Mr Science.
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August 2005
Kept moist, fruit flies can live for a day without their heads.
A rose by any other name may not smell as sweet: People subjected to the same odor (cheese) found it pleasant when told it was cheese, and unpleasant when told it was body odor.
Bugs don’t spatter on your car at speeds under 37mph. They just bounce off.
Scientists still do not know why soot forms, but have discovered a new class of molecule, enols, which may help explain combustion better.
September 2005
Surfactants and enzymes make saliva a mild natural detergent. So it is perfectly logical that the mom should clean up the kid with a little spit.
The molten core of the Earth, 1510 miles in diameter, rotates at a rate 2% faster than the surface of the Earth. This makes some sense when you think about how an ice skater rotates more rapidly when drawing her arms in closer to her body (thus decreasing her radius of rotation).
How many gigabytes does your hard drive hold? Mine is relatively small by modern standards: only 80. But even that is quite a lot when you consider: 1 (ONE) gigabyte is the equivalent of a pickup truck load of books.
The animal with the longest average lifespan is the Rougheye Rockfish, at about 200 years.
Oct 2005
Special Titillation Edition
As American women get stouter (mostly from poor eating habits), their breasts are getting bigger, increasing on average from 34B to 36C in the last 15 years. (Factoid: Letter designations for bra sizes were introduced in 1933 by SH Camp & Co.). Large breasts are generally uncomfortable, particularly when in motion, as a pair of D-cup breasts weighs between 15 and 23 pounds, roughly the equivalent of carrying around two small turkeys. Hence women with large breasts tend to exercise less, which of course, makes them even bigger. (Factoid: Most women’s breast tissue is basically the same. It is largely the fat content that determines the size … unless implants are involved). A comfortable bra with broad straps is the best way to inhibit breast movement and the pain associated with it. (Factoid: The first sports bra was created in 1977 when two American women cut up a pair of jockstraps and sewed them together).
Spider silk is the toughest fiber in the world with respect to combined strength and elasticity. It has yet to be duplicated by humans (as of 1500 EDT Oct 20, 2005, as far as I know).
Global DNA testing has revealed that 4% of us (on average) have a Father who is NOT the one we think is our Daddy. Percentages vary by culture and economic stratum. I researched this and found that the percentage in the US is probably higher … maybe 8-10%. With large local variation (low in Utah, high in DC, for example).
Testing sewer discharge is a good way to monitor certain kinds of illicit drug use. Italian experience along the Po River records 40,000 hits of cocaine use for one month (out of a population of 5 million).
Sigmund Freud observed: “The principal task of civilization … is to defend us against nature.” I assume he included human nature in that observation.
Among the 23 countries who spend the most per-capita on health care (as sampled by WHO), the USA spends the most, and has the second lowest “healthy life expectancy,” with the Czech Republic coming in dead last. I researched this a bit and found it is probably true. “Healthy” life expectancy excludes periods of illness. Apparently we spend too much on hopeless cases.
Dec 2005 Report
Clean thoughts: Exposed to the smell of an all-purpose cleaning fluid, Dutch undergraduate students thought “cleaner” thoughts and spread less crumbs while eating. The researchers did not reveal the thought-reading technology used to determine that the students thought “cleaner” thoughts, but the crumbs were easy to measure.
The so called “Darley Arabian” horse, who lived in England in the early 1700s, was responsible for 95% of the Y chromosomes in thoroughbreds today. Chromosomes are strands of DNA.
The speed of light: In a vacuum it is 186,282 statute miles per second. But in water it slows to 140,000 miles per second. In Bose-Einstein condensate it is only 38 miles per hour. In a sense, light speed never really changes. However, when light photons are traveling thru a medium, they are absorbed by the atoms in the medium, and new photons emitted to go on their way.
You can see the remnants of the Big Bang. Tune an old TV to an unused UHF channel (be sure the cable is unhooked). Part of the static on the screen is microwave noise left over from the Big Bang of 13.7 billion years ago.
Ignorance abounds: Latest scientific thinking says that the universe is 75% dark energy and 21% dark matter. Science knows practically nothing about either, so can say little about 96% of everything.
Hello? Bonobos (smallish chimp-like primates & a close relative of humans) have sex with every member of their group, male & female, to say hello and stave off tensions. Thus the old hippy saw “make love not war” has some precedent in the primate world.
The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 meant that a large area (the “hot zone”) was ruled off-limits for human habitation. A large part of the hot zone now has radiation levels similar to Denver CO … and wildlife is thriving there, mainly because there are hardly any people to disturb them.
Jan 2006 Report (courtesy Discover & Physics Today, &c.) … a 2005 recap.
Animals in salt springs. Life abounds: Critters have been found in salt springs 100x saltier than the sea & in 160 deg F water & under Antarctica & at sulfur vents under the sea where light never reaches. Surely they live on other worlds.
Freezing water. Speaking of which: Water freezes at 95 Deg F! So long as the pressure is 92,000 psi. (for comparison, the tires on my truck are inflated to 30 psi).
Crows. There have been a lot of crows hereabouts, and … I have something in common with them. I like frog legs, they like frog livers … the crows peck the livers right out & leave the rest of the frog to the rest of the critter world.
Pigeons. Clearly this means: Birds are not bird-brained after all. In fact, some pigeons can tell a Monet from a Picasso (so long as a reward is involved).
Remembering and lawyers. We all know this is true: You can remember things that never happened. Science has proved it. Lawyers always knew it.
Galaxies without stars. There are galaxies without stars … Composed entirely of “dark matter” … VirgoHI 21 is one.
Laser transistors. New laser transistors could push computing speeds way up, just when other technologies had about maxed out. And to think …we used punched cards when we first started tracking global temperatures in the 1970s.
Global temperatures. Speaking of which: Global Temperatures are steaming along nicely, with 2005 likely being the warmest year on record. For sinking cities like New Orleans & Venice, it is not good news that the oceans are rising faster than previously thought. It will take another 10 to 15 years to settle on a reliable trend, but an inch a decade is a good guess. How long til we need to sell Fla back to Spain? Probably in just a few centuries, by which time greenhouse gas concentrations will have made seawater so acidic that coral reefs will dissolve. PS: There is enough ice around to raise sea level by 200 feet.
Blinking. When we blink, our brain automatically turns off the parts of the brain that process sight. So, unless we are thinking about it, we never notice the little episodes of darkness that happen when we blink every 5 seconds or so.
Lab-grown meat. Lab-grown meat is a real possibility for the future (based on tissue regeneration research). What will the PETA vegans think about that?
Hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide (a common gas that smells like old eggs) induces hibernation in mice. Next step: Try it on us. I, for one, would like to hibernate now & again (e.g., Xmas & winter in general).
Stupid people die young. Stupid people die young. Those same stupid people also have slow reaction times. I am not sure what to make of these (to me) distressing statistics.
Malarial mosquito. When a malarial mosquito bites you, the bite releases chemicals that let other malarial mosquitoes find you more easily by your new smell. This knowledge may lead to better bug away spray.
DNA. Uncle who? DNA sez: Humans & chimps split from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago.
Voyager 1. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now about 9 billion miles away … the most distant human artifact in the universe.
Tsunami. Last year, when the largest tsunami ever recorded struck the Far East; its remnants reached the US east coast 29 hours later.
Monthly thought. My thought for the month: Science happens when imagination coincides with reality.
Feb 2006 Discover(y) Report
Saffir-Simpson scale. The American Geophysical Union reports that Lakshmi Kantha of the Univ. of Colorado (Boulder) has suggested changing the sacred Saffir-Simpson scale for hurricanes. Basically the new scale (or scales) would measure the intensities in tenths (so a weak cat 3 storm might be a 3.1 or 3.2 storm), and it would remove the upper limit of 5. Some versions of the proposed measures include storm size and speed of movement, and could produce very large indices (teens, 20s, and 30s). Kind of like the way earthquakes are measured (there is no upper limit).
Tiny gold particles. U of NE (Lincoln) folks have embedded tiny gold particles in bacteria creating the first living electrical circuits. Because they absorb water, these critters can measure humidity very accurately (they get bigger, the gold particles get farther apart, the electrical resistance changes & we can measure the changes).
Parasitic intestinal worms. U Edinburgh, Scotland: People who have certain types of fairly benign parasitic intestinal worms also have lower rates of asthma & allergies. Just think: someday medical treatment may include injections of parasites.
Fat. From U Burgundy, France: Fat tastes good because it is … fat. A new type of taste bud has been discovered: The fat bud. It joins the other five … sweet, salt, sour, bitter, & savory (aka, the taste of msg) in the pantheon of (probably) human taste. So far the only proof is in experiments with mice (which have taste buds very much like the 10,000 or so you and I have).
Wasps. U GA (Tifton): Wasps make fine drug sniffers. Wasps can be trained to “sniff” out a variety of smells (including narcotics) in just a few minutes. Then, when exposed to the smell, the whole canister of sensor wasps goes ballistic and sets off the cop alarm. Tho the bugs die off quickly (a couple of days), their short training period and ample abundance in nature should have the hounds worrying about their jobs. Note: Wasps sniff with antennae, not noses, and could detect all manner of toxic stuff. Now all we need is to improve wasp longevity.
Lost sight. People who lose their sight because of brain damage still retain an uncanny ability to correctly “guess” colors and shapes presented to them. Probably this is the result of other (non-sight) parts of the brain picking up signals from the eyes and (somehow) transmitting them to the cognizant (but non-sight) parts of the human consciousness.
Female stimuli. Well, duh … Stanford researchers have found that women have a more sensitive response to both positive and negative emotional stimuli than men (something to do with the prefrontal cortex). So women are more emotive … who’d have guessed?
Down pillows. U of Manchester: Down pillows actually host FEWER microorganisms than so-called hypoallergenic synthetic pillows. We humans contribute nearly a cup of moisture a night to our bedding, and also keep the whole mix nice and warm. No wonder millions of spores & fungi find cozy quarters in our bedding. It is not yet clear why the down pillows are less hospitable to the wee beasties … maybe it’s just because the bedding is of “higher quality” and more tightly woven.
Meso-America. There is increasing evidence that the epidemics following the Spanish arrival in Mexico (and earlier human mortality epics in meso-America) were related to an American hanta-virus-like outbreak, and were only exacerbated by the white man’s diseases like typhus. Climate records seem to corroborate this. Droughts cause the rodents to bunch up (and infect each other), and then the following wet spells disperse the rats & their pestilence.
Edible ink and paper. Apparently there is actually a restaurant in Chicago (Moto, 945 W Fulton Mkt) that prints pictures of food using edible ink on edible paper and sells the stuff for dinner. The ink is soy & the paper starch. Yum.
Monthly thought. My thought for the month: Proof is in the eyes of the beholder.
March 2006 Mr Science Newsletter
Abortion in the 70’s. Talk about controversy: A researcher has suggested that a good part of the drop in violent crime since the early 1990s was because of the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. By definition, aborted fetuses are unwanted. And it is indisputable that most criminals had less than optimal upbringing. The only missing (and probably unprovable) link is the idea that unwanted fetuses brought to term tend to have less than optimal upbringing after they are born and are more likely to turn criminal.
Cannibalism. More controversy: British scientist Simon Mead asserted (in 2003, via complex evolutionary genetics) that prehistoric humans widely practiced cannibalism. Basically, the theory is based on observed human resistance mechanisms for prion-type diseases (e.g., mad cow types of ailments) that he says could only have evolved if cannibalism were once common. The theory & the controversy continue, as anthropological data accumulate that he may be right. Waste not, want not?
fMRI brain scans. Neurologist Mark George & others in Charleston, SC are experimenting with fMRI brain scans as lie detectors, and the work seems promising. However, if the subject really believes the lie, then what? … In a related story, Jim Buchanan reports in the Jan 29 Asheville Citizen-Times that brain scans of subjects who were asked politically charged questions responded using the emotional parts of their brain and not the parts devoted to reason and logic. No surprise here.
Male anglerfish. The smallest vertebrate meets big mama: The male anglerfish (Photocorynus spiniceps) discovered in the Philippines is just 6.2mm (a quarter of an inch) long. It spends its life fused to its much larger female counterpart, which is up to half a million times greater in weight. In scientific terms, the male P. spiniceps is labeled a sexual parasite.
Bird avoidance model. A team from the Netherlands is developing a Bird Avoidance Model to predict the density and altitude of migrating birds so aircraft can fly around or over them. They combine weather data with bird observations, and are claiming some success. This is not so much about the poor birds as it is about saving aircraft & human lives. In the past 30 years bird collisions have cost 32 (human) lives & 25 aircraft for the USAF alone.
Harry Potter. Harry Potter keeps kids out of trouble: Emergency room visits declined 40% on weekends when the last two Harry Potter books were released, according to the Brit. Med. Journal.
Spinning pulsar. Green Bank Telescope News: The fastest spinning pulsar (a 12-mile wide collapsed star) rotates at about 43,000 rpm. By contrast, Earth rotates about .0007 rpm.
Siberian volcanoes. The Siberian volcanoes about 250 million years ago resulted in a lava flow about the size of the USA. Many lives were lost. Many species as well.
GPS shoes. Here is an idea Adidas is working on (really): Shoes with GPS computers that nudge your feet to indicate the proper direction to your destination.
Giant virus. Science catches up with the rest of us: A giant virus (Mimivirus) discovered in 2003 has mystified biologists because it seems to combine characteristics of viruses and bacteria. Hell, most of us could never tell the difference anyway.
Ants. Ants can’t do it twice: All males of the ant species mate and then die, leaving the females to carry on. Not totally unlike humans, when you think about it … on average, females do outlive males.
More ants. Speaking of ants: The queen of a tree dwelling ant Cataulacus oberthueri (aka Darth Vader) has 2 compound eyes & 3 simple eyes. The better to see you with.
Nature deficit disorder. Kids gotta play: A recent study of 9-year-olds found that the radius around the home where kids were allowed to play has decreased to one-ninth what it was in the 1970s. As a result, kids gain weight and know less about nature. Nature deficit disorder is how it has been characterized.
April 2006 Mr Science Newsletter
Causing global warming. If people cause global warming, then perhaps a lack of people can cause cooling. Europe's "Little Ice Age" may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague. From around 1500, Europe appears to have been gripped by a chill lasting some 300 years. Pollen and leaf data support the idea that millions of trees sprang up on abandoned farmland, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would have had the effect of cooling the climate, sez a team from Utrecht University, Netherlands.
Measurement of time. Measurement of time is becoming so accurate may need to rethink the definition of time. Since 1967 time has been defined by atomic transitions in Cesium rather than the rotation of the Earth. Since the Earth is slowing down slightly, atomic time gradually gets out of synch with Sun time. Nobody is sure what we’ll do about that. The old solution, leap seconds every so often, is no longer very practical because of the disruptions it causes. On top of that we will soon face another dilemma: Because of General Relativity, Earth’s time and gravitational fields get scrambled so that a clock runs faster by one part in 10 to the 16th power for every meter of increase in altitude. We’ll soon be measuring time that accurately. The trouble is, we can’t measure altitude that accurately. Nobody is sure what we’ll do about that either.
