Category Archives: Science

Science of Gun Violence

Inquiring Minds Podcast: The Science of Gun Violence.

I listened to this podcast episode today (it aired on October 16,2015) and found it had much food for thought. They interviewed Brad J. Bushman, who is a professor of communication and psychology and has studied the causes, consequences, and solutions to the problem of human aggression and violence. He also is a member of President Obama’s committee on gun violence.

Unfortunately I didn’t find a transcript of the podcast, but you can take a quick look at Bushman’s research results in this set of presentation slides: Understanding Potential Linkages of Gun Violence to Media Violence.

Five planets visible

If you’re more interested in viewing the planets in our solar system we already know are there (as opposed to a potential “new” ninth one), take a look at the sky in the next weeks.

Earthsky: See all five bright planets simultaneously! “All five bright planets will appear together in the morning sky from about January 20 to February 20, 2016. That hasn’t happened since 2005.”

NPR: For The Next Month, 5 Planets Will Align In Early Morning Sky. “As of today, you can see all five planets that are possible to see in the sky with the naked eye early in the morning. NPR’s Robert Siegel talks with astronomer Jackie Faherty about why this is happening.” (NPR media player and transcript)

Nine planets after all?

NPR: Scientists Find Hints Of A Giant, Hidden Planet In Our Solar System.

[Michael E. Brown, t]he astronomer whose work helped kick Pluto out of the pantheon of planets says he has good reason to believe there’s an undiscovered planet bigger than Earth lurking in the distant reaches of our solar system.”

The Washington Post: New evidence suggests a ninth planet lurking at the edge of the solar system.

“[T]he authors, astronomers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, have not observed the planet directly.

Instead, they have inferred its existence from the motion of recently discovered dwarf planets and other small objects in the outer solar system. Those smaller bodies have orbits that appear to be influenced by the gravity of a hidden planet”.

See the original paper here:

The Astronomical Journal: Evidence for a Distnad Giant Planet in the Solar Symste. By Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown.

Abstract: “Recent analyses have shown that distant orbits within the scattered disk population of the Kuiper Belt exhibit an unexpected clustering in their respective arguments of perihelion. While several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this alignment, to date, a theoretical model that can successfully account for the observations remains elusive. In this work we show that the orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) cluster not only in argument of perihelion, but also in physical space. We demonstrate that the perihelion positions and orbital planes of the objects are tightly confined and that such a clustering has only a probability of 0.007% to be due to chance, thus requiring a dynamical origin. We find that the observed orbital alignment can be maintained by a distant eccentric planet with mass [around ten times the mass of Earth …].”

Space.com: The Man Who Killed Pluto: Q & A with Astronomer Mike Brown.

Some links via MetaFilter: Many Very Educated Men Just Screwed Up Nature. Possibly?.