Tag Archives: Strange

Time’s arrow and our weird universe

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Our universe, and the nature of time, may be much stranger than we ever could have imagined.

Think about this. What is time? It is something that can be measured.Seconds, minutes, hours, years, millennia. But unlike other properties of our physical world, it only goes in one direction. You can’t add or subtract time, not literally. This has left scientists stumped.

Now, scientists have come up with one of the more bizarre theories of the universe and time that I’ve ever heard. To explain the back and forth movement of time, our universe might be just one side of another universe that was formed during the big bang. And since we exist on the opposite side of that universe, we are living in that mirror universe’s distant past.

This all comes courtesy of an article in Scientific American (by Lee Billings, who I work with there, btw). Much of it is over my head, to be honest, and I’m probably not summarizing it correctly. But what intrigues me most is the whole issue of time as a physical property. I always assumed that time flows, consistently, constantly, in one direction. But scientists can’t explain this. I never realized it was an issue.

After reading the article, I didn’t come away with the impression that we’re going to build some sort of time machine. or maybe visit this parallel universe (thought that would really be cool from a sci-fi perspective). What the article shows me is that there’s so much that we don’t know — about the universe, about life, about even ourselves.

Some might be scared by this lack of certainty. I think it’s exhilarating.

Tiny monsters, continued

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Real-life creepy bugs are one of my favorite science-related topics. Not sure why — maybe because it combines monsters and science.

Here’s the latest. First, we have book scorpions. I’ve only seen a scorpion in real life once. I was in El Paso and one of the suckers, pincers snapping away, was crawling up a bedroom wall. Totally freaked me out.

book-scorpion

Well, it turns out not all scorpions are vicious. Not only are so-called book scorpions too tiny to harm us humans, they’re pretty helpful. These small creatures (there are over 3,000 different species) are only a couple of millimeters in length. What they love more than anything are booklice.

What are booklice? Bugs that eat the glue that binds books. And book scorpions devour these booklice. If it wasn’t for them, all our books would fall apart.

No word on whether book scorpions would help keep your Kindle clean.

The second of today’s tiny monsters is the Demodex mite.

mites

This microscopic critter is a relative of spiders and ticks. And you are very familiar with it. How familiar? Right now there are scores crawling all over your body.

No worries, though. The mites that live among us are relatively harmless, though when their numbers get out of whack they can cause skin conditions such as rosacea.

It turns out that Demodex has been with us for a long, long time, perhaps as long as when humans first left Africa and spread out all over the world. Not only Demodex — there are several species of mites that scientists are just beginning to identify.

Read more about book scorpions here at Scientific American, and more about the hitchhiking mites at Discover Magazine.

(Book scorpion image courtesy of Protasov AN/Shutterstock; mite image courtesy of Alan R. Walker)

 

 

 

 

Tale of the vampire (plant version)

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File this under: Evil Nature.

The more I study science, the more I’m convinced that nature is home to some of our biggest nightmares.

More proof? There’s a vampire-like plant that not only feeds off its prey, but convinces it to let down its defenses.

Kind of like this guy (Nosferatu, the first film vampire, and the creepiest, in my book).

how-to-make-vampire-teeth-nosferatu

Scientists have long known that a plant called the dodder (deceptively cute name) wraps itself around a target plant, burrows into it, and then drains it of all its nutrients. Hence the vampire correlation.

But what they didn’t know were the details. How do dodders get away with it?

It turns out that once a dodder makes contact with the plants, it releases bits of its genetic material into the victim plant, and in turn receives bits of the plant’s genetic material, which prompts the victim plant to lower its defenses.

Or, as this article states, the dodder sweet-talks its victim into surrendering.

dodder

See-through science

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Ever wanted to be invisible? Not in the metaphorical sense, but truly transparent?

Me either. But for those who do, scientists are a step closer to making see-through skin.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have advanced a process called tissue clearing that basically strips away all the color from the body. They did this in mice (not humans). What they got was a blurry, goopy messy looking thing. Ugly, but still intact.

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How did they do this? By injecting a gel and detergents into the mouse’s bloodstream, which somehow stripped away most of the things that block our view.

Why would they do this? Having see-through organs would allow scientists to study body processes in real-time, as they happen. This would allow scientists to better understand conditions such as chronic pain.

I support most science, but for now, I’m adding this to the “not too sure this is a good idea” pile. I can imagine this getting into the hands of mad scientists who try this (illegally) on humans.

At the very least, it would make a really horrific story.

No word on how the mice fared, though. I can’t imagine it feels good to be injected with gel and detergents.

