麻豆传媒

Mapping black holes

Richard Notley has been wondering down a dark path鈥� and found enlightenment in remarks made by mathematician Roger Penrose (麻豆传媒, 19 November 2022) about the structure of the universe. He writes:

鈥淩oger may have solved a problem I have. A continuation of Roman Road, Hereford, on which I live, goes into Lane [pictured below]. I have ridden down this lane several times both ways wondering whether I will hit the event horizon. But I鈥檓 still here, so I鈥檓 now considering that this should be called 鈥楴aked Singularity Lane鈥� as there isn鈥檛 an event horizon?鈥�

Richard鈥檚 isn鈥檛 the only Black Hole Lane in the UK. is Blackhole Lane, a continuation of Derrington Lane in Stafford.

And these British examples aren鈥檛 the only navigable black holes in the universe. There is also a off Witherbee Road in Berkeley County, South Carolina.

Widening the net, one can find other geographic black holes in North America.

Road forks off from Little Valley Access Road near Little Valley in California. And another branches off Route 31 near Goderich, Canada.

People who use map apps have discovered other Black Hole Roads, too. And in coming years, when more powerful instruments become available to searchers, there might be many additions to the list of known Black Hole Lanes and Black Hole Roads.

More exciting still, given the discoveries of recent decades, who would now rule out the existence of Black Hole Streets, Black Hole Avenues, Black Hole Boulevards and maybe even Black Hole Bridges, Black Hole Tunnels, Black Hole Aqueducts, Black Hole Golf Courses, Black Hole Pubs, Black Hole Hotels, and other black hole locations worth or not worth a visit.

Rauks (rocks)

Tom Gill is one of many scientists who always want to know more about the things they love.

鈥淚鈥檝e been a geology nerd for fifty-plus years,鈥� he writes to Feedback. 鈥淚 was today years old when I learned that a type of rock exists which is officially named鈥� rauks.鈥�

Gill鈥檚 epiphany 鈥� that rauks are rocks 鈥� came from the city of Wroclaw in Poland.

鈥淐lusters of sea stacks, called rauks, are unique rocky landforms characteristic of Baltic Sea coasts,鈥� explain Mateusz Strzelecki at the University of Wroclaw and his colleagues. The team supplies more detail, and explains how it was acquired, in a study called 鈥溾��.

That study adds some geography to their geology report of last year: 鈥溾��.

Poland also is, or at least was, home base for a scientist named Jacek Rauk, who in 1969 published a about the 鈥渟welling of roof rocks鈥�. Roof rocks are the rocks that make up the top of an underground chamber 鈥� such as a mine shaft, a cavern, a lava tube or a gas pocket.

That same year, Maurice Stone at the University of Exeter, UK, co-authored a study about 鈥溾��. On the record, 1969 was a good year for Stone and Rauk 鈥� and stone and rock.

Worm鈥檚 view of the tree

Worm, Boris Worm (spoken aloud that way, the name has much the same musical ring as 鈥淏ond, James Bond鈥�), has long been a biology professor at Dalhousie University in Canada.

Worm sees humans as predators. You can read his explanation of that in the study 鈥溾��, which Worm and 11 co-authors published in the journal Communications Biology.

Back in 2012, many biologists still embraced a relatively simple structure for the metaphorical 鈥渢ree of life鈥�, which is an ongrowing attempt to show how the many kinds of life are related to each other.

That year, Worm teamed up with Trevor Branch at the University of Washington in Seattle to predict what might happen to some parts of the tree that live underwater. Worm and Branch wrote a nominative determinism smorgasbord of a paper called 鈥溾�� in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The journal鈥檚 acronym for itself is TREE.

Following this, lots of biologists were embracing a 鈥渄ramatically expanded version鈥� of the tree metaphor. The grasping was exemplified by Laura Hug, then at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues writing a paper in 2016 titled 鈥溾��. They said that 鈥渆ven an approximation of the full scale of the tree has remained elusive鈥�.

Some efforts to know and protect the tree of life are quite down to earth, none more flatly (and also more blatantly British) than a recent analysis by Joseph Bull, Henry Grub and colleagues, in the journal Nature, of 鈥溾��.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and聽co-founded聽the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is聽.

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