Climbing catfish, catching neutrinos, and making it rain

Hello, friends!

How have you been? It’s that time of year where I am repeatedly moved by trees. The sheer visual nourishment a large tree provides, at its peak voluptuousness in late summer, along with the soothing, swishing sounds of the wind blowing through its leaves* is almost enough to bring me to tears.

Maybe I’ve been indoors too long.

Anyway! Coming up:

🤦 how dodgy science led to $250,000 going literally up in smoke

🪤 how to catch a particle that can zip through a light year of lead as if it weren’t there

🤕 what happens when humanoid robots get together for a kickabout.

Let’s go!

*This is called “susurrus”, something I learnt the other day when Matt Damon was winning a lot of money for charity.

read all about it

Researchers in Antarctica are trying to detect neutrinos in a massive block of ice: “We’re going to take a glacier about 2.5km… tall, which is one of the most transparent mediums that exists on the planet,” says physicist Carlos Argüelles-Delgado. “We’re going to deploy these very sensitive light sensors… that can detect single light particles known as photons… When a neutrino comes from outer space, it can eventually interact with something in the ice and make light, and that’s what we see.” (Gizmodo)

Keeping pregnant participants out of medical research is more dangerous than including them: “There have been growing calls, in the past few years, to improve the pregnancy evidence base, to revisit the rules, and to recognise that it is high time to protect pregnant people – and their children – through rather than from research,” writes health policy professor Alyssa Bilinski. (STAT)

Robots competed in running, football and kickboxing events at the first World Humanoid Robot Games: There was a lot of falling over. (Live Science)

🎥 Watch these catfish – loads of them – climbing up a waterfall in Brazil. (Phys.org)

that time when…

The US government tried to make it rain with a bunch of dynamite (August 1891)

When a US Civil War general noticed it often rained after a battle, he thought it might have something to do with the cacophony of combat agitating the clouds. The idea came to be known as concussion theory.

On three days in August, a group of scientists set off explosives to test the theory. The US government footed the bill, a handsome $7,000. (If this is an 1891 $7,000, that’s going to be about $250,000 today, according to this inflation calculator. Who’s really making it rain then eh? Eh? *gets coat*)

The experiments were viewed with a fair bit of scepticism back then – there was no science backing up concussion theory, and perhaps the rain on days after battles can be explained by the fact that it was going to rain eventually anyway, and generals don’t like to fight when it’s wet. Bang goes the theory.

what’s happening this week?

Your agenda for Monday 18 August – Sunday 24 August.

All times are BST, and all sky views are from London.

look around you

🔭 in a sky near you: Rise early on Wednesday morning to see a sliver of waning Moon join Venus (below the Moon) and Jupiter (to the Moon’s right) – they’ll form a little right-angled triangle in the east at about 4am. Gemini’s twin stars Castor and Pollux will appear on the triangle’s left.

On Thursday morning at half 4, Mercury joins the planet parade, the lowest and dimmest point of light forming a wobbly diagonal line of the four bodies.

👀 closer to Earth: In honour of the magnificent trees I saw in Greenwich Park on the weekend, see if you’re almost moved to tears in the presence of a sweet chestnut, whose fruit will be ripening in those spiky jackets until the end of summer.

Sweet chestnuts can be found throughout the UK in woodlands and copses. According to the Woodland Trust, although size isn’t a reliable indicator of a tree’s age, most ancient sweet chestnuts have a girth of more than 6m.

So, if you and a couple of friends can’t reach all the way around it to give it a hug, you may have a real oldie on your hands.

online talks and events (there’ll be more come September, promise)

📚 Mimi’s Tiny Adventure: Lab in the Library, hybrid event by the Institute of Physics, Wednesday 20 August, 14.00, free

we need answers

Last week our teaser came from the Lateral podcast. It went:

The answer is… salt.

until next week…

What celestial body could join a type of peach, a video game console first launched in 1994, an award whose recent winners include Michelle Yeoh and Christopher Nolan, and a retired vehicle 111m tall?

Answer comes next week. See you then! x