Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico and annetteboardman. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, planter, JML9999, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Welcome to the Saturday Science Edition of the Overnight News Digest...with a twist…
...because I would not be the college football fan that I am and the University of Michigan Wolverines fan that I am without mourning the loss of ABC college football announcer Keith Jackson last night at the age of 89.
...in honor of Keith Jackson, I will sprinkle some of his most memorable play-by-play calls thoughout this diary...most...but not all of them...are Michigan memories.
Forgive my indulgence.
LiveScience: Why Do Hurricanes Have Eyes? Scientists Still Don't Really Know by Rafi Letzter
A cyclone's eye is a place of safety and a sign of danger. Inside the eye, winds are calm and no rain falls. Blue skies are usually visible overhead. But ending up inside a storm's eye is bad news — the eye is ringed by the eye wall, where the storm's most powerful winds swirl. And when an eye forms, it's a sign that a cyclone has grown more organized, and more powerful. It's a key step on the road to becoming a fully-fledged hurricane..
So, meteorologists watch cyclonic eyes carefully. Those strange, still spots convey invaluable information about what destruction a storm will wreak. And yet, despite researchers' intense focus on the phenomena, cyclone eyes are barely understood. A paper published in 2006 found hundreds of explanations for cyclone eye formation, many of them explicitly contradicting one another.
But a new paper by a physicist, an applied mathematician and an engineer, published today (Jan. 12) in the journal Physical Review Fluids, may help narrow the field.
Probably Keith Jackson’s most famous play-by-play call is...close to being my all-time favorite call...you know what it is…and there’s a bonus call in this clip…
Nature: Revamped collider hunts for cracks in the fundamental theory of physics by Elizabeth Gibney
The quest to explore the frontiers of physics will heat up next month in Japan, when beams of high-energy electrons are set to start smashing into their antimatter counterparts at one of the world’s premier accelerator laboratories. The experiment, called Belle II, aims to chase down rare, promising hints of new phenomena that would extend the standard model — a remarkably successful but incomplete physics theory that describes matter and forces.
In February, an accelerator at Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba will begin an initial six-month run of collisions. The eventual goal is to chart in high precision the decays of B-mesons, which contain a fundamental building block of nature known as a b quark (the ‘b’ stands for ‘beauty’ or ‘bottom’).
The work builds on B-meson observations made by experiments including those at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Both efforts are looking for the subtle influence of any new particles or processes on the ways that known particles decay into others. Physicists at the LHC saw some intriguing signs of potential departures from the standard model, most recently in 20171. Buzz around these results has piqued the interest of theorists in Belle II and has prompted new groups join the international collaboration, says Tom Browder, a physicist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and spokesperson for the Japan-based experiment.
Of course, Keith Jackson called a few games that did not go Michigan’s way.
Science: The Long Shadow of Frankenstein by Kai Kupferschmidt
In January 1818, a woman barely out of her teens unleashed a terrifying tale on the world: the story of a doctor who builds a creature from scavenged body parts, then recoils in horror, spurns it, and sees his friends and family destroyed by the monster. Two hundred years later, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is still essential reading for anyone working in science. The ill-fated creator she portrays has influenced public perception of the scientific enterprise unlike any other character, forever haunting the borderland between what science can do and what it should do.
The story has mutated and it has frequently been mangled. It has spawned countless books, plays, and movies—some pictured on these pages—and even a superhero comic. It has inspired technophobes and scientists alike. "Franken-" has become a passe-partout prefix for anything deemed unnatural or monstrous.
Interpretations of the tale have also multiplied. A story of scientific hubris, a creator consumed by his creation, a male scientist trying to eliminate women's role in reproduction, an attempt by Shelley to deal with the trauma of losing a baby. To the growing group of scientists pondering the ways in which science might eventually destroy humanity, it is the earliest warning of such risks.
None of this quite captures the secret of the story's longevity. To borrow the monster's own description of indelible knowledge, Shelley's tale "clings to the mind … like a lichen on the rock." In the preface to the 1831 edition, Shelley wrote: "Now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper." It did. And it still does.
This particular play-by-play call by Jackson was a little before my time...but oh, the drama…
Phys.org: Evolved illusion—blackest black gives bird of paradise an edge by Bill Hathaway
The mating display of the male bird of paradise owes its optical extravagance to a background so black it is the envy of telescope and solar panel engineers, according to a new study published Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications.
Their velvety black plumage is so dark it gives the illusion that adjacent patterns of color glow brilliantly, an effect much appreciated by mate-hunting females, according to the researchers. Optical measurements showed that these feather patches absorb up to 99.95 percent of directly incident light, a percentage comparable to manmade ultra-black materials used in the lining of space telescopes. Microscopic structures of the wings even resemble those designed by engineers to create ultra-black materials used to facilitate light absorption in solar panels.
