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Mapping black holes

Richard Notley has been wondering down a dark path… and found enlightenment in remarks made by mathematician Roger Penrose (Â鶹´«Ã½, 19 November 2022) about the structure of the universe. He writes:

“Roger 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’m still here, so I’m now considering that this should be called ‘Naked Singularity Lane’ as there isn’t an event horizon?”

Richard’s isn’t the only Black Hole Lane in the UK. is Blackhole Lane, a continuation of Derrington Lane in Stafford.

And these British examples aren’t 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.

“I’ve been a geology nerd for fifty-plus years,” he writes to Feedback. “I was today years old when I learned that a type of rock exists which is officially named… rauks.”

Gill’s epiphany – that rauks are rocks – came from the city of Wroclaw in Poland.

“Clusters of sea stacks, called rauks, are unique rocky landforms characteristic of Baltic Sea coasts,” 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 ““.

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

Poland also is, or at least was, home base for a scientist named Jacek Rauk, who in 1969 published a about the “swelling of roof rocks”. Roof rocks are the rocks that make up the top of an underground chamber – 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 ““. On the record, 1969 was a good year for Stone and Rauk – and stone and rock.

Worm’s view of the tree

Worm, Boris Worm (spoken aloud that way, the name has much the same musical ring as “Bond, James Bond”), 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 ““, 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 “tree of life”, 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 “” in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The journal’s acronym for itself is TREE.

Following this, lots of biologists were embracing a “dramatically expanded version” 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 ““. They said that “even an approximation of the full scale of the tree has remained elusive”.

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 ““.

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

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