of light...



If I can fnd the large one on the HST website I'll update... (here it is, zoomable and clickable (flash))

and there's more news... new caves at yellowstone, cyclons on jupiter, and on and on and on...

check it out...

If you don't sleep...

you will not learn well the day after...

but, you will still be able to remember bad things.

students deprived of their sleep did perform 40% worse in memory tests than students well rested.

but, and here's the kicker, they did perform only 19% worse in words with negative emotional charge, such as 'cancer' or 'jail', and 59% worse in good things such as 'cookies' and 'holidays'...

I do agree with the authors of the paper, who suggest an evolutionary safeguard mechanism to avoid forgetting threats.

this way, if something bad happened the day before, you still have a chance to avopid it... neat uh?

A dry moon...

Science announces that what seemed to be ice on the moon, is most likely a weird radar reflection from rough terrain... I know one or two things about radars due to my previous acquaintances :-) Believe me, it's a mess, not the clear-cut things that we are shown in movies... :-|

anyway, back in topic, I never particularly liked the idea of going back to the moon to build a permanent base. I'd rather have my (tax) money spent on serious studies on going to mars, which looks like a much more interesting place to visit. and for more than a political stunt and flag sticking...

Mars Direct, here we come!!!

Crazy ideas...

I thought those people at slashdot posting their disassembling of an old SNES/cabinet/loo to install inside a modern PC were crazy, but this guy really goes over the top. He plans on using cockroaches to play a video game, through a motion capture system implanted on them, and I guess translating the event in the game into light cues for the cockroach to react to...

if it's not the craziest idea I've ever heard, it's almost there...

good luck man...

The Loom is in a frenzy...

Carl Zimmer put out two posts in a day! go read.

one about Mushrooms

one on complexity to go on the National geographic's website. The original article is nicely and freely available. I hope this drives up the website traffic enough that publishers understand it's useful to give something away for free...

yeah piracy is good once again!!! or may be we should say free stuff is good!!!

again early in the morning...

again at work at 6.30. No, I'm not workaholic, but my GF came to visit me yesterday. very much appreciated - pity she forgot her swimsuit so the planned outing to the city pool didn't come up as planned. In alternative, a nice dinner with risotto con zucchine e zafferano, e spiedini d'agnello... with a good cannonau della romangia to help everything to go down easily... nice nice nice...

so, why this early? yet again, she's to catch the 6.30 train, and even if the station is like 200m away, I don't feel like letting her walk on her own... especially when i'm up anyway... I'm one of those person who simply can't sleep anymore when awakened... vabbe'. never mind...

earlier in, earlier out, more time this af'noon to swim, and write up... ehy, more time to blog too ;-)

have a nice day.

You are what you eat...

And this may explain why belgian are so weird-looking :-P

look what I have been served for lunch today:

yes, you see correctly, in the upper right corner there's actually a cluster of four fried meatballs, surrounded by an army of... caramellised cherries, of the kind we italians would only dream of putting on ice creams (we call them amarene)

now, it was, surprisingly, good. the contrast betwee the sweet/sour of cherries and the fried meatballss was pleasant... if you like that kind of thing.

now, i don't know what piint I actually want to make, just wanted to bring to your knowledge that diversity in cuisines is even larger than in chemistry! ugh!

One more interesting Blog

jump-blogging again, I found an "english teacher abroad" blog full of interesting (and well written) snippet of japanese life... I'll stick it in my blog-to-follow list... thanks Mike

Correlating Good Grades and Success in Life

Here's a post (yes, I'm still jump-blogging) where a singaporean teacher advocates that good grades do not always make for good jobs outside work. His analysis is clear, and I do agree on some points: you don't need a degree with distinction to perform well in the workplace, from my experience it takes more passion and focus, than proper cleverness or knowledge.

I do not agree on him that people who go back from work to uni to 'do their masters' are forced to do this because they do not perform well at work. quite the opposite, from what I see... People who go back to academia for a masters do so 'cause they want to step up in the career ladder, never satisfied with what they're doing/earning at the time...

and if it's true that, as he says, people who didn't do well at uni may well earn more than their distincted colleagues, that's hardly the case for 'teachers/professors', whose rewards very rarely are in the money they earn...

I can only talk for my field and a few others that I know, but usually the salary scale is:

Industry > Academia > School.

mah... may be things really are different in Singapore...

Jump-Blogging again...

The 'next blog>' button up there is a temptation... I like to stop from time to time and just click it... sometimes I have to close the firefox tab immediately 'cause the blog is sexually oriented (you will not believe how many people blog their sex life... :-( How lame.

Some others, I'm just bored by advertisement blogs, or pointless blogs (like my own eh eh)...

But some other times rewarded by nice blogs like Green Submarine. I stopped during my peregrination 'cause I recognised Pippi LongenStock, also known as Pippi Calzelunghe in italy... One of my childhood idols...

Ecco sono qui
Pippi Calzelunghe così mi chiamo;
credo proprio che
una come me non c'è stata mai!
Ogni volta che
devo far qualcosa combino guai,
ma alla fine poi
vedo che son tutti amici miei!

Why do trees change colors in autumn?

Here comes a question which I often asked myself. why do trees have to change the colors to the leaves, just before dropping them? isn't this a waste of resources on the trees side? why they don't just suck their leaves empty, and then drop them?

Carl Zimmer at the loom has an interesting piece about this. enjoy!