Several people asked me about the odd phenomenon that in these here parts sunrise gets later each day until early January even though the days themselves get longer after the winter solstice.

From EarthSky: The winter solstice always brings the shortest day to the Northern Hemisphere and the longest day to the Southern Hemisphere. But, the tardiest sunrise doesn’t coincide with the day on which the sun is above the horizon for the shortest time, least daylight hours; similarly, the latest sunsets don’t happen on the day of greatest daylight.

Why is this? The main reason is that the Earth’s rotational axis is tilted to the plane of our orbit around the sun. If it were perpendicular to the orbital plane we wouldn’t perceive this discrepancy.

A secondary reason is that the Earth’s orbit is eccentric (an ellipse, like a squashed circle, with the centre of the sun slightly off its centre), Earth travels fastest in January and slowest in July. Clock time gets a bit out of sync with sun time – by about 30 seconds each day for several weeks around the winter solstice. Adapted from Latest sunrises for mid-northern latitudes in early January.

Additionally, says Royal Museums Greenwich, the longest natural day is about 51 seconds longer than the shortest. But, for clocks to be useful, days need to be fixed in length. We fix them on the average, or mean, length of a natural day (hence Greenwich Mean Time). By averaging out the length of each day like this, the clock time at which the sun reaches its highest point slowly drifts back and forth as the months progress. There is a knock-on effect on the times of sunrise and sunset. The earliest sunrise occurs a number of days before the longest day and the latest a number of days after the shortest.

After shortest day sunrise still gets later is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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Festive Felicitations to you all, hope to see you in 2014, here on the Sciencebase site (newsfeed), on my Song, Snaps, Science page, or on Twitter @sciencebase), Google+ and Facebook, of course.

Last post…of 2013 is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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Coughs and sneezes really do spread diseases, airborne droplets from your infected mucus, phlegm and snot sprayed over your companions on the daily commute, in the office, at the shops, at school etc can pass the viral or bacterial particles to infect that other person if the particles get into their nose, mouth or on the surface of their eyes. Here are just a few of the nasties you might catch from a cough or a sneeze or someone drooling on you: Bacterial meningitis, chickenpox, common cold, influenza, mumps, strep throat, tuberculosis, measles, rubella, whooping cough etc

Coughs and sneezes spread diseases is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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In a thousand years’ time, our apps and smartphones,
our status updates and our tweets,
Our hybrid EVs, solar panels, windfarms,
all of our digital neats
Will seem so quaint, and misguided,
so twee and lopsided
They’ll talk of yet more Dark Ages repeats

Just think of our medical scans,
dental whitening, e-cigs and implants
Think of 1D gigs, get-rich-quick scams
And the sickening failure of healthcare plans

But, the world will still be an awful mess;
there will be floods and famine, I confess
There will be less water more disease,
Those with too much, and those with much less

There will be drug addiction and babies will cry,
The moon will wax and wane
It will be too hot and too cold, too wet and too dry
Winds will change, but we’ll stay the same

We will eat and we’ll drink, we will fornicate and frolic
We will ponder and think
and try to explain life with symbols symbolic
We will find it hard to imagine our past
or what the future really might bring
So, the best and the only thing we can do at last,
is live life to the full and let our hearts sing

Yesterday’s future tomorrow is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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The Reactive Reports RSS/newsfeed is http://www.reactivereports.com/chemistry-blog/feed

If you are already using that link in your feed reader, then you don’t need to do anything, but if you subscribed to the site via the old Feedburner system then please make the necessary change to maintain access to our free updates! Thanks.

SECOND UPDATE: From Sciencebased Medicine [no relation]: “While zinc has the ability to inhibit rhinovirus replication in the test tube, clinical trials for the treatment of colds have been disappointing. While there was a very modest improvement in symptom score in one study of adults, the benefit was seen only when zinc was taken in large doses 5-6 times per day. At these doses, GI side effects were significant and patients complained of a bad taste in their mouth. Needless to say, 5-6 times per day dosing with these side effects would preclude this as a viable option in children. Additionally, a well-designed, randomized, double-masked, placebo-controlled study demonstrated no effectiveness of zinc on cold symptoms in children and adolescents.”

