Updated: 2012-05-31 22:35:00
Carolyn Boyd guides her pickup down a cliffside trail overlooking Dead Mans Pass, a limestone canyon cut deep into the backcountry of southwest Texas. A ring of black vultures circles overhead. Boyd slows the truck and scans the canyon for what has drawn their interest. On top of a boulder, splayed out like a ritual sacrifice, is a half-eaten goat carcass. “Mountain lion,” she says.
The region known as the Lower Pecos is an arid 21,000-square-mile expanse of southwest Texas and northern Mexico surrounding the confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande. The land is barbed with cacti, teeming with rattlesnakes, and riven with impassable canyons. But more than 4,000 years ago, these barrens were home to a flourishing culture of hunter-gatherers, creators of some of the world’s most complex and beautiful prehistoric rock art. The literal meaning of those paintings had been dismissed as an unsolvable mystery—until recently.
Boyd parks at the bottom of the canyon. In her early fifties, with high cheekbones and dark hair pulled back under a hat, she is both elegant and hardy, like a pioneer woman from a classic Western. She sets a brisk pace up the side of the canyon. Her destination is Delicado Shelter, one of some 300 shallow caves in the region known for paintings of human figures, deer, canines, felines, birds, rabbits, snakes, and other desert animals. Boyd, an archaeologist and director of SHUMLA (Studying Human Use of Materials, Land, and Art), an education and research center in Comstock, Texas, will spend the afternoon scouring the shelter for insight into the ancient residents and their spiritual world.
Through decades of dogged work, Boyd has also developed a system to understand this enigmatic art...
Image: The figures at the White Shaman rock shelter seem to depict a journey through the spirit world. Courtesy of SHUMLA School INC 2012
Updated: 2012-05-31 21:27:07
It occurred to me today that right about now is the time someone should have chosen as the date for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the birth of the idea of “Topological Quantum Field Theory”, as well as … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-05-31 11:26:21
Today’s physics news: Virgin Galactic spaceship cleared for test flights by US FAA and ORCID scheme will give researchers unique identifiers to improve tracking of publications. Virgin Galactic spaceship cleared for test flights by US FAA Commercial spacecraft SpaceShipTwo can begin rocket-powered suborbital test flights, the company has said Guardian Scientists: your number is up [...]
Updated: 2012-05-30 09:58:33
Today’s physics news: James Webb telescope’s Miri instrument flies out to US, ghostly jets seen streaming from Milky Way and tuna carry Fukushima isotopes James Webb telescope’s Miri instrument flies out to US Europe shipped one of its big contributions to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Tuesday. BBC Ghostly jets seen streaming from [...]
Updated: 2012-05-30 04:50:00
We’ve all seen lectures go awry when plastic transparencies slide off projectors, but L. Mahadevan was probably the first to seriously analyze a plastic sheet’s fall from grace. It is even safer to assume he was the first to use it as a model for a flying carpet. Now, due to Mahadevan’s curiosity and an enterprising grad student, scientists have created an electrically powered sheet that propels itself through the air.
In 2007 Mahadevan, a mathematician at Harvard University, turned his analysis into a proposal for coaxing a flexible sheet to fly pdf) ust above the ground. His study concluded that a thin sheet rapidly vibrating in a wavelike motion, much like a ray swimming near the seafloor, would stay aloft.
Mahadevan never built his flying carpet—he moved on to analyzing how wet paper curls and lilies bloom. But in 2008 Princeton graduate student Noah Jafferis came across Mahadevan’s paper and put the idea into practice...
Flying carpet image courtesy of Shutterstock
Updated: 2012-05-30 01:30:00
:
Updated: 2012-05-29 16:15:00
In 1994 Howarth Bouis stood before potential donors at a conference in Maryland and unveiled his plan for combating malnutrition in the developing world. Bouis, an economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), envisioned impoverished farmers in Africa and South Asia growing staple crops that are enriched in key nutrients like iron, zinc, and vitamin A. His presentation had the audience hooked—until he said he would accomplish the feat via old-fashioned plant breeding techniques.
At that point Bouis might as well have been lecturing on plows and sickles. Conference attendees wanted to solve the hunger problem with high-tech science, the kind of advances that produced incredibly effective fertilizers and pesticides during the green revolution of the 1970s. Their attention had just turned to genetically modified crops, engineered with specific genes that would not only enhance nutrition, as Bouis proposed, but also boost yields and instill resistance to pests and weed killers. Bouis came away with a single
$1 million grant—a fraction of the money needed to reach his goals.
People ignored Bouis then, but they don’t anymore...
Updated: 2012-05-29 11:01:36
Today’s physics news: Science Weekly podcast: The world awaits the transit of Venus and more Science Weekly podcast: The world awaits the transit of Venus The epic story of the first global science collaboration to measure the transit of Venus is told by historian Andrea Wulf; barrister Polly Higgins on ‘ecocide’; and the 50th anniversary [...]
