What is not immediately apparent from the news report is that this was an experiment in rodents and its relevance to the human desire for kebabs is limited.
The Daily Mail strikes again.
Tag Science
Science in the media summed up in one sentence
Copper nanotubes next Tuesday
If I were looking for an abbreviation for copper nanotube, I would probably choose something other than what these Chinese researchers went for:
(Thanks to Eleanor for letting me know this exists!)
Media satisfaction
I know a bit about science, certainly enough to be aware that media coverage of science is on the whole terrible. I used to think that this was a specific problem with science coverage; however, now that I know a little bit about language, I find that the media coverage of this is also, in general, crap.
This makes me wonder: are there any specialists in any field who are happy with the way their subject is treated in the news? I suspect I’m taking far too many media stories on trust just because I lack the background knowledge needed to see that they’re rubbish.
The hottest possible temperature
The coldest temperature possible is −273·15°C, otherwise known as absolute zero: but is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?
Seems like an innocent enough question, right? Absolute zero is 0 on the Kelvin scale, or about minus 460 F. You can’t get colder than that; it would be like trying to go south from the South Pole. Is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?
Well, the answer, depending on which theoretical physicist you ask, is yes, no, or maybe. Huh? you ask. Yeah, that’s how I felt. And the question doesn’t just mess with the minds of physics dummies like me. Several physicists begged off of trying to answer it, referring me to colleagues. Even ones who did talk about it said things like "It’s a little bit out of my comfort zone" and "I think I’d like to ruminate over it." After I posed it to one cosmologist, there was dead silence on the other end of the line for long enough that I wondered if we had a dropped call.
Candidate temperatures range from 1017 K to 1032 K, the latter being one quadrillion times hotter than the former (although both are really quite warm).
I once asked if there was such a thing as a maximum temperature when learning about absolute zero in my A-level chemistry class; happily, it seems that it’s not as stupid a question as I assumed at the time.
Martin Rees on why we’re all doomed
Astronomer Royal Martin Rees thinks that this century is the most important one in the Earth’s 4.5 billion year history:
It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that astronomers, contemplating timespans measured in billions, must be serenely unconcerned about next year, next week and tomorrow. But a "cosmic perspective" actually strengthens my own concerns about the here and now.
Ever since Darwin, we’ve been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.
Our sun formed 4.5bn years ago, but it’s got 6bn more before the fuel runs out. And the expanding universe will continue – perhaps for ever – becoming ever colder, ever emptier. As Woody Allen said, "Eternity is very long, especially towards the end". Any creatures who witness the sun’s demise, here on Earth or far beyond, won’t be human. They will be entities as different from us as we are from a bug.
But even in this "concertinaed" timeline – extending millions of centuries into the future, as well as into the past – this century is special. It’s the first in our planet’s history where one species – ours – has Earth’s future in its hands, and could jeopardise not only itself, but life’s immense potential.
Hint: it’s not good.
It seems to be a truncated version of his book Our Final Century (which I’ve not read). Interestingly, Rees’ publisher removed the question mark from his original title Our Final Century?; his American publisher seemingly didn’t think this made the doom impending enough, and renamed it again as Our Final Hour.