UPDATE: I just took a look at the packet of Zn tabs I have, 15mg per tab. The Cochrane Review says effective dose seen at 75mg. So…who’ve I been kidding? Anecdote is not evidence.

Zinc is the only supplement I take if I feel a cold coming on. Vitamin C, echinacea, cod liver oil etc have no proven effect. But, recent Cochrane analysis vindicates earlier research on which I based my choice.

Zinc – The promise: Laboratory studies have found it can inhibit replication of the rhinovirus, the most frequent cause of cold symptoms.

The research: A Cochrane review of 18 good quality studies last month found that zinc lozenges or syrup significantly reduced the average duration of the common cold in healthy people when taken within 24 hours of the onset of symptoms.

Dr Mullen says: “Zinc influences the immune system in a number of ways: it is involved in immune cell recruitment and function, systemic inflammation, is an antioxidant, and may have antiviral properties with respect to the common cold.”

The verdict: A proven treatment for colds, although side effects include a bad taste and nausea. The review advises taking zinc lozenges of 75mg or more until there is more research.

There is one caveat, I remember my old GP telling me he was involved in a Cambridge U study on cadmium content of zinc supplements. Cadmium is toxic, don’t know what the conclusion of his research was, never been able to find it on PubMed. But, either way, it’s a risk-benefit equation you have to balance yourself. Just don’t waste your money on the remedies that are really nothing more than expensive placebos (homeopathy and Reiki therapy for instance), they will do nothing to tackle a viral or any other infection.

Do supplements really help us keep healthy in the winter? – Telegraph.

Work in 2001 suggested that cadmium can indeed be present in zinc supplements – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11474903, other work highlighted the fact that zinc is protective acute exposure to cadmiu – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23726800

Zinc, the only supplement is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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Papadakis publishers have released the Higgs edition of their unique publication – the result of a collaboration between the home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN and renowned paper engineer Anton Radevsky. Radevsky’s previous pop-ups include The Modern Architecture Pop-Up Book, The Pop-Up Book Of Space Craft and The Wild West Pop-Up Book. Co-author is Emma Sanders who heads Microcosm, CERN’s museum of particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland. The new edition is supported by the London Science Museum.

In this fabulous example of the art, the pair distil 7000 tonnes of metal, glass, plastic, cables and computer chips into miniature pop-up to tell the story of CERN’s quest to understand the birth of the universe.

You can order the LHC Pop-up book from the usual outlets. More details on the book here. There is a companion volume by Claudia Marcelloni and Colin Barras – Hunting the Higgs. In that book, the story of how two years ago, the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider began investigating the most powerful of particle collisions and ultimately revealed the first experimental evidence for the infamous Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that gives matter its mass.

Large Hadron Collider Pop-Up is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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I just received what has to be the most bizarre press release ever. It’s either totally genuine and totally naive or a really good anti-gun spoof, can’t quite decide:

“Since early eighteenth century the shotgun has been used for hunting and in warfare. Countless deer, rabbits and birds has been killed, and Countless soldiers, from the trenches of Verdun to Bagdad have experienced the deadly blast of led shots. No more.

My name is Per Cromwell. I’m a designer/inventor at ST-labs.
Today we’re launching a product I worked REALLY hard with for a long time: “Flower Shell” a shotgun shell loaded with flower seeds instead of deadly led.

• Transform any 12 gauge shotgun to a life giver instead of a life taker.
• Make gardening more FUN!
• Comes with 12 different seeds. (Columbine, Cornflower, Daisy, Poppy, Sunflower, Peony, meadow flowers and more)
• Each shell is hand made with love.
• The amount of gunpowder has been reduced and adjusted to fit the different seeds.
• More info on www.flowershell.com

  If you want more information, piuctures or anything, don’t hesitate to ask me.
  This is my dream project.

  Best wishes from a foggy autumn Sweden.
  ST Per Cromwell”

  How does your garden grow? is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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Yesterday evening we were all Monty Python Dead Comet Sketch over ISON. It was pining for the Oort, this comet had ceased to be, it was no longer trailing up the blazes…etc etc

But, this morning, I wake to hear news that this comet has actually ceased to not be.

