A Quantum Diaries Survivor

You don’t need to be an oceanographer like Curtis Ebbesmeyer to love the idea - you just need to have been a child some time ago. Twentynine-thousand plastic ducks, the kind of toy you always find in the bathtub of small children, were dispersed in the pacific ocean in 1992 when a storm wrecked three containers of a cargo ship off the coast of China. They have since traveled the seven seas, some of them landing in Australia, others on the coast of Chile, and more than 10 thousand still around the globe, traveling about a mile a day in a long cold trip through the Bering straits, then frozen in pack ice, and finally thawing out in the warmer Atlantic waters - as Ebbesmeyer had predicted.

The retired oceanographer has spent his time following the ducks and other plastic toys in their 15-years journey. And valuable information has been obtained from the observation of the wanderings of these little plastic creatures. Indeed, they appear to be worth ready money… 

The Daily Mail, from which I stole the picture above, has the full story.

Mercilessly speared by deadlines converging on my flesh and bones, I am only able to point to the commendable work of others to entertain you today. Below is a short list of interesting science-related posts I found in blogs I read or stumbled upon.

• Resonaances has a very good post about the new bounds on dark matter cross section obtained by the XENON-10 collaboration. A factor of 6 improvement over previous results, and a limit that start cutting into the flesh of CMSSM allowed regions.
• Babe in the Universe tells us, in her usual witty style, of a giant storm on Mars. Her blog is always up to date with astronomy news.
• String conferences are all the rage this summer. At Strings 2007 Witten has given a talk and produced a paper worth a look, if you like the genre. Information and discussion at the Arcadian Functor and at  Peter Woit’s blog.
• Alexey Petrov explains that the PVLAS result on magnetically induced vacuum dichroism -and the related possible axion interpretation- has been revised, and no signal is actually there: it was a detector effect.
• To close the list with one item that doesn’t belong, Jennifer Ouellette has little physics in her post on roller coasters, but I enjoyed reading the history of these things and related trivia.