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Missed News 642
August 7, 2021
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Little Lighthouse Lofoten Islands
August 6, 2021
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Litløy Lighthouse (Norwegian: Litløy fyr) is a coastal lighthouse in Bø Municipality in Nordland county, Norway. It is located on the island of Litløya in the Vesterålen archipelago, which overlooks the nearby Lofoten Islands.
The lighthouse and the adjoining buildings were built in 1912, and the light itself was electrified in 1959. In 1991, the light was automated. The people who worked at Litløy Lighthouse remained, however, first and foremost to do maintenance at the lighthouse and nearby beacons. Secondly, there was a need to keep shipping activity under observation, both to control and assist if need be. There was also a meteorological weather station on the island. Eventually, the cost of keeping the staff at the island caused the lighthouse to be depopulated on 26 June 2003.
In 2005-06, the Norwegian Coastal Administration (NCA) sold 20 lighthouses along the coast of Norway. One of these was Litløy Lighthouse. Bø municipality was offered to buy the lighthouse but chose not to accept the offer. It was then sold to Ellen Marie Hansteensen. She bought the lighthouse in order to make it accessible to the public, in accordance to Norwegian law (Stortingsmelding 28 (2000–2001)). Wikipedia
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Images from Lofoten Islands Norway
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Some Scientists Believe the Universe Is Conscious
August 6, 2021
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In upcoming research, scientists will attempt to show the universe has consciousness. Yes, really. No matter the outcome, we’ll soon learn more about what it means to be conscious—and which objects around us might have a mind of their own. What will that mean for how we treat objects and the world around us? Buckle in, because things are about to get weird.
What Is Consciousness?
The basic definition of consciousness intentionally leaves a lot of questions unanswered. It’s “the normal mental condition of the waking state of humans, characterized by the experience of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, awareness of the external world, and often in humans (but not necessarily in other animals) self-awareness,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology.
Scientists simply don’t have one unified theory of what consciousness is. We also don’t know where it comes from, or what it’s made of.
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How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists
August 6, 2021
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The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Physicists quantify this tendency to spread by counting the number of possible ways the dye molecules can be arranged. There’s one possible state where the molecules are crowded into the thimble. There’s another where, say, the molecules settle in a tidy clump at the pool’s bottom. But there are uncountable billions of permutations where the molecules spread out in different ways throughout the water. If the universe chooses from all the possible states at random, you can bet that it’s going to end up with one of the vast set of disordered possibilities.
Seen in this way, the inexorable rise in entropy, or disorder, as quantified by the second law of thermodynamics, takes on an almost mathematical certainty. So of course physicists are constantly trying to break it.
One almost did. A thought experiment devised by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 stumped scientists for 115 years. And even after a solution was found, physicists have continued to use “Maxwell’s demon” to push the laws of the universe to their limits.
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It took physicists 115 years to tame Maxwell’s Demon. Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine
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Missed News 641
August 6, 2021
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Warszawa, Poland
August 5, 2021
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Warsaw (/ˈwɔːrsɔː/ WOR-saw; Polish: Warszawa [varˈʂava]) is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the Vistula River in east-central Poland and its population is officially estimated at 1.8 million residents within a greater metropolitan area of 3.1 million residents, which makes Warsaw the 7th most populous capital city in the European Union. The city area measures 517.24 square kilometers (199.71 sq mi), while the metropolitan area covers 6,100.43 square kilometers (2,355.39 sq mi). Warsaw is an alpha global city, a major international tourist destination, and a significant cultural, political, and economic hub. Its historical Old Town was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The city rose to prominence in the late 16th century, when Sigismund III decided to move the Polish capital and his royal court from Kraków. The elegant architecture, grandeur, and extensive boulevards earned Warsaw the nickname ‘Paris of the North’ prior to the Second World War. Bombed at the start of the German invasion in 1939, the city withstood a siege but was largely destroyed by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, the general Warsaw Uprising in 1944, and the systematic razing by the Germans in advance of the Vistula–Oder Offensive. Warsaw gained the new title of Phoenix City because of its reconstruction after the war, which had leftover 85% of its buildings in ruins.
