Christmas RATions for a Frolicking Fox

Forget the turkey – RATS are the Christmas treat for this ravenous reynard.

Fox with freshly caught rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fox with freshly caught rat (Photo:Tim Jones)

I caught this juvenile fox in the garden this Christmas Eve morning enjoying a little pre-lunch entertainment courtesy of an unfortunate rodent.  Very similar to watching a cat play with a mouse.  Here’s the series:

Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fox with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Spot the rat competition (Photo:Tim Jones)
Amazing throw: rat is the blur at high right (Photo: Tim Jones)
Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)

Fox playing with rat (Photo:Tim Jones)
What ?   (Photo:Tim Jones)


Update 30/12/12  Foxy Fame

Our star is currently promoting the forthcoming production of Ben Jonson’s Volpone by the Playing Up Theatre Company at the Rondo Theatre in Bath during February, where the Sly Fox has apparently developed a taste for chickens.

a4fox

 

 

 

Of related interest…

Post by Ed Yong here at DISCOVER on how foxes might be using magnetism to help catch prey.

Spot of Winter Sun

With snow now everywhere in the UK, it’s chilly enough to forget some of winter’s less obvious compensations – like the magnificent sunset I snapped this afternoon.

Winter sun with sunspot and seagull
Winter sun with sunspot and seagull (Photo:Tim Jones)
Winter Sun with sunspot and bird
Winter sun with sunspot and seagull (Photo: Tim Jones)
winter sun
Winter Sun (Photo: Tim Jones)

Under these sort of cloud conditions, the intensity of the sun’s light is reduced but its image remains sharp.  It may even be possible to see large sunspot groups – if they’re there – with the naked eye.  I wasn’t able to see anything with my naked eye on this occasion, but there is a small speck visible in the top left of the disk in the picture above.  Through a 400mm lens, that speck looks like this:

sunspot
Sunspot (Photo:Tim Jones)

The two parts of the spot, the umbra and penumbra at different temperatures, are clearly visible.  There are actually a couple more very small sunspots visible on the full disk: click the picture below for a larger image:

photo of sun showing sunspots
Surface of sun with sunspots (Photo: Tim Jones)

All in all, not a bad afternoon’s improvised astronomy.

WARNING: As always with the sun, you should never look at it directly with any kind of optical instrument, and even staring directly at the sun with just your eyes can be dangerous.   I took these pictures by pre-focusing to infinity and pointing the camera without looking directly at the sun’s disk, which was low in the sky at sunset and behind cloud.  The safest way to view the sun and sunspots is to use a telescope to project their image onto a piece of paper.

A Cautious Perspective on the Mystery Missile

You may be aware of the mini-controversy  around what was initially thought to be a ‘mystery missile’ launch earlier this week off the California coast.  This clip sums it up:

The official line now seems to be that it wasn’t  a missile at all, but the vapour contrail from a passenger jet, the sunset and viewing angle making the event look like something it wasn’t. Last time I looked, NASA were reported to be supporting that view based on satellite imagery, and a specific aircraft has been correlated with the event.

The incident reminded me that things are indeed not always as they seem, especially  in the sky around sunrise and sunset.  And to illustrate, I’ve dug out a few pictures – all taken in the last three months.

One thing that really struck me in the mystery missile film was the ‘solidity’ and volume of the plume.  Aircraft contrails are more wispy aren’t they?   But then I looked at this picture I took just before sunrise, which includes a contrail every bit as bushy as the one in the film:

Contrails over Surry, UK (Photo: Tim Jones)
Contrails over Surry, UK (Photo: Tim Jones)

Perspective too is a funny thing.  Take a look at this picture I took of a passenger jet near Heathrow Airport in London just as the sun was setting.

Passenger Jet (Photo: Tim Jones)
Passenger Jet (Photo: Tim Jones)

It’s not immediately obvious, to me at least, whether this plane is coming at me or flying away.  There’s a Gestalt Switch moment when the eyes confuse the rear of the fuselage for the nose end.  Things don’t get much clearer when we zoom in:

Passenger Jet (Photo: Tim Jones)
Passenger Jet (Photo: Tim Jones)

A few seconds later and the setting sun catches the plane’s tail, making the direction of flight more obvious.  At a distance, could such a bright reflection isolated to one part of an aircraft be confused with a rocket nozzle – especially if you’d already got the idea in mind?

