It’s actually a little frightening when you consider that gravity, a force that we think is so strong on earth, is really not that strong at all. Because if it was even slightly less strong than it is, we might float out into the ether, and it is remarkable what subtle forces are needed to transcend the law of gravity:

We spend every day of our lives rooted to the Earth because of gravity, so it’s natural that most of us consider it a powerful force in the universe. Not so.

Think about it: The force of the entire Earth pulling down on a pin or a paperclip can be overcome with a small fridge magnet. Static electricity can make fabric and strands of hair stubbornly defy gravity — and all that takes is a short walk in a wool hat. Entire groups of people can be lifted off the ground for hours with a large balloon full of hot air. If gravity were as strong as the electromagnetic force, or the strong and the weak forces in an atomic nucleus, we’d all be a very finely distributed sludge over the surface of the earth.

Scientists recently witnessed the explosion of a Type 1a supernova that was born about 9 billion years ago. Type 1a supernovae are a specific kind of white dwarf star that occur only in binary system, in which two bodies are close enough to one another that they display gravitational interaction around the same center. Here’s a snippet from the article and a photo:

The team used the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to observe the supernova in near-infrared wavelengths over eight months.

“In our search for supernovae, we had gone as far as we could go in optical light,” said principal investigator Adam Riess, of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, in a statement. “But it’s only the beginning of what we can do in infrared light.”

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University), and S. Rodney (The Johns Hopkins University)

A news of the weird item for you. A hollow ball of metal has dropped from space down into the Namibian countryside, according to a report from the Agence-France Presse.

Credit: AFP

This is not a new occurrence. Apparently, numerous similar objects have fallen from space over the last 20 years in various locations around the globe. I did see that any locals were hurt in the incident, and the ball does not seem to pose any risk, although I don’t know what to make of the testimony that locals heard “explosions” several days beforehand.

Here is some more information:

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.

With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of “two halves welded together”.

It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik.

It was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 meters wide.

Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years, authorities found in an Internet search.

The sphere was discovered mid-November, but authorities first did tests before announcing the find.

Police deputy inspector general Vilho Hifindaka concluded the sphere did not pose any danger.

“It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow, but we had to investigate all this first,” he said.

Not that I understand this very well — I’m afraid I didn’t learn much about neutrinos in my English classes in college — but according to this article, scientists are preparing to build a telescope that will be the second largest structure ever constructed by man, coming in second only to the Great Wall of China.

The KM3net telescope planned for the sea bed under the Mediterranean will be a network of detectors with a volume of several cubic kilometres, built to detect neutrinos - tiny, fast-moving particles that pass straight through water and even solid rock.

And to what purpose: to scope out neutrinos under the Mediterranean sea. Neutrinos are fast-moving subatomic particles, and detectors are often installed deeply underwater to eliminate most of the interference. Each detector, and there will be a network of them, will be taller than the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai:

The sea water in between the 900m KM3Net detectors works as a giant optical ‘detector’ – the detectors look for ‘flashes’ caused by neutrinos hitting water atoms.

Most of the neutrinos pass straight through, but the few that do collide with atoms will be picked up by the huge telescope.

The detector’s discoveries could propel research in dark matter and high energy physics.

Construction could start as early as next year.

I’m sure many readers are familiar with the famous “trolley dilemma” in which a person much choose one of two scenarios: imagine you are driving a trolley and in front of you are five people who will die if you don’t switch the tracks to divert the car. If you divert the car, however, one person is standing on the other track and will be killed. Most people, I would bet, would choose to save the five people versus the one, unless there was an important reason why the single person might be more significant or special than the five.

Say, for instance, that on the first track, there were just five blue collar railway workers, all single men with no wives or children, but on the other track stood a single mom who was eight months pregnant. True, five lives is still greater than a woman and an unborn child, but the decision, I think, then becomes a little tougher. Or, say the scenario included the five blue collar workers versus the Dalai Lama, Bill Gates or some other figure who has had a sweeping impact on humanity. Or, five privates who just enlisted in boot camp on the one side and one four-star general on the other track.

Nonetheless, the dilemma is an interesting one to think about because it forces us to put value judgments on life itself. Is one important person’s life more valuable than a bunch of nobodies? Should we always choose to save the greatest number of people no matter who the single person is on the second track?

Carlos David Navarrete, a evolutionary psychologist at Michigan State University, recently put 147 participants using a virtual simulation. Ninety percent of those tested pulled a switch to divert the car, while 14 let the car kill the five people. Three people pulled the switch to change the tracks but subsequently changed their minds.