"Evolution sometimes ends up with the same solutions as humans," said senior author Rick Prum, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale.
The juxtaposition of darkest black and colors create to bird and human eyes what is essentially an evolved optical illusion, said co-lead author Dakota "Cody" McCoy, a Yale graduate now with the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard.
Some of Jackson’s greatest calls took place when he was teamed up with HOF quarterback Bob Griese...whose son, Brian, was the quarterback for Michigan from 1995-97 and the 1997 national championship season produced some great moments for the Jackson-Griese announcing team.
The Conversation: Why do we need to know about prime numbers with millions of digits? by Ittay Weiss
Prime numbers are more than just numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. They are a mathematical mystery, the secrets of which mathematicians have been trying to uncover ever since Euclid proved that they have no end.
An ongoing project – the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search – which aims to discover more and more primes of a particularly rare kind, has recently resulted in the discovery of the largest prime number known to date. Stretching to 23,249,425 digits, it is so large that it would easily fill 9,000 book pages. By comparison, the number of atoms in the entire observable universe is estimated to have no more than 100 digits.
The number, simply written as 2⁷⁷²³²⁹¹⁷-1 (two to the power of 77,232,917, minus one) was found by a volunteer who had dedicated 14 years of computing time to the endeavour.
You may be wondering, if the number stretches to more than 23m digits, why we need to know about it? Surely the most important numbers are the ones that we can use to quantify our world? That’s not the case. We need to know about the properties of different numbers so that we can not only keep developing the technology we rely on, but also keep it secure.
This call in the 1993 Sugar Bowl played between Miami and Alabama beginning at 19:12 through ~20:00 has always been an all-time favorite call of mine...’’Teague’s got the ball!”
This was the best picture that I could find on youtube.
Space.com: Monster Black Hole Unleashes Messy Double 'Burp' by Sarah Lewin
The giant black hole at the center of a distant galaxy has been spotted taking in gas and letting out two mighty "burps" of high-energy particles, lending support to the theory that such galactic cores go through cycles of messy activity.
Researchers presented images of the belching black hole today (Jan. 11) at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, showing lingering evidence of two burps in a row.
"Black holes are voracious eaters, but it also turns out they don't have very good table manners," Julie Comerford, an astronomer at the University of Colorado Boulder, said during a news conference at the event today. "We know a lot of examples of black holes with single burps emanating out, but we discovered a galaxy with a supermassive black hole that has not one but two burps." [The Strangest Black Holes in the Universe]
At times, Jackson instinctively knew that a college football moment needed little or no commentary or the driest commentary possible...you see that in the Woodson portion of the first clip in this thread; the same instinct was on display in the 1974 USC-Notre Dame game….more famously known as ‘’the Anthony Davis game.’’
LiveScience: Out-of-This-World Diamond-Studded Rock Just Got Even Weirder by Stephanie Pappas
A tiny chunk of stone that looks like nothing else ever seen in the solar system might be even weirder than scientists thought.
The Hypatia stone was found in southwestern Egypt in 1996. It was hardly more than a pebble, just 1.3 inches (3.5 centimeters) wide at its widest and a smidge over an ounce (30 grams) in weight. But analysis revealed that the stone (dubbed "Hypatia" for a fourth-century female mathematician and philosopher) fit into no known category of meteorite. Now, a new study suggests that at least some parts of the stone may have formed before the solar system did.
If so — and that is a big "if" — the stone might reveal that the dust cloud that eventually congealed into our solar system was not as uniform as previously believed. [Big Bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events]
When the Hypatia stone was first discovered, researchers weren't sure where it came from. Because it is studded with microdiamonds 50 nanometers to 2 micrometers in size, one possibility was that it was a strange example of a type of diamond known as a carbonado diamond. But studies in 2013 and 2015 definitively knocked out that possibility: The ratios of noble gases in the stone show that it is most certainly from out of this world. (The
diamonds probably formed from the shock when the space rock blasted through Earth's atmosphere.)
Two more indulgences…
The first is my all-time favorite play-by-play call by Keith Jackson...in the 1989 Rose Bowl (the nickname for the Rose Bowl, ‘‘The Granddaddy of Them All.’’ is attributed to Jackson) against USC...the Trojans had just missed a go-ahead field goal but...being a Michigan fan in those days in the Rose Bowl against USC, you were always waiting for something...anything... horrific to happen and for USC to pull out yet another win...and then...from the beginning of the tape, it lasts about a minute.
The person that I was dating at the time thought that I had certifiably lost my mind during Leroy Hoard’s 61 yard run...and maybe I had, I didn’t give a shit…
Lastly, there’s the final game that Keith Jackson called in his storied announcing career. It is also considered by many (including myself) to be the greatest college football game of all time, the 2006 Rose Bowl between Texas and USC.
RIP, Mr. Keith Jackson...you are sorely missed already.
Everyone have a great evening!