Term O' The Day

Thagomizer: an informal name for the distinctive arrangement of four to ten spikes on the tails of stegosaurid dinosaurs.

The term "thagomizer" was coined by Gary Larson in a 1982 Far Side comic strip, in which a group of cavemen in a faux-modern lecture hall are taught by their caveman professor that the spikes were named "after the late Thag Simmons". The term was picked up initially by Ken Carpenter, a palaeontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who used the term when describing a fossil at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting in 1993.

Thagomizer has since been adopted as an informal anatomical term, and is used by the Smithsonian Institution, the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, the book The Complete Dinosaur and the BBC documentary series Planet Dinosaur.

Nice.

The Far Side almost certainly holds the number one spot for comics taped up on the doors of scientists.

Dark Matter Filaments

Apologies for the radio silence here at Chez CK.  Attention was required elsewhere.  I've noticed a steady trend of people visiting this site each day (super exciting), which makes me feel guilty enough to make it up to you best I can.  We'll start with a little bit of news that was overshadowed by the "particle just like the Higgs but we're only 99.9999% sure it's the Higgs which isn't sure enough" discovery.

(Sauce) 

You've probably seen this picture make its rounds on ye olde internetes.  One is of neurons, the other is a simulated construction of the universe on an intergalactic scale.  I'm not here to compare them, but it's the most popular picture I know of that shows a distinct feature of the arrangement of galaxies - the filament structure between superclusters.

These filaments have been known for decades - I'm not sure when they were first spotted, but I'm sure it was in a galaxy survey not unlike this one:

Ploink

Where the redshift of galaxies is used to to determine distance.  This foamy, sponge-like structure is sometimes called the cosmic web, because everything astronomers name is badass.

HuffPo

This is not the type of thing light matter will tend to do on its own.  The Lambda-Cold (cold meaning slow enough to be non-relativistic) Dark Matter model posits that dark matter started in the universe as a web that light matter was attracted to, and thus began to collect along these filaments.  The distribution of dark matter wouldn't behave like the matter we're familiar with; it doesn't radiate photons so there's no temperature changes, it doesn't interact with electromagnetic fields, so it wouldn't bounce and jostle, or form molecules, and so on.

Anyhoos!  We found a filament.  The information came out at the same time as the Higgs announcement, so it got little play, but it's another brilliant discovery all the same.

(Physics World)

This is an image of the gravitational lensing of two galactic clusters, Abell 222 and Abell 223, and the lensing in between them.  This connecting lens also emits x-rays characteristic of hot gas, which would be expected to form along the filaments, but is too light to bend light as strongly as indicated.

It's not definitive, it doesn't completely eliminate competing models, it's no 99.9999% certainty, but discoveries in science often aren't.  A model is by it's nature created to explain a wide variety of phenomena, so it takes a wide variety of phenomena to verify.  And this is a great step in that direction.  Another piece of the puzzle, a little bigger than the others.

Brains Are Neat!

(Sauce)

Of course, you already knew that.

We all remember being a teen, smoking low-quality fatties with our pimply compatriots under the stars, asking impossibly irrelevant questions like 'what if god was a woman?' and 'you think Lincoln got stoned with former slaves?'  And, surely, someone brought up the idea that the red you see isn't the same red they see.

What a ridiculous notion!  We each have human brains, we went through similar development and construction of the basic areas of the brain.  Our respective color-determining cortices are at least similar enough that its a small step to assume our perceptions are likewise the same.  And we all seem to share similar emotional responses to similar colors.  Same wavelengths, same physiology, same reactions - sure, we may not find the answer anytime soon, but we can make some solid presumptions.

Obviously, I'm not the funnest person to have 'What if...' conversations with.  I can admit my faults.

And on the subject of admitting faults: it now seems likely that I was wrong.  My apologies, my young stoner friends.