Day Two

of Central Standard Time, and my body still thinks it's an hour later than the clock will admit to.

But then, I used to have jet lag flying in from New York.

And I Hope

You all remembered to set your clocks, watches, and other timepieces an hour ahead, so you're as disoriented as I am. (Seriously -- it takes me a few days to adjust to the time change. If you thinks that's weird, I used to have jetlag flying in from New York or Asheville.)

Science Saturday: Gamma Rays

This is an interesting story, if a little esoteric.

An exploded star some 3.8 billion light-years away is forcing scientists to overhaul much of what they thought they knew about gamma-ray bursts – intense blasts of radiation triggered, in this case, by a star tens of times more massive than the sun that exhausted its nuclear fuel, exploded, then collapsed to form a black hole.

Now, I don't know if you're interested in astrophysics or not (outside the version that's operating in Thor: The Dark World), but there's one thing in that paragraph that ought to make you think: the star that exploded is 3.8 billion light-years away, which means that explosion actually happened 3.8 billion years ago. That's about the time that life arose on Earth.

And we're just now seeing it.

If that doesn't make you stop and think, I give up.

Christian Science Monitor, via Raw Story.

Some Perspective

The news is the usual mix of non-scandals, made-up scandals, idiotic commentaries, and dodging and weaving by the movers and shakers. Just to give you a good take on how important it all is, consider this:

The Mesozoic Era, which lasted from about 250 million to 66 million years ago, is often called the Age of Dinosaurs. As a kid, this brought to mind one endless summer when dinosaurs flourished. And many of the books I read picked one environment from three different periods within the era to represent dinosaur life. Little Coelophysis was the canonical Triassic dinosaur; the huge sauropods and theropods of the Morrison Formation represented the Jurassic, and a Cretaceous Tyrannosaurus versus Triceratops face-off ultimately capped off the succession. With the periods juxtaposed this way, millions of years didn’t seem so very long.

But let’s unpack some of that scenery. Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus and their neighbors roamed western North America about 150 million years ago. This slice of time falls in the latter portion of the Jurassic. The traditional representatives of the latest Cretaceous scene—Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops—did not evolve until about 67 million years ago. By themselves, these dates are just labels, but think of them falling along evolution’s timeline. About 83 million years separated Apatosaurus from Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus from Triceratops. The so-called Age of Mammals—which began when the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out—has been going on for about 66 million years. Less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus rex than separated T. rex from Stegosaurus.

(Emphasis in original.)

And just to give you an idea of what the world looked in the time of Diplodocus and Stegosaurus:

There's a really neat site called "The Paleomap Project" with maps of the earth through time. It's fascinating, particularly when you think about how they can identify various landmasses -- do you know where Alaska was during the Cambrian era?

I may just spend the next hour browsing through that.