Sun reflecting off aircraft tail-fin (Photo: Tim Jones)
Sun reflecting off aircraft tail-fin (Photo: Tim Jones)

It’s easy to be fooled by bright objects catching the sun.  Helium filled toy balloons are favourite UFO candidates.  I’ve more than once rushed into the house for camera and binoculars when something fast and bright has appeared in the sky.  The motion of a rising balloon is very smooth, and viewed from the right angle the mystery object can appear to travel horizontally across the sky faster than it really is.  The last one I saw reminded me of an International Space Station (ISS) pass, only in daylight.  Again, one of the issues I have with the mystery missile film is that I can’t tell how fast the missile / aircraft is moving – vertically or horizontally.

Shiny balloons make for great UFOs (Photo: Tim Jones)
Shiny balloons make for great UFOs (Photo: Tim Jones)

Here’s another example of skyward things not being all they at first seem.  To the naked eye, we see a typical multi-engine passenger jet flying at high altitude.

Aircraft contrail illusion (Photo: Tim Jones)
Aircraft contrail illusion (Photo: Tim Jones)

But with the benefit of a telephoto lens, it turns out to be three (presumably military) jets flying in formation:

Three jets in formation, showing contrails (Photo: Tim Jones)
Three jets in formation, showing contrails (Photo: Tim Jones)

Something else that isn’t clear from the mystery missile footage is the absolute and relative position of the helicopter that took the pictures.  Again, perspective can be confusing.  Take a look at this shot I took looking down on a plane in the clouds.  Obviously I took this from the air, right?

Jet plane against clouds (Photo: Tim Jones)
Jet plane against clouds (Photo: Tim Jones)

Wrong.  I was standing in the local park (and it’s not a hilly region) when I took this.  A bird flying into the frame puts some limits on the likely altitude, but it’s still ambiguous if you don’t see the full context:

Jet plane against clouds (Photo: Tim Jones)
Jet plane against clouds (Photo: Tim Jones)

To finish off, here’s a picture I took only a couple of weeks ago from mountains over-looking Los Angeles and the bay area.  It was twilight, and that lump above LA Downtown is Catalina Island.  Perfect missile-spotting conditions.  Maybe I’ll catch the next one.

View over Los Angeles and out to sea (Photo: Tim Jones)
View over Los Angeles and out to sea (Photo: Tim Jones)

UPDATE 13/11/2010

Comprehensive analysis of this event and discussion of previous missile/aircraft contrail confusions here at Contrailscience.com.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Here are a few pictures from my visit last week to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Voyager at JPL

JPL, the NASA funded laboratory operated by Caltech, hold an annual public open day in May.  What’s less well known I think is that they also run 2 hour (free) tours twice a week for anyone who can book ahead and has appropriate photo i.d.  (you’ll probably need to book a month or more in advance).

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Photo Tim Jones
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, La Cañada Flintridge

Hopefully these pics give a flavour of the visit which, thanks to JPL engineer Randy Wesson, was quite excellent.

Truth be known, I’ve been impressed with JPL’s communications since the late 1970s, when they mailed to me in the UK a substantial pack of planet and probe photos.  Ah, the things that went on before the internet!

Well worth planning ahead and booking a visit if you’re going to be in the Los Angeles area.

In the museum, full-size models of some familiar probes including Voyager, Cassini, and Galileo were on display.

Museum at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Photo Tim Jones

Mars Science Laboratory: Curiosity Rover.
Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity Rover.

Our tour took in the famous ‘Darkroom’ control room at the Space Flight Operations Facility, and the Mars Science Laboratory Project (MSL).

JPL’s Martian programs were in evidence, including the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the Mars Science Laboratory Rover due to launch in 2011.  Spirit has over-performed against design expectations but is now stuck in the Martian surface: one of the laboratory shots above shows the simulation rig being used to test possible escape strategies.

For more info. you should of course visit JPL’s own superb website – where I see they’ve just started streaming live construction of the Mars Science Laboratory Rover.

 

Book Review: Collider – the search for the world’s smallest particles, by Paul Halpern

  • Hardcover: 272 pages
  • Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (28 July 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0470286202
  • ISBN-13: 978-0470286203
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.3 x 3.3 cm

 

Good luck I say to anyone setting out to write a popular science book on particle physics.  The concepts are weird, the math is hard; and on publishing timescales there’s not a whole lot of new stuff worth talking about.

Moreover, it’s a tall order that’s less about content and more about the way you tell it.  Happily, in Collider: The Search for the World’s Smallest Particles– Paul Halpern tells it well.

