Funmurphys: the Blog

Science Trio

I saw three interesting science stories today, and amazingly, they had nothing to do with intestinal bacteria!

First up is the launch of Deep Impact, which isn't a movie but a satellite designed to rendezvous with the comet Temple1 and launch an "impactor" spacecraft designed to use kinetic energy to blow a big hole in the comet, allowing the mothership to take pictures and analyze the material ejected during the impact. That way we'll know what comets are really made of -- dirty snowballs, or something else below the surface. In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't take $250,000 to report this, but I used to work on the Delta program in my long lost youth. The fireworks are scheduled for, when else, the Fourth of July

Hopefully, Greenpeace etc. won't protest this major destruction of comet habitat in the name of science.

Secondly, it isn't a story about a large wooden badger, but a giant dinosaur eating badger. Yes, you heard me right, fossils have been discovered in China of large badger like mammals that ate dinosaurs -- they found the fossilized dino in the belly of the fossil badger. In the words of one of the scientists, it was a "short-legged but powerful animal with fearsome teeth." Perhaps he meant big pointy teeth. I mean, the finding does competely overturn the view of mamals from that time as being small cuddly cuties that wouldn't hurt a fly (if there were any).

And lastly, Scientists now believe that the Universe isn't made of string, but is a giant flat bell. OK, I'm inflating things abit. Alright, enough cosmological humor. Scientists have confirmed that the early Universe rang with sound and the sound waves influenced the structure - galaxies etc. - of the universe. The good news is that the Universe is flat but wavy; the bad news is that the expansion of the universe isn't stopping; what began with a bang won't end at all.