You know, sometimes I look at the almost child-like personality of Foxx and think, from time to time, that to actually live life through those eyes – with an eternal and perpetual sense of wonderment at everything – would be awesome. But, sadly, we don’t have the option. Ah well, never mind. On with the grind, I guess.

This week, Mart is busy doing SCIENCE! in his super-secret secret lab and has discovered a way that may just allow him to give Foxx more intelligence – maybe even as much as half a wit. Maybe.

Thoroughly analyse this week’s crenellated and slightly squidgy strip here.  

We endeavor to cherrypick the best examples of current thinking and put them into your immense and powerful BRAIN  to enhance your world view. To bring to you enlightenment without the hassle of going to a university and being all socially inadequate around girls and that.

Okay, well, let’s be honest, we don’t do that much, But when we see an article or a news story about THE SCIENCE! that is the equivalent of waking up and finding dinosaurs in your car, then we have to pass it along as best we can.

But, I am afraid, dear, sweet gentle readers, for the first time we have totally failed. We have today found an article of THE SCIENCE! that is so staggeringly obtuse, we have not been able to break it down. More after the jump.

We came across an article at New Scientist that, frankly, even though we have read it several times, does not go in. It does just not go in. We have tried with and without glasses, with lab coats, and we even ran it through the Google translation thingy to see if it would tranlsate it into English or something. But we were bested. The article is made up of lots of little paragraphs that, in of themselves, make sense. But considered as a whole, it makes our BRAINS shut down in a flop-sweat.

Anyhoo. As far as we can tell, the article relates to a current idea that, based on evidence gathered from the  GEO600 experiment in Hanover – a observational project designed to detect and analyse gravitational waves – our world may be nothing more than a holographic projection. Or possibly we are real, and the universe is a 2 dimensional projection. Or something. On the details, we are fuzzy, very fuzzy. But it is weird-ass SCIENCE! thinking, so we are intrigued.

It seems to also include black holes, storage of information about the black hole and its 3 dimensions in the 2 dimensions of the event horizon (that’s the hologram part) and possibly dinosaurs with lasers.* 

As an example of how fucking mind-futzing the article is, even the teaser paragraphs – the bits in the middle in a massive font that are designed to attract your attention with a simple, subject-revealing tease and HUGE quotation marks  - make your brain fart. For example:

“Incredibly, the experiment was picking up unexpected noise – as if quantum convulsions were causing an extra sideways jitter”  

Buh? WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN IN ENGLISH? Are we talking timey-wimey spacey-wacey here?

So, anyway, as we have no hope of offering any kind of useful brief summary of the article in any meaningful way, here is a totally random excerpt:

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

[dogsounds comment: that has to be one of the most awesome and random quotes ever uttered by a scientist: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram." This scientist would give Slartibartfast a run for his money at a party.]

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Go read the full article at New Scientist here. If anyone can break this down for us, comment below. We’ll take all the help we can get.

And if you like the image above, it’s from wearscience.com who sell all sorts of awesome SCIENCE! themed apparel.

*Actually, the whole “dinosaurs with lasers” part may have just been us projecting to find something familiar and comforting to latch on to. Which we totally didn’t.

So, the first and most important rule of any super-secret science team working to create Godawful aberrations of nature for who-knows-what purpose is pretty self-evident: shut the fuck up and say nothing. So it’s both amusing and disheartening to hear that the fount of all super-secret military industrial complex conspiracy theories – DARPA – announced right in it’s annual budget – it’s annual fucking budget, I shit you not – that it is working on synthetic organisms that will live for ever and, should they turn out to be harmful, contain a genetic kill-switch. WTF? More info after the jump.

Wired magazine’s DARPAwatch section revealed this scary fact. Seems that the Pentagon is fed up with the “ randomness of natural evolutionary advancement” and has directed DARPA to work on creating fully synthetic organisms that will be immortal, but that will, should the highly predictable shit-hitting-the-fan outcome that we can all see coming a fucking mile away like a train with a massive headlight all the way down at the other end of the tunnel come to pass, include a biological kill-switch – allowing the organisms to be stopped dead in their tracks.

