Man builds merry-go-round, invents radio astronomy

Hello friends! I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been taking better notice of things, or if this is just the general trend, but spring seems to be passing really fast this year. Grab a bouquet of it while you can.

There’s a distinct air of mystery in this week’s dispatch, with talks about the strange flickering of an otherwise unassuming star and surprising specimens from the Natural History Museum.

There’s also the story of an odd radio signal that paved the way for a new field of astronomy (and eventually gave us the setting of the movie Contact).

What will you discover this we- hang on, news just in:

🪺 Egg update

🐔 Sometime last century (read: just over a month ago) I noted here a story I’d once heard about a scientist who drew on an egg before the chicken had laid it and found the unmarked end came out first.

🤓 That scientist was Heinrich Wickmann. As told in Tim Birkhead’s The Most Perfect Thing, Wickmann kept eight very tame chickens that laid eggs on his desk. By marking the end of the egg he could see inside one of these chickens, Wickmann established that the egg turns around about an hour before it’s laid, with the blunt end emerging first.

💃 Oh, and they turn horizontally, like a cable car on a turntable (as seen in this video you should totally check out if you like watching burly men heave 7-tonne vehicles for mass transit), not vertically like a cartwheeler.

Alright! To the kicks…

This week’s kicks

(Note: Prices for events exclude booking fees where they apply.)

Monday 29 April

👽 Is it aliens? The most unusual star in the galaxy, hybrid event held by Gresham College, 19.00, free: Astrophysics professor and Sky at Night presenter Chris Lintott casts an eye on Boyajian’s star, spotted flickering unusually about 10 years ago. What’s causing this flickering? Disintegrating comets? Alien megastructures? Chris sets things straight.

😍 Take in a carpet of bluebells: It’s probably the last chance to get your bluebell fix for the year. Find them in areas where there’s little soil disturbance – they’re a strong indicator of ancient woodland. As ever, the Woodland Trusts have your back with this guide on where to find bluebells in your area.

🤝 While you’re there, enjoying this almost supernatural blue glow, consider the powerful partnership that’s happening underground. Bluebells, like many other plants, team with an ancient group of fungi in a symbiotic partnership known as arbuscular mycorrhiza.

🍴The fungus embeds itself in the bluebells’ roots, letting the plant access more nutrients than it would manage on its own and greatly expanding its growth. In return, it laps up the carbohydrates produced by the plant.

🌍 Scientists think this ancient partnership may have been instrumental in plants’ ability to colonise land more than 400 million years ago.

Tuesday 30 April

🤯 Dig Deeper: Scientific surprises and accidental discoveries, hybrid event held by Natural History Museum, 18.30, from £5: Four of the museum’s scientists tell the stories and secrets behind some of the most intriguing and surprising specimens in the collection. Our mate from yesterday, Chris Lintott, chairs the event.

🦕 💎 To whet your appetite, here’s the story of how this stunner of an agate spent almost 140 years in the museum’s mineralogy collection hiding a dinosaur egg.

Wednesday 1 May

Bringing back our lost wildlife, online event held by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, 18.30, free (donations invited): Red squirrel project officer Molly Frost tells us about the trust’s work with the rare creatures, which require continuous and extensive conservation efforts for their survival.

🤩 Oh, and here’s Dame Judi Dench looking slightly alarmed by a red squirrel, apparently in flight.

Thursday 2 May

🦠 A journey through the virosphere, hybrid event held by the Royal Society, 18.30, free: Professor Edward C. Holmes lets us in on some new research that shows viruses are far older, more diverse and more complex than previously understood. The lecture also considers whether viruses’ reputation for always causing disease is perhaps misplaced, and the role they play in global ecosystems.

Friday 3 May

⚛️ The future of fusion, hybrid event held by the Royal Institution, 19.00, theatre: £7 to £16 (theatre); pay what you can (livestream): Sir Ian Chapman talks to three leading experts in the field of fusion energy who will present their views on the opportunities, challenges and breakthroughs of the technology.

🔮 Is fusion always 30 years away? Spend any time reading up on the future of the technology, and you’re likely to encounter a phrase like this. This review tests whether that prediction is valid today.

📈 TL;DR: The review finds that while fusion was 19.3 years away 30 years ago, 28.3 years away 20 years ago, and 27.8 years away 10 years ago, today it is just 17.8 years away. (Plenty of time to build a flux capacitor and track down a DeLorean.)

Saturday 4 May

🌅 (Very) early risers with a clear view of the eastern horizon can catch a look at the crescent Moon, Saturn, and the ISS as it flies by just after 04.20. Stick around to see Mars rise about 5 minutes later, just to this group’s left.

Sunday 5 May

📡 Throwback, 1933: Man builds merry-go-round, invents radio astronomy. On this day in 1933, the New York Times covered Karl Jansky’s discovery of cosmic radio waves. Jansky found the radio waves with an antenna he’d built and mounted on the wheels of Model T, which let him turn the apparatus and capture the signal.

⚡ Jansky had been tasked by Bell Telephone Laboratories to study static sources that could interfere with telecommunications. Using his so-called “merry-go-round”, he identified three basic types of static, from local thunderstorms, distant thunderstorms, and another mystery source.

🤔 After studying this static over the course of a year, he concluded that it was coming from the centre of the Milky Way, making it the first known detection of extraterrestrial radio signals.

🔍 Today, astronomers use radio telescopes to study structures that can’t be seen with the human eye, such as nebulae. Jansky gives his name to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, which provided the backdrop for a lot of the 1997 film Contact.

We need answers

A couple of weeks ago I asked:

The answer is... the computer mouse. Douglas Engelbart and Bill English invented the mouse, then known as the “bug”, in 1964. Engelbart filed the patent in 1967, which was granted in 1970.

Until next week...

What is represented by the following sequence?

p, n, μ, m, [blank], k, M, G, T

Answer comes next week. See you then!