I was just thinking how nice it was that this spaceship had elevator buttons made for human hands when the deepest voice ever spoke behind me.
“Please press the button for upward.”
I jumped unprofessionally, whirling before he’d finished the sentence. A looming bulk in a space suit stared down at me while I got my heart rate under control.
“Sure thing,” I said, pressing the button. “Sorry, you startled me. Has anyone told you you’re impressively quiet for such a big fellow?”
The brown eyes visible through the visor crinkled in what might have been a smile. “It has been mentioned,” he said.
If I remembered correctly, this was one of the new species that everyone was calling Smashers. I didn’t know if that was a direct translation of their own name for themselves, or just a description of something they liked to do. This one was built like a bear with a stubby dinosaur tail, so I could easily picture him smashing. And as I recalled, he was a he — the males were said to have that yellow/orange color about the face. So handy for their species to be color-coded this way.
“Going all the way to the top?” I asked while we waited.
“Yes,” he said. “I am going to meet—”
The floor slipped out from under me, and I nearly bashed my face on the elevator door as alarms began to whoop. A loud thud told me that the big guy hadn’t been so lucky, but at least he was wearing a helmet.
Very lucky, I realized, since he’d just cracked a sculpture with his face.
“Are you okay?” I shouted over the alarms.
He was already getting up. “Yes. What has happened?”
“I think we hit something. That’s the sign to evacuate. Come on, the escape pods are right down here.”
He didn’t object when I grasped his arm to help guide him in the right direction. He was a little unsteady on his feet, and the floor kept vibrating like we were flying through a field of debris too large for our shields. I hoped the escape pods were up to it.
Dang, I hope there’s enough pods! I thought as we entered the room to see crowds funneling into every available exit. I spotted one on the end and pulled him toward it. Nobody claimed it before we got there.
Get in, clear the door, shut the door, sit down, hit the thrusters.
We blasted away under automated control.
Pray to all the odd gods of space travel that we make it. I looked to my companion, who was holding a hand against his helmet. Pray real hard.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I think,” he said in the highest, squeakiest voice ever, “My suit is leaking.”
“What?” I laughed, unprofessional again. I cleared my throat. This wasn’t funny. “Is it damaged where you hit it?”
That chipmunk voice replied, “It must be,” and I had to bite my lip.
“Let me see,” I said, moving closer. “Maybe we can fix it.”
He lowered his hand to show a deep dent right at the seam of the visor, with worried eyes behind it.
I opened my mouth to describe the leak, but my voice came out shockingly deep. “Yeah, it’s dented. What?”
We realized the difference at the same time.
“My air!” he squeaked.
“What do you breathe?” I coughed. “Sulphur hexawhatever?” My voice returned to normal when I stood back and took deep breaths, but his didn’t.
The urgent conversation that came next led to a tableau that lasted until our rescue: him lying on the floor in a puddle of dense gases, and me standing on a seat with my face as close to the top of the escape pod as possible.
When it became reasonably clear that neither of us was about to suffocate in each other’s air, we turned to small talk and sea shanties to pass the time. He was a great singer with that subterranean bass, and he picked things up quickly.
By the time our rescuers opened the door, we were deep in a rousing chorus of “What Do We Do With A Stabby Roomba.”
On the way to the medical ward, we exchanged contact info and promised to stay in touch. This had the makings of a great band.
This blue our mind and left us green with envy—fluorescing animals at the Aquarium!
Fluorescence is what you get when short-wavelengths of light—like UV and blue light—excite electrons in substances, causing them to radiate back longer wavelengths of light—like greens, yellows and reds. (This is not to be confused with bioluminescence, where chemical reactions inside animal bodies are producing their own light.)
Fluorescence in animals is widespread, and may serve different purposes. For some animals, fluorescence is merely a fun physics phenomenon without an intended purpose—shark skin, shrimp shells and human fingernails all fluoresce without much apparent benefit.
But for others—like anemones, jellies and even mantis shrimp—fluorescence may be a way to lure prey toward a dastardly demise, with brightly illuminated stinging tentacles and ensnaring traps standing out against what appears to us to be but a banal background.
Blue lights and yellow filters to highlight fluorescent wavelengths are excellent tools to track the reproduction and development of certain critters. Our Jelly Team previously used fluorescence to complete the life cycle of the flower hat jelly!
Special thanks to brilliant Aquarist Christy for sharing the tube anemone photos and gifs in this thread from their rounds at the Aquarium! And if you'd like more on the subject, check out this talk with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s Dr. Steve Haddock all about animal light:
Fun to Imagine with Richard FeynmanIn 1983, the BBC aired Fun to Imagine, a television series hosted by Richard Feynman that used physics to explain how the ...
In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript
in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the
documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a
sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an
extraordinary island. Johansen`s descriptions of his adventures upon the island
are fantastic, and are often considered the most enigmatic (and therefore the
highlight) of Thurston`s collection of documents. We contend that all of the credible phenomena which Johansen described may be
explained as being the observable consequences of a localized bubble of
spacetime curvature. Many of his most incomprehensible statements (involving
the geometry of the architecture, and variability of the location of the
horizon) can therefore be said to have a unified underlying cause. We propose a simplified example of such a geometry, and show using numerical
computation that Johansen`s descriptions were, for the most part, not simply
the ravings of a lunatic. Rather, they are the nontechnical observations of an
intelligent man who did not understand how to describe what he was seeing.
Conversely, it seems to us improbable that Johansen should have unwittingly
given such a precise description of the consequences of spacetime curvature, if
the details of this story were merely the dregs of some half remembered fever
dream. We calculate the type of matter which would be required to generate such
exotic spacetime curvature. Unfortunately, we determine that the required
matter is quite unphysical, and possess a nature which is entirely alien to all
of the experiences of human science. Indeed, any civilization with mastery over
such matter would be able to construct warp drives, cloaking devices, and other
exotic geometries required to conveniently travel through the cosmos.