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch: “Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism”.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Now, forgive us here for sounding a little thick, but it seems to me that there can’t be that many practical, non-weaponizeable, non-evil-plan-formed-in-a-secret-volcano-base things you can do with a synthetic organism. After all, they are not talking about building something that can do the shopping, mow your lawn, or look after grandma whilst you are out to make sure she doesn’t drop another hip or something. And quite what they mean by the “intended biological effect” we are not sure. But, after doing a lot of SCIENCE! in our brains, we are pretty sure that something that is living and breathing isn’t going to be a cure for penile warts or halitosis.

And it stands to reason that if the genetic loyalty built into this organism is intended to avoid  nefarious enemy subjugation of the organism itself, then we are talking about something here that you would be designing to use against such an enemy.

So, one one hand, we have to applaud the openness of DARPA for telling everyone exactly what mysterious secret government projects they are working on. If only the guys with capture UFO tech in Area 51 could be so forthcoming, there would be a whole lot less tin-foil hat loonies about.

On the other hand…isn’t it about time they stopped screwing around with microbes and finally got on with making laser-toting dinosaurs and nuclear dolphins and all that shit? Man, they are taking, like, for ever. You may have the greatest minds in there, DARPA, but the internets have been ahead of you for years. Just hire 300 web-literate man-children and you will have weapons that would give any military  leader a pants-tent like a flagpole. Then again, thinking about it, whilst this would give rise to armored space-jellyfish and power-armor wearing kangaroos, a weaponized Pedobear would be somewhat less awesome. Just stay away from the chans, is all we’re saying.  

Read the full article here.

(facebook readers click here for the video)

These, I am afraid, are mere irritants. Nothing major. How about an event that would guarantee 100% extinction, with no notice whatsoever until it actually happened? How about something that may have already taken place? Worried?

Meet WR 104. More after the jump.

Pretty isn’t it? This is a picture of WR 104 taken from the Keck infrared telecope. WR 104 is a binary star system, located, it is thought, about 8000 light years out from Earth, towards the center of the Milky Way. Two stars, locked in a graceful dance, one an 0-type star, one possibly a Wolf Rayet type star. Both are super-massive, and both super luminous, and both (if our assumptions about their type and makeup are correct) the kind of stars that die in tremendous super or even maybe hypernovae.

The type 0 star poses no real threat, at that distance it will merely be something bright and pretty to look at in the night sky. The other, though, does not seem quite as appealing – there is the slim chance that this star, when it dies, could generate what is the most powerful event known to exist in the universe – a gamma-ray burst.

As is well postulated, when a star dies the slow breakdown of its material leads to a shrinking and a tremendous increase in density. Finally, when the matter within the star can be reduced down no more, and there is no more nuclear fuel to be spent – the core of the star containing only the inert heavy element remnants of past nuclear activity – the star dies in a huge explosion – a supernova - the central remnants crushed by increasing gravitational force to a single point of infinite gravity and infinite mass forming a singularity (a black hole). Matter and gas blown outwards wend their way across space, seeding the formation of new stars and planets. It’s how we came to exist – all matter in the universe came from such destruction – it’s the only place the heavy elements are made. We are all made of start stuff. These things are pretty tame – you’d have to be within, say, 20 light years of a regular supernova to suffer any adverse effects from it.

But, just occasionally, instead of this more typical supernova, something else can occur: sometimes, when a star is massive enough, as well as the outburst of material and the crushing of the inner core the explosion can unleash a torrent of gamma radiation – a gamma-ray burst.

Since their existence was first observed and origins suggested, astronomers, cosmologists and astrophysicists have studied gamma-ray bursts. They are incredible things: they last anywhere from seconds to a few minutes, and the energy unleashed by the star in such an event  can be far greater than our Sun will put out in its entire lifetime. The energy is released in two pencil-thin streams, one from each of the stars’ poles – and they utterly destroy anything that lies in their path.

Well, yeah. But what are the odds that we would even be in the path of such a burst?

Well, as it turns out, the odds ore actually pretty good. See, the image above shows the gases around the stars in a familiar pinwheel shape. The gas and material ejected by the star moves outwards, and as the stars spin around their axis, the material is pushed out into a flat plane about the equatorial area – like the old ice-skater’s arms analogy. So, what does the image tell us? It tells us that if we see the star as a pinwheel, then we can only be facing one place - one of the poles. We are lined up with the axis, more or less. The pole. We could be staring right down the barrel of a loaded gun.

