Making Science More Better For You on 11/26/07

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You know, acting their age. No more listening to the Sex Pistols.

Watching Galaxies Grow Old Gracefully

ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2007) —In the early 1900s, Edwin Hubble made the startling discovery that our Milky Way galaxy is not alone. It is just one of many galaxies, or "island universes," as Hubble dubbed them, swimming in the sea of space.

Now, a century later, NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer is helping piece together the evolution of these cosmic species. Since its launch in 2003, the mission has surveyed tens of thousands of galaxies in ultraviolet light across nine billion years of time. The results provide new, comprehensive evidence for the "nurture" theory of galaxy evolution, which holds that the galaxies first described by Hubble – the elegant spirals and blob-like ellipticals -- are evolutionarily linked.

According to this "nurture" theory, a typical young galaxy begins life as a spiral that is actively churning out stars. Over time, the spiral might merge with another spiral or perhaps an irregular-shaped galaxy, before kicking out a few more bursts of newly minted stars. Eventually, the galaxy slows down its production of stars and settles into later life as an elliptical.

"Our data confirm that all galaxies begin life forming stars," said Chris Martin, the principal investigator for the Galaxy Evolution Explorer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "Then through a combination of mergers, fuel exhaustion and perhaps suppression by black holes, the galaxies eventually stop producing stars."



Sure, as long as parents don’t mind having building blocks thrown at them.

Simple Retro Toys May Be Better For Children Than Fancy Electronic Toys

ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2007) — The recent recalls of various children’s toys have parents and would-be Santas leery this holiday season, but it may just be the thing to push consumers to be more creative about the toys they buy their young children.

“Old-fashioned retro toys, such as red rubber balls, simple building blocks, clay and crayons, that don’t cost so much and are usually hidden in the back shelves are usually much healthier for children than the electronic educational toys that have fancier boxes and cost $89.99,” says Temple University developmental psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek.

The overarching principle is that children are creative problem-solvers; they’re discoverers; they’re active, says Hirsh-Pasek, the Lefkowitz Professor of Psychology at Temple and co-director of the Temple University Infant Lab. “Your child gets to build his or her imagination around these simpler toys; the toys don’t command what your child does, but your child commands what the toys do.”

As Roberta Golinkoff, head of the Infant Language Project at the University of Delaware says, “Electronic educational toys boast brain development and that they are going to give your child a head start. But developmental psychologists know that it doesn’t really work this way. The toy manufacturers are playing on parents’ fears that our children will be left behind in this global marketplace.”

Golinkoff adds that “kids are not like empty vessels to be filled. If they play with toys that allow them to be explorers, they are more likely to learn important lessons about how to master their world.”

They’ll probably learn other important lessons too—like how to feel bitter and excluded when their friends talk about how much fun they’re having with their electronic gizmos. Yep, a red rubber ball can be a real motivator.




A defect in the universe? Oh, you mean something you didn’t expect to see.

A cosmic defect that appeared at the beginning of time has come to light

GOD does not play dice, or so said Einstein. But might he knit? If so, physicists seeking to explain the fundamental nature of the universe think they may have spotted a point at which a stitch became tangled, creating a flaw in the fabric of reality.

The universe was born in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. The first snapshots of the infant universe, showing it aged a mere 300,000 years, before the first stars coalesced, are taken in the light (or, rather, the microwaves) from that explosion. The cosmic microwave background, as it is known, reveals the early universe to have been a remarkably uniform fireball. Today's universe looks very different. It is lumpy, with clusters of galaxies scattered through it. Physicists have therefore spent years examining the baby pictures in the hope of discerning telltales of how the change happened.

What they have found are subtle variations in the cosmic microwave background, including a large spot that is distinctly colder than the rest. Over the past year, several ideas as to what caused this spot have been proposed and then quashed. The latest suggestion, made by Neil Turok of the University of Cambridge, in England, and his colleagues, and published this week in Science, is that the spot is a blemish which formed as reality crystallised, rather as ice cubes contain irregularities and air bubbles.

At the precise moment the universe began, its constituents—which today appear as fundamental forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, and subatomic particles such as electrons and quarks—were unified into a single substance in the extreme heat of the explosion. As the universe expanded, though, it cooled. And as it did so, it went through phase changes, just as steam condenses to liquid water that then forms ice as the temperature falls. At each point at which the phase of the universe changed, one of the forces of nature became distinct, or a type of matter emerged as being different from the others. Only when this process was complete did the familiar pattern that makes up the laws of physics properly emerge.

So, does God sleep on the cold spot?