Will this be the most viewed animated gif of Black Friday once the US wakes from its turkey-induced tryptophan coma (#deceivedwisdom by the way) that they refer to generously as Thanksgiving?

More on what we might expect from comet ISON via NASA and SpaceWeather.

Dead Comet Sketch is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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Touch Press has come up with the perfect gift for the chemist with an iPad in your life with The Elements in Action app. Great videos, neat explanations, easy to use.

Wonderful demonstrations showing why you are not allowed to take mercury and gallium on your holiday flight, a foil “tank” of air floating on sulfur hexafluoride gas, and a quick test to show your titanium tools are genuine and not iron-based fakes…there’s also gallium the element that would have been Salvador Dali’s favourite we suspect, it melts on a hot day, although on a really hot day he might have enjoyed rubidium too. Then there’s the bromine watch…

TouchPress also debunks a couple of bits of pieces of chemical deceived wisdom. For instance, we’re all taught that iodine sublimes when heated, leaping straight from the solid to the gas phase, but the app video shows a distinct liquid phase just before clouds of iodine vapour appear. Caesium does react violently with water, but not quite as cataclysmically as your chemistry teacher may have led you to believe.

The Elements in Action iPad, iPhone & iPod app – Touch Press.

The sound of cicadas and crickets in the outdoor video clips may be a little distracting but adds to the authenticity of the sodium or liquid nitrogen in the lake!

Chemist with an iPad is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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According to Brian Clegg, writing about “bromide” in Chemistry World this week. Bromide salts had an early role in reducing the impact of epilepsy and seizures, which were at the time thought to be caused by an over-active libido and more specifically masturbation.

“Potassium bromide was linked to the reduction of sexual passions,” writes Clegg. “It doesn’t seem unreasonable, then, that potassium bromide might be used in an attempt to reduce sexual tension in circumstances where men were isolated for long periods, hence the story of bromide in the tea [given to soldiers during the Great War]“.

Personally, I recall some time in the 1990s during the time I was contributing chemistry news and features to New Scientist magazin, I had a call from a researcher at one of the big UK soap operas at the time (no longer on our screens, oh alright it was Brookside).

The scriptwriters had a character (Sinbad) who was being overlibidinous and the researcher wanted to know if there were anything they might have his girlfriend add to his tea to temper his desires. They’d heard about “bromide”, but that does seem still to be considered something of a myth, as Brian explains.

I don’t remember what I actually told the researcher they might use, but suggested whatever it was would complicate the “humourous” plotline by introducing an element of pharmaceutical fraud, whereby the girlfriend would have to get hold of something prescription only (an antidepressant/sedative with libido-reducing side-effects, for instance).

I think in the end the scriptwriters were told to find another way that Sinbad’s girlfriend might quell his desires…given that he was the soap’s windowcleaner maybe they had her slap about the place with a wet squeegee…

Potassium bromide.

Bromide in yer tea? Pull the other one is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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Okay…you know people always say that travelling back in time, with a “time machine”, wormhole or whatever, would be impossible because if you could go back in time, you might bump into your grandparents before your parents were conceived and somehow your presence prevents one of the conceptions that lead to your parents and ultimately you so that you are never born so are never “in the future” so that you could never use that time machine to travel back and stymie the conception of one of your parents, so you would be born and so could travel back in time and…you get it…it’s a PARADOX. They even made a whole movie franchise from it starring Michael J Fox, after all.

But, here’s the the thing. If you were able to travel back in time and somehow stopped your mother giving birth to you so that you never travelled back in time then, the timeloop might alternatively close so that you’d be stuck in the time before your birth with no time machine…

Anyway, enough of that, here’s an amusing video showing most of the continuity and a few metaphysical bloopers in Back to the Future

Time travel paradox is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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Scientists have the strongest evidence yet that granite exists on Mars. The findings suggest a much more geologically complex Mars than previously believed.

Large amounts of a mineral found in granite, feldspar, have been detected by the spectrometers on board the NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; the granite is present in an ancient Martian volcano. Moreover, minerals that are common in basalts that are rich in iron and magnesium, ubiquitous on Mars, are nearly completely absent at this location. The location of the feldspar also provides an explanation for how granite could have formed on Mars.