The Brain. Speaking of time: The brain has its own clock-like mechanism. Just as the brain rotates the image it gets from the retina (so trees don’t appear to grow sideways when you tilt your head), it also compensates for the difference between the speed of sound (about 750 mph) and the speed of light (about 670 million mph) at conversational distances, so the speakers lips (that we see) & sound (that we hear) appear synchronized. If it were not for this mechanism, the world would seem like one big badly dubbed movie. At long distances, like a guy hammering a nail a block away, this mechanism does not work, and the sight and sound appear out of synch (which for me feels just slightly creepy when I see it).
Kola Superdeep Borehole. Energy from Hell? The Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia is the world’s deepest borehole. Since the beginning of drilling in 1970, it was cored to a depth of 12.26 km (7.6 miles). The Russians gave up after 24 years, mostly because of the high temperatures ... reaching 180°C (356°F) ... much higher than the expected 100°C (212°F). As fossil fuel gets more expensive, drilling for energy will become more attractive. In many parts of the world it is already a practical energy source. Since the deepest borehole is only 12.26 km deep, and the Earth's diameter is 12,756 km (7,926 miles), there is a lot we don't know about what lies beneath.
Scintilla and science. Can scintillia* & science mix? Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine (soft-core erotica), took over Discover magazine in March 2006. O My.
* This word was invented by Tom Lerher (I think) & means “stuff that is scintillating.”
I am surprised it has not entered the wider lexicon.
May 2006 Mr Science Newsletter
Allergies. Its allergy season again, when some of our immune systems get confused and start reacting to ragweed like it was leprosy. According to that premier medical journal, National Geographic Magazine, people with allergies “… should have moved a cow into their living room.” That’s right: Farm kids have fewer allergies later in life than non-farm people. The theory is that you chicken farmers & other agrarian types are assaulted with such numerous & diverse forms of micro-life, that your immune systems get smarter than the average immune system, and can therefore better tell the difference between harmless pollen, mold & spores; & the more dangerous stuff like influenza.
Male bats. Most ladies already know this, but it has now been scientifically proven that male bats, (and other species) with larger testicles have smaller brains. That is, for a given bat population, the larger the testes, the smaller the brain mass. The reason for this appears to be that female bats (like females of lots of other species, including many humans) tend to have multiple mates. With sperm from many mates present at one time, the reproductive advantage belongs to the guy with the most numerous and vigorous swimmers (i.e., the one with the biggest cajones). Since bats gotta fly, it is particularly important that the weight gain in the testes be balanced by weight loss elsewhere, and apparently it is brain mass that is sacrificed. For some bat types, testes represent nearly 10% of their body weight. Think about that next time you pick up a 15 lb turkey from the supermarket. (Syracuse U).
Vegans. Vegans want us all to stop using animal products, but never explain what to do with the billions of farm critters that will be left over when they finally get their way (the vegan’s way, that is). The Svensk Biogas Company in Sweden has the answer: turn them into fuel (the animals, that is, not the vegans). Until recently they used only cow manure to produce methane. But they have now invented a method to grind up and utilize the entire cow. According to my calculations, the Swedish train that runs on this stuff gets 2.5 miles/cow. Similar gas plants are in operation in the USA (mostly using poultry parts, not entire animals), but they don’t run the trains.
Shared birthdays. It is sort of counter-intuitive, but statistically true nonetheless, that in a group of just 23 people, odds are better than even (>50%) that at least two of the people will share the same birthday (not year, of course). In a group of 200 it is a virtual certainty (99.9...9% with 25 “9s”).
Batteries. Batteries could be going extinct. Capacitors store electrical charges on metal plates and can be recharged with virtually no wear. Batteries store electricity via chemical reaction and wear out after a while. Capacitors are used all the time in electronics but are too weak for most conventional battery applications. Now MIT scientists have developed carbon nanotubes that may boost capacitor capacities to battery-like levels and eventually replace many of today’s batteries.
Sound waves. It has been hypothesized that sound waves produce the “missing” energy that allows supernova stars to explode. Physical models seem to confirm this. Maybe it really is “music of the spheres” that creates the calcium & iron in us. (U Arizona).
Taking breaks. We all knew this, but now science tells us it’s true: We are more efficient if we take a break now & then. Electronic brain monitoring at MIT has shown that brains in rats & people work better when given breaks between learning experiences so the brain can “replay” each lesson and learn it better. Research in the Netherlands seems to confirm this … people were given identical information to study and were then asked to make complex decisions. One group was told to read the material for 4 minutes, then rest 10 minutes, then make the decisions. Another group was told to study the material for 14 minutes then make the decisions. The group that took the rest got the best scores. Sleep on that.
June 2006 Mr Science Newsletter
Asteroid. A large fragment of an asteroid that punched a 100 mile-wide hole in the Earth's surface has been found. The pillow-sized fossil meteorite was dug out of the 145-million-year-old Morokweng crater in South Africa. It is a unique discovery because large objects (but not necessarily smaller ones) were widely believed to completely melt or vaporize as they collided with Earth. This one apparently didn't. (University of Witwatersrand & BBC).
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. Three years of data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have confirmed “with unprecedented precision” the Big Bang Expansion model of the birth of our universe. In this theory, the universe began with an inflationary epoch of exponential growth that stretched the cosmos by at least 22 orders of magnitude within less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second some 14 billion years ago … (the late Carl Sagan would have loved this). After about 380 thousand years the universe had finally cooled enough to change rather abruptly from opaque plasma to a transparent gas of neutral hydrogen and helium. Footnote: WMAP measures the background radiation pattern in the universe with incredible accuracy. Anisotropy is just a fancy word meaning “not isotropic,” that is, not uniform. (Physics Today & NASA).
Our senses. “We know that what appears to our senses as empty space is in reality a richly dynamical medium, full of symmetry-breaking fields, condensates, and virtual particles.” Frank Wilczek, MIT.
Osteoarthritis. Scientists are devising a way to monitor the progression of osteoarthritis - by listening to a patient's knee. (I don’t have arthritis … just a cartilage tear … to be repaired June 7, 2006). A University of Central Lancashire team plan to harness a technique called acoustic emission, used by engineers to detect unsafe buildings and bridges, to listen to arthritic joints. The aim is to develop a hand-held device for doctors to use to analyze the high-frequency noises emitted by old creaky knees &c. (BBC)
Cosmic radiation. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to extended manned space missions is cosmic radiation. Galactic cosmic rays come from supernovas — exploding stars — outside our galaxy, and they often travel close to the speed of light. They can be any element (up to the atomic weight of iron), but because they have lost or gained electrons, they are said to be ionized, meaning that they carry a negative or positive charge. Elements with the greatest atomic weight are the most dangerous to astronauts. Nobody so far knows exactly how to overcome this problem. (Discover, NASA)
NASA’S SOHO. NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite can see thru the sun and anticipate solar storms (magnetic anomalies that cause all kinds of havoc for electronics) while they are on the far side of the Sun. The Sun rotates about once a month & up to now there was no way of knowing what was going on the side facing away from us. The way to "see thru" the sun is with sound. Every second about 7,000 California-size bubbles of hot plasma rise to the surface of the sun and pop, creating sound waves. As the waves reverberate through the interior, they reflect off the surface of the sun's far side before returning to the front, where they create a slight ripple that SOHO's instruments can detect. Sound waves speed up when they hit a magnetically active region on the back side, so if they return to the front a bit sooner than normal, that means a magnetic storm is brewing.
Surface temperature records. Had you heard the global warming debate issue about surface temperature records being inconsistent with upper air surface temperature records? This apparent discrepancy was much debated (especially by global warming skeptics). But according to a May 2, 2006 report by the US Climate Change Science Program Office, the problems have been mostly resolved and indeed the human influence on climate warming is real. Two things led to this conclusion: Better data and better climate prediction models. It’s not all perfect yet, but the writing is on the wall: Al Gore is probably not too far off the mark. Footnote: The editor of the report (Tom Karl) was my assistant for several years & I co-authored his first climate paper with him. Sometimes I miss work. (AGU & NOAA)
July 2006 Mr Science Newsletter – Biggest to smallest edition
Science and theology. Science & theology are mixing as never before. A new book “The Cosmic Design: String Theory & the Illusion of Intelligent Design” by string theorist Leonard Susskind, raises the possibility that one of two things may be true, neither of which is testable: On the one hand, there may be some 10 to the 500 power (that’s a one followed by 500 zeroes) universes out there, all having different laws of physics (this huge number is an estimate of the number of possible combinations & permutations of the most fundamental physical constants). In that scenario, we happen to be in the one universe where life like us is possible. On the other hand, we may be in the only universe there is, in which case, some Intelligent Designer probably fine tuned the laws of physics just for us.
Nanotechnology. Nanotechnology refers to really tiny stuff (one-billionth of a meter scale) that actually works, but can be seen only with an electron microscope. Size-wise, a nanometer is to a grape what a grape is to the Earth. Wavicles are particles that also behave as waves (i.e., they “vibrate” at a certain frequency). A photon is one such particle … of light or electromagnetic energy … which has zero mass (i.e., zero weight) and is really just a little bundle of energy. Electrons are wavicles too, but they have mass. A new critter (to me) is the Quantum Dot (QD): a class of nanocrystal, (a few atoms at most) so confined and isolated that the removal or addition of a single electron can be detected. QDs can also absorb/emit a single photon. Because of these properties, it will likely be possible to build incredibly small computers (and make incredibly powerful big computers) with QDs. Interesting footnote: Electrons can “tunnel” from one dot to another in such a way that a single electron can exist in two dots at the same time. (Physics Today)
Fiber-optic cable. A small nanotech company, OmniGuide Fibers, has developed a new type of fiber-optic cable that is basically a long skinny flexible tube coated inside with a flexible (and here is the trick: nearly perfect) mirror so it can perform feats such as laser surgery & communications with unheard-of efficiency. (Fortune, of all places). If scientists ever figure out a way to string carbon nanotubes together, we will have material 50 times stronger than steel, and can carry a thousand times the electricity. (U Tex)
Leidenfrost effect. A tiny mechanical device that may have applications like cooling computers has been demonstrated at the U of Oregon. It uses the Leidenfrost effect to move a small droplet of liquid along a sawtooth surface … mechanical motion that transports liquid using only heat. The principle, named for Johann Leidenfrost who first quantified it, says that at a certain temperature (the Leidenfrost point), a droplet of liquid on a hot surface no longer just evaporates, but rather forms a vapor barrier and skips across the hot surface for a time before vaporizing. Cooks who spit on the griddle to see if it’s hot enuf know about this, tho they may not know its name. The Leidenfrost point for water on a clean brass surface is 392 deg F. Amusing footnote: Leidenfrost, in German, means something like suffering frost.
Bird flu. We have heard a lot about bird flu, tho no American has got it (yet) and it is not a pandemic (yet). Here’s a pandemic that has occurred, but has not been much in the news: Arsenic poisoning due to contaminated groundwater in the Ganges Delta in India and Bangladesh. On neurological examination, arsenic-typical neuropathy was diagnosed in 63% of the adults, a prevalence previously seen only in severe, sub-acute exposures. Some 30 to 60 million people have been exposed. (WHO)
Dermestid beetle. The dermestid beetle that eats only dead flesh is often used by scientists to clean old bones. Among other things, such bones can be used in climate research.
August 2006 Mr Science Newsletter – One Year Anniversary Edition
Fruit flies. A year ago we learnt that, when kept moist, fruit flies can live for a day without their heads. Now consider this: Playing recordings of male fruit fly mating calls is a successful way to lure females into the traps. This increases the efficiency of traps by not clogging them up with males who can't lay eggs anyway. Experiments with cheap thermoacoustic devices (converting heat directly to sound) promise to lower costs dramatically when compared to amplifier-speaker systems. (Physics Today)
Colloquial and scientific theories. There are colloquial theories & scientific theories. A proposition is not a scientific theory unless it is testable and can, by experiment or observation, be proven false. The theory of evolution is a durable scientific theory. It is tested all the time and can be observed (e.g., when we perform selective breeding to produce bizarre creatures like Chihuahuas). Intelligent design is not a scientific theory because it cannot be proven that there is no "intelligent designer." So to debate the matter is really kind of silly. Most durable scientific theories (like Newton's laws) are eventually proven to operate only under certain circumstances and are, in fact, proven to be false at some space-time scales.
Stars. Stars form when gravity forces interstellar gas into clumps of "burning" gas. Burning is in quotes because the process is really a nuclear reaction where mass in converted to energy. For our Sun, this is the energy that powers the Earth. As the fuel is used up, the central core of the star contracts further, while the outer layer of hot gas expands to a "Red Giant", 10 to 100 times the size of the original star, and is eventually dissipated into space. During the Sun's Red Giant phase, in about 5 billion years, our Earth will be burnt to a cinder, and the central core will become a White Dwarf about the size of the Earth, but 300,000 times more dense. This process describes the life cycle of stars up to 8 times the mass of our Sun. For stars greater than 8 times the size of the Sun, the core contracts to the point where negatively charged electrons are pressed against positively charged protons, thus producing neutrons & a super-dense Neutron Star. In this process, the outer layers are blown away in a Supernova Explosion. For stars more than 25 times the mass of the Sun, the core is believed to collapse into a black hole & is never seen again.
AMS and Katrina. It is somewhat ironic that the American Meteorological Society Conference on Hurricanes & Tropical Meteorology for April 2006 had to be rescheduled in Monterey vs. New Orleans because the hotel had been destroyed by Katrina. (AMS)
Islam and Life in Space. Also in April 2006 the Malaysian Space Agency held a 2-day conference on “Islam and Life in Space.” It resulted in a computer program called “Muslims in Space” that will tell a Malaysian scientist on the space station when to pray and in what general direction he should nod. In orbit, traveling 17,500 miles per hour, where the day is 90 minutes long and kneeling is impractical, some adjustments in Islamic ritual (5 prayers a day facing Mecca) are called for. (Discover)
Sloppy September 2006 Mr Science Newsletter (I’ve been on vacation mode & skipped the citations this month).
Earth’s magnetic poles. The magnetic poles of the Earth flip round in an irregular way every 330,000 years or so. About 60 such reversals have been found in the geological record over the past 20 million years. What happens is: The magnetic field weakens, disappears for a few thousand years, then reappears in a way that your old compass would now point south rather than north. Here’s the interesting part: We’re overdue for a reversal (the last one was 780,000 years ago), and the magnetic field has been fading at a decreasing rate for the past 140 years. It will disappear in 2,000 more years if the current trend continues. This will allow more cosmic radiation to reach the Earth & will render magnetic compasses useless. Don’t worry: Life on Earth has survived lots of these, but still: it should be interesting.
Food stamps. More Wal-Mart bashing: Penn State economists claim that food stamp usage doubles in counties with new Wal-Marts. They think maybe the small businesses that go out of business are the cause. I wonder: Maybe Wal-Marts just attract poor people. Like a magnet.
