NYTimes: Wotta bunch of Monterey Bay currents; our kill-for-fun felines ; evolution in the at-home pc cloud; and a pleasant, not wholly unfounded thought…
All of a sudden The Tracker is imagining Lagrangian coherent structures all over the place. I bet they are what shepherd riptides from the shore to beyond the surf line, that wrap smoke rings, and that keep the vortices from a paddle’s tip so persistent. Or not. But a new term for something that one didn’t know was just one thing can suddenly make things seem clearer. This after ogling the remarkable image (High Def here) of surface currents in Monterey Bay, with a meandering boundary between the waters that are just sloshing here and there and those that are headed for the open sea. Writer Bina Venkataraman has the NYTimes Science Times’s lead story and it’s an unusual and superb one – an adventure through the mathematically dense world of physical oceanography but without the equations. Behind the seeming chaos of swirling, tidal pumped waters (and many other fluid situations), she writes, are “moving skeletons embedded in complex flows.” Those are the Lagrangian things. Air turbulence, blood flow mixings, all kinds of swishings and sloshings are apparently becoming more explicable. And these boundary layers are observable with the right tools. I’d like to know what those paddle things along the Monterey Bay shore that, a caption says, are detectors. Maybe some kind of phased array radar or something. It’s a transfixing tale of roiling movements.
Other notable headlines:
- John Markoff: Wanted: Home Computers to Join in the Research on Artificial Life ; If you want to imagine your PC or Mac running all night growing self-replicating and self-perfecting worms, and not the pernicious hacker kind, this story’s for you.
- Carl Zimmer: Can Evolution Run in Reverse? A Study Says It’s a One-Way Street: Carl’s piece run’s right under Markoff’s, an evo two-fer. It’s persuasive – but could have used an outside expert remarking on the study. And: does this have any bearing on talk of reverse-engineering birds, chickens maybe, to be sort of like little theropod dinosaurs?
Natalie Angier: Give Birds a Break. Lock Up the Cat ; A convincing revisit to the problem of housecats and songbirds. It’s the morning’s most emailed story in the lineup. One suspects relatively few people, however, will read it and decide to shut an outdoor cat inside.- Fran Schumer: After a Death, the Pain That Doesn’t Go Away ; Mental health professionals wondering whether a not so rare, persistent, and incapacitating grief may merit its own categorical name.
- Nicholas Wade: Quest for a Long, Long Life Gains Scientific Respect; Resveretrol and its mimics, again. And he makes some judgments on how two doctorate-toting restricted diet fans look to the eye. One, apparently, is pretty dishy; the other bears a mien a little bit like death. The piece is a bit of a promotion. Wade explains his motivation well with his closing line (The end of this post’s hed comprises part of it).
As usual, plenty more at whole section ;
- Charlie Petit
