The bottom of the oceans is a mostly unexplored frontier that does not get as much attention as the frontier of space. But it does attract adventurers who seek to go where no one has gone before. On January 23, 1960 Auguste Piccard and Don Walsh went to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the world that, at a depth of 11,034m, is deeper than Mount Everest is high. But no went there again there for over a half-century until in 2012, when filmmaker James Cameron went there in a submersible. Unfortunately, the submersible had many systems failing during the trip so that, although he was not in danger, it was never used again. I blogged about this back then. No one went again for another seven years. But in the last year that picture has changed dramatically.
[Read more…]

The wildfires in the Pacific Northwest have been on a devastating scale. Starting in California they have spread north to Oregon and Washington states and consumed millions of acres of land. While California is subject to regular drought and heat and is thus prone to wildfires, the other two states are cooler and rainier and thus do not usually experience this level of fires. The level of fire activity in those areas is being called ‘unprecedented’.

Washington Gov. Jay Inlsee on Wednesday held a news conference after touring Bonney Lake, where the Sumner Grade Fire has burned more than 800 acres including four homes, and has forced evacuations.

Inslee previously issued a statewide emergency proclamation due to fires in eastern and central Washington. However, the fires have only gotten worse and due to recent weather conditions, around 480,000 acres have burned since Monday,

“This is an extraordinary series of events we have suffered,” Inslee said, pointing to the combination of dry grass, high temperatures and heavy winds.

The governor said the conditions have been exacerbated by the changing climate in Washington, and said he looks forward to working with people across the state to fight the cause of the fires.

[Read more…]

Its title is The Idea that a Scientific Theory can be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth: It’s time we abandoned it and can be read here.

Suppose you could get a layer of liquid to stay suspended in mid-air, then you could observe counter-intuitive things such as objects like toy boats floating on both the top and bottom surfaces, being right side up on the top surface and upside down on the bottom surface.

But how could you get such a layer of liquid to defy gravity in this way? It turns out you can, as can be seen in this video.

[Read more…]

I have always found time-lapse videos of plants growing to be endlessly fascinating because they make them look like they have agency. Rusty Blazenhoff has found some nice ones.

Learning a language is not easy, as I can personally testify. So the ease with which children all over the world learn the language of their environment, despite the fact that the languages are very different, has always been a source of great curiosity for researchers. Linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory revolutionized the field. To the extent that I understand it, he argued that there was something known as a Universal Grammar, common but deep rules that all languages shared, and that our brains were hardwired and coded to be receptive to them. As children heard adults around them speaking, various switches were thrown in the brain that converted these general rules into the specific ones for that particular language, enabling children to quickly pick up the syntactic structures of that language.

Over time, the question of what constituted those basic rules of grammar has shifted but the basic idea of some kind of universal grammar has remained. But there have been periodic attempts to upend the Chomsky model as the dominant paradigm and this article is one such attempt, though the author Vyvyan Evans, while claiming to target Chomsky, seems to be aiming his fire more at Stephen Pinker’s interpretation and popularization of Chomsky’s ideas. Another article critiques Evans’s arguments.

While I find the subject fascinating, I simply do not have the expertise to evaluate the competing theories or to judge whether Chomsky’s or any of the alternative view is correct but I pass along the articles because they discusses the issues involved fairly clearly.