Updated: 2012-05-25 19:22:35
Here’s a fun thing that has been zipping around the internets this week: a collection of “back of the envelope problems” put together by Edward Purcell. Hours of fun reading if you’re the kind of person who likes to spend their leisure time doing word problems (and I mean that in the best possible way). [...]
Updated: 2012-05-25 11:00:36
Today’s physics news: Mars ‘has life’s building blocks’, Dark Matter crisis averted and how to make a material that shrinks when stretched Mars ‘has life’s building blocks’ New evidence from meteorites suggests that the basic building blocks of life are present on Mars. BBC How to make a material that shrinks when stretched Metamaterials could [...]
Updated: 2012-05-23 18:46:08
Last month we mentioned a paper on the arxiv that made a provocative claim: evidence from the dynamics of stars above the galactic disk indicates that there is essentially no dark matter in the vicinity of the Sun. I am not an expert on galactic dynamics, but nevertheless I and others were immediately skeptical, especially [...]
Updated: 2012-05-21 19:56:01
Multiverse Mania makes the big time this week, with a cover story Welcome to the Multiverse by Brian Greene in Newsweek. While the title indicates that the Multiverse is here and part of our scientific world-view, the subtitle is a … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-05-17 17:25:00
:
Updated: 2012-05-17 01:18:38
There’s at least one thing about string theory that has changed dramatically since my book was written back in 2002 or so. At the time I accumulated various numbers showing the way hiring in particle theory at leading institutions in … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-05-17 00:34:42
The implications of the failure to find SUSY at the LHC are beginning to sink into the particle physics community: the paradigm that dominated the subject for the past 30 years has collapsed in the face of experimental (non)-evidence, threatening … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-05-14 16:57:05
This week Yale is hosting a conference on Perspectives in Representation Theory, in honor of Igor Frenkel’s 60th birthday. I’m planning to take the train up there and attend some of the talks tomorrow and Wednesday. Frenkel has been a … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-05-10 15:50:00
, ,
Updated: 2012-05-09 01:20:54
This week at the University of Pittsburgh the Phenomenology 2012 Symposium has talks reviewing the current situation in particle physics phenomenology. Not much new, but there is one plenary talk on string phenomenology, Cumrun Vafa’s Stringy Predictions for Particle Physics. … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-05-05 18:24:31
Matt Strassler posts here about a recent panel discussion of phenomenologists talking about the implications of the latest results from the LHC. You can listen to the thing for yourself, and see what Matt has to say at his blog, … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-05-05 01:00:00
A year ago, an unusually rainy spring caused the Mississippi River’s most serious flooding since 1927. Record-setting water levels threatened Memphis, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. It was up to Major General Michael Walsh, then commander of the
Mississippi Valley division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to open floodgates and blow up levees, flooding some areas but averting catastrophe in major cities downstream. In his own words, here’s how he decided where to send the swelling waters.
We knew it was going to be a challenging flood year. I was working in an operations center aboard the Mississippi, the largest motor vessel on the river: 241 feet long, with five decks.
We have a comprehensive flood plan that dictates what to do when water reaches certain levels—where we need to allow controlled flooding to save cities downstream. By April 9 the flood gauges at Cairo, Illinois, which straddles the Missouri and Kentucky borders, exceeded allowable limits. We were supposed to open the nearby Birds Point–New Madrid Floodway when the water reached 61 feet, and on the night of May 1, the forecast level climbed to 63 feet. The decision was clear. If I didn’t open that floodway and relieve the pressure, levees would have broken somewhere else—but the angst level was very high. We planned to submerge 130,000 acres of farmland, and Missouri’s attorney general asked the Supreme Court to stop the operation, but the court refused the request. I gave the order and we blew up the floodway on May 2.
Our first move removed about a fifth of the water flowing through that area, but we hadn’t gone far enough—we still had to open up the next floodway, the Bonnet Carré, just upstream of New Orleans. We opened it on May 9, in bright sunshine, with a few hundred people out to watch.
Even then the river was flowing at record rates...
Updated: 2012-05-04 07:30:50
: : String Theory Media What We Do String Theory Media develops documentary and feature content about music and music-making for traditional and new . media Who We Are Craig Havighurst Founder writer producer Anne Cates Videographer Editor Contact Us String Theory Media 615.460.1236 2812-B Vaulx Lane Nashville , TN 37204 OUR VIDEO WORK Ralph Stanley Sam Bush Darrell Scott : Crooked Road Robert Plant Alison Krauss EPK The Infamous Stringdusters Kathleen Edwards Blue Highway String Theory Reading List James Barron : Piano Martha Bayles : Hole In Our Soul R Jourdain : Music , The Brain , And Ecstasy How Music Captures Our Imagination Thomas Levenson : Measure for Measure Archives May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011
