Cocktail Astronomy | Quasar Quartet

Image credit: Hennawi & Arrigoni-Battaia, MPIA via Astronomy Now
Here at Future-ish, we love astronomy and we love cocktails. So to prep our fans (and ourselves) for those stellar weekend cocktail conversations, we are pleased to offer our Cocktail Astronomy post each Friday.

Some of our readers may be off to the symphony tonight or this weekend to listen to their favorite classical pieces. Among them there will certainly be some exceptional quartets. For this week's Cocktail Astronomy we are sharing a story from Astronomy Now about a cosmic quartet of four quasars recently discovered by a a group of astronomers led by Joseph Hennawi of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Quasars are produced by matter falling into black holes. The existence of this quartet is sending scientists back to the drawing board regarding the formation and evolution of quasars because generally quasars are so rare and so far apart. Not these four fine fellows. Scientists are also now referring to the nebula surrounding the quasars the "Jackpot Nebula" given the rarity of the nebula itself and that of the quasars within it. Rare event on top of rare event...perhaps a stop at the local casino after the symphony is in order.

>> More information about the discovery is available in the May 15, 2015 issue of Science.

SeanChron - Live Chat with Bill Foster

2.17.11 - Today I joined in on a Science Now live chat with Bill Foster, a physicist, businessman, and the former Democratic representative to the U.S. House of Representative for Illinois's 14th congressional district, serving from 2008 until 2011. Foster was chatting on the topic of electing scientists to public office, something near and dear to us here at Future-ish. Foster has some big ideas to get scientists more engaged in politics but he's also very realistic about the challenges that exist for scientists and the general public in doing so. You can read through the archived chat at the link above.

SOS - Save Our Sea...Cucumbers

Image: Chris73/Wikimedia Commons

They are not exactly large charismatic megafauna that inspire wildlife lovers around the world to donate millions of dollars to conservation. But sea cucumbers are increasingly becoming the latest casualty of overfishing for use in soups and medicines. The global decline in sea cucumbers is due in part to the fact that they are easy to catch and reproduce slowly. Marine reserves do exist to protect sea cucumbers but - like many wildlife reserves - poor funding, inadequate controls, and lack of enforcement mean that poaching for the highly-prized little echinoderms is still the biggest challenge in protecting the species. The good news is that efforts are underway to understand and address the pressures threatening sea cucumbers. You can read a full report on the trade in sea cucumbers here and a recent academic article (Anderson et al, 2010) here, or a short article in the January 14, 2011 issue of Science Magazine (you'll need to register...but it is free). With good research, increased conservation and protection efforts, and better consumer awareness, this important member of marine ecosystems around the world will continue to inch across our ocean floors.

Minorities in Science

Freeman Hrabowski, President of the University of Maryland, has been a busy man lately. He recently chaired a committee that published Expanding Under-represented Minority Participation: America's Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads and authored the editorial page in the January 14, 2011 issue of Science Magazine with his comments titled Boosting Minorities in Science. Both pieces offer incredible insight, data, and solutions to address to true obstacle in creating an inclusive future. We hope Hrabowski stays busy with this important line of research and work.

Science's Breakthrough of the Year

This December, Science Magazine named their 2010 Science Breakthrough of the Year...and the technological tiara went to...the first quantum computer. This 'little resonator that could' is smaller than a human hair and represents that first time that a human-made device has employed quantum level mechanics. This is big because it demonstrates that the weird laws that apply at the level of tiny objects like photons and neutrons, laws that for example say an object can actually be in two places at once, are also applicable at the level of big objects, like us. Furthermore, this little device also showed that many of the theories of quantum physics may now be testable since it they conducted the test in the 'real world', observable level and successfully verified the ground state and motion of their micro machine.

View the AAAS press release. Visit the lab websites of the primary investigators Andrew Cleland and John Martinis.

Here's Science Magazine's YouTube post on the topic:

See Spectrum - Science, Volume 329

Another entry into the See Spectrum Project: Volume 329 of Science Magazine.

TSS in the Press | Science Careers Blog

5/26/09 - Ric Weible of Science Magazine's Career Blog gives a shout out to TSS (Future-ish's first iteration) in his post "You Can't Make Science Any Cooler".