Female sex drive. A woman's sex drive begins to plummet once she is in a secure relationship. Researchers from Germany found that virtually all the 30-year-old women surveyed wanted regular sex at the start of a new “secure” relationship, but after four years, less than half wanted regular sex. Conversely, the team found a young adult male's libido remained the same regardless of how long he had been in a relationship. Did we really need scientists to tell us this?
More global warming. In the past month (as in nearly every month), more indicators of global warming have been found: Increasing melting at both poles & increased intense precipitation. The rain thing happens because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. Likewise, hurricanes have become more intense (because warmer sea temperatures make for more intense tropical cyclones … which are quite literally, heat engines).
Hurricanes. Speaking of hurricanes, some scientists in NJ have suggested using pumps to bring cooler water to the surface to reduce the severity of hurricanes. Or maybe, they say, we should tow icebergs into the path of an intensifying storm to cool the water.
Speech. There is a respectable theory that suggests the following: Human speech evolved from human music … namely mating calls. That is, the score preceded the lyrics. I ask each of you to consider your own adolescent years (adolescence = maturity in prehistoric times) and think about this question: Did the mating call come before the grocery list? I’m betting on the mating call. Generally it is a lot easier to find some grub(s) than a mate.
Consuming wine. More than a decade ago we were told that drinking red wine in moderation can lower your risk for a heart attack. Now, new results suggest that white wines protect the heart just as well, at least in rats. The study, which was partially funded by the grape industry, suggests that more heart-protective chemicals exist in grapes than scientists had suspected.
October 2006 Mr Science Newsletter
Gold in the core. Using the relationships between atomic weight, mineral abundance & other Earth science variables, Bernard Wood of Macquarie Univ in Australia has calculated that there is enough gold in the Earth’s core to cover our planet’s surface to a depth of 18 inches of pure gold. Sadly, bore holes couldn’t even get close to it tho.
Comet-like gas ball. Two years ago astronomers found a giant comet-like gas ball (Abell 3266) moving at 1.8 million mph (away from us, thankfully) through a cluster of galaxies 864 light years away. The thing is so big that it would engulf 5 billion of our solar systems in one gulp. At 83 million degrees F, it does not emit visible light, but has been studied via x-ray radiation using a European Space Agency satellite. As it spins off one solar mass per hour, it provides new information on how stars & galaxies are created.
Vehicular accidents. Pseudo-scientific observations: We seem more fearful lately of things like terrorism and nuclear energy (which, in spite of the horrors, have caused comparatively few deaths), while paying much less attention to more probable risks such as motor vehicle accidents. Anna Quindlen wonders if we are breeding “a generation enveloped by a black miasma of imminent disaster” where “the drumbeat of danger becomes persistent white noise, unremarked, unheeded … while once everything was unspoken, now it seems everything is out there.” Well, I think we humans simply tend to like horror stories, murder mysteries, & that ilk. We’ll take whatever news the networks are offering at the moment & morph it into a real life horror-mystery mode.
Follow-up hurricanes. Following up on a theme from last month, the August 2006 issue of Physics Today has a good article on hurricanes and sea surface temperatures. Basically, a hurricane is a big heat engine that transfers energy from the ocean to the atmosphere. The theoretical physical relationship says that, all else being equal (and all else is seldom if ever actually equal), maximum storm wind speed is proportional to the square root of the sea surface temperature. So, while the details might be messy, nobody should be surprised if warmer seas induce stronger storms.
Ants counting. Ants can count. Like many other insects, they use the sun (polarized sunlight, actually) to determine direction. And they count their steps (like a pedometer) to calculate distance.
Antikythera Mechanism. In 1901 a shoebox-sized gearbox (the Antikythera Mechanism) was recovered from a 2,000 year old Greek shipwreck. Now, physicists from Athens University & Cardiff University have determined that the bronze-geared device (with about 30 gears & 2,000 Greek characters) was a kind of astronomical computer. One wonders what other wonders the ancients had figured out.
Scotland wine. If climate modelers are right & the climate zones in the Northern Hemisphere are shifting northward, Scotland may someday be prime wine grape country. I’ve some Tartan Wines meself, so was not surprised by this bit of prognostication.
November 2006 Mr Science Newsletter
Life in ancient ice cores. Back in 1970, nobody believed there would be life in ancient ice cores from Antarctica (where the air temps of 75 deg below zero Fahrenheit are common). But beginning in the 1970s with work by Russian scientist SS Abyzov, well aged bacteria, fungi, and other life forms as ancient as 250 million years old have been revived by various means (Abyzov used a broth of potato soup & yeast). One possible realistic application of this technology: Finding extraterrestrial life. Another less realistic idea: “Time travel” by humans via freezing & thawing (which works now only for small human embryos). (AGU)
Space travel. There is a big brouhaha in space science now because the Bush administration wants to give higher priority to manned space exploration as opposed to un-manned. Three senior NASA science advisors have been fired or quit over it. One way to look at the issue is the way Stephen Hawking seems to: The Earth is our only home, and when something goes wrong with Earth (as it probably will, though nobody knows when … it could be billions of years in the future), we’ll need space travel to find another home.
How things work. Did you know that there are comprehensive computer models that can explain & predict the way nuclear weapons work, but not one to explain how a bicycle works? A British physicist is well on his way to remedying that. And it’s very complex. (Physics Today) Also, some college girls have invented a bicycle that teaches budding cyclists how to ride on the very first try. They simply put a spinning gyro in the front wheel.
Searching for tumors. Duke University researchers have used a computer-based Google-like approach to automatically search mammograms for tumors. They used thousands of scanned images, with and without tumors, to “teach” the program how to recognize malignancies. In their tests the computer was as accurate as the manual method, and four times faster. (Physics Today)
Hawaiian earthquake. The recent Hawaiian earthquake reminds: though continental drift is a well worn theory today, it was controversial well into the 1960s. The term Plate Tectonics was not even coined until the mid 1960s. But now we know (as well as such things can be known) that the Earth’s land masses have drifted together (into one huge continent) and broken apart again about three times in the last billion years or so. And they’ll probably drift together again about 250 million years from now. The rate of movement averages a few inches a year, and is similar in magnitude to the growth rate of your fingernails.
Floating continents. This whole idea of continents floating about on the mantle of the Earth was first formally proposed by German meteorologist Alfred Wegener in a book in 1915. Meteorologists, you see, are used to stepping back and watching things move about on maps. Geologists thought he was crazy, but that did not seem to bother him, even though he died long before his theory was accepted. Others who more-or-less got it right were the ancient Hawaiians, who thought the volcano god Pele moved southward from island to island over the eons. Actually, the Earth’s crust is moving northward over a “hot spot” in the mantle, long ago creating the ancient extinct volcanoes in the north (Kauai is 5.5 million years old), and also creating the current active volcanism in the south (on the Big Island of Hawaii, that’s only 700,000 years old). Like sliding a big pot across a hot burner.
December 2006 Mr Science Newsletter
Scientists and Engineers for America. Thousands of "people of science" (like that phrase?) have started a non-partisan (tho probably mostly liberal) PAC called "Scientists and Engineers for America," http://www.sefora.org, after becoming concerned by statements like this from the soon-to-be former Sen. George Allen (R, VA): “There is little evidence linking global warming to human activity.” For the record: There is lots of evidence linking global warming to human activity. The confusion is probably a misunderstanding of the difference between evidence & proof. The prevalence of scientifically unreasonable assertions in our national discourse is one reason why about 7,000 people so far have joined eight Nobel laureates in this effort to assure that scientific voices are heard in important debates. It was probably all the press coverage of his “Macaca” crack more than his silly physics that brought down Allen. But there is no proof of that. Just evidence.
Foxes and goshawks. Conventional wisdom holds that predators tend to pick off the very young, very old, sick, or injured. But (sez a U MD study) the most likely victims of foxes & goshawks in prairie dog country are healthy virile male prairie dogs. At least during mating season, when said prairie dogs are preoccupied with other things and become easy prey for predators. One suspects this is poetically true for many species. Us included.
Homosexual critters. Do penguins dream of roasting in hell? The Oslo Natural History Museum now has an exhibition on homosexuality among animals. While homosexuality would not at first seem to promote propagation of the fittest, it appears to do no harm and may actually help in some circumstances. For example, a pair of gay male birds may rear eggs "donated" by a female. In the case of flamingos, two males can hold a much larger territory than a regular flamingo pair, thus more chicks can grow up. In some colonies, as many as one in ten pairs of penguins may be same-sex, while in some animals the whole species is bisexual … bonobo chimpanzees for example. (BBC)
Plankton. Most of us have heard of little life forms called plankton (both plants & animals) that drift about in the sea. But seeing all the leaves blowing around this past fall reminded: There are also things called Aeolian Plankton, which are little plants & animals that float in the air. Some are not so little. The spider Nephila Maculata, (which with legs extended can more than cover a hand) spins a balloon-like web as a juvenile and floats from place to place thru the air.
Earthquake deaths. Grisly as it may sound, predictions of the numbers of deaths from specific earthquakes can now be made in real-time, as the earthquake is occurring. Data from satellites, census statistics, and seismometer networks can be combined to provide estimates of the number of fatalities for given geographic area for specified periods of time. These estimates can then be used to estimate what disaster assistance may be necessary. In the Bam, Iran earthquake series of seven events on December 26, 2003, about 28,000 deaths were predicted & 23,000 were observed. (AGU)
January 2007 Mr Science Newsletter.
Understanding mental health. Dr. Nora Volkow, the Director of the National Institutes of Drug Abuse (part of the National Institutes of Health), has contributed to our understanding of mental health by revealing the similarities among different types of addictive behavior. She says that most of us have the potential for becoming addicted to something under certain circumstances, regardless of our willpower. Her list of possible addictions includes (among other things): Alcohol, nicotine, drugs, gambling, sex, and food. The theory: As we understand treatment for any one of these disorders, the results will be applicable to the others. (1/1/07 Newsweek)
Weight Loss. Wanna lose weight? Head for the tropics. The rotation of the Earth causes a centrifugal force that, as you head toward the equator, tries more and more to spin you off the surface. This speed of the rotation is great enough to cause you to weigh one pound less at the equator than you would at the pole.
1791 telegraph system. It is an interesting coincidence that two historic communication events happened in the spring of 1791: The first practical demonstration of a visual telegraph system was conducted by Claude Chappe in France; and Samuel FB Morse was born in Massachusetts. The visual system used coded visible signals between towers to relay messages, and at one point there were about 1000 visual telegraph stations in Europe alone. Many “Telegraph Hills” still exist as place names (San Francisco, for example). The word itself (telegraph) was coined in France in 1794. We all know what changes to this semaphore-like system Morse wrought 50 years later.
“What hath God wrought” was first operational telegraph message ever sent, but the second was “Have you any news?” Looking at the potential of the telegraph in the late 1840s, James Gordon Bennett, ed. of The NY Herald, said “… newspapers must submit to destiny and go out of business.”
Snowball Earth. There is a theory called Snowball Earth that suggests the entire globe froze over about 635 million years ago. It has not been proved or disproved, but is gaining more respect. The first conference on the topic was last summer in Switzerland. Some firm evidence of low latitude glaciation at sea level has been found, and climate models say it is entirely possible. The mechanism is fairly simple: snow & ice reflect heat & cause further cooling in a runaway ice-reflection effect. To get out of the freeze (the theory goes), volcanoes have been the mechanism to add greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. (AGU)
Global warming. The friendly face of global warming has been pretty much ignored. It was even considered (by some climatologists I know) to be politically incorrect to discuss global warming’s benefits (plant life thrives when carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere) because of all the harm global warming will do (sea level rise, for example). But now a mainstream science publication, AGU’s EOS, Vol. 87, No. 48, 28 November 2006, has run an article, Preventing Another Ice Age, by Joseph Sternberg, that concludes global warming may protect the Earth from another ice age for the next 400,000 years. Ice ages happen every 100,000 years or so, and most researchers don’t think we’re due for another for tens of thousands of years. But …in the very cold spell we experienced in the 1970s, some climatologists suggested that the ice age process had already started.
February 2007 Mr Science Newsletter.
The naming of plants and animals. Scientific names for plants & animals are often honorifics based on the identity of a person who discovered the species and/or did significant research on it. A mollusk discovered by the modest and taciturn 1940’s era director of Buitenzorg Botanical Gardens, Karel Dammerman, was called Thiara Carolitaciturni, honoring both a standardized version of his name and his personality … a rare honor indeed. Similarly, fly geneticists have officially named the gene that causes offspring to be born with no external sex organs: The Ken & Barbie Gene.
Monitoring river and streams for flooding. The British (as they are wont to do) have invented a clever, cheap way to monitor rivers & streams for flooding. Stream gages (that measure water level with a float) tend to be expensive and trouble-prone. But video cameras (like those common cell phone devices) are cheap & reliable. So … the Brits are now experimenting with using computers to watch video images of stream level, and also gage the speed of flow by tracking flotsam, at 13 locations across Yorkshire. It works in a mode similar to camera-based speed traps, red-light tattlers & toll-booth scofflaw catchers. Big Brother may soon be watching everything.
Epigenetics. Epigenetics has recently taught us that successive generations can change their heredity without changing their gene structure. It’s done by heritable chemical markers (or switches) that can turn genetic features on or off. These epigenomes can be influenced by environmental factors like diet, types of predators, &c. And they can be durable: 70 generations in some worms. So your native instinct was right: Both nature and nurture create us and even influence our offspring.
Intuitive judgment:How reliable? The intuitive judgment we were born with is not always reliable. Demonstratively, at tiny scales of particle size, and at both small and large scales of distance, things can be at two places at the same time and exhibit time reversal. For “entangled” particles (including both light photons & atoms), the state of one particle at one time can be determined by occurrences that happen in the future to a particle some distance away. In 2006 this was shown to be possible for the first time using light and cesium atoms at a distance of a few feet. At least that is my understanding of these strange phenomena.
March 2007 Mr Science Newsletter.
The little ice age. The little ice age in Europe & N America occurred from roughly 1500 – 1700 & according to one theory (pub’d by AGU) was partly responsible for the booming sales of beaver pelts that so decimated the beaver population of that time. Later, in addition to coats, felt hats were also manufactured from the beaver pelts. In America, CT was one of the primary felt producing areas. Felt-making involved soaking fur with mercury nitrate, which poisoned many of the hat-makers & is responsible for the mad hatter sobriquet. Long Island Sound sediment cores still show elevated mercury levels 20 to 40 cm below the top of the sediment (covering the 1820 to 1900 era).
Women and dairy products. Women who consume dairy products are twice as likely to have twins as vegan mothers. Maybe it’s the hormones in the milk.