Here’s a brief analysis of the findings:

While the findings corroborated with the results of a previous study that relied on self-reported methods, the experiment also showed that participants who did not pull the switch were more emotionally aroused. This means that their inaction might not be so much a conscious choice but a result of freezing up during highly anxious moments, which is akin to a solider failing to fire his weapon in battle, Navarrete said. Perhaps if they had remained calm enough to process what was happening, the percentage of people who would have pulled the switch to save five and let one die might have actually been greater.

“I think humans have an aversion to harming others that needs to be overridden by something,” Navarrete said. “By rational thinking we can sometimes override it – by thinking about the people we will save, for example. But for some people, that increase in anxiety may be so overpowering that they don’t make the utilitarian choice, the choice for the greater good.”

And a video (with some nifty accompanying music, I might add):

As I noted here, Kepler-22b was discovered earlier this month. Kepler-22c and Kepler-22d have also been found as part of the mission.

The announcement came today that too more planets have been discovered by the Kepler spacecraft. These two planets have been named, appropriately enough, Kepler-22e and Kepler-22f.

Here is a snippet from The New York Times’ article:

Astronomers said the discovery showed that Kepler could indeed find planets as small as our own and was an encouraging sign that planet hunters would someday succeed in the goal of finding Earth-like abodes in the heavens.

Since the first Jupiter-size exoplanets, as they are known, were discovered nearly 15 years ago, astronomers have been chipping away at the sky, finding smaller and smaller planets.

“We are finally there,” said David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was a member of the team that made the observations, led by his colleague Francois Fressin. The team reported its results in an online news conference Tuesday and in a paper being published in the journal Nature.

You can learn more about Kepler here.

Earlier this month, NASA’s Kepler mission found its first star orbiting in a habitable zone around a sun similar to our own. This is another important discovery because as we know and as I have pointed out before, any planet that can be found within the habitable, or “Goldilocks zone,” as it is otherwise called, has the potential to support life (as long as water is also present).

According to the article:

The planet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth. Scientists don’t yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets.

Previous research hinted at the existence of near-Earth-size planets in habitable zones, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Two other small planets orbiting stars smaller and cooler than our sun recently were confirmed on the very edges of the habitable zone, with orbits more closely resembling those of Venus and Mars.

“This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Kepler’s results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA’s science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe.”

Kepler discovers planets and planet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars to search for planets that cross in front, or “transit,” the stars. Kepler requires at least three transits to verify a signal as a planet.

“Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet,” said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who led the team that discovered Kepler-22b. “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”

Here are a couple illustrations of the planet and its orbit:

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech - This artist's conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech - This diagram compares our own solar system to Kepler-22, a star system containing the first "habitable zone" planet discovered by NASA's Kepler mission.

Head over to the Breaking Spells blog to read that intellectual superstar, William Lane Craig, explaining how animals other than humanoid primates aren’t conscious of pain because they have no prefrontal cortex. Actually, mice do seem to have these, and other animals probably do as well. Here’s another article from the NIH that suggests as much.

This is Craig’s comment about prefrontal cortices:

…the awareness that one is oneself in pain requires self-awareness, which is centered in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain—a section of the brain which is missing in all animals except for the humanoid primates. Thus, amazingly, even though animals may experience pain, they are not aware of being in pain. God in His mercy has apparently spared animals the awareness of pain. This is a tremendous comfort to us pet owners. For even though your dog or cat may be in pain, it really isn’t aware of it and so doesn’t suffer as you would if you were in pain.

And a portion of the blogger’s response:

… the pre-frontal cortex is present in animals outside the primate line. It’s a bit different (primates tend to have granularized cortices^[1] ). …

WLC is citing the work of philosopher Michael Murray, who suggests that animals aren’t aware of their pain (therefore god exists) -but Murray has some fatal flaws in his work. Murray differentiates humans from other animals by claiming (with minimal evidenciary support) that there exists a “affective pathway” which allows for self-awareness -this pathway, he says, terminates in the prefrontal cortex in humans. Because non-human animals aren’t self aware of their pain, according to Murray, they aren’t suffering. In other words, gratuitous evil is not present.

But lets suppose it’s the granular layer that’s found in primate cortices that makes the difference. This granular layer is present in many non-human primates, and yet these primates experience pain and are clearly, demonstrably aware of it. Gratuitous evil, therefore, exists among non-human primates that suffer predation, abuse, natural disasters, anthropogenic habitat destruction, infanticide, etc., etc.

If gratuitous evil exists, god can neither be omnipotent or benevolent. Therefore, god doesn’t exist. It’s not my reasoning, it’s the reasoning of WLC and Michael Murray. Surely one or both would move their goalposts accordingly if called on it, so I’m not expecting either to revise their positions. That would be too much like science.