Interesting Facts

According to researchers at Kyoto University cats have a rudimentary understanding of physics. (The researchers showed how cats would react differently when they shook boxes with something in them, than when they shook empty boxes. Amazing! Cats reacted to a rattling sound? I don't suppose it occured to them that the shake of a cat  treats container has preconditioned cats to this.)  

According to a team of physicists we now have the “clearest evidence yet” that our universe is a hologram. (According to an article in Nature, the conflict as to why Albert Einstein's theory of gravity clashes with quantum physics, could be solved if the Universe were a holographic projection. The theory is that the three dimensions we perceive are actually just “painted” onto the cosmological horizon - the boundary of the known universe. I really struggled with the title for this one!) Source

Sigma is the 18th letter of the Greek alphabet, but it's also a measurement of standard deviation and it's used in particle physics as a measurement for a discovery. (Seemingly any discovery in particle physics needs a five-sigma level of certainty. This is the equivalent of tossing a coin and getting the same result more than 20 times in a row, because this is very unlikely (try it), a five-sigma result becomes an accepted discovery. So, basically - particle physics is like tossing a coin.)

According to modern physics, 98% of the universe is invisible. (Only four per cent of the mass of the Universe is in the atoms that make up you and me, the stars and planets. And we’ve only ever seen half of that with our telescopes. 23 per cent of the mass of the Universe is invisible, “dark”, matter. We know of its existence only because its gravity tugs on the visible stars and galaxies. No one knows what it is. And 73 per cent of the mass of the Universe is dark energy. Discovered only in 1998, this invisible stuff fills all of space and it has repulsive gravity.  Although I do think that calling gravity repulsive is a bit over the top, gravity simply sucks.) Factoid Source

Scientists still don't know how our sense of smell actually works. (According to Nobel prize winners, Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck there are odorant molecules, but the means by which a detected molecule is translated into a smell within the brain  remains a mystery.  Theorists are even hypothesising that our sense of smell may have its basis in quantum physics.  My nose - the quantum physicist.)

Niels Henrik David Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922, allegedly taught himself English by reading Dickens' Pickwick Papers over and over again. (Ha! When I heard this I realised why someone of my acquaintance was so disappointed when he realised that reading The Pickwick Papers is the literary equivalent of watching paint dry.)

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have created a "quantum state" in the largest object yet. (Seemingly this means an object is in two places at once. If anyone would like to read the full article on the BBC and then come back here to explain how this is possible, please do, because my brain is about to explode and then it will be in many places at once.) Full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8570836.stm