Word: sea
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...other years I've parsed the portents of the Globe awards, and applauded or derided the winners' speeches. This time there was no star wattage; the announcers on the channels I watched all sank into a sea of blandness and blondness. As for hints of Oscar triumphs and upsets... honestly, does it matter? It's my job to care, and I don't. Movie audiences may feel similarly indifferent toward Feb. 24 Oscar show - and not just because, if the strike lasts, it too will be hobbled. Deprived of their usual chance to suck on the helium of the Globes...
...Paleo-climate experts have seen hints of this oddity before, but the new Science paper nails it down much more firmly. Andre Bornemann, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, along with several colleagues, got their information by analyzing the amount of the isotope oxygen-18 in foraminifera, tiny, shelled sea dwellers that thrived at the time. It turns out that when water evaporates from the sea but doesn't return (implying that it's trapped up on land somewhere, frozen), the ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 in seawater changes (O-18 is heavier, so it evaporates less...
What researchers found was a stretch of a few hundred thousand years during which foraminifera shells were unusually rich in oxygen-18, suggesting the presence of glaciers. Though changes in ocean temperature can also alter the oxygen balance, sea-bottom temperatures don't vary much no matter what's happening up top, yet the bottom-dwelling foraminifera still exhibited an oxygen imbalance, implying that the ice effect was more likely. Nobody can explain how you can have glaciers in a superhot world. But then, nobody can really explain how the world got quite that hot in the first place...
...from Scotland. I thought about getting a rack of lamb from New Zealand, but I couldn't resist asking the guy behind the seafood counter for the fish with the most frequent-flyer miles. I was going to get the opah from Fiji, but then I spotted the Chilean sea bass from South Georgia island, southeast of Argentina?more than 7,000 miles of travel just to get eaten for a magazine article. Already feeling like some sort of insane European king, I added some asparagus from Peru to my shopping cart and, for dessert, threw in a pineapple from...
...care? This one's easy: the Milky Way is a lump, as is our solar system, as are all of us. No lumps, no you. The second question is, Where did all the lumpiness come from, given that the universe shortly after the Big Bang was a pretty uniform sea of particles? This is a puzzle that's had a complicated history, but it may be a little closer to getting solved, thanks to an anomalous spot in a photo recently taken by a space-observing satellite...