One More Detour on the Writing Road

Every so often, you stumble over a discovery that just settles in your backbrain and fizzles away.

But creating a time cloak—something that could hide not just an object but an event—is even more ambitious. Rather than just rerouting the rays of light striking an object, a time cloak would have to deflect all the light beams influenced by the object as it moves through space. The time cloak would, in essence, create an interval during which all information about what an object is doing disappears.

Big Idea: Physicists Carve a Niche in Time.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

This to-scale representation of the Sun and the planets is eye-opening. You can scroll rather quickly–just watch for the teeny flashes that indicate a planet just flitted past at speed.

Saturn turns up at about the quarter point. Think about that.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

Scare the neighbors! Alarm your friends!

Or they may all just squee all over the place, who knows?

Green glowing kittens. Can puppies be far behind?

When these green kitties were still twinkles in their parents’ eyes, scientists investigating a macaque gene thought to protect monkeys against feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) inserted it into cat eggs with a lab-grown virus, intending to test whether cats carrying the gene were resistant to FIV as well. Researchers are interested in seeing how the macaque gene guards against FIV, which is the feline version of HIV, in hopes of transferring their insights to combating HIV.

But here’s where things get wacky: The team also included in the virus a jellyfish gene that makes a glowing green protein, to act as a signal. The virus does not always succeed in transferring the genes entrusted to it, but by including the jellyfish gene, the team gave themselves an easy way to tell when the transfer took place: kittens that glow green under fluorescent light, showing that they carry the jellyfish gene, almost certainly carry the macaque gene as well.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.