Weight issues. A friend once told me he thought it was no so much WHAT you ate, but HOW MUCH you ate that caused diet-related problems. Now an eight year experiment that followed 48,835 postmenopausal women has concluded about the same thing. Cutting fat from the diet does not reduce breast cancer, colorectal cancer, heart disease, or stroke. After concluding this $415 million dollar project, researchers are starting to focus instead on obesity. “The evidence base has become very strong that it’s being fat, not eating fat, that’s associated with risk.” (JAMA)
Olavius algarvensis. Olavius algarvensis is a Mediterranean worm that has no gastrointestinal tract. Instead it hosts subcutaneous (under the skin) symbiotic algae that process its food and waste for it. The high school biology teacher who supervised my worm dissection class would have been amazed.
Moore’s Law. Moore's Law (vintage 1965) seems safe for a while longer. It has been stated various ways, but in general equates to an average performance improvement in the computer industry as a whole of over 1% per week. Intel and U Cal. have announced a new laser-emitting chip design that will be 100 times faster than the present technology. It is basically a semiconductor that transmits both electricity and light. Bottom line: Download a feature-length movie in a few seconds.
What is a planet? This whole brouhaha over what is and is not a planet is getting ever dicier. Some planet-size objects have been found orbiting each other with no “parent sun” in sight. Nobody is quite sure what to call them … they are not stars & not planets, by conventional definitions. Planemos, for planetary mass objects, is one suggestion. I suggest Colops for cold, lonely planets. (U Toronto)
April 2007 Mr Science Newsletter.
Rising sea levels and global warming. According to an AGU report on a UN panel of 163 experts from 29 countries who met in Paris in June 2006, sea level rose about 17 mm (0.67 inches, 0.056 feet) per decade for the century up to 1991, and has averaged 32 mm (1.26 inches, 0.105 feet) per decade since. What part of this is attributable to global warming is not clear. If you know your elevation above mean sea level, you can make some guesses about when your property might be beach front. The most definitive sea level rise predictions vary from a few inches to a few feet by New Year’s Day 2100. But the fact is that climate modelers have not yet achieved much predictive ability for sea level. Worst case sea level rise (from US Geological Survey) if all glaciers & ice sheets melt: 80 meters (262 feet … but that would be centuries away, we hope).
Accidental oceanographic instruments. Meanwhile, other oceanographers were using flotsam to analyze the complexities of the currents in the North Pacific Ocean. Lots of stuff makes the trans-oceanic trip from China and other Asian countries to North America (and vice versa), and some of it spills overboard, usually in storms. When the time and place of such spillage is known, scientists can track the refuse and make inferences about oceanic circulation. Among these accidental oceanographic instruments: 80,000 Nike sneakers (2.5% recovered on beaches), 28,800 plastic turtles (3.3% recovered), and 10,224 sandals (Nike again). AGU.
Underwater sand dunes. Some of the world's largest underwater sand dunes were mapped in the Pacific Ocean off the San Francisco coast as part of a study to help researchers better understand beach erosion. The submerged dunes, called sand waves, are located just west of the Golden Gate Bridge, measure more than 30 feet high and 700 feet long, according to researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey. The sand waves were created by the displacement of sediment by powerful currents rushing through the mile-wide opening between the ocean and San Francisco Bay.
May 2007 Mr Science Newsletter.
Pirates and eye patches. The stereotypical pirate with an eye-patch has some historical precedent. Old fashioned navigation instruments such as astrolabes, cross-staffs, & quadrants, used up to the 18th & 19th centuries, required the navigator to sight directly on the sun with one eye, leading (after some years) to blindness in that eye for many a sailor. NB: Observing the Sun can be dangerous. The UV radiations can cause cataracts. Excessive visible light can burn the retina.
Elevated body temperatures. Darwinian evolutionary theory would seem to imply that fevers must serve some sort of benefit, otherwise why evolve them? The Roswell Park Cancer Institute seems to have an answer. Slightly elevated body temperatures are associated with temporary enhancement of our immune system. So maybe fever reducers are not such a great idea for mild fevers?
Vanillin. Vanillin is the main component of vanilla bean extract and is the main ingredient in vanilla flavoring. According to Discover, Japanese chemists have isolated vanillin from cow dung. Yum.
Salt plains. The world’s largest salt plain, Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia is just about the flattest place on Earth, with its relief varying less than 16 inches over 4,000 square miles. Coincidentally, the world’s largest “mangrove wetland” is also about 4,000 square miles in extent … the Sundarbans of the Bay of Bengal. When I was a kid in Florida we called them “mangrove swamps” … no longer politically correct, I guess. (Nat Geo).
Genetic basis. There appears to be a definite genetic basis to the concept known as "race." It results not from differences in the genes themselves, but from how the genes are “expressed.” A gene is a sequence of DNA that represents a fundamental unit of heredity. Gene expression is the process by which the gene is activated and the DNA code of that gene is translated into a specific protein which initiates the appearance of an inherited trait. U of Pennsylvania researchers are using this research to better understand the differences in disease occurrences among different racial types. Which is about the only constructive use I can think of for the idea of “race.”
Nano-liquid. A new clear nano-liquid has been developed that will stop bleeding. This will speed up surgery, since half the time can be spent controlling bleeding, and improve visibility, since the stuff is clear. (MIT)
Extreme global freezing. The theory that Earth once underwent a prolonged time of extreme global freezing (Snowball Earth) has been dealt a blow by new evidence that periods of warmth occurred during this era. Analyses of glacial sedimentary rocks in Oman, published online in Geology, have produced clear evidence of hot-cold cycles in the Cryogenian period, roughly 850-544 million years ago. The UK-Swiss team claims that this evidence undermines hypotheses of an ice age so severe that Earth's oceans completely froze over.
June 2007 Mr Science Newsletter.
Mission Moho. Mission Moho (an off-and-on project for decades) to drill completely through the Earth’s crust and into its mantle for the first time ever, is about 1500 meters (about a mile) deep with another 3000–3500 meters to go. “Full Crustal Penetration” is the rather risqué geological term for this feat. It is a challenge partly because the crust is thinnest on the ocean floor and thickest on land (up to 70,000 meters). So the drilling must be done at sea. Nobody knows exactly what we’ll find when we get to the mantle, as nobody has been there before. Molten rock, the magma that repaves the ocean floor every 100-200 million years, is expected. Only one ship in the world can accomplish this: D/V Chikyu (Earth in Japanese). No predicted date of completion has been released. (AGU)
Tampa Bay. AGU reports in “Sea Level Rise in Tampa Bay” (6 March 2007 EOS) that core samples from the bay bottom confirm: sea level has been rising there (as in other places) at a rate of about one inch per 25 years for the past 7,000 years. Maybe some locals who have been there over 50 years may have noticed the stains creeping a couple of inches up the sea walls. Nobody is really sure how much of that is sinking land … or … rising sea. But most evidence implies that rising sea is the dominant factor (although, as a practical matter, it really doesn’t matter).
Louisiana sea level. In Louisiana, the problem of sea level rise is compounded the actual sliding of the land into the Gulf of Mexico. Underground faults are causing this slippage, and GPS measured it at a rate of 6.5 inches of lateral movement in 2006. (AMS)
Shock waves. As an object moves through the air, it creates a series of pressure waves in front of it and behind it, similar to the bow and stern waves created by a boat. These waves travel at the speed of sound, and as the speed of the aircraft increases the waves are forced together, or compressed, because they cannot get out of the way of each other, eventually merging into a single shock wave at the speed of sound. This critical speed is known as Mach 1 and is approximately 1,225 kilometers per hour (761 mph) at sea level.
Telescoping nosepieces. Lockheed Martin & Gulfstream Aerospace have developed 25-foot telescoping nosepieces that reduce a sonic boom to a sonic puff. Actually, the device creates mini-booms that spread the compression wave (that causes the boom) over a span of about 0.3 seconds instead of concentrating the energy in one big boom. It’s kind of like the difference between putting the same flow of water in a shower instead of a jet. (Physics Today)
Dinka tribal herd boys. When they are out with the cattle, Dinka tribal herd boys of the Southern Sudan smear themselves and their animals with dried dung, which looks like ash. This protects against the sun, tsetse flies and other insects.
Weight of rain. Factoid I just calculated: When it rains one inch on my 4+ acre lot, the rain weighs about a million pounds.
July 2007 Mr Science Newsletter ... a little late this month.
Mr Science has been goofing off on vacation.
Developing civilizations. Here is an intriguing little theory: The complex of forces that led humans to develop civilizations about 7 thousand years ago included stabilization of sea level so that coastal cities could be sustained. After the last ice age, sea level increased rapidly … about 6 feet a century. That meant coastal communities had to keep moving. But about 7 thousand years ago, sea level stabilized and has since risen only a few inches per century. (AGU)
Puma cats. Puma (big South American cats), like people and other critters, get big before they grow up. Puma cubs will grow to the size of the mother and still be dependent on her for a full season of learning about hunting and other life skills.
Blindsight. Blindsight is the imperfect ability that some blind people have to “see.” Although the visual cortex in their brain may be damaged and they are unaware of any sight, another more primitive part of the brain can still sense certain visual images (such as the location of an object or an expression on a face) and somehow transfer that information to the conscious mind. That seems complementary to a theory of blindspots, where we might actually seem to perceive something, but it does not register on our conscious mind.
The evolving mind. Many of our conscious mind skills are acquired while growing up. The maturing mind is in effect an evolving mind. So it should not be surprising that, on average, well cared for kids do better than ill cared for kids. From the time the first brain cell is formed in a human fetus until early childhood, the brain grows at a rate of 250,000 cells a minute. Children have more nerve connections in their brains than do adults. One lesson from this is: Take good care of all our kids so they’ll grow into smarter adults. (WSJ)
There seems to be a well established belief among professional dog show judges that there are smart breeds (e.g., border collie) and less intelligent breeds (e.g., Afghan hounds). Maybe the collie brain is more evolved?
Mpemba effect. The Mpemba effect is a strange physical property of liquids where a hot liquid can cool to a given temperature more quickly than a cooler one. That is, under certain conditions, identical containers of the same liquid at different temperatures, put in the freezer at the same time, will freeze at different times, with the liquid that started out warmer being the first to freeze. The explanation of this seeming paradox is that the warmer liquid (being less dense & having more convection currents, as in the roil of boiling water) cools more efficiently than the cooler liquid, and the "momentum" of this convective property continues to provide a cooling advantage that is superior to the cooler, more quiescent sample of the liquid.
August 2007 Mr Science Newsletter
Laws vs. theories. According to recent issues of Physics Today (two articles & lots of letters), some scientists are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more. Their gripe is that some scientific principles, like theories of relativity, evolution, and plate tectonics, are so well established that they deserve to be called laws, just like Newton’s laws of motion & the law of gravity. But English, being stubbornly democratic, still calls these things theories, even though millions of experiments have failed to find any scientific evidence that the theories are not true. Scientific publishers are being urged to fix this! We shall see.
Bee fly. Speaking of theories … Just for fun an entomologist named Neal Evenhuis has named a new species of bee fly he discovered: Phthiria Relativitae … pronounced “Theory o’ Relativity”. How did he get away with it? He submitted his paper to a non-English language journal (Polish, as it happens) and flew in under the radar. I don’t know how to pronounce Evenhuis.
Operational weather forecasts. The world’s first operational weather forecasts were made by British naval officer Robert FitzRoy in the early 1860s, when the USA was otherwise distracted. He even coined the term “weather forecast,” though that by itself probably didn’t take much imagination. The (short) list to whom the forecasts were routinely telegraphed is revealing: the Times, Lloyd’s & the Shipping Gazette, the Board of Trade, Admiralty, the Horse Guards, and (of all things): the Humane Society. How Brit. (AMS)
Body cells. Who am I? Of the 100 trillion cells in the human body, only about 10% are actually human. The other 90% are symbiotic (or in some cases parasitic) critters like bacteria & fungi that are (mostly) unknowingly employed by us to keep things running. (Discover)
Atoms. Richard Feynman, one of several great physicists of the 20th century, wrote in the introduction to his “Lectures in Physics” that if he had to summarize all he knew of physics in one brief, simple sentence, it would be: “All things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”
September 2007 Mr Science Newsletter.
Solar variability. A Danish physicist, Henrik Svensmark, thinks that in addition to the well known greenhouse effect, solar variability may be a global warmer. His theory is that cosmic radiation provides cloud condensation nuclei (i.e., cosmic cloud seeding). When the Sun is active, we get less cosmic radiation, and thus (the theory goes) less clouds & warmer temperatures. Clouds have always been a big challenge for climate modelers. If Svensmark’s idea proves to have any merit at all (and so far it does not seem to), climate modelers would have yet another layer of complexity to deal with. To date, however, Sun-climate connections have not proven to be particularly significant in observed warming. And trends in cloud cover are not well documented.
Greenhouse gases. Interesting twist: A recent study reveals that a reduction in the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere led to a significant decrease in global temperatures 34 million years ago, which may have caused many amphibians and reptiles in North America to become extinct. The global temperature drop was about 15 degrees F spread over several hundred thousand years. Natural biotic and geologic processes likely caused the greenhouse gas fluctuations. (AMS & Nature)
Planck length. How big is infinity (and how small)? The Planck length is approximately 1.6 × 10−35 meters. It is the scale at which ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. The Planck time is the time it would take a photon (light particle) traveling at the speed of light to move across a distance equal to the Planck length. This ‘quantum of time’ is equal to approximately 10-43 seconds. Within the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, we can say only that the universe came into existence when it already had an age of 10-43 seconds. The estimated radius of the observable universe is about 46 billion light-years or 2.7 × 1061 Planck lengths. And the age of the universe is thought to be about 14 billion years. Thus, above and below those lengths and times, the concept of infinity is a mathematical abstraction without any current physical meaning.
The organs in lungs. Here is a little factal (I’ll define factal as a fact that is not intuitively obvious, but is nonetheless true): The organs in lungs that exchange oxygen in and carbon dioxide out are little semi-spherical nodules (or sacs) called alveoli (singular: alveolus). Their total combined surface area in the typical human is larger than a tennis court. A full court is 36 ft x 75 ft, or 2700 sq ft … a good sized house.
Lenin’s quote. Lenin said: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” One of the great things about science is that all claims are always open to testing and verification. This purported quote from Lenin shows how much he understood human nature, as well as how little he understood science.
A dwarf planet. The International Astronomical Union has decided what to call poor Pluto: A dwarf planet. To add insult to injury, it has recently been established that another dwarf planet, Eris (formerly called Xena) is actually about 27% more massive than Pluto.
October 2007 Mr Science Newsletter.
Einstein in school. Contrary to popular notions, Einstein never failed math at school, but overall he was not a star student either. He failed a physics lab course in college, partly for missing class and partly for conducting unauthorized experiments (one caused an explosion). He resented authority, which was interpreted as a behavioral problem in German culture, and went so far as to temporarily drop out of high school. And, he was not good at language arts. In his high school exams he got C’s in French. (Einstein, by Isaacson, 2007)
Schwarzschild radius Earth. The Schwarzschild radius is a length associated with a given mass where, if the mass were compressed to fit within that radius, no known force could stop it from continuing to collapse into a gravitational singularity known as a black hole. For the Earth, that radius is about a third of an inch. So if our planet were squeezed into the size of a grape, it could become a black hole. When this result of the general theory of relativity was figured out in the midst WWI (during which the unfortunate Schwarzschild died on the eastern front), it was thought to be a mathematical aberration. But in modern times the existence of black holes has been pretty much confirmed. It is inspiring to think that during his spare time, this artillery soldier was pondering such things.
