perfidy

Some science links I've accumulated over the last few days, annotated.

• Instapundit and many others linked this article from the Times, How Microbes Defend and Define Us.  (Including, since I started this post this morning, Aretae and Isegoria.) Fascinating bit - "In the mouth alone, Dr. Relman estimates, there are between 500 and 1,000 species. “It hasn’t reached a plateau yet: the more people you look at, the more species you get,” he said. The mouth in turn is divided up into smaller ecosystems, like the tongue, the gums, the teeth. Each tooth—and even each side of each tooth—has a different combination of species."  Those documentaries on the bugs that live on our skin always creeped me out.  But somehow, this is just remarkable.
• The Death of Nemesis - in two versions.  There's a theory, fairly well established now, that something really, really bad happens every 27 million years or so.  One popular explanation for the extinctions has been Nemesis, a dark companion to the sun that periodically came in close and f*cked shit up.  But the new study shows that the very regularness of the periodicy argues against Nemesis, because we know that there have been close encounters with other stars, etc, over the last 500 million years.  No star could maintain that regularity over that time.
• Higgs Boson, the God Particle, not discovered.  Rumors around the campfire were saying that the God Particle had been found.  Not so, say the Lords of the Tevatron.  I really doubt that it ever will be.
• Black Holes apparently blow bubbles. A short one:
  

  A relatively small black hole has been spotted blowing bubbles with diameters of more than 300-1500 light years.

  Robert Soria of the University College London and colleagues pored over images and data from the European Southern Observatory and Chandra X-ray Observatory, zeroing in on an unusually large remnant from a supernova explosion. Its host galaxy appears in the Sculptor constellation of Earth's southern sky, around 12.7 million light years away.

  They discovered three hot spots in the x-ray emissions, all in a row, and identified the central one as the core of a black hole a few times larger than the sun. The two spots flanking the core are produced by jets colliding with interstellar gas.

  A nearby star feeds the black hole, giving it energy to shoot a flood of particles out each side at near the speed of light. These jets are much more powerful than expected for a black hole of this size, blowing bubbles that expand faster than the speed of sound. The finding suggests that more of the energy spent by a black hole goes into accelerating matter - rather than emitting x-rays - than previously supposed.

  I'd like to point out that gravity is an attractive force. Not likely to cause jets. Electromagnetism, on the other hand, is known to produce jets (plasma) and x-rays (in x-ray machines, for example) and accelerate particles (particle accelerators).

• Giant Planets.  Cool article about the discoveries around Beta Pictoris, only 60 ly away.