Holy crap!  Spiders catch and eat bats!  I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.  They do, after all, eat dwarfs and hobbitses.

You all have seen videos of large buildings being destroyed.  They go boom and collapse in on themselves creating a lot of noise and dust and leaving a pile of debris.  What do you do when there are other buildings directly next to your skyscraper?  Leave it to Japan to come up with an answer.  You take it apart one floor at a time:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_4G_8gEjng&feature=youtube_gdata_player]

There is so much beauty in this world that is completely invisible to us.  Take the infrared for instance.  There is so much light swirling around us all the time that we never see with our primitive eyes.  Luckily, though, we have science!  And that’s how we can get videos like this:

I found this through my main source for all things beautiful in the universe, Phil Plait.  While watching the video, I noticed that certain things like the sky seemed to be coming through in color and I thought to myself, “Wait, that can’t be right…”.  If it’s in infrared, the sky almost certainly shouldn’t be blue.  I then read Phil Plait’s explanation of the video and he pointed it out as well!  I love it when I notice things that don’t seem quite right and then get confirmation of my doubts.  Skeptic-sense engaged!

This may come as a surprise to you, but big things are big.  Take the Moon for instance.  Pretty big.  Except if you compare it to the Earth.  And the Earth is pretty big except if you compare it to the Sun.  When you scale up by orders of magnitude it becomes very difficult for the human brain to comprehend what exactly is being talked about.

That’s how politicians can throw around numbers like one trillion and scare people.  Numbers that large are so far out of our everyday experience that we can’t wrap our head around them.  I liken it to how the trip to Grandma’s house seemed like it took forever when you were a child but now it seems like a short jaunt in the car.  You have to work regularly with large numbers for them to make sense.  If you don’t work with large numbers, you should be very cautious of what conclusions you draw from anyone throwing large numbers at you.  It is likely that they’re taking the large numbers out of context to make them scarier than they actually are.

All that to say that when you try to wrap your head around things that are big, it’s good to have a familiar frame of reference to compare to.  That’s what makes this picture of the continental United States superimposed on the Moon so useful.  The U.S. is about 3,400 kilometers across at its widest longitude and the Moon has a circumference of around 11,000 kilometers.  So this looks about right if it isn’t perfect.

Kind of cool, huh?

A very large meteor has streaked across the sky in Russia.  And there are lots of videos!  You want to watch them.  You really do.

There have been reports of many injuries from the sonic boom of the meteor breaking windows all over the place.  If you’ve never heard a sonic boom from a plane before, they are LOUD and will break windows.  This meteor was much bigger than an airplane.  Thus, the shockwave had much more energy.

As Phil Plait says, this has nothing to do with the very large asteroid that’s scheduled to streak by the Earth this weekend.  It’s just a coincidence.

I’ll certainly be keeping up with this story because it is AWESOME!  I’ll post any other cool videos I find.

A Danish company is working on designing external air bags on cars to save the lives of bicyclists.  Another Scandinavian company has an air bag bicycle helmet.  We are falling way behind in the bicycle safety war.  Are we going to let some stinkin’ blondies beat us?

Personally, I think we should be spending more money inventing Securefoam.

 

And where are the three seashells I was promised!

This Scenes From A Multiverse comic is eerily familiar.  It’s about evolution, but replace that with just about any other “contentious” scientific subject and you’ll find yourself in the same boat.  People have a root level fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain thing works and yet they still choose to take a stand and build their world view around that misinformed opinion.  We are, as a people, so afraid to simply say, “I don’t know enough about that to form an opinion”.  Instead, we take the misinformed opinions of someone we mistakenly trust and use them as our own.  That is, unfortunately, how reality works.

This one’s for the ladies.

Are you adventurous?  Do you want to have a baby?  Then you qualify to be the first one on your block to own your very own Neanderthal baby!  Don’t let the Joneses beat you to it!  Order yours today!

This is actually kind of interesting.  Neanderthals are actually quite similar to us.  It is possible that they can also be just as smart as us.  Bring up a Neanderthal in present day and they would fit right in.  Well, except for their looks.  And there’s the problem.  We already have plenty of other races for Republicans to fear.  Do we really need another species?

If you can get your hands on a copy, read Issac Asimov’s “The Ugly Little Boy”.  It’ll give you a pretty good idea of how this whole experiment would turn out if it were allowed to proceed.  Without the time travel, of course.