So, let’s assume for a minute that Earth is lined up exactly, and that a gamma-ray burst occurs. What would happen? Well, it is suggested that at the very least, the gamma radiation would destroy ozone  in our atmosphere and create a smog of nitrogen dioxide. Not so bad then.

Not quite. It is thought that it could burn off up to 50% of the Earth’s ozone by ripping apart the ozone molecules in the atmosphere. When you think that the issues we are having now with regards to global warming are caused by a mere 5% depletion of the ozone layer, 50% sounds like a bad thing. And the nitrogen oxide could be a thick blanket that would not only block out the sun – putting a supervolcano’s feeble efforts to shame – but would also be water soluble, precipitating out as acid rain. And this is the best-case scenario. Add to that the theory – still hotly debated at this stage – that the incredible numbers of cosmic rays beating down could lead to mass extinctions  (this is radiation – there is a reason the Apollo missions were scheduled during periods when it was assumed solar activity was at a minimum) and it begins to seem that this may not be a good thing at all, and there would be no way to “escape” the effect.

Now, it is not known for sure that the second star will emit such a burst. Heck, astronomers cannot even really agree on how far the binary system really is from Earth. Maybe 5000 light years, maybe 8000 (any astronomer will tell you that  distance is one of the hardest things you can try to measure). And there is also some evidence that perhaps we are not quite so perfectly lined up with the poles – the burst could, as physicist Michio Kaku puts is, “graze the earth“. And, it has to be said, we have no way to know if this will happen tomorrow, next week, or in a milllion years. But it certainly gets you thinking.

And the best bit? the burst would travel at the speed of light, The same speed as the light from the explosion. So that would, basically give us no warning at all. We would only know it happened, when it happened. For all we know, it happned many years ago.

Maybe even 8000 years ago.

It’s geek-out time here again at dogsounds towers, and here are two little treats for your inner geek. Remember, the laws of physics cause geeks and nerds to repel, so nerds need not apply. Jump right in after the…uh…jump.

Firstly, a charming and mesmerising interactive journey from the world of the macro – our everyday world – to the world of the quantum, with the Nanoreisen “adventure beyond the decimal”. With quiant and charming sounds and a very subtle and delicate sense of humor, this interactive flash animation takes you from the everyday – a mosquito, a laptop, a car headlight- to the world of the quantum. And includes a very lost and confused-looking mite.

Experience it for yourself here and note the extra level of geek topping in the subtle Star Wars sound effects. The site offers an update service to keep you informed af further adventures to be had. Sadly, you may be waiting for physicists to actually discover the updates first.

Secondly, a fascinating short video that demonstrates something that, go on, you know you have always wondered: just what exactly does happen when you fire a particle accelerator at a webcam?  Haven’t you? Not even a bit?  Wow, you are so a rubbish geek. Sure you’re not a nerd in denial? As ever, facebook readers will have to click here to see the video.

I can spend hours trawling through without even realising it. But what keeps me hooked? There are, of course, good, solid and well-researched dialogs on these sites, well-thought out, well-written and filled with keen logic. But then there are also the insane ramblings of people who will believe, to coin a phrase, “any old shit their feeble mind can conjour up”.  Example after the jump.

Many of these more comical (by “comical” I, of course, mean “pathetic”) themes are recurrent: the Galactic Federation Of Light (the prophet of this nonsense shot herself in the foot by predicting when we would see thousands of alien ships over our cities. Despite the fact the date came and went with no action, many idiots still believe in this rubbish), The Mayan Calendar (despite the fact that evidence that the Mayan calendar ending in 2012 (meaning  the end of civilisation) has been shown to be utter nonsense as it was based of a badly-translated Mayan inscription, many people still believe this) and more.