Granite, or its eruptive equivalent, rhyolite, is often found on Earth in tectonically active regions such as subduction zones. This is unlikely on Mars, but the researchers studying the data suggest that prolonged magmatic activity on Mars may well have led to these compositions on large scales.

Evidence found for granite on Mars.

I know some of you will be starting to think about Christmas already…don’t worry, that’s fine. I’ve got a little sing-along-a-Dave treat coming up for you with which you can begin the “celebrations”. I might even accept gifts this year, as long as they’re of the 40% distilled C₂H₅OH-H₂O flavoured azeotrope variety, preferably from Northern Ireland rather than Scotland.

Anyway, if you are starting preparations early (it’s 15th November folks, no need to rush), here’s a little festive warning you can cut out and pin to your noticeboard or stick to your fridge with that Xmas pudding fridge magnet you got in your stocking in 1997, you know the one that falls off when you try to stick anything heavier than a dead fly’s wing with it…

You can get 12-armed snow crystals that are essential a double 6 with a twist and triangular crystals are like compressed hexagons. If I remember, rightly it’s all in Deceived Wisdom where I quote from the main man in this area http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/class/class.htm

A pre-festive warning is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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NB: I temporarily removed this post from circulation while I thought about the details. Given the public bile surrounding these photos I didn’t want to give any vigilante details that might help someone locate the alleged hunter, but I think this current edit tells the story without raising potential problems. My concerns about the photo: there is smearing and blurring of these low res photos as if they have been manipulated so there is still ambiguity, but there is an additional photo and description on the hunter’s blog post that would suggest that any tweaks or jpf compression artefacts are incidental and the photos are genuine, after all.

UPDATE to the UPDATE: A sciencebase reader found what appears to be a blog from the hunter himself, in which he discusses the various people pictured and how killing an elephant was apparently his life’s ambition.

UPDATE: A detailed analysis of the low-res, grainy images that were available show that (obviously) the main man in both photos is the same person. So, we might now assume that he shot the elephant and had two photos taken, one with a fellow hunter and a second with various other people on the hunting safari at a different time. In one photo (the one with the group as opposed to the pair) flash was used, hence the colour tonal differences between. The sky behind and the fact that the surrounding foliage and twigs etc on the ground have not moved.

ORIGINAL: There’s a “photo” on the internet that’s been circulating for months, but is gaining new traction on Facebook for some reason as people start to share it blindly. It purports to show an elephant that has been shot while eating and shows the “family” who allegedly killed it. I was suspicious of the pixel edges around the bizarrelly well-staged family grouping who are supposedly honkered down behind the dead animal.

I checked on Snopes. Nothing. Hoaxslayer has done a detailed analysis and claims it’s a genuine photo from a hunting safari company called “Frikkie du Toit” which has a gallery of various people with their kills.

Here’s the photo that’s doing the rounds right now:

Accompanying this photo are a lot of expletive-heavy comments and the text “This Rich Family Killed an Elephant while it was eating. Let’s make them famous. I see 5 animals and 1 elephant!”

To be honest, that looks like the most unlikely hunting group ever, to my eye. But there are also tell-tale signs that it’s faked. Look at the guy’s right hand, doesn’t it look a bit blurred as if someone used imaging editing to hide what he was really resting his hand on?

The gun? Doesn’t look like any weapon I’ve ever seen, looks like someone drew it on with a 3pixel line tool in their photo editor. The pixel edges of the female on the left and the boy at the back don’t look right either. And, why are they all grinning inanely as if it were actually just a family snapshot rather than their looking mean and hunter-like. Oh, by the way, do hunting safaris allow minors along?

But, here’s the real clue that it’s not genuine: There’s an almost identical photo with different hunters on the “Frikkie” site, which looks just as fake (look at the placement of the hunter on the left’s elbow):

So, who killed the elephant? I suspect it was not hunters nor poachers (tusks are still present) and that it was probably killed legally at a time when there was an elephant cull in that region. I don’t know why anyone would simulate this photo. But, if it were current and genuine, don’t you think one of the real news outlets as opposed to activist blogs and facebookers would have reported on it?