Anchoring the core physics around a theme is helpful: whether it’s Brian Greene on string theory or Paul Davies on the search for extra terrestrial life or,  as in Halpern’s case, the physics, technology and people that have advanced our understanding of the subatomic world.

Collider is a story of impressive people building big machines to smash small particles together to reveal big truths.  With CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) limbering up under the Franco-Swiss countryside, the timing couldn’t be better.

At 232 pages before the notes, Collider is manageable without being superficial, and has sufficient pace and variety to engage even those for whom memories of high-school science induce a cold sweat (and for whom leptons is just another brand of tea).

Tracts of quantum weirdness interspersed with biographical vignettes and discussions on collider engineering should ensure a broad spectrum of readers stay the distance.  Those led out of their depth, however gently, will find delightful pangs of (at least partial) understanding along the way.   Personally, the engineer in me found particular joy in the mix of ethereal concept and enabling technology that particle physics, perhaps more than any other field, embodies.  Halpern as a physicist clearly enjoys and respects all aspects of the endeavour.  Indeed, Collider stylistically is quite polymathic, even poetic in a Saganish sort of way:

“Alas, summer’s heat sometimes shapes cruel mirages.  After modifying its equipment and retesting its data, the HPWF team’s findings vanished amid the desert sands of statistical insignificance. Skeptics wondered if electroweak unity was simply a beautiful illusion.”

Poetry aside, the physics kicks in early with unification, theories of everything (TOE), and the limitations of an incomplete Standard Model.

The better known particles are introduced via their discoverers’ stories: Thompson’s electron, Roentgen’s X-Rays, Becquerel and the decomposition products of uranium, Rutherford’s proton, and Chadwick’s neutron.

By describing relatively simple experiments from the early era, like the measurement of alpha and beta particle size, Halpern gives his subject a tangibility, a graspable air that prepares  the mental ground for later complexities.

Following the evolution of particle sources, accelerators, and detectors, Collider takes us through a chronology starting with unaccelerated decay products striking stationary targets, to linear accelerators, to the various circular synchrotron variants like Ernest Lawrence’s Bevatron and Cosmotron, ending with the contra-rotating particle streams and super-cooled magnets of the LHC.

As beam energies increased, detectors became more complex, sensitive, and selective, allowing the existence of myriad new particles to be confirmed or discovered.  Cloud and bubble chambers joined hand-held scintillation detectors and Geiger counters in the particle physicists’ armory, and as the forerunners of the giant counters, traps and calorimeters stacked up today in CERN’s ATLAS and ALICE experiments.

Halpern devotes the last three chapters to a discussion of dark matter, dark energy and the possibility of higher dimensions in the context of string, brane and M-theory, where he underlines the mutuality of physics and cosmology in understanding the bang, whimper, crunch or (somewhat depressing) rip possibilities of an uncertain multiverse.

Looking to the future, Halpern suggests the fate of particle physics itself is less certain than current LHC excitement might lead us to believe.  If the Higgs Boson, higher dimensions, or mini-blackholes show up, then fine; but if they don’t – where do we go next?’.  Larger machines might be an answer, but with costs that were never pocket money now truly enormous, stakeholders, including the physics community, will need to look to their priorities.  And as if to say ‘don’t say it will never happen’, Halpern dedicates a whole chapter to the last,  some would say terminal, back-step in American particle physics: the 1992 cancellation of the Reagan era Superconducting Super Collider (SSC).

Something Collider really brought home for me is how the nature of particle physics as a discipline and a career has changed.  Individual pioneers have been replaced by research groups working on projects staffed by thousands.  As Halpern says, if the Higgs were discovered, they’d be no obvious single candidate for the inevitable Nobel prize (except Higgs himself of course).   Data filtration and  computation as disciplines have become as important as the collider itself: the LHC is served by a global network of computers.  That creates the opportunity for remote distributed working and facilitates multi-national involvement, but also means young researchers need to think about the kind of experience, and resume, they’re building.  At PhD level already,  Halpern says the slow pace of fundamental revelations has required a force-put change in the definition of what qualifies for the degree in particle physics [we can’t all split the atom for the first time, right?].

I’ve one critical note on the history, and maybe I’ve just been reading too many Cold War biographies of late, but I felt Halpern’s analysis underplayed the military motivation and sponsorship behind the adolescent years of particle physics.  Given that the  topic’s already well covered in works like Gregg Herken’s Brotherhood of the Bomb, and that I walked away from Collider feeling inspired rather than cynical, it’s a choice of emphasis I’m inclined to forgive.