But one of the most annoying is the whole myth of Planet X, also called Nibiru. If we are to believe the doomsayers out there, this is a mysterious planet that only passes the Earth every now and then, and contains a race of aliens that are in some posts out to destroy us, and in others out to save us. Apparently, despite the fact Nibiru roams around the Solar System, it also hides behind the Sun (which is why we can’t see it).  Apparently, it’s scheduled passing by Earth (in, you guessed it, 2012) will cause the poles to shift and the oceans to rise, yada yada yada.  Google it for more detail – it is the finest example of buffoonery you will come across. Despite every single person on the face of the planet Earth who has the slightest bit of knowledge of astronomy saying “look, this is basically complete and utter bollocks”, many still believe. And this post, from a popular conspiracy website (which actually has a high percentage of intelligent and thoughtful discussions going on about other subjects) is a classic example of wearing a tinfoil hat so tight it cuts off the blood to the brain:

Prepare To Save Yourselves OR Prepare To DIE

********TURN OFF EVERYTHING AND LISTEN FOR YOURSELF*********

The Anunnaki who inhabit Nibiru are able to create, destroy, and manipulate whole solar systems – able to switch between multiple dimensions. The movement of the PlanetX group is intelligently controlled and appears to stay behind the Sun to avoid the attention of the masses until late in the going. Got it?? COINTEL AGENTS claim that PlanetX is a hoax but THEY ARE LIEING since they falsely claim it would have to be prominent in the sky by now.

The evidence for PlanetX is growing more abundant every day. For about three weeks, I’ve been able to hear the unsettling noises of its approach in the south skies. Saturday night the sounds were briefly so intense and my wife and I had to turn our music up pretty loud to block it out. I can hear it as I type this message… similar to a distant howling wind. Reports of these noises, though plentiful, WILL NOT show up on google search results. NASA is also tampering with all imaging systems that would otherwise show absolute proof. The internet is under close scrutiny make no mistake about it.

You can either prepare to save yourselves or prepare to die. 

Classic. Because, of course, you can hear the sound of a planet OUT IN THE VACUUM OF SPACE from Earth. This must be why we can hear the Sun… 

Guess it is just totally impossible that this sound, like the howling wind, could, y’know, be the howling wind? He later decribes it as sometimes like “a cosmic jet” or a vacuum cleaner, to which one responder suggested maybe the writer had heard maybe a jet and a vacuum cleaner.

Important to note, of course, that the poster does not include any of this growing evidence.

So this is the kind of thing I love to get caught up in. It both amuses and frustrates me, and what keeps me hooked is the responses to threads like these. I pity the folks that lap it up, and I give a thumbs up to those who take the piss out of them.

I often wonder how these people maintain a normal, functioning everyday life. If I knew for a fact that this was going to happen, would I be sat on the internet posting on some forum? Or would I be heading to the hills to find a cave and lay low till it all passed? Would I calmly go to work each day and say nothing?  Surely, if these people are so convinced of this nonsense they shoul by now be jobless pariahs, shunned by cow-orkers and friends alike for being gibbering idiots? Certainly, if someone I employed babbled on about this all day (which, you think you would, if you believed it) I would consider not only his continued employment, but his mental health.

Anyway, check out the full forum thread here. Have a browse around the site, there is actually some some good serious stuff to be read, if you can get past all the insane tin-foil nonsense like this.

So, you have most likely seen BigDog before, the robot ‘pack-horse’ developed by Boston Dynamics. But here is some more up-to-date footage of the ‘Dog, this time coping with ice and snow, and also jumping - for a machine, rather gracefully. I have to say, it kinda makes Asimo look like a doddery old fart. Watch the film after the jump.

I still can’t quite get this to fit in a comfortable place in my head though. I mean, we see the quirky ‘hostess’ robots that those loveable, crazy Japanese engineers come up with (and you know that the engineers have no significant female in their life, and you know exactly WHY they are determined to make a life-like female robot) and they are all well and good. But they are so far from the uncanny valley – so unlike a real person – that you know they are artificial.

BigDog, however, is driving through the uncanny valley in a Mack Truck and deciding where to set up a tent for the night. You know it’s a machine  – 70% of it is exposed machinery up top, and the loud petrol engine drones incessantly when outside. But its the damned legs. Thir movement is so naturalisitc and so fluid and so lifelike-speed that my brain can’t quite figure out if this is a machine or a cyborg – some ghastly half cow, half robot creation. And then I feel sorry for the cow.

And seeing it on the ice? It’s like somebody hacked Bambi apart with a Stryker saw to fit the mechanical stuff in. Did they have to put fur on the legs?

So it is strange. It’s a damn machine, but I still feel angry when the dude (a staple part of these films) kicks it to show how it recovers. Bad man! Bad scientist! No cake for you!