Gamers and surgeons. Beth Israel Medical Center (NY) research has shown that laparoscopic surgeons, who use tiny cameras & remote instruments inserted into the body, were more efficient at their work if they’d played a lot of video games in their youth. This is no surprise. But it is a bit unsettling to realize that video games have been around long enough for the gamers to become surgeons. Seems like only yesterday that Mario invaded our homes. (Archives of Surgery)
Hurricanes in strange places. In March 2004 hurricane Catarina became the first hurricane ever observed in the South Atlantic Ocean (south of the equator). Then in 2005, hurricane Vince became the first tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in continental Spain. Could global warming be the culprit? Maybe, but the news is not all bad. NOAA & U of Miami researchers say (in 2007) that changes in wind shear (i.e., differences between low level and high level winds) over the tropics could moderate the effect that global warming may have in increasing hurricane activity. AMS
Newton’s apple. The metric unit of force is the Newton, which is roughly 3.6 ounces of force. Weight, you see, is a force … mass times gravity directed downward toward the center of the Earth. It is (mildly) amusing & ironic that the approximate average weight of the smallest commercially sold apple is about 1 Newton.
November 2007 Mr Science Newsletter.
Cold-weather-related deaths. Cold-weather-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics. But does that mean that the increased death rate by heat resulting from global warming will be offset by decreased death rates for cold weather? Conflicting results have been obtained in various research projects. Harvard found that the increase in heat deaths would likely be greater than the reduction in cold deaths. But a European study showed the opposite. Sociological research tends to be this way. There are so many factors involved that teasing out details can be a problem.
Reading test. Here is a little test for which there are really no wrong answers:
Which of these sentences is easiest & hardest to read?
1. Firstthereisthisonethathasallitspartsandtheyareallintheproperorder.
2. Thn thr s ths lttl xmpl f a sntnc wtht vwls, knd f lk Hbrw.
3. Fllaniy tehre is tihs smalpe wrehe the lretets are all hree, jsut not in oredr in the mdilde of the wdros.
Could you read them all fairly well? I wrote them so I am not an objective judge. But I think 1 is the hardest & 2 & 3 are about the same. My one single objective test subject said she thought 1 was hardest, 2 easiest. Damn robust, that language thing.
Religion and science collide. Religion and science often collide, sometimes in unexpected ways. Various American Indians have objected to having instruments like seismometers located on their lands to measure earthquake activity, considering such activity inappropriate, disrespectful, and even sacrilegious. Geophysical researchers have developed a 12-step protocol for dealing with such matters and have held workshops to find ways around the problem. (AGU)
New facts vs. old theories. In the culture of science, it is a virtue to change your opinion when faced with new facts that contradict old theories. By contrast, in some sociopolitical cultures such behavior is considered a vice.
Ice age now? Global warming notwithstanding, we are in something of an ice age now. Large scale ice sheets have advanced & retreated for the past 2 million years or so, but for the 100 million years before that, the poles didn’t have year-round ice caps. One rare but spectacular phenomenon associated with these cycles is the breaching of huge dams, as the ice melts, with resultant flooding of catastrophic proportions. Geological records show such occurrences in the Washington – Idaho – Montana area near the end of the last minor glacial period about 15,000 years ago; in the English Channel twice in the past half million years; and in the straight of Gibraltar about 6 million years ago. A flood of this type through the Bosporus into the Black Sea 7 thousand years ago may be origin of biblical flood accounts. (Physics Today)
December 2007 Mr Science Newsletter.
Bacteria species. One reason that not much is known about the roughly 700 different species of bacteria that make their homes in human mouths is the cost and difficulty of culturing them in a lab. Now Stanford University researchers have built a micro-lab that can study one bacillus at a time, hence, no need for growing cultures. Made of tiny pipes, valves, pumps, reaction chambers & computers, the chip-size lab (about an inch square) can do lots of the prep work for DNA analysis, and may facilitate study of the 99% of the Earth’s bacteria that have never been cultured. (Physics Today)
Echolocation. Echolocation is using sound or ultrasound echoes (higher tones than humans can hear) to navigate and find prey. In 1778 it was proven that bats can echolocate, but it was not until 1960 that echolocation in dolphins was proven. Bats use their mouth (or sometimes nose) to project the sound, while dolphins use a click generator below their blowhole and project the sound through their head. Though externally quite different (bats have big ears, dolphins have no protruding ears), the internal workings the hearing mechanisms of bats & dolphins are quite similar to each other … and to humans. (Physics Today)
Liquid crystals. The use of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) is common now, but liquid crystals themselves have been around forever: in snail slime, silk, insect wings, milk, and even DNA & hair cells in our inner ear. But in spite of their name, liquid crystals are not crystals and they need not be liquid … they are “orientationally ordered soft matter.” This politically-correct-sounding moniker simply implies that their molecules can take various positions, but are always oriented in the same direction. By contrast, a true crystal contains molecules whose orientation and position always remain constant. When neither orientation nor position is constant we call the substance … liquid. (Physics Today)
Eye movements. Our eyes are constantly in motion, even during visual fixation. Boston University researchers have found that these eye movements likely constitute an effective sampling strategy by which the visual system enhances the processing of fine spatial detail. In other words, because the eyes are vibrating, we see details we otherwise would not see. http://www.journalofvision.org/7/9/591/
Stem cell ethics. "Nonpresidential" is an odd new word that has crept into bio-lab usage. When the US government decided in 2001 that it would not spend any money on new embryonic stem cell lines, little thought was given to how, exactly, research lab accounting procedures could be tweaked to assure adherence to the letter of the law. Different labs have taken different approaches when studying new and unapproved stem cells, with some setting up entirely separate nonpresidential facilities, and others labeling different parts of the lab and its equipment nonpresidential ... right down to "NP" stickers on the trash cans. http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=14741
Mr Science Newsletter, January 2008.
First scientific society. Science as we know it is a fairly new enterprise. The world’s first scientific society (relating to what we would call science) was founded in Naples in 1560 by a fellow named della Porta. In the 1640s, a “Philosophicall Clubbe” was begun in Oxford for the discussion of experimental natural philosophy (i.e., science), & in 1662 the clubbe was given a charter by Charles II as “The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.” In the 1650s in Paris, a wealthy patron named Montmor established a similar series of meetings in his home … the so-called Montmor Academy. Montmor seemed more interested in applied science (stuff he could sell) than pure science. His charter says that their purpose “shall not be the vain exercise of the mind on useless subtleties,” but “the improvement of the conveniences of life.”
Temperature time series. Up to the 1970s climate was thought to vary gradually, maybe a fraction of a degree F per century or so. Temperature time series of a few to several decades were thought to contain mostly semi-random oscillations combined with noise. The paradigm was that trends, if detected, were noise, data errors, or faulty analysis. This was gospel and was only slowly replaced in the 1970s-1980s by the idea that climate on a scale of decades-to-centuries might not be stable. Hence the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the UN) was formed in 1988, & things have just got more interesting since then.
Birds: The last dinosaurs. An NC State Paleontologist, Mary Schweitzer, discovered soft tissue preserved in T. Rex bones and analyzed proteins from it. They were similar to chicken collagen, of all things, adding to almost incontrovertible evidence that birds are, indeed, the last of the dinosaurs. Collagens are the main proteins of connective tissue in animals.
Abundant life in Antarctic seas. Prof. Dr. Angelika Brandt of the Hamburg Zoological Institute and Museum recently led expeditions to the ocean area around Antarctica and surveyed bottom dwelling life at 40 locations in the Weddell Sea. They did not expect to find the profusion of life forms that were discovered: over 750 new species. Apparently life thrives almost everywhere.
What black holes are made of. Most of us probably think of black holes (if we think of them at all) as incredibly dense clumps of matter. But that is not correct. Black holes (if they exist at all, and we’re pretty sure they do) are just warped space and time, without any matter. Matter that falls into a black hole ceases to exist. The new $370M Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO), with sensors in Louisiana & Washington State, is designed to measure black-hole-induced space-time warps as small as 0.(enter 18 zeroes)1 meter. Perhaps we may soon know more than we could ever imagine about black holes.
Light speed & electronics. Many folks think of electronics as running at the speed of light, but that is not true. For example, the electrons in an old fashioned TV tube are traveling at only about 6 or 7 % the speed of light. Still, since light travels nearly 671 million miles per hour, those electrons are running over 40 million mph.
Mr Science Newsletter, February 2008.
Planet types. A terrestrial planet (also called a telluric or rocky planet) is primarily composed of silicate rocks. Terrestrial planets are substantially different from gas giants, which might not have solid surfaces and are composed mostly of some combination of hydrogen, helium, and water (as liquids, gases or solids). Our solar system has four terrestrial planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The gas giants, the outermost planets, are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, & Neptune.
Gödel’s theorems. Kurt Gödel (1906 - 1978), friend to Einstein, was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. Gödel's proof of his first incompleteness theorem is among the most celebrated results in mathematical logic. It states that any formal theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. Gödel's second incompleteness theorem says that any formal theory that includes a statement of its own consistency is, in itself, inconsistent. What this says, in effect, is that we can never understand all there is to know about even the simplest mathematical constructs, like the integers (i.e., whole numbers ... -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3 ...). So don't be surprised if we never figure out other more complex things like the nature of matter & quantum physics. Sad footnote: Towards the end of his life Gödel became convinced that he was being poisoned and essentially starved himself to death.
Sleeping around. World travelers and students of other cultures know that meal time and eating habits can vary greatly from country to country. But we don’t usually take much notice of the sleeping habits in strange lands. Well, they can indeed be strange (to us). The western habit of sleeping quietly on soft bedding, three feet off the floor, alone or as couples, is in reality something of a global anomaly. Often sleep is a communal affair, noisy, sexy, and irregular, with the odd farm animal sometimes present. On the other hand, since we often sleep with pets, the idea of roosting with chickens about may not seem so radical. (The Head Trip, by Jeff Warren)
Bug eyes. For some evolutionary reason, lots of insects are blind to red (long wave color), but can see a bit into the short-wave ultraviolet spectrum where we can’t see. Sensory tests have proven this, but there is no known test to show what that ultraviolet color looks like to the insects. In fact, we don’t really even know how colors appear to anyone (except ourselves).
Science is religion? Science is sometimes said to have (or be) its own religion and that may be true, depending on how you define “religion.” Less disputably, science and academia do seem to have their own faith-based belief system. For example, it may be perfectly OK to use correlation analyses to estimate the danger levels of pollutants, or to assess disease risk for different racial types or genders. But to use exactly the same methods to assess, say, science preferences, or physical or mental prowess, is ethically hazardous. You may recall, just mentioning the possibility that women may, on average, have different preferences from men, got the president of Harvard fired. The truth is, to paraphrase Harvard psychiatrist Michael C. Miller, we are not yet close to being able to link all human characteristics to specific biological or environmental causes, & a goodly part of wisdom is appreciating how much you don’t know. http://www.health.harvard.edu/
Mr Science Newsletter, March 2008.
Earth is cooling? Actually, on geologic time scales, one can say that the Earth is cooling from its once molten state. Bits of its fiery core pop up now & then as volcanoes. In the 19th century, when atomic physics was mostly unknown, scientists were fooled into thinking that the Earth was quite young by trying to calculate its cooling rate as though it were a hot potato just taken out of the oven. In reality, radioactive decay keeps the core at several thousands of degrees (F or C, take your pick … nobody knows for sure).
Foretelling the Global Warming Debate? “Meteorology has ever been an apple of contention, as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect on the minds of those who have attempted to study them.” Joseph Henry (1797 – 1878), American scientist and the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. During his lifetime (and thereafter), he was (and is) considered to be one of the greatest American scientists of the 19th century.
Cosmic Ray Flux. In addition to climate change, volcanoes, impacts by comets & the like, there is convincing empirical evidence that 62-million-year variations in cosmic radiation have been partly responsible for several of the species extinctions during the past half billion years or so, with higher radiation causing the deaths. This variation is caused by a 450,000 mile per hour oscillation of our Solar System within the Milky Way. Sometimes we have more protection from the rays, sometimes less. People are not thought to be at risk, but we are in the beginning of an upswing. (Physics Today)
Space Debris. Junk that is accumulating in Earth orbit from satellites, space stations & such is becoming a threat to working satellites (communications, navigation, weather, &c.). There are hundreds of millions of pieces of the trash, with tens of thousands of them fist-size or bigger. One of the biggest recent space polluters was the Chinese stunt in January 2007, when they demonstrated their ability to blow up satellites. And the US likely did its part when blowing up the spy satellite in 2008. There are no international treaties regarding that sort of thing now, but the Chinese got the world’s attention, so some kind of treaty may be forthcoming. (Physics Today)
Mr Science Newsletter, April 2008.
MP3: Lots of sound, few bits. Efficient digital sampling of sound signals, such as mp3 encoding of music, works partly by mimicking the physiology of hearing. When we hear only random noise in a given frequency range, we know it’s there. When an ordered pattern (e.g., music) is added at a similar frequency & volume, we hear both the noise and the music. But …when music becomes a little louder than the noise (by about 6 decibels), our brain blocks out the noise & we hear only the patterned sound. This is how smart digital sampling works. It does not select random bits to discard. It selects a range of sounds and eliminates those that we would not hear anyway. (Physics Today)
Wandering Poles. It was reported a while back that the Earth’s magnetic poles may die away in a couple of thousand years, and reform so that old fashioned magnetic compasses point south. Monitoring during the 20th century shows that both magnetic poles wander around more or less in synch at an average speed of about 5 miles per year. However, since 1990, the north magnetic pole has been moving toward the NW up to about 35 mpy, while the south mag pole has lagged behind at 3 mpy. What all this means is not entirely clear. A north mag pole in Siberia is one possibility.
Wandering Longitude. One of the challenges of climate change science is determining what past climate has been so we can tell if it’s changing, and by how much. Since large-scale computer processing of weather data did not start until 1948 even in the most advanced countries, getting machine-readable data for earlier times has been a high priority task. Complicating this for older data, particularly from ships, is the question of where the data were observed. The use of the Greenwich Meridian as zero longitude was not standardized until 1884. As a result, climatologists have had to deal with conversions from many different longitude systems … about 650 of them as of 2007.
Wandering Mass. Of the global standards for length, mass, time, and other fundamental quantities, only the kilogram (about 2.2 pounds), the basic unit of mass, remains a physical object: a cylinder of 90% platinum and 10% iridium cast in 1889 & housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sevres, near Paris, France. But, global standard or not, it appears to be losing weight ... about 50 micrograms (the weight of a fingerprint) when compared with the average of dozens of copies. R. Davis of the Bureau can't explain it: "The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart," he said. "We don't really have a good hypothesis for it." Meanwhile, the search is on for a new standard.
