Science
Planck Telescope Reveals ancient Cosmic Light (BBC)
Robins can literally see magnetic fields, but only if their vision is sharp.
Invasion (Exquire).
The Lord God first divided the darkness from the light. Then he divided the heavens from the earth and the earth from the sea. Evolution did the rest: It divided the earth between humans and ants, and in so doing created another fundamental dichotomy. There are billions of humans on earth, and trillions upon trillions of ants — an estimated 1.6 million for every human being. If the earth were a scale, and all the humans were placed on one side and all the ants on the other, it would not budge. Ants have answered the ever-expanding human biomass with an ever-expanding biomass of their own, so that the planet is poised, teetering between its two most successful civilizations — each of which is social, aggressive, expansionist, and well suited for war.
I am here with a report from the front. I am here to tell you that the numbers suggesting an equivalence between ants and humans are not fanciful scientific estimates but rather reliable indicators of what to expect if ants invade your home — or if, from the ants’ point of view, you decide to live on top of an ant colony. If you think the numbers sound like abstractions, if you wonder what deranged census-taker came to the conclusion that in the shadow of each and every human being there lives a hidden host of 1.6 million, well, that only means you haven’t attempted the experiment of peacefully coexisting with them. If you do, however, you will find that the numbers sound just about right. Three humans live in my house, which would mean by that calculation, 4.8 million ants might live around it, licking at the walls or, more often than not, infesting them. But, hell, I’m sure I counted 4.8 million just on my daughter’s swing set, which we had to dispense with in part because its steel tubes regularly poured forth ants and ant larvae like sand, and my daughter finally freaked out. I’m sure I counted something close to 4.8 million the day I turned over my canoe and figured that its bottom was filled with wet leaves, until those leaves started to vibrate en masse, started to move. “The numbers are just incredible,” says Mike Rust, a professor of entomology at the University of California at Riverside. “We’ll do population surveys at night. We’ll go to a house and put out ten sugar-water stations around the house and another ten around the property. In the morning, the sugar water will be gone, and we’ll have counted six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand ants. And that’s in a night.”
Scientopia rises from mass exodus at Scienceblogs.