M.J. Rose

…and we wonder, what else can our furry friends see that may be invisible to us? Spirits and ghosts perhaps? How many times have we watched our pets staring at (or barking at) something up in the corner that is unseen by us?

From Live Science,

Cats and Dogs May See in Ultraviolet
By Tanya Lewis

“A house cat’s bizarre antics may be more than just feline folly. The kitty may be seeing things that human eyes can’t.

Unlike humans, many animals see in ultraviolet, and a study now suggests that cats, dogs and other mammals can, too. Knowing these animals see things invisible to humans could shed some light on the animals’ behavior, the researchers say.

“Nobody ever thought these animals could see in ultraviolet, but in fact, they do,” said study leader Ron Douglas, a biologist at City University London, in England.

Light is made up of a spectrum of colors. Visible light (that humans can see) spans from red to violet, and beyond the visible lie ultraviolet wavelengths. Many animals are known to have UV-vision, including insects (such as bees), birds, fish, some amphibians and reptiles, and a handful of mammals (such as some mice, rats, moles, marsupials and bats)…”

For the rest, click here. The video is below.

With murals of tomes as far as the eye can see, this new library is a marvel.

From Bored Panda,

China Opens World’s Coolest Library With 1.2 Million Books, And Its Interior Will Take Your Breath Away

by James Gould-Bourn

“Nobody likes to be watched while they’re trying to read a book, but we’re willing to make an exception if it means getting to visit this stunning new library in China, because as you can see below, the incredible structure has a giant spherical auditorium in the middle that looks just like a giant eye.

Located in the Binhai Cultural District In Tianjin, the five-story library, which was designed by Dutch design firm MVRDV in collaboration with the Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute (TUPDI) and has since been dubbed “The Eye of Binhai”, covers 34,000 square metres and can hold up to 1.2 million books. Taking just three years to complete, the library features a reading area on the ground floor, lounge areas in the middle sections and offices, meeting spaces, and computer/audio rooms at the top. We’re not sure how much studying we’d get done though – we’d be far too busy marveling at the awesome architecture!”

More info: MVRDV

For more pictures, click here.

Does it seem a little like the world is having some sort of apocalypse lately? Well, the CERN scientists are taking that thought a little further with the idea that perhaps the universe shouldn’t exist in the first place…

The BASE experiment at the CERN antiproton decelerator in Geneva.
Stefan Sellner, Fundamental Symmetries Laboratory, RIKEN, Japan

From Cosmos Magazine,

Universe shouldn’t exist, CERN physicists conclude

A super-precise measurement shows proton and antiproton have identical magnetic properties, writes Cathal O’Connell.

“One of the great mysteries of modern physics is why antimatter did not destroy the universe at the beginning of time.

To explain it, physicists suppose there must be some difference between matter and antimatter – apart from electric charge. Whatever that difference is, it’s not in their magnetism, it seems.

Physicists at CERN in Switzerland have made the most precise measurement ever of the magnetic moment of an anti-proton – a number that measures how a particle reacts to magnetic force – and found it to be exactly the same as that of the proton but with opposite sign. The work is described in Nature.

“All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” says Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN’s Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is.”

Antimatter is notoriously unstable – any contact with regular matter and it annihilates in a burst of pure energy that is the most efficient reaction known to physics. That’s why it was chosen as the fuel to power the starship Enterprise in Star Trek.

The standard model predicts the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter – but that’s a combustive mixture that would have annihilated itself, leaving nothing behind to make galaxies or planets or people.

To explain the mystery, physicists have been playing spot the difference between matter and antimatter – searching for some discrepancy that might explain why matter came to dominate.

So far they’ve performed extremely precise measurements for all sort of properties: mass, electric charge and so on, but no difference has yet been found.

Last year, scientists at CERN’s Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus (ALPHA) experiment probed an atom of anti-hydrogen with light for the first time, again finding no difference when compared with an atom of hydrogen.

But one property was known only to middling accuracy compared to the others – the magnetic moment of the antiproton…”

For the rest, click here.