Bauanleitung Aluminiumhut
(by HOAXILLA)

The Extraction of the Stone of Madness or The Cure of Folly
by Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1494 (Museo del Prado, Madrid).

Still shots from a 1970 film in which Amanda Feilding drills a hole in her head. She does not recommend self-trepanation to others.

Can a Hole in Your Head Get You High?
by John Horgan, Scientific American, April 27, 2015.

π by Darren Aronofsky, 1998.

A Six-Hour Long-Exposure of the Celestial North Pole
(by Bartosz Wojczyński)

Zu zeigen ist: Alle stumpfen Winkel sind rechte Winkel.
Gegeben: Ein stumpfer Winkel ABC.

1. Konstruiere DC rechtwinklig auf BC längengleich zu AB.
2. Verbinde A mit D.
3. Errichte die Mittelsenkrechte auf AD und BC. Ihr Schnittpunkt ist O.  Zeichne die Strecken AO, BO, DO, CO.
4. Wie man leicht sieht ist AO = DO, BO = CO und Winkel(CBO) = Winkel(BCO).
5. Da alle Seiten gleich lang sind, sind die Dreiecke ABO und DCO kongruent und daher Winkel(ABO) = Winkel(DCO).
6. Da Winkel(CBO) = Winkel(BCO) ist, erhält man durch Subtraktion von gleichen Winkeln: Winkel(ABC) = Winkel(BCD). q.e.d.

David C. Jolly, »Das verlorene Theorem Euklids«, The Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results, New York 1983; dt.: Georg H. Scherr (Hrg.), Journal der unwiederholbaren Experimente, Frankfurt/M 2. Aufl. 1986, Seite 141. Read More »

Calbuco eruption
(Chile, 22 April 2015)

Calbuco eruption
(Chile, 22 April 2015)

Graphic by Ian Worpole, February 1991.

Visualizing Subatomic Particles Over Time: Graphics from the Archive, 1952-2015
by Jen Christiansen, Scientific American, April 15, 2015

The behaviour of dark matter associated with 4 bright cluster galaxies in the 10kpc core of Abell 3827
by Richard Massey, Liliya Williams, Renske Smit, et al.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, June 2015, 449(4):3393-3406. doi: 10.1093/mnras/stv467, First published online April 14, 2015, http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/449/4/3393

Galaxy cluster Abell 3827 hosts the stellar remnants of four almost equally bright elliptical galaxies within a core of radius 10kpc. Such corrugation of the stellar distri-bution is very rare, and suggests recent formation by everal simultaneous mergers. We map the distribution of associated dark matter, using new Hubble Space Telescope imaging and VLT/MUSE integral field spectroscopy of a gravitational lens system threaded through the cluster core. Analysis of ground-based imaging previously sug-gested that dark matter associated with one galaxy had become offset by up to 6kpc from its stars – perhaps lagging behind during its long infall because of a drag force created by dark matter self-interactions. Exploiting our new, high-resolution data, we find that each of the central galaxies retains an associated massive halo. At least one of the galaxies is offset from its dark matter. The best-constrained position is 1.62 +0.50/−0.47 kpc from the stars, where the 68% confidence limit includes both statistical error and systematic biases in mass modelling. With such a small physical offset, it is difficult to definitively rule out astrophysical effects operating (exclusively) in dense cluster core environments – but if interpreted solely as evidence for self-interacting dark matter, this offset implies a cross-section σDM/m ~ (1.7 ± 0.7)×10 Read More »

National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track
by Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, DOI10.1073/pnas.1418878112, April 13, 2015.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.abstract

Significance
The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Comparing different lifestyles revealed that women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that men preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not. Our findings, supported by real-world academic hiring data, suggest advantages for women launching academic science careers. Read More »

Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

The Neanderthal in the karst: First dating, morphometric, and paleogenetic data on the fossil skeleton from Altamura (Italy)
by Martina Laria, Fabio Di Vincenzob, Andrea Borsatoc, et al.
Journal of Human Evolution, 21 March 2015
doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2015.02.007

In 1993, a fossil hominin skeleton was discovered in the karst caves of Lamalunga, near Altamura, in southern Italy. Despite the fact that this specimen represents one of the most extraordinary hominin specimens ever found in Europe, for the last two decades our knowledge of it has been based purely on the documented on-site observations. Recently, the retrieval from the cave of a fragment of bone (part of the right scapula) allowed the first dating of the individual, the quantitative analysis of a diagnostic morphological feature, and a preliminary paleogenetic characterization of this hominin skeleton from Altamura. Overall, the results concur in indicating that it belongs to the hypodigm of Homo neanderthalensis, with some phenetic peculiarities that appear consistent with a chronology ranging from 172 ± 15 ka to 130.1 ± 1.9 ka. Thus, the skeleton from Altamura represents the most ancient Neanderthal from which endogenous DNA has ever been extracted. Read More »

Wide-Field Lensing Mass Maps from DES Science Verification Data
by V. Vikram, C. Chang, B. Jain, et al.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03002, 12 Apr 2015

Weak gravitational lensing allows one to reconstruct the spatial distribution of the projected mass density across the sky. These "mass maps" provide a powerful tool for studying cosmology as they probe both luminous and dark matter. In this paper, we present a weak lensing mass map reconstructed from shear measurements in a 139 deg² area from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Science Verification (SV) data overlapping with the South Pole Telescope survey. We compare the distribution of mass with that of the foreground distribution of galaxies and clusters. The overdensities in the reconstructed map correlate well with the distribution of optically detected clusters. Cross-correlating the mass map with the foreground galaxies from the same DES SV data gives results consistent with mock catalogs that include the primary sources of statistical uncertainties in the galaxy, lensing, and photo-z catalogs. The statistical significance of the cross-correlation is at the 6.8 sigma level with 20 arcminute smoothing. A major goal of this study is to investigate systematic effects arising from a variety of sources, including PSF and photo-z uncertainties. We make maps derived from twenty variables that may characterize systematics and find the principal components. We find that the contribution of systematics to the lensing mass maps is generally within measurement uncertainties. We test and validate our results with mock catalogs from N-body simulations. In this work, we analyze less than 3% of the final area that will be mapped by the DES; the tools and analysis techniques developed in this paper can be applied to forthcoming larger datasets from the survey. Read More »

(RS Puppis)

What if dark energy isn’t real?
If our “standard candles” aren’t so standard, is dark energy still real? by Ethan Siegel (Apr 11, 2015)

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.” -Robert Frost

Bears often ponder the meaning of life too.

A beautiful Einstein ring (SDP.81).

Students sit in an open glasses classroom in China for their lessons.

The simple, free solution to the myopia epidemic
(CNN, April 6, 2015)

Around the world, we're becoming collectively more near-sighted. Near-sightedness, or myopia, means nearby objects appear clearly, but those farther away look blurry.

The rates of myopia have doubled, even tripled, in most countries over the last 40 years, researchers say. Several places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan have rates in the 80%. In South Korea, myopia rates among 20-year-olds have leaped from 18% in 1955 to over 96% myopia in 2011.

And it's a global issue -- rates of myopia are also rising in Western nations like Germany and the United States. "It's about 40% in the U.S., compared to about 25% in the 1970s," said Dr. Michael Chiang, clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Read More »