 

Pictures worth a thousand words

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I’ve never been drawn to the visual arts. My life’s vocation is crafting words into stories that relay emotions, moods and experiences. But thanks to the vastness of the world wide web, I’ve discovered visual artists whose works are as vivid as anything the best wordsmith could create.

One of these visual artists is a photographer, M. Funk, based in Germany and France. I came across his website by accident. I’m glad I did. His photographs capture a moody eeriness that I could only hope replicate with words.

Take a look at a sample of his work below, and be sure to check out his website for more.


TEMPÊTE-4

 

AIR-DE-LA-NUIT-11

IT-WAS-A-SUNNY-DAY

 

UNREAL1

(Images courtesy of M. Funk)

Bioluminescent creatures in the darkest realms

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Life on earth is truly stranger than anything we’ve imagined. Science continually finds more evidence of this. Just one example? Fish in waters devoid of any natural light equipped with light-giving powers of their own.

bioluminescent

How do these fish manage to produce light from their own bodies? Through a mix of two chemicals. One is called, ominously enough, luciferin. This chemical creates the light. The second chemical, luciferase, spurs the reaction that, along with oxygen, creates the light. Deep-sea creatures use this light to not only find their way, but also to communicate with other fish and trap their prey.

What I love about science and nature is that there are so many twists and turns in the evolution of life, ones we are still discovering, that rival the wildest creatures dreamed up in our imaginations.

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Spider fangs: nature’s perfect piercer

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Some people love spiders (why??). Some people love to hate spiders. My view is: hey, Mr. Spider, you stay over there, I’ll stay over here. To me, they’re creepy as hell — horror movie creepy.

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Now there’s more to add to their creep factor. Not only are spiders adept at trapping their prey alive in a sticky web and sucking their blood and bodily fluids out in a slow, agonizing death, their fangs were honed by nature, God, evolution (take your pick, or as I believe, all of the above) to be the perfect piercing tools.

This article published in Scientific American discusses a study of spider fangs. It turns out that the curve of the spider fang allows the spider to not only attack from different directions, but also hold their prey while injecting their venom. And the hollow, conical shape gives the fangs strength.

Not cool.

The upside?

1) More fodder for horror writers. Now we’ve got an even more gruesome way to describe spider attacks.

2) Maybe they can design better piercing equipment, not only for medical applications, but also for those casual body piercers among us.

(Image courtesy of LiveScience.com)

Read this book: After Dark

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In the hands of this fiction master, After Dark is nighttime Tokyo reimagined as a surreal noir-ish dreamscape.

after darkI was in one of my favorite bars in Jersey City talking to the bartender Tom about the new insomnia-themed sci-fi novel Black Moon (which is on my shortlist). After a quick tour of books — others and mine — he threw one title at me: After Dark, by Haruki Murakami. Tom said it was strange, offbeat and captivating.

So I tried it. Tom was right.

The best words to describe After Dark is The Twilight Zone. The classic TV series often featured stories, settings, and characters that weren’t outright sci-fi or horror, but were just off-kilter enough to not be truly of this world. That describes After Dark.

The novel is set in a not-so-safe district of Tokyo. The narrator brings us in with a swooping eagle-eye view of the city (pretty after dark altmuch literally). Murakami uses an interesting technique where the narrator is our guide. He is nearly a character himself, though one who is never named or described. Instead he is the all-knowing, all-seeing, and he lets us have a glimpse.

What exactly do we glimpse? A pair of protagonists in their late teens chatting in a Denny’s after midnight. Mari is a 19-year-old student who doesn’t want to go home. Takahashi is a jazz musician on his way to an all-night practice. Mari and Takahashi met months earlier when Takahashi’s friend went on a date with Mari’s beautiful sister Eri.

What we get is a lot of talk between the two — on life, loneliness, alienation. After Dark almost reads like a play. We don’t get much action, but it doesn’t matter. These two characters are compelling.

Once Takahashi leaves Mari the action picks up. Mari gets tangled up with the manager of a “love hotel” where a Chinese prostitute has been beaten. We get glimpses of the dark side of this city, and it’s fascinating.

two girlsThe real strangeness comes when we get to the story of Mari’s sister Eri, the breathtakingly beautiful model. Eri sleeps through the whole book. Except for when she becomes trapped inside a TV.

Yes. That’s right. Trapped in a TV. The brilliance of Murakami is that he could write that and pull it off.

If you choose to read After Dark — and you should — don’t expect plot-twisting thrills. What you’ll get instead is a haunting story about young people on the edge.

(Two Girls image courtesy of www.innakomarovsky.com/blog)