Mr Science Newsletter, May 2008.
No Such Thing as Immortal. If, somehow, humans could avoid aging and all forms of disease, we would still be mortal: Accidents happen. Given the current state of things (accidents in transportation, at work, or at home, for example, plus crime &c.), we would live on average 1,700 to 1,800 years. But with improvements in safety, we could go on tens of thousands of years. (Max Planck Institute)
A New Name for our Era. Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English defines Anthropocene, noun: a term used to describe the current geological period, starting from the 18th century when human activities began to impact global climate and ecosystems. Etymology: coined in 2000 by chemist Paul Crutzen; Gk anthropos 'human' and kainos 'recent'. Apropos to that idea is this observation from the UN: sometime in 2008, for the first time ever, more people will live in cities than in rural areas. (AGU)
This Old Earth. The beginnings of the planets orbiting our Sun can be dated rather well to 4.567 billion years ago (nice number, that: 4567) by the radioactive decay of uranium in primitive meteorites. And the date our Moon was formed (probably by ejecta from a glancing blow by another proto-planet) can be dated from moon rocks to about 4.440 billion years ago. There are no traces of that collision on Earth today (no, it's not why the Pacific Ocean is so big) because Earth was molten at the time, and plate tectonics, volcanism, and other geologic processes have erased all records of the Earth's labor pains during the first half billion years of its existence. No rocks remain from that era. (Physics Today)
Appendix: Snug Harbor? Most of us were probably taught that the evolutionary purpose of the appendix was unknown, or that the appendix was a useless organ, or even that it was a downright deadly organ (as all organs can be when they go awry). However, medical researchers at Duke have made a perfectly reasonable suggestion: The little pocket of intestine called the appendix is actually a safe haven for all the beneficial bacteria we need to work for us in our gut. If a victim survives a case of drastic gastric-intestinal illness, most of the gut may be emptied of its contents, both good & bad. But the trusty (if troublesome) little appendix will still hold an emergency supply of vital bacteria to aid in recovery.
Energetic Humans. Using Einstein's E=mc2, Energy equals mass times the speed of light times the speed of light, http://www.scienceinpublic.com/2005/einstein/mc2.htm
says that if you could convert one kilogram of matter to energy you’d get 25 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy. That means if you took a 150 lb person, which equals about 68 kilograms, and converted him/her to energy, you'd get 1,700 billion kWh of energy. Furthermore, according to:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs2001/enduse2001/enduse2001.html
household electricity consumption for 2001 was about 1,140 billion kWh.
So, most of us contain enough energy to provide electrical power to all the houses in America for at least a year.
Light Speed. The speed of light, that magical quantity that never varies no matter what, may vary after all. But not now. Using conventional cause-effect physics, part of the cosmic microwave background radiation, an echo of the big bang, shouldn’t be there. But it is. One way to explain it is that light speed was very much greater in the early stages of the universe. (Physics Today).
Mr Science Newsletter, June 2008
Water from Where? In March 2008, independent teams using data from the Spitzer Space Telescope & the Keck Observatory reported evidence of water vapor & organic molecules in distant protoplanetary disks. These disks are thick accumulations of matter with a young star at the center, much like the material that accreted into our own planets in our solar system. This research will probably help answer one of the more perplexing mysteries about the formation of Earth: Where did all the water come from? No single explanation is now agreed upon by a majority of all astronomers. (Physics Today)
Organic LEDs. Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) use carbon instead of silicon as their basic material. Some OLED applications are already on the market, but like most new technology, they are expensive. The Sony 11” XEL-1 OLED TV sells for a couple of thousand dollars, if you can find one. The advantages are many. OLEDs are: thinner than plasma & LCD, use much less electricity, & have better contrast & picture quality than anything else. If the new units prove durable and can be manufactured economically, they will catch on someday. http://news.sel.sony.com/en
Tiny, Heavy Nuclei. If a typical atom (say, carbon) could be inflated to the size of the Superdome in New Orleans, then its nucleus (its collection of protons & neutrons in the center) would be about the size of a house fly. But it would be a dense, heavy fly. That fly would contain 99.9% of the mass of the entire structure. The other 0.1% if the mass would be in the surrounding electron cloud … the size of the Superdome. Since the atomic density of carbon is 2.267g/cu.cm, that fly would weigh over 10 tons.
Cats & Dogs. Although animals are not “persons”, we all know that animals have “personalities” and that dogs’ personalities are way different from cats’. Given those differences, one wonders how (or, for some of us, why) cats were ever domesticated to begin with. Oxford professor Carlos Driscoll has an answer. He tested the genetics of both wild and domestic varieties of cats (about 1,000 of them) and says that the domestic variety appears to have emerged about 10,000 years ago at the same time that agriculture and grain storage began. This timing matches the archaeological record. Conclusion: The cats probably helped the humans keep the vermin out of the stored food.
Rat (& Cat) Whiskers. Rat whiskers have been studied extensively as a model of sensory processing. Like cats, rats have an extraordinary ability to indentify objects by the sensory perception using their whiskers. It works in much the same way that you could tell differences among, say, a rug, a smooth wood floor, or mown grass by dragging the tip of a walking stick across the surface … but with far more complexity and precision. Somehow the critters can record and recognize various resonances and oscillations as they vary the stiffness of the whiskers through a wide range of motions. MIT researchers needed data rates of one gigabyte per second to even begin modeling rat whisker sensitivities. (Physics Today)
Confused yet? "A new technique for deriving hurricane climatologies from global data, applied to climate models, indicates that global warming could reduce the global frequency of hurricanes, though their intensity may increase in some locations." From Emanuel et al., in the March 2008 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Mr Science Newsletter, July 2008.
Other Universes. Most mainstream cosmologists will tell you that there was no when & where before the Big Bang because time & space did not exist. That is not a very satisfying answer to human intuition. And some reputable scientists think that there are other alternatives, mostly involving multiple universes coming & going in all directions of space & time, in multiple other dimensions (which is not a very satisfying to our intuition either). The good news: At least one of these hypotheses (Steinhardt of Princeton & Turok of Cambridge) will likely be testable someday, maybe in a few decades, via gravity wave detection. Then we may have some tangible evidence of other universes.
On Natural Selection. In 1831 Patrick Matthew published a book, "On Naval Timber and Arboriculture" ... the very year Charles Darwin, at age 21, set sail on the Beagle. The book was not a smash hit, but it was prescient. Here is a quote from Matthew’s it:
"... those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing — either a prey to their natural devourers, or sinking under disease, generally induced by want of nourishment, their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind, …progeny of the same parents, under great differences of circumstance, might, in several generations, even become distinct species, incapable of co-reproduction." Darwin knew nothing of Matthew's work until Matthew (a Scot) pointed it out to him in 1860, following publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species"... which, by the way, does not explain how species originated.
NASCAR & Physics. Auto racing draws higher attendance numbers than any other spectator sport in the USA. In NASCAR, the practice of drafting, where one car follows another just inches away, allows both cars to go 3-5 mph faster than either alone could go. Here is how that works: The car in front is fighting most of the air resistance (which tends to push against the direction of motion). But, in addition to air resistance in front, there is a vacuum behind a speeding car tending to suck it backwards. (Think of a car at one instant as occupying a volume of air. In the next instant the car has moved ahead and the vacuum left where the car used to be creates a suction.) So, the trailing car eliminates the suction for the lead car, while the lead car fights the resistance … hence they share the work & both can go faster. There is actually a book out about the complex: “Physics of NASCAR.” Many of us already knew: closely following a big truck improves our mileage … unsafe but true.
Antarctic Ice Grows? How can the Antarctic Ice Cap be growing in spots if global warming is going on? Well, the answer is simple: If a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and causes more snow in places where the average temperature is still below freezing, then the ice sheet can grow.
Reality is Fuzzy. During the 2007 presidential primary race, one headline read: “Conservatives accuse Rudy of fuzzy math.” While it is true that the quote was intended as a put-down, fuzzy math is a legitimate branch of science. In many ways it can describe the real world better than the more familiar variety of math where answers are either right or wrong. Fuzziness in science can be used not only to describe uncertainty, but can also provide mathematical models in cases where there is no single “correct” answer. This includes abstract notions such as pleasant & beautiful, as well as very real and useful concepts like fertile, wild, dangerous, & even drought. It can also be used to quantify things like the properties of an electron at some given instant.
Mr Science Newsletter, August 2008.
Global Heating by the Sun. Although it is a bit counterintuitive, as the Sun runs out of fuel, it heats up the Earth (before finally fizzling out). A part of the reason is that conversion of mass to energy by the Sun depletes the solar mass and reduces its gravity, allowing it to become bigger (for a while). But don’t worry too much (for now). The net effect is about a 1 deg C (1.8 deg F) warming of Earth every 100 million years. (AGU)
Global Heating by Us. Global warming by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases is well known science now. But another source of global warming is the increase of heat in the atmosphere generated by non-renewable energy resources, including nuclear. As engines & power plants &c. add heat to the environment, the net result is global warming over and above that caused by the Sun & the greenhouse effect. The amount of the change depends on assumptions concerning future energy use. If we use all renewable, Earth-based energy (solar, including wind, tides, waves, and biomass; or geothermal &c.) there will be no noticeable net effect. If we use non-renewable sources like coal, oil, gas, & nuclear, OR of we beam additional solar energy to the Earth from space, the effect could add 10 deg C (18 deg F) to global temperature over a span of a few hundred years. This effect may loom large in future IPCC assessments. (AGU)
The Science & Psychology of Global Warming. The greenhouse effect (which makes our planet habitable) has been understood in general terms since the 1890s. Since the 1970s our understanding of climate in general and global warming from human sources in particular, has advanced to the point where the human influence on climate can be quantified with considerable certainty. Cutting edge research groups, and there are several around the world, agree on this, and the pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which must be unanimous to pass muster, have said that we are warming the Earth. So why, one may ask, are there still global warming skeptics? Probably the answer is faith & denial. Faith that the planet (or supreme powers that control the planet) will intervene & fix our mess, & denial (a common human trait) that there is a serious problem to begin with. The oceans are storing much of the heat that human activity has generated, and it all must be released sooner or later, so our kids & grandkids will be the ones who will probably wonder why we were not paying attention.
Fast Toys. Baseball fans all know that the fastest fastball imaginable is about 100 mph. But other sports are way faster. Arrow speeds in archery routinely exceed 200 mph. The world record golf ball speed is 204 mph. Tennis balls can go up to 120 to 150 mph or so. And the fastest Jai Alai ball was 188 mph. But here is a surprise: In Badminton a shuttlecock can leave the racket at 200 mph. Meanwhile, ping pong balls slog along at under 70 mph (Physics Factbook & Wiki).
Heavenly Bodies. Asteroid is Latin for star-like. (A similar word structure is humanoid, which means human-like.) But asteroids are nothing like stars. They do not produce their own energy, they are way way smaller that stars, and by definition, are smaller than planets. A more proper term might be planetoid. Comets have tails & asteroids don’t. However, a stray asteroid can get scooped up by the gravity of the Sun and become a comet. The tail of the comet is ice & dust “blown” away by the “solar wind,” which is not really wind, but energetic particles that radiate outward from the Sun.
Mr Science Newsletter, September 2008.
The Climate of 2007. The American Meteorological Society recently (July 2008) published its global “State of the Climate in 2007” and pronounced 2007 the warmest year over land areas since data begin in 1880. It was not the warmest over the oceans partly because of a major La Niña (cold upwelling equatorial water off the west coast of South America). Consistent with a warming globe, the Carnegie Inst. has found the tropical areas expanding, pushing the jet streams higher & closer to the poles by a few miles a year in each hemisphere. One result of this: a drier climate in the southern USA.
Ice Age Glacials & Interglacials. Technically, an ice age is a long period of cold temperature in which ice sheets cover large parts of the Earth. We are in one now, & it began about 2 million years ago. Glacials refer to colder phases within an ice age, while interglacials are the warmer phases. The last glacial period began about 110,000 years ago and ended about 13,000 years ago. During this period there were several changes between glacier advance and retreat. The maximum extent of glaciation was approximately 18,000 years ago. Even some academic types are inconsistent about the terminology, and it gets worse. The glaciations that occurred during the last glacial period have different names, depending on their geography: Fraser & Pinedale (western parts of North America), Wisconsinan (central North America), Devensian (British Isles), Midlandian (Ireland), Würm (Alps), Weichsel (or Vistula, northern Central Europe), Valdai (Eastern Europe), Zyryanka (Siberia), Llanquihue (Chile) and Otira (New Zealand).
The History of Thinking. By various means it has been pretty well established that Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, & humans migrated out of Africa about 50 thousand years ago, & what we call civilization began maybe 7 to 12 thousand years ago. But when did contemplative thinking begin? Peter Rudman estimates (in “How Math Happened”) that it was about the same time as the out-of-Africa migration, but admits that is just a guess. It could have been a million years ago, or as recent as 30,000 years ago. Maybe it even arrived concurrently with the present ice age 2 million years ago. Some believe that it was in response to climate stress that true human intellect evolved.
Laws of Nature. Newton's law of gravity says the force between two masses m1 & m2 at a distance r apart is: F=G*m1*m2/r2, where G is the gravitational constant.
Coulomb's law says that the electrostatic force between two charges q1 & q2 at a distance r apart is: F=K*q1*q2/r2, where K is Coulomb's constant.
These are two of the simplest and most elegant equations in science, and are remarkable not only because they are so eerily similar, but also because they are clearly wrong at very small scales. If you do a little arithmetic, you will see that as r approaches zero, F approaches infinity. Since we never see infinitely large forces anywhere, something else (i.e., quantum mechanics) is going on at very small scales. Even in nature, wisdom must be used temper the letter of the law with the spirit of the law.
Matter & Electricity. Maybe it’s not so weird that the equations look alike for the attraction of matter by matter & the attraction of unlike electric charges (or repulsion of like charges). After all, what we perceive as matter is really just electrical charges. Here is how that works: Everything that you touch & feel exerts a force on you that you perceive as pressure. Remember: atoms & molecules have their positive charge inside & their negative electrons outside. That pressure you feel is really the repulsion of all the negatively charged electron clouds around the molecules in your fingers and the electrons in whatever it is you are touching.
Mr Science Newsletter, October 2008.
Deepest Dive Ever. Swiss scientist Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the US Navy dived 10,915 meters (35,810 ft) into the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean on January 23, 1960 in the submersible Trieste. It took about five hours to reach the bottom. Aside from learning about some fish that live at the bottom of the deepest depths in the world, not much science came out of the Trieste dive. The bathyscaphe was retired and dismantled in 1963. The dive has never been repeated, and presently (2008) no manned or unmanned craft exists capable of reaching such depth. We now have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do of the bottom of the Earth Ocean.
