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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.

Snow is just awesome, and always brings back happy childhood memories. How can you not like silent, flumpy snow?

Float on over and catch this week’s strip right here.

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.

Take a big bite out of this weeks strip, right here.

But Carl Sagan set to music and auto-tuned? Fucking awesome.

Facebook readers, as always,  click here to see the videos.

The songs were created by The Symphony Of Science 

And to round off this little collection of awesome, something silly:

(and yes, I know, but “weasels” worked better in the title…)

 What would happen if every human being on Earth just suddenly disappeared? What would happen to our cities and towns, our buildings and structures, without humans there to maintain them? Would anything be left behind to reveal to some far-distant civilisation of some sort of creature that we ever even existed? Find out after the jump.

The following is a fascinating (and somewhat sobering) look at what would happen if such an unlikely even occurred, based on current knowledge of the nature of decay, structural engineering, biology, nature and the way in which mother nature reclaims territory (hint: aggressively). How long would power stay on for? How long would a car last? Would skyscrapers remain standing? How do the rigid and seeingly permanent structures we build hold up when we are not there to keep them in working order? The film looks at what might happen after one day, ten days, one year, five years, ten, fifty, all the way up to 100,000 years after people.

Most haunting is about half way through where the film examines what has happened in the last thirty years in Pripyat, Ukraine (the infamous “ghost town” of the Chernobyl disaster is one of the few examples available of a true abandoned location that serves as a test-bed for what happens when no one is around). Slightly jarring when one of the experts commenting was speaking almost verbatim from Call Of Duty 4: “Fifity thousand people used to live here Now it’s a ghost town.”

Have a watch of this thought-provoking and very arresting film. Facebook readers click here to see the video.

This week’s strip was planned to be something else, but the recent seismic activity at Yellowstone prompted this strip instead.

I seriously doubt anything will happen at Jellystone to rob Yogi of his lucrative picker-nick basket supply, but if it did, well, nice knowin’ ya!

You can read the harmonic tremors of this week’s strip right here.

Some things never leave you, etched in the mind from when you were young. The music from World At War, the snake-eating scene from Capricorn One or the damn noise that is featured in this strip.

Never mind hiding behind the sofa to watch Doctor Who, this was hardcore stuff, and Day Of The Triffids gave me bad dreams for months.

And being a kid, I loved it. Read the full strip here.

dogsounds has carried out tireless research to track down such mythical monstrosities as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and others. And after a long and arduous search, involving many seconds of hard keyboard manipulation, our correspondent in the Deutschedogsounds field office has tracked down and captured one such creature for all the world to see.

We give you: the mythical kebabalope!

Mythical no longer!

For many hundreds of years, drunken British men have wondered (if only for a brief second) what the hell it was they were eating when they ordered a big, nasty kebab at midnight on their way home. Many have watched their swarthy Greek or Turkish hosts shave the gently rotating block of meat with a sense of wonderment and a question that has been with man since early times: What the fuck is that?

It is said that all the doner meat supplied to dodgy take-away outlets in the UK is supplied by one single company, and that this company had protected their source of delicious and yet dubious meaty goodness by spreading disinformation that it was a mundane substance such as lamb, or even chicken. But hardened cryptozoologists and connossieurs of nasty, nasty food have known for a long time that this meat was of a different ilk: the sacred kebabalope.

Using information gleaned from German sources, where the kebabalope (Arterycloggius Snackalicious) was believed to be found, we tracked down the man who is responsible for raising and farming all the kebabalopes supplied to the Western world: kebabalopeherd Herr Johann Frühstücksfleisch. A secretive and loyal farmer, we managed to appeal to his sense of disclosure with 500 euros and two slightly-dressed chicks.

In our exclusive interview, he revealed that his ranch is the only place on earth where kebabalopes are farmed, and as such only he has the knowledge of how to raise these shy and retiring creatures.

I can’t reveal too much, said Herr Frühstücksfleisch, but it involves metal poles and slow rotation. The kebabalopes love rotation. It’s a bit like being one of those plate-spinning guys at the circus. It’s very hard work, and requires great dedication. That’s all I can tell you.

We caputured the rare picture above with a secret camera as one of the small creatures was slowly ambling back into its pen. We were not allowed to take pictures of the creatures in their farmed environment for fear of leaking trade secrets.

Herr Frühstücksfleisch would also not reveal where kebabalopes come from, wishing to keep his unique source a secret.

So now you know. Next time you order a doner, you can imagine a herd of these noble creatures charging as best they can across some great plain…whererever it is they live. And if someone chastises you for eating such unhealthy food, simply explain that kebabalopes, in the wild, are cute, and therefore obviously good for you.

You can actually buy your own plush kebabalope here.