Futurismic

Researchers from Scotland and Belgium have identified a link between a woman’s stride and orgasmic ability:

The results showed that the appropriately trained sexologists were able to correctly infer vaginal orgasm through watching the way the women walked over 80 percent of the time. Further analysis revealed that the sum of stride length and vertebral rotation was greater for the vaginally orgasmic women. “This could reflect the free, unblocked energetic flow from the legs through the pelvis to the spine,” the authors note.

Another advance in the onward march of science…

In slightly more directly sfnal news scientists have discovered an upper limit to the mass of black holes:

…these gigantic black holes, which accumulate mass by sucking in matter from neighboring gas, dust and stars, seem unable to grow beyond this limit regardless of where – and when – they appear in the universe.

This may affect some of the long term predictions of the future of the universe, as expounded in Stephen Baxter’s Deep Future, which is well worth a read.

[both stories from Physorg][image from pizzodisevo on flickr]

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No, it’s not the title of some best-forgotten B-movie, but some high-brow astrophysics that - in all honesty - I can’t say I fully understand. But it’s something to do with quantum physics, entropy and super-massive black holes:

“Although Hawking radiation implies that black holes contain all this disorder, scientists have been puzzled as to where it all comes from. The collapsing stars that turn into black holes do not start out with nearly enough. How does the matter become so scrambled?

Frampton’s team argues that the extra entropy is generated by the random nature of quantum physics. This should sometimes allow a collapsing ball of matter to spontaneously transform into something called a “monster” – an arrangement of matter that has maximum disorder, with particles travelling at high speed in random directions.”

These “monsters” could help explain our way to a quantum theory of gravity, apparently. It’s times like this I wish I’d stuck with science instead of engineering. [Image courtesy NASA]

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There’s a science fiction tale or two to be dug out of this little science item, I’m thinking:

If the latest simulation of what happens when black holes merge is correct, there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing several thousand times the mass of the sun, roaming around the Milky Way galaxy.

The simulation in question is focused on “intermediate mass” black holes, and there isn’t really even any strong evidence that such things, weighing a few thousand solar masses, exist. (Via PhysOrg.)

Still, if they exist, and two of them of different sizes and rotating at different speeds combine, the simulation indicates resulting merged black hole gets a kick in the pants that can hurl it away in an arbitrary direction at a velocity that averages 200 kilometres per second but in some instances can be as high as 4,000 kilometres per second–enough in either case to allow the black hole to escape the globular cluster where these intermediate black holes (if they exist) are predicted to form.

The researchers are reassuring:

“These rogue black holes are extremely unlikely to do any damage to us in the lifetime of the universe,” Holley-Bockelmann stresses. “Their danger zone, the Schwarzschild radius, is really tiny, only a few hundred kilometers. There are far more dangerous things in our neighborhood!”

Of course, anything with a mass of a few thousands suns wandering close to the solar system is going to play havoc with planetary orbits…but fortunately, space is very, very big.

It’s probably nothing to worry about.

(Image: Ute Kraus, Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Golm, and Theoretische Astrophysik, Universität Tübingen, www.spacetimetravel.org)

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It’s (relatively) common knowledge that black holes consume pretty much anything and everything … and apparently that includes each other, as astronomers speculate that the black hole at the center of our own galaxy may have gobbled up a smaller sibling over 100 million years ago.

While we’re on the subject of astronomy, and just in case you get asked by a curious child and don’t want to get caught on the hop, you may wish to learn why space is dark. [Image by D P Hershman]

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