World's Largest Volcano. Mauna Loa in Hawaii is usually characterized as the world's largest active volcano. But is it? Yellowstone National Park is larger than 2 million acres, and virtually all of it is an ancient caldera (aka, volcanic crater, or mouth of a volcano). We all know that it is somewhat active (hot pools, Old Faithful, &c.). Yellowstone has blown about 100 times since its first known eruption about 16 million years ago, and its last one, about 2 million years ago, covered the western half of what is now the USA with ash and destruction, and no doubt enveloped the Earth in a volcanic winter that lasted many years.
Nature vs. Nurture. All wise old grandmas throughout time have concluded that different learning styles seem appropriate for different people; and for some people and some topics, no learning style seems to work well. Now genetics & the devilishly complex task of interpreting human DNA are helping to explain why both nurture & nature are important, and how to custom-fit nurture to a particular individual’s DNA. For example, the Max Planck Institute has shown that some fairly common DNA variants correlate highly with a person’s ability (or inability) to learn from his own mistakes. In some cases, it may not be best to just let baby burn his finger to learn that the stove is hot. Someday maybe all babies will be DNA tested & come with their own customized child-rearing guidelines.
Electricity from the Sun. The USA could theoretically satisfy its need for electricity using a photovoltaic solar collector area totaling about 100 miles by 100 miles (roughly half the size of the Texas panhandle). But you’d need a lot of battery backup. Using ordinary car-type lead-acid batteries, you’d need about 500 of them, each the size of the superdome, scattered around the country. Not a very practical proposition. That’s why storage of solar heat by molten salts for steam power generation is considered a more practical alternative. (Physics Today)
Science & Superstition. Early medical science was hindered in Europe & parts of Asia Minor by superstitions about human dissection (and still is in the USA for stem cell research). In Egypt, where dissection had been part of mummification for thousands of years, no such taboo existed, which is why early medicine was more advanced in Egypt than elsewhere. The great Isaac Newton could also be said to have been superstitious: He was deeply involved with alchemy. We now associate alchemy mostly with attempts to transform lead into gold via mumbo-jumbo. But as Newton said: “… alchemy does not trade with metals as ignorant vulgars think …” but rather involves mystical transformations in general, including transpositions in space (i.e., movement). Alchemy was full of ideas about unseen invisible forces working remotely, which is just what gravity is. So, Newton’s brilliant theory of gravity may have been related to his interest in alchemy.
Mr Science Newsletter, November 2008
Nuke who? One of the world‘s largest global traders of uranium is (I am not making this up): NUKEM Inc. It is a multinational company headquartered in Germany.
Eat What? Because of the way mammals gestate in the womb, we are not born with the hundreds of different kinds of bacteria we need to help digest our food. This is one reason why infants are so prone to puke. From the moment of birth onward we begin acquiring the critters we need. A normal vaginal birth will transfer fecal matter from mother to child to get the process started. Kissing and suckling will help move things along. Maybe baby kissing is instinctual for this purpose. Once we are bulked up with gut critters, we have about ten times more of them than we have human cells in our bodies.
Personality. Research going back to the 1930s has concluded that for most practical purposes, our personalities are composed of just five assessable qualitative factors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, (Mnemonic acronym: OCEAN).
Openness: to a variety of thoughts & experiences.
Conscientiousness: diligence to tasks at hand.
Extroversion: comfort in the company of others.
Agreeableness: cooperative, compassionate, not antagonistic.
Neuroticism: inappropriate emotional responses to situations (honesty is here).
Culture helps form personality traits, just as individual personalities determine culture.
Monkeys on Wall Street. Monkeys can exhibit trading behavior, both learned and instinctual, much like people. Yale primate psychologist Laurie Santos has been studying lemurs & apes & monkeys for years, & has shown that once they have been taught to barter (say, tokens for apple slices), they will shop for the best deal, take risks, hoard tokens, & even exhibit brand loyalty, just like us semi-rational humans.
Yes, We Have No Bananas? If you begin to notice a banana shortage at the local market, it is because the Panama disease fungus has begun to infect Cavendish banana trees worldwide & there is no cure. Cavendish is the variety now used for global commercial banana distribution. A search is on for a disease resistant strain. (Nat Geo).
Mr Science Newsletter, December 2008
Science Saves. My Jeannie had a couple of carcinomas of the left breast taken care of via mastectomy on Dec 3, 2008. The next day she was up & about & doing her chores as usual. Today (Dec 9), all the testing was completed and she was declared cancer-free. Staples come out in about a week. Such are the true human benefits of modern science.
Tons of Carbon Dioxide. A gallon of gasoline weighs about seven pounds, but when burnt, produces about 25 pounds of carbon dioxide. This happens because each carbon atom is combined with two oxygen atoms before it is sent out the tailpipe. Gasoline itself is a very concentrated form of energy. One gallon of gas is the distilled remains of about a hundred tons of ancient plant matter (not dead dinosaurs). Most of the carbon we have today came out of volcanoes in the distant past. Volcanoes still belch out carbon, but we humans are now putting about 20 to 90 times the carbon into the atmosphere that volcanoes do in a year. That’s several billion tons of CO2 a year now (containing about three billion tons of carbon).
Owl Ears. We can all tell if sounds are coming from our right or left (if we have two ears & can hear). But some owls can do even better. They can hear in 3-D and can pin-point prey by sound just like we can see things in 3-D. The way they do this is by asymmetrical ears, one high, one low, so they can tell the height the sound is coming from. Add to this the right-left spacing between the ears, to tell what direction the sound is coming from, and you have a jolly good night predator. The way this works is: Sound from one direction (vertical or horizontal), moving at 760 mph, arrives at one ear before the other. The brain can tell which ear gets the signal first & hence can infer the direction to the source of the sound. The bowl-shaped face of most owls helps focus the sound. Ear tufts, seen on some owls, are not ears at all. They are just display feathers.
Earthquake Prediction. A major earthquake (magnitude 6.7) and its aftershock (6.2) occurred in the Ionian Sea 55 km (35 miles) SSW of Kalamata, Greece and 230 km (145 miles) SW of ATHENS, Greece on Feb 14, 2008 (12:09 PM local time in Greece). Globally, this is not a rare event, and no significant damage was reported. Earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater occur every week or so (on average) somewhere on earth. What makes this episode special is that it was predicted (using seismic electrical signals) and the prediction was published on the front page of the Greek newspaper ETHNOS on Feb 10, 2008. (EOS)
Cool Factoid. Air conditioning equipment in the U.S. is often rated in terms of "tons of refrigeration". This is because the very first systems just blew air over ice to cool it, so cooling capacity was ordered from the local ice house in tons (of ice). A ton (2000 pounds or 907 kilograms) of ice melting in a 24-hour period is equal to 12,000 BTU per hour, or 3517 watts (http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/appenB9.html). So, in modern parlance, a ton is 12,000 BTUs of cooling capacity. Residential systems are usually from 1 to 5 tons (3 to 20 kW).
Mr Science Newsletter, January 2009.
Carbon Trading. Carbon trading to help control global warming is already a reality, and will become bigger business as global climate policy gains focus. The simplest way to exert real control is to cap production among the 2000 or so global coal & oil & gas producers & allow them to trade credits. They, of course, don’t like that and want far more complex trading of credits & offsets among millions of end users. The main problems with end user caps are: no accurate measurement technology exists; no robust verification is possible; and it is impossible to say if an offsetting conservation program would (or would not) have been undertaken with (or without) the offsets. Given the level of skill that Wall Street wizards have demonstrated in recent years with their complex trading schemes, one can only hope that carbon trading will be kept simple & transparent. (Ha! Not likely.)
Our Grandparents Called It Greed. Economists call it aggressive self-interest. For a few decades now, scientific studies have pretty much confirmed that boom-&-bust behavior is instinctual for us humans. The research generally goes like this: A large group of volunteers are given free “credit instruments” exchangeable for actual money via various exchange rates, with the only rule being that they make trades with each other. The trades are all completely voluntary ask-and-bid arrangements. Even when all volunteers know the exact worth of their credits and everyone else’s, the trading cycles almost invariably (l90% of the time in some studies) result in a bubble and a burst, as participants try to outsmart each other.
New Blue Eyes. According to the University of Copenhagen (who ought to know), baby blue eyes are a fairly recent innovation on the human family tree. Using DMA analyses, Hans Elberg et al. have concluded that the gene for blue eyes first appeared in the human genome between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago … right on the cusp of the historical record & civilization itself. Hmmm.
WTF? Language conveys emotion as well as simple meaning. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has shown that taboo words (piss) activate primitive emotional circuits in the brain, while milder synonyms (urine) do not. This is because of societal conditioning, not literal meaning. It has little to do with sexual connotation, and is always subject to change. For example, it is now OK (at least in the USA) to say intolerance sucks, or Kim Jung IL is a jerk, even though the original connotations involved fellatio & masturbation. So, concludes Pinker, all codified censorship boils down to thought control and ultimately leads to logical absurdities.
Horse Power. Horsepower is a unit of power (or energy) that is not defined consistently for all applications & hence is seldom used in science. The term "horsepower" was coined by James Watt to help market his improved steam engine. By experiments in a brewery, it was inferred that a horse could lift an average of 330 pounds at a rate of 100 feet per minute over a 4-hour working shift. Hence it's definition of one horsepower as 33,000 foot-pounds per minute, which is about 735.5 watts in light bulb units. An article in Nature in 1993 calculated the upper limit to a horse's power at 14.9 hp for a few seconds, but for longer periods an average horse produces less than one horsepower. Put into perspective, a healthy human can produce about 1.2 hp briefly and sustain about 0.1 hp over long periods, while trained athletes can manage 0.3 horsepower for a period of several hours.
Happy New Year, Mr Sci
Mr Science Newsletter, February 2009.
The Sun & Global Warming. There is a frequently recurring theory, espoused by a few seemingly reputable scientists, that a good portion of the observed global warming is related to changes in solar radiation. One reason the theory is so persistent is that if you take certain selected solar data and compare it to specially smoothed and filtered temperature data, there is an apparent correlation. However, if all pertinent solar and temperature data are analyzed (as done in January 2009), the conclusion is: “Solar variability does not explain late 20th century warming” (the title of the Physics Today article).
Elephant Teeth. An elephant may have 24 to 28 molars (the tusks are its incisors), but no more than 8 molars are in wear at the same time for adults. Uniquely, the molars proceed from the back of each jaw towards the front in a linear progression thru 6 or 7 cycles. As the front teeth become worn down & fall out they are replaced with new teeth. The 6th molar, the biggest, weighs on average nearly 9 pounds with a grinding surface of about 8x3 inches. For the 10% that have a 7th molar, it will be smaller than the 6th. Once the last molars wear out at about age 70, the elephant is incapable of chewing its food properly and dies from starvation or malnutrition.
Sharing the Pain. Did you ever notice how we tend to want to share bad news as quickly as possible? When someone dies, or is hospitalized, or there is an earthquake, before you know it we are on the phone letting friends & family know the latest. My guess is that there are at least two reasons for this. One is the comfort & release of sharing. The other is an instinctual drive, primitive and unconscious. If my theory of correct, it is easy to see how it might have been an evolutionary advantage. If a tiger just got into the cave and ate Uncle Gork, letting the rest of the tribe know the scoop ASAP would be a good idea.
Battery Assault. If you leave a dead battery in a circuit with other good batteries, that can induce a reverse polarity in the dead battery, so it is no longer dead, but is working against all the other batteries. Think of a battery as an electron pump. When the battery is charged, the positive charge at the positive end sucks electrons in, and the negative charge at the other end pushes them out. Remember: opposite charges attract each other & like charges repel. If a battery is dead, and no longer pumping, then it is only conducting current. Excess negatively charged electrons coming in the "positive" end can accumulate there & and convert it to the negative end, regardless of the little + and – signs printed on the battery.
Water to Treetops. Cornell Univ. has developed the first synthetic tree-pump, which can move water from web-like nano-roots thru extremely thin capillaries (the trunk) to polymer “leaves” that evaporate the water, all on the scale of natural trees. The only energy used for this pump is the evaporation from the leaves. This creates molecular-scale interactions that resist gravity and move the water up the “tree”. This is no mean feat. Just try sucking water 30 feet up thru a straw & you’ll see.
Mr Science Newsletter, March 2009.
Climatology: Rodney Dangerfield of Science? Here are some quotes from Mark Bowen’s book “Thin Ice” (about tropical mountain glacier climate research):
Regarding the 1930s: “… those few scientists who paid any attention to Callendar’s work
Regarding the mid-1970s: “… the fledgling field of climatology.”
Regarding the 1990s: “…probably the world’s most well known climatologist (which may not be saying a lot) is Wallace Broecker …”
Climate has become famous in the modern world, but climatologists have not.
Gunpowder. Fire gets its oxygen from the air, which is only 20% oxygen (the rest is mostly nitrogen). What makes gunpowder and the like so explosive is where it gets it oxygen: from itself, no air needed. In simple black powder (now obsolete for all but hobbyists & fireworks), the oxidizer is potassium nitrate (saltpeter), which contains three atoms of oxygen, in addition to one atom of nitrogen and one of potassium. For fuel, sulfur (aka brimstone) and soft-wood charcoal are added to the mix, and its results are well known. Dung & urine were used to make potassium nitrate up into the 1800s. Charcoal …wood cooked in an oxygen-deprived environment … is a complex mix of carbon and hydrocarbons. Pure carbon does not make good gunpowder.
Camel Backs. Camels’ humps contain mostly fatty tissue and are not primarily for water storage. Blubber holds in heat, which is why walruses & whales have a lot of it surrounding their bodies. It is thought that camels evolved with most of their fat on their backs so the rest of their bodies could give off heat more easily. Having a fatty back also insulates the body from the hot noonday sun for these desert critters.
Super Paper from Sweden. Nanopaper made of natural cellulose nanofibers has a tensile strength almost equaling that of structural steel. Lars Berglund from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology developed a process to extract & compress the fibers, keeping their properties intact. Nanopaper's strength comes from both the undamaged cellulose fibers, and also the way they are arranged into networks. Although strongly bound together, they are still able to slip and slide over each other to dissipate strains and stresses. The mechanical process used to pulp wood damages the natural fibers, weakening them.
Empathetic Daddies. Couvade syndrome, or sympathetic pregnancy, involves a father experiencing some of the same behaviors and hormonal changes (!) as the mother near the time of childbirth. Couvade is from the French couver, "to hatch." It occurs occasionally in nearly all cultures, but has been documented as customary behavior in some tribal societies; especially those were women hold higher social status than men. How the men mimic the hormone shifts is still not fully understood.
Mr Science Newsletter, April 2009.
The Science of Wisdom. We all know that really smart people can sometimes seem very unwise about certain things. Serious scientific inquiry into the nature of wisdom began in the 1970s with work by psychologist Vivian Clayton, who characterized wisdom as the ability to acquire & analyze knowledge both logically and emotionally. Recently the Temple Foundation gave the U of Chicago $2.7 million for the “Defining Wisdom” project, which will fund about 40 different research proposals. In a few years they’ll know if that was a wise investment.