So quibbles aside, Collider is a bit of a page turner – which by the timbre of my opening statements isn’t a bad endorsement.   By presenting the obscure realities of particle physics in the context of the machines and people that revealed them, Halpern has for sure made an unfamiliar pill easier to swallow.

A Web of Intrigue

I got up yesterday morning at what for me is quite an early hour – 6.30ish.  So with no CSI on the box at that time, I chose the healthy option and went for a walk in the park.  Where I took this picture:

spider web with water droplets
Spider web with water droplets (Photo: Tim Jones)

That’s only kind of true.  What I actually took was this picture:

Spider Web with water droplets
Zoom out. Spider web with water droplets (Photo: Tim Jones)

and only later discovered the fine structure of water droplets clinging to the spider’s thread when I got home and fired up the computer.

A beautiful and fascinating sight.  But, as per usual, the deeper beauty is in the science behind WHY droplets deposit in such regular patterns.

One Google later, I’d found this relevant study described in a Nature News piece (full research paper doi:10.1038/nature08729 behind pay-wall; also as per usual…).

The News piece describes work by Lei Jiang from the Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences on the hackled orbweaver spider Uloborus walckenaerius.  The authors found that if you get in close enough, spiders’ silk appears not as a simple thread but is covered in puffs of minute nanoscale fibres.  When the puffs get wet they contract into tight beads or knots connected by thinner pieces of silk, necklace fashion.  Additional water migrates and accumulates on the rough surface of the knots in preference to the smoother connecting silk, forming the uniform droplets we see.  The research also inspired thoughts around practical offshoots, like the possibility of a man-made equivalent for the manufacture of highly water absorbent materials.

I didn’t see any ‘puffs’, but I’m pretty pleased with the resolution I achieved with a good but relatively straightforward camera.  That said, I’m feeling the need to get some of that spider silk under the microscope.

Here’s one more picture taken on the same day, of a single strand of web stretching between two trees; would you believe a distance of over 20ft?

Single filament spider silk (Photo:Tim Jones)
Single filament spider silk (Photo:Tim Jones)

Single filament spider silk (Photo:Tim Jones)
Single filament spider silk (Photo:Tim Jones)

The water is clearing from one portion, and the dry filament is just visible in the close-up view.   In the technical jargon, we can say the ratio of droplet size to silk diameter is ‘amazing’.

And if you’re wondering where the spider/s were all this time?  Me too.  For the arachnophiles, here’s one I took earlier.

spider
Spider (Photo:Tim Jones)

The Amazing Rock-eating Tree

Bit of silliness for a Sunday morning maybe.  But all the same, for those who missed it on Twitter, here is the amazing rock eating tree.

Tree growing around a piece of slate (Photo:Tim Jones)
Tree growing around a piece of slate (Photo:Tim Jones)

Tree assimilating slate
Another view (Photo:Tim Jones)

Slate-eating tree to be precise.  Tabloid hype aside, I think it’s pretty amazing to find this kind of situation undisturbed after what must be a good few years.

I took the picture last month in a disused slate quarry in North Wales, but it’s up a path that’s a wee bit off the tourist route and not so obvious.  Presumably the piece of slate either fell or was placed near the growing roots near ground level, and nature has somehow accommodated it.  The quarry was working at its peak in the late 1800’s – so who knows the real history behind this slatey vignette.

Attempts to dig out the relevant academic literature on this situation were in vane –  there isn’t any (come back if you know different).  I did find some reports on how tree roots detect and navigate around below-ground objects; but  that’s not the same.

And as this story may be old news for Twitter friends, here’s a bonus in the form of the Amazing Hat-eating Tree.

Fungus assimilating hat October 2008 (Photo:Tim Jones)

Fungus assimilating hat June 2010 (Photo:Tim Jones)
Fungus assimilating hat June 2010 (Photo:Tim Jones)

Straight-up.  I first stumbled across the beanie hat hung on a substantial piece of tree fungus back in October 2008 – caught in the clutch of  arboreal assimilation.  Then, hesitant as I am to admit to this, I made a point of revisiting the champingnoned chapeau 20 months later, still there but a little worse for wear.

All good fun, but this sort of thing does summon up those Planet of the Apes / Logan’s Run images of nature biting back following the  post-apocalyptic collapse / coalition spending cuts.  Non?

Blimey – not had so much fun since writing my definitive Ozzie the Iceman piece.