The real worrying thing is the murderous, vigilante intent of many people who comment on the image, whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Imagine if someone ‘shopped your head into a nasty photo like this, blurred it a bit and spread it around the internet telling everyone you should be shot for being such an “animal”…

If anyone has any real evidence that there really was a family that killed this elephant while it was eating, I’m happy to update this post

Elephanticide redux is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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More poetic silliness with a scientific bent. This time another hero, one of the great polymath scientist and science communicators – Michael Faraday – who started out as a chemical assistant to Sir Humphry Davy, inventor of the eponymous miner’s lamp.

A Faraday look in his eyes is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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It’s a distant memory to me, but apparently barbers and hairdressers still chunter on to their customers as they snip and tease the cranial follicular extrusions: “Turned out nice again…although they’re forecasting snow…oh that Chancellor’s got a nerve cutting benefits and introducing new taxes, and have you seen the price of petrol these days…going anywhere nice on your holidays, then?

In case you hadn’t already guessed, hairdressers, like beauty therapists, nurses, taxi drivers and many others involved in one-to-one occupations (with the exception of doctors) are generally not interested in your responses to their verbal outpourings. The stream of consciousness, the unceasing gossip, the endless chit-chat is a barrier. An aural barrier they erect to create an auditory fog that lets them escape into their own world and focus on the task in hand whether that’s tussling with your tresses or taxiing you from A to Z…

There are many occupations that create a wall of sound around employees, factory work, construction, railway engineer etc and as such, those involved in that work are encapsulated by the sound or if it is above a certain threshold they wear ear protection which encapsulates them in what you might think of as a negative sound space. They might fancy a chat on the job but there’s no opportunity until a tea break comes along. For those who work in the not-so-splendid isolation of the office cubicle, the whirring of a printer, the background chatter of colleagues on the phone and the trundling of the post-room trolley set up the aural landscape for them. But, unless they’re engaged in a phone conversation themselves they need not create the kind of barrier needed by those working one-to-one, such as the hairdresser and taxi driver.

Recently, Harriet Shortt of the Department of Business and Management, at the University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus, in Bristol, UK, has focused specifically on the auditory landscape of the hairdressing salon. In her research, reported in the International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, Shortt explains how employees construct their auditory barriers, or one might say, their imaginary escape routes, to help them cope with the constant emotional labour of their task. This is an especially important consideration in ensuring employee wellbeing and mental health where an occupation requires the employee to be constantly on display and offers little refuge behind the walls of a cubicle or in front of a screen or in the more naturally noisy environment of the factory floor, for instance.

Shortt H. (2013). Sounds of the salon: the auditory routines of hairdressers at work, International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, 5 (4) 342. DOI: 10.1504/IJWOE.2013.057400

Aural barriers protect workers is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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The original Movember hipsters?

Pictured: Croatian electromagnetic pioneer Nikola Tesla and British-born Hollywood great Charlie Chaplin.

Chas and Nik is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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Some start-the-week-fun with science. A few of my heroes immortalised in what I self-generously refer to as “verse”, as if any of them need me to “immortalise” them with rhyme…now with added Higgs.

Dick

Feynman never suffered any fool quite gladly
His diagrams confused but they were no fadly
And his bongos he’d bang and his hands hurt so badly
Though his memory lives on, he’s long gone very sadly

Rosie

A dark lady slaved in the lab of a King
With the secret of life she did play
But, Watson and Crick a structure did bring
to deoxy-ribo-nuke-A

Nik

Nikola Tesla had magnetic charm
A twentieth century star
His current alternating was so fascinating
And his name now quite grandly a car

Albert

Quantally speaking Albert couldn’t have cared
Any less of a man would have run away scared
But he saw the light and he speedily shared
Energy equals mass times velocity squared

Now with added Higgs

Peter

Bosuns at sea, they’re always nautical
Bosons in fields are Higgs’ kind of article
They give matter its mass,
taking flight aeronautical
A Nobel pursuit good God, heavy particle!

Dick, Rosie, Nik, Albert (and Peter) is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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Is there anything Nobel-winning, all-carbon, one-atom-thick, wonder material graphene won’t be able to do? Here’s a demonstration of a graphene “piano”…

A graphene piano is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom
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