Physicists in Congress

Yesterday's NYT (June 10th 2008) had an interesting article by Cornelia Dean about the three Physicists in the US Congress and Senate (two Democrats and one Republican, in case you are wondering).

There are 435 people in the House, Mr. Holt said, and “420 don’t know much about science and choose not to.” He recalled his exasperation when anthrax spores were discovered in the Capitol in 2001 and colleagues came to him and said, “You are a scientist, you must know about anthrax,” a subject ordinarily missing from the physics curriculum.

“The difference,” he said, “is we would be perfectly happy to pick up a copy of The New England Journal of Medicine and read about the etiology of anthrax.”

“In fact, we basically did that,” Mr. Ehlers said.

“We know more than our colleagues,” Mr. Holt said, “but not more than they could know.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Foster said, “unless things play to their advantage in the next election, they are not interested.”

I like Strange Maps

While on the subject of interesting maps, there is a entire blog dedicated to showing and discussing Strange Maps, from the Lost Rivers of London to the spatial distribution of Gnomes in Europe. Well worth a look.

A new map of the Milky Way galaxy

Maps are magical things: they contain both knowledge and mystery.

Modern maps may not explicitly show monsters drawn on the unexplored parts of the map, but we're free to put them in ourselves.

And maps are often wrong.

The image on the left represents the latest and best map of what our own Galaxy looks like, and our place within it [credit: R. Hurt, Spitzer Science Center / JPL-Caltech / NASA].

We know quite a lot about our own Galaxy [e.g. see galaxymap.org, but be aware that galaxymap.org shows the images rotated by exactly 180 degrees compared to the new map], but every now and again something interesting and unexpected pops out to surprise us.

For example, we used to think the Milky Way was a four-armed Spiral galaxy with a few straggly sub-arms or spurs (e.g. see here). The main arms in the old picture were the Norma, Scutum-Centaurus, Sagittarius and Perseus arms. Our Sun currently resides in none of these arms but in the Orion spur.

Now new work using the Spitzer Space Telescope by Bob Benjamin and his collaborators (this is a press release) has shown that the Norma and Sagittarius arms do not deserve their status as major arms: instead the Milky Way is a two-armed grand-design spiral (as shown in the image above). Compare the new image (shown above) to a recent but older Milky Way map also from the Spitzer Science Center's web site.

Space.com also as the story.

[Update 06/06/2008: Fixed a typo, noted that the Sun's location in the Orion Spur is only its current location, and added a label]

The Dark Side of Space Chimps

Who can resist a story that contains the following line?

Cassidy does not skimp on the darker side of the space chimp story.

SPACE.com has an interesting article by Jeremy Hsu about a new documentary of the history of the use Chimpanzees in the space program.

I am sure you are grateful that I resisted the urge to add a picture from "The Planet of the Apes."