Mountains and Moonbows

What do aurora, noctilucent clouds, sun-dogs, and green flash have in common ?  Answer: they’re all examples of rare and interesting visual atmospheric phenomena I’ve totally failed to observe this summer.

Lunar corona and Lenticular Clouds, Jungfrau Massive (Photo: Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

Conditions have often been right, even optimal.  I’ve made repeated observations with sophisticated equipment: my eyes and a camera, but no joy.  The only solace for standing in a field staring at the twilight horizon for nights on end has been the proximity of the local hostelry.  On reflection not such a bad deal.

I’ve had better luck in the past, but more so with the moon than the sun.  Take the example above of a lunar corona in the Swiss mountains.  Snapped between avalanches from an improvised snow-hole during my ascent of the Eiger from the window of the Beau Rivage Hotel in Interlaken.

Lunar coronae are in no way attached to the moon, but are an earthbound visual effect caused by moonlight passing through clouds of small particles.  As it’s a diffraction effect rather than a refraction effect, it works even with particles that don’t transmit light, like pollen grains for instance.   In this case the effect is most likely caused by water droplets in clouds.  The same thing happens with the sun sometimes, the visual ‘corona’ in that case not to be confused with the physical corona that is attached to the sun – so to speak.

Talking of confusion, lunar coronae, or moonbows, are not the same thing as Moon Rings.  I made that mistake when I started writing this piece and subsequently had to change the title.   A Moon Ring is just a name, but it’s a name specifically reserved for a ring of light caused by the refraction of moonlight through high altitude ice crystals.  Because ice crystals are hexagonal in shape, they all refract light at the same angle, which from an observer’s viewpoint produces a ring concentric with the moon at a fixed radius of 22 degrees (for fuller explanation see here).  Measured across the sky, that looks like 44 moons put next to each other (the moon takes up roughly half a degree of the 180 degrees of the sky we can see at any time).  The ring in my picture is at most ten moon diameters from the moon’s disc, or five degrees.  So it ain’t a Moon Ring.

A lunar corona can be more spectacular though, and if the conditions are right, a whole rainbow of colours can spread out from the inner ring, going from red to blue.

On a different tack now….

Apart from the moonbow, this scene includes an almost text-book perfect example of a mountain weather phenomenon known as Mountain Waves and Lenticular Cloud formation.

Lenticular clouds over the Jungfrau Massive by moonlight
Blow-up of the scene above showing moonlit lenticular clouds forming over the Jungfrau Massive (Photo:Tim Jones)

When air is forced to rise by flowing up the side of a mountain, it can cool down sufficiently, to the dewpoint temperature, where water vapour  condenses to form clouds. (That is adiabatic cooling and cloud formation as first explained by Erasmus Darwin. Just sayin’.)  When the air descends on the other side of the mountain, it warms up to above the dewpoint and the cloud disappears, the water drops vapourising again.   The isolated cap left on top of the mountain is a lenticular cloud.

That said, what I think we’re seeing in the photo here is a special circumstance for lenticular cloud formation that I first came across as a trainee private pilot.  In this case, air flowing over the mountains is trapped under a higher layer of stable air, causing standing waves to be set up, with lenticular clouds peeling off the cusps.

Reminiscent of a Katsushika Hokusai painting

The same conditions generate a series of turbulent rotating eddies lower down on the lee side of the mountain which can cause so-called ‘rotor clouds’ or ‘roll clouds’ to form.   It’s best not to fly anywhere near areas of rotating turbulence, so these clouds are good visual warnings for pilots to take special care (although as the mountain wave effect can extend 30 or forty miles downwind of a large range, you’re just as likely to feel the warning).

For a close-up view of a lenticular cloud, here is a lenticular altocumulus I snapped this summer floating off the leeward side of the San Gabriel Mountains in California.  The bulges are caused by rotating air under the cloud.

lenticular cloud formation off San Gabriel mountains in S.California
Lenticular cloud formation (Photo: Tim Jones)

That then about wraps it up for mountains and moonbows.  Just to leave you in the true spirit of transparent open-book research and a view of the laboratory where the Swiss studies were made, complete with proof of location.  And flowers.

Armchair atmospheric physics (Photo: Tim Jones)

Update November 2011 – Here’s another lunar corona; this time with Jupiter and taken from Kingston upon Thames:

Moon with lunar corona and Jupiter
Moon with lunar corona and Jupiter

Of related interest on external sites:

Rare Green Flashes Captured from the Moon (Universe Today)

http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/cloud-spotting.html

http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2011/12/17/magic-clouds-in-the-magic-city/