In 2012, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Warsaw as the 32nd most liveable city in the world. In 2017, the city came 4th in the “Business-friendly”, 8th in “Human capital and lifestyle” and topped the quality of life rankings in the region. The city is a significant center of research and development, business process outsourcing, and information technology outsourcing. The Warsaw Stock Exchange is the largest and most important in Central and Eastern Europe. Frontex, the European Union agency for external border security as well as ODIHR, one of the principal institutions of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have their headquarters in Warsaw. Jointly with Frankfurt and Paris, Warsaw features one of the highest number of skyscrapers in the European Union. Wikipedia
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An image from Warszawa, Poland
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Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
August 5, 2021
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On October 19, 2017, a Canadian astronomer named Robert Weryk was reviewing images captured by a telescope known as Pan-STARRS1 when he noticed something strange. The telescope is situated atop Haleakalā, a ten-thousand-foot volcanic peak on the island of Maui, and it scans the sky each night, recording the results with the world’s highest-definition camera. It’s designed to hunt for “near-Earth objects,” which are mostly asteroids whose paths bring them into our planet’s astronomical neighborhood and which travel at an average velocity of some forty thousand miles an hour. The dot of light that caught Weryk’s attention was moving more than four times that speed, at almost two hundred thousand miles per hour.
Weryk alerted colleagues, who began tracking the dot from other observatories. The more they looked, the more puzzling its behavior seemed. The object was small, with an area roughly that of a city block. As it tumbled through space, its brightness varied so much—by a factor of ten—that it had to have a very odd shape. Either it was long and skinny, like a cosmic cigar, or flat and round, like a celestial pizza. Instead of swinging around the sun on an elliptical path, it was zipping away more or less in a straight line. The bright dot, astronomers concluded, was something never before seen. It was an “interstellar object”—a visitor from far beyond the solar system that was just passing through. In the dry nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union, it became known as 1I/2017 U1. More evocatively, it was dubbed ‘Oumuamua (pronounced “oh-mooah-mooah”), from the Hawaiian, meaning, roughly, “scout.”
Even interstellar objects have to obey the law of gravity, but ‘Oumuamua raced along as if propelled by an extra force. Comets get an added kick thanks to the gases they throw off, which form their signature tails. ‘Oumuamua, though, didn’t have a tail. Nor did the telescopes trained on it find evidence of any of the by-products normally associated with outgassing, like water vapor or dust.
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Encountering aliens would be surprising; the fact that we haven’t yet heard from any is perhaps even more so. Illustration by Paul Sahre
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The Strange and Gruesome Story of the Greenland Shark, the Longest-Living Vertebrate on Earth
August 5, 2021
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Greenland sharks are among nature’s least elegant inventions. Lumpish, with stunted pectoral fins that they use for ponderously slow swimming in cold and dark Arctic waters, they have blunt snouts and gaping mouths that give them an unfortunate, dull-witted appearance. Many live with worm-like parasites that dangle repulsively from their corneas. They belong, appropriately enough, to the family Squalidae, and appear as willing to gorge on fresh halibut as on rotting polar bear carcasses. Once widely hunted for their liver oil, today they are considered bycatch. For some fishermen, a biologist recently told me, netting a Greenland shark is about as welcome as stepping in dog poop.
And yet the species has an undeniable magnetism. It is among the world’s largest predatory sharks, growing up to eighteen feet in length, but also among its most elusive. Its life history is a black box, one that researchers have spent decades trying in vain to peer inside. Where do Greenland sharks mate? What is their global range and population structure? And, most enticing of all, how long do they live? A study begun in the nineteen-thirties suggested that the species’ lifespan might well be extraordinary, based on the slow growth rate of a single shark that a scientist was lucky enough to catch twice. Verifying this, however, proved nearly impossible. To determine age in other sharks, biologists count the growth rings on their fin spines and vertebrae. But Greenland sharks have no hard tissues in their bodies; even their vertebrae are soft. The longevity question seemed unanswerable.
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Using carbon dating and a new method involving proteins in the lens of the eye, Danish scientists have unraveled the mystery of how long Greenland sharks live. Photograph by WaterFrame / Alamy
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Missed News 640
August 5, 2021
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Joshua Tree National Park, California
August 4, 2021
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Joshua Tree National Park is an American national park in southeastern California, east of Los Angeles and near Palm Springs. It is named after the Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) native to the Mojave Desert. Originally declared a national monument in 1936, Joshua Tree was redesignated as a national park in 1994 when the U.S. Congress passed the California Desert Protection Act. Encompassing a total of 790,636 acres (1,235.4 sq mi; 3,199.6 km2) – slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island – the park includes 429,690 acres (671.4 sq mi; 1,738.9 km2) of designated wilderness. Straddling San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, the park includes parts of two deserts, each an ecosystem whose characteristics are determined primarily by elevation: the higher Mojave Desert and the lower Colorado Desert. The Little San Bernardino Mountains traverse the southwest edge of the park. Wikipedia
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An image from Joshua Tree National Park, California
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