On the other hand, of course, the science geek in me thinks “Whoa…dude…”

With thanks to Xenophila.

Full video after the jump. Readers on Facebook can view the film here.

In case you weren’t aware, i.e. you are not a mind-numbingly stupid, easily-led, tree-hugging, sandal-wearing, crystal-waving, love and light-preaching (mostly American) halfwit, recently the internet was assailed by the biggest load of absolute bollocks since John Titor’s time-travel hi-jinx, onto which a seemingly endless number of desperate, pathetic people clung.

A lady going by the particularly feeble name of Blossom Goodchild, who is apparently either English or Australian, no-one seems to know for sure - started claiming (somewhat inevitably through the youtubes) that she was “channelling” aliens through some hokey other-dimensional spiritual plane or other. Apparently it just happened to tap into a number of popular theories of the feeble-witted including noble alien races coming to our aid, and fighting less noble alien races hell-bent on our destruction. Or some shit like that. 

Many hard-of-thinking (mostly American) folks decided that based on no evidence whatsoever this must absolutely be true, and that these aliens – allegedly part of the Galactic Federation Of Light – were to be our saviours. With the promise of enlightenment and peace and all manner of pseudo-spiritual rubbish, many seemed to totally not pick up on that fact that this Goodchild woman just happened to also be selling books about this nonsense. Her messages were supposed to be for all to hear, and for the betterment of mankind. And you , of course, have to buy the book to find out more.

To a normal person, like you and I, the moment somebody mentions a book or CD or DVD, the antenna twitch and we think “oops, bollocks alarm sounding, pull out, pull out!”. Sadly, a large number of people were too stupid to think this and bought all her drivel hook, line and sinker. And boat, and expensive mooring for the boat, and boat-based maintenance and fuel bills, and the cost of bait and fishing equipment. And with the full knowledge that they’re gonna need a bigger boat.

Anyway, where the fuck was I going with this? Oh yes. So, anyway, all these “channelled” (i.e “shit she made up whilst putting on a silly voice”) prophecies culminated with what can only be described as the most utterly dumb act carried out by a snake-oil salesman: a concrete date. She stated that the Galactic Federation of Light would appear on the 14th October 2008, in massive 2000-mile long spaceships. Can you guess what happened next?

Exactly. Fuck all. The next thing you know, she is on the youtubes again, stating that “I don’t know what happened, I have no idea why they didn’t show,” etc. etc.   Now, this kind of crap makes me mad. The fact that people were taken in by it – that makes me madder still. But what makes me feel even more disdain for the human race than I already do is that scores of her followers still support her and fight her corner religiously – even though what actually happened – nothing whatsoever – cannot be anything but proof that she was conning people into parting with their money for her nonsense.

She stated in her apology video that “the fact she made almost nothing off of her books – about $4,000AUS” (which is about £13.22 in proper money) proves that she was not lying.

No, love, it just proves that your book was shite and you didn’t sell many.

Anyway…I wandered off a lot there.  At some point I may do a proper blog about it, because the sheer amount of endless, unadulterated new-age crap that took over abovetopsecret.com made me furious and made me want to take a rusty shotgun to everyone that is so gullible as to believe in such rubbish.

So, to the topic at hand. Back on the UFO trail, I came across this film, made in 2005 and presented by defence journalist Nick Cook – a stout fellow of solid diligence and logical mind – i.e. British – which investigates the UFO phenomenon and asks the question: is there a more earthly and rational explanation behind sightings, abductions and cattle mutilations?

With many years of experience in the field of defence technology, Cook is well-placed to shine an investigative light on UFO’s and ask the question: are they simply super-secret black military projects based off of German plans from World War 2, cultivated in the minds of German scientists commandeered by the US Military as part of Project Paperclip? Was the whole phenomenon a self-perpetuating creation of the CIA and misinformation intended to keep US military secrets away from the prying eyes of the Russians at the height of the cold war?  

A logical and level-headed invvestigation, and worth a watch, even if things do peter out a bit when he gets on shaky ground (such as , he never really investigates abductions at all).  Worth a watch.

Oh, and one last thing that should have had people realising that the Goodchild stuff was all bollocks: she quoted them as actually using corny phrases like “three of your Earth-days”. Get to Fuck.