Bioturbation. Marine sediments cover about 70% (!) of the world. The processes by which organisms transfer carbon and other materials between the biosphere & the geosphere occur in these sediments & are collectively called bioturbation. They are important processes (Charles Darwin’s last book was about them), and have gained more significance now, since global climate change is linked closely with carbon cycles. It is humbling to think that the future of our planet depends significantly on regrettable little creatures that crawl about in slime.
Trees Clean Soils. Fast-growing trees like poplars & willows can be used to naturally & inexpensively clean up polluted soils. Their root systems can even be directed deeper than normal (via pipes) so they can tap the aquifers & neutralize pollutants. Argonne National Labs near Chicago has pioneered the process. That lab is as old as the nuclear age & has a rich variety of pollutants to test this system on. Phytoremediation is the technical term for this, and a good tree can pump 26 gallons a day in summer.
Dum Dum-ification. Here’s another good word: Agnotology: The science that concerns itself with the various ways by which ignorance can be created. Demonstratively false superstitions that are nonetheless widely believed, like the 13th floor phobia, are examples.
Journey to the Center of the Earth. The fabled journey to the center of the Earth (shortcut to China) would be far more difficult than a trip to Mars. All the dirt (which is very little) & rock & water & molten metal above you would exert over 30,000,000 pounds per square inch of pressure at a temperature of about 10,000 deg Fahrenheit. No technology that we know of could deal with that. Tire pressure, for comparison, is about 30 pounds per square inch & that can produce a good blowout.
Panarchy. There is a theory espoused by C S (Buzz) Holling, a Canadian ecologist, which says, basically: As complex systems become more efficient, they become less resilient. He calls the idea panarchy, a word that means a few other things as well. In this context, complex systems can include organisms, forest ecosystems, and even the global economy. When you think about it, the idea makes sense. We humans, for example, have two kidneys, when one will do, which is not very efficient. But having a spare does make us more resilient. And so on. Maybe this is why we should embrace a bit of inefficiency in government. The alternative might be anarchy.
Mr Science Newsletter, Spring 2009.
Sleep Paralysis. Some people suffer from episodes that can be described as a state between sleep and wakefulness. It is called Sleep paralysis, and consists of a period of inability to perform voluntary movements either at sleep onset or upon awakening. Sometimes sufferers can vividly recall dreams that occurred during these half-conscious episodes with such clarity that they truly believe that the dreams really, physically happened. This could explain all sorts of strange phenomena, from alien abduction tales to seemingly sincere, but patently false, crime confessions.
Name That Tune. Music has a seemingly mystical ability to help our minds encode information. For tens of thousands of years before humans had writing, we still had information to preserve & share. Anthropology says that much of this data was encapsulated in song. It's still the way most of us learn the alphabet. As for retention, musical memory is amazingly accurate. People can remember details and nuances of songs they know to such a degree that you can play them about a tenth of a second burst of a piece of music they know and they can name it from that. Just think of all the silly advertizing jingles we learnt as kids & still drag around in our memory banks. (Prof. D. Levitin, McGill U.)
Good Old Wars: Not So Good. We are mostly taught that WWI & WWII were the most horrific wars ever, and in some ways that is true. But science tells us that warfare in prehistoric times claimed many more lives, as a percent of population, than modern wars. In the book ‘War Before Civilization’, Lawrence H. Keeley of the University of Illinois, says that 87% of tribal societies were at war more than once per year, with 65% of them fighting more or less continuously. The attrition rate of these close-quarter clashes produced casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants in modern warfare. Despite the carnage and effectiveness of modern warfare, the evidence shows that tribal warfare was on average 20 times more deadly than 20th century warfare, which itself became dramatically less deadly beginning in 1946, ironically, because of the most horrific weapon ever: nuclear bombs.
Sea Level, Ice Caps & Glaciers (O My). Comprehensive peer-reviewed computer models to predict sea level changes have only recently come of age. Geophysical Research Letters (Bahr et al., 2009) published one such study that says glaciers & ice caps have reached a point where they are out of balance with the current climate and will continue melting & will contribute about 7 inches of sea level rise by 2100, even if the climate does not warm any more. If climate continues to warm as predicted, the ice will lose 55% of its volume & sea level rise will be at least 15 inches by 2100. The 2007 IPCC report predicted that sea level rise by 2100 would be 7 to 23 inches, so the new news is fairly consistent with the old news.
Protons & Tennis Balls. The highest energy cosmic ray protons have about the same energy as a well hit tennis ball (about 0.044 watt-hours, or about 0.038 food calories). This is pretty impressive, considering that a tennis ball is 26 orders of magnitude more massive than a proton (that’s 10 multiplied by itself 26 times). These super energetic particles are extremely rare and thought to originate in the centers of galaxies.
Energy Equivalents. It is a jolly coincidence that energy units “watt-hours” & “food calories” are roughly equivalent: 1 watt-hour = 0.86 food calories (about). This means that if you consume 86 calories (not much, really), you have eaten enough energy to power a 100 watt light bulb for one hour (assuming 100% efficiency).
Mr Science Newsletter, 2009, #6
Social Psychology. Cognitive dissonance is an often uncomfortable sensation caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The "ideas" or "cognitions" can include attitudes and beliefs, and also the awareness of one's behavior. Theories of cognitive dissonance suggest that people are motivated to reduce dissonance by changing (or justifying or rationalizing) their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Buyer's remorse is a form of cognitive dissonance. Cultural dissonance is dissonance on a larger scale, and seems to explain a lot about the human condition. F. Scott Fitzgerald proved himself to be a prescient social psychologist when he opined that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Biocentrism: It’s all in your Head. Biocentric theories about science involve the observer as the most important component in an experiment. As George Berkeley observed: “The only things we can perceive are our perceptions.” All reality does, in fact, reside in our minds, and thinking about that can really give you a headache. Take the notions of space and time, for example. Neither is a tangible entity that we can pick up and look at … they are just concepts, and Einstein did not help much when he combined them into space-time. Phenomena like entanglement, where particles separated by great distances can somehow instantly sense changes to one another, inform us that our innate concepts of space & time may be a bit awry.
Space-Time: Really Just Space? Einstein’s theories may invoke the space-time continuum, but in their 1971 introduction to black holes, Ruffini & Wheeler point out that Einstein’s account of gravity is purely geometrical, and that every variable that arises in his equations is expressed in units of length. Time and mass are both measured in centimeters (or inches) using that ethereal constant of nature, the speed of light (which is a unitless constant if space is time).
Abstract vs. Real. According to retired physicist N. David Mermin (and most other science philosophers), classical physics did such a good job of explaining things that we fell into the bad habit of equating the real (tangible things & events) with the abstract (ways we understand events). Einstein understood this and said: “Space & time are modes by which we think, not conditions under which we live.” A point in geometry, having no dimensions, is an abstraction. And since space is just a collection of points, space is an abstraction. And since time is space, time is an abstraction, not real. Get used to it.
Money Buys Happiness … up to a Point. It is not very scientific, but you can measure happiness by simply asking people if they are happy with their lot in life. Tom Barnett, looking at such studies over many countries says that globally, the limit of personal happiness seems to top out at about $20,000 per capita (in 2008 $). Environmental protection efforts and democratic governance increase significantly as average per capita income rises to the $5,000 to $10,000 range. Mass violence tends to virtually disappear when average per capita income reaches $3,000. Of course, it may be difficult, in some cases, to tell which is the cause & which is the effect. (Great Powers, 365)
Mr Science Newsletter, 2009, #7.
The Geography of Eating. Although we’re in an economic recession now, North America is still a jolly good place to be by any measure. There are four major grain exporting regions in the world, North America: 105 million metric tons/yr; the former Soviet Union: 21; South America: 18; New Zealand: 9. Net importers of grain are North Africa & the Middle East: 58; Asia: 47; sub-Saharan Africa: 17 and Europe: 12. The Middle East imports a total of 78% of its food, while North America exports 40% of ours (and wastes another 10 to 20%).
Soft & Hard Water. "Hard" water contains a lot of calcium or magnesium ions in solution. (An ion is an atom or molecule where the total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons, giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge.) The calcium &/or magnesium content can cause "scale" to form inside pipes, water heaters, &c., and also reduces soap's ability to lather. Filtration, distillation, or a water softener can solve the problem. In a water softening process, salt (sodium chloride) can be used so that the calcium and magnesium ions in the water are replaced with sodium ions, which are much more benign for most domestic water uses.
Silent Earthquakes. Silent earthquakes, also called slow slip events (SSEs) by geologists, occur in subduction zones, where an oceanic plate is sliding underneath a continental plate. Silent earthquakes release their accumulated strain energy over time scales of tens of minutes to a few months, as opposed to a few seconds or minutes for “regular” earthquakes. They can cause a lot of damage, but are not generally catastrophic. They are important to earthquake prediction. Mexico has the highest incidence of large silent earthquakes in the world.
Sun’s Mysterious Corona. The Sun's 6,000 deg K (10,000 deg F) photosphere is the region where light originates. It is composed of 1000 km (620 mile) wide convection cells called granules of hot gas that boil with lifespans of about eight minutes. Above the photosphere is the 2,000 km (1240 mile) deep chromosphere, which is more visually transparent than the photosphere. Above that is the incredibly hot & tenuous corona. At a million deg K, (1.8 million deg F), the corona extends millions of miles into space, and is most easily seen during a total solar eclipse. How the energy is transported from the relatively cooler photosphere to the ultra-hot corona is still a mystery.
Rubber. Rubber is called rubber because it rubs out a pencil mark. But it wasn't good for much else until vulcanization (a curing process involving high heat and curatives) was invented in the mid-1800s. The cured rubber has stronger bonds between the molecules and is thus tougher and resists rot better than the uncured material. Charles Goodyear (1800–1860) invented vulcanization (named for the Roman fire god) but never made any money out of it. The four types of curing systems in common use are: sulfur systems, peroxides, urethane crosslinkers, and metallic oxides.
Auralization. We are all familiar with visualization, which in science is making data into visual patterns such as maps and charts. Auralization is the same idea, except it uses sounds instead of sights. It is not new. The old Geiger Counters that put out static-like sound when radioactive material was detected used Auralization. With our present expansive knowledge of sound properties, and large capacity, high speed computers, it is possible to accurately produce music as it would sound in a particular design for a concert hall … without ever building the actual hall. This makes architectural acoustics a lot easier than it used to be.
Mr Science Newsletter, 2009, #8
Eclipse is Eclipsing. This past total solar eclipse got a lot of press coverage, and rightly so. It is a matter of sheer luck that the disc of the sun is 400 times larger than the disc of the moon, but is also 400 times farther from the earth, so the lunar disc exactly coincides with the size of the solar disc. Tidal friction, which is gradually causing the earth to spin more slowly (lengthening the day), is also causing the moon to drift away from the earth. Several hundred million years from now the moon will be too far from the earth to completely cover the sun and there will be no more total solar eclipses.
Galileo Deserves the Credit. On page 125 of the July 2009 National Geographic, it says: “Four hundred years ago Galileo gave birth to modern astronomy ...” Actually, about 4 months before Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the heavens, an Englishman named Thomas Harriot used his “Dutch perspective glass” to create a very fine map of the moon’s craters and “oceans”. He did this in July 1609, and his work was not improved upon for decades, making him, arguably, the first telescopic astronomer. However, Harriot never published his own work, so very few knew of it. Thus Galileo, who did publish, lots, gets the credit.
Magnetic Blood Filtration. Antibodies are proteins that are produced by our immune system to latch onto and kill harmful bacteria, viruses and the like. However, not all forms of infection can be treated naturally by antibodies. A new technique at Harvard Medical School nano-engineers tiny magnetic beads and coats them with proteins that will latch onto particular infectious cells (e.g., fungus) and allow them to be separated by a magnet from healthy cells during a dialysis-like procedure.
Sound advice. Sound is a pressure wave … an alternation between higher and lower pressure in the air (or water). The frequency with which the pressure wave oscillates between high & low pressure determines whether the sound is high pitched (treble, for fast oscillation) or low (bass, for slower oscillation). The waves oscillate pretty fast. The frequency of middle C is between 256 and 280 Hertz (i..e., 280 cycles per second). The difference in pressure between the high & low pressure parts of the wave determine how loud it is (measured in decibels, dB, where more difference = louder sound). 120dB is about the threshold of pain. 180dB and above can cause injury or death (from rupturing air-filled organs such as lungs).
The Internet: Hive, not Hierarchy. The internet has no business plan, no CEO, no single firm responsible for building it. There is no overall map of the internet. It is, basically, a system that relies on kindness, trust & a sense of quid pro quo. It is very delicate and vulnerable, but is also very resilient, thanks to volunteers like the North American Network Operators Group, who can detect and repair problems in near-real-time. When YouTube was completely blocked by Pakistan in 2008 (not just in Pakistan, but globally), NANOG had it back on line in a couple of hours. Internet protocol (IP), the method used to send data around the internet, was first described by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974. Data is broken into chunks - or packets - and sent around different parts of the network, owned by different corporations and entities; much like a drink is passed along a row of people at a sporting event. (Jonathan Zittrain & BBC)
Mr Science Newsletter, 2009, #9
Rainy Daze. The May 2009 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reports that some new official world-record rainfall amounts have been certified by the World Meteorological Organization for La Réunion island in the South Indian Ocean, near the Tropic of Capricorn about 155 miles east of Madagascar. It is an overseas département of France, about 31 miles by 28 miles in size, population about 800,000. It is mountainous, with its highest peak over 10,000 feet. The old record for 1-day rainfall (set in 1966) stands: 72 inches … that’s 6 feet. But new records for 2, 3, and 4 day totals were set in 2007: 97” (8 feet), 143” (12 feet) and 192” (16 feet). It was from tropical storm rains. More at http://wmo.asu.edu/
Rain on Snow. Relatively obscure rain-on-snow events in the far north (Canada, Siberia, e.g.) could become more of a problem as the Arctic warms. Normally, at very high latitudes, most precipitation is snow and very little is rain. However, during warm spells, rain can fall on top of snow, then freeze over like the surface of a skating rink, making it difficult or impossible for grazing animals to reach their food. In October, 2003 a rain-on-snow event on Banks Is., Canada killed about 20,000 musk-oxen and severely disrupted the lives of people who live in the area. (EOS)
Evolution at Work. You have probably heard how over-prescribing antibiotics helps make diseases more resistant to those antibiotics. Here is how that works: Antibiotics don’t kill all the infectious bacteria, but (if they work) do kill enough so that the remaining bugs disperse & the patient lives. However, those bugs who do survive the antibiotic are the ones who tend to have a resistance to it, and they are the ones who breed and have offspring that carry the same antibiotic-resistant genes. Then new antibiotics have to be developed for the newly evolved strains of disease. This little cycle has been going on for decades with malaria. Genetic engineering may be the best way to win these battles.
Evolution of Hominids. About six million years ago human-like hominids evolved from our close cousins, the chimps. One parsimonious theory (i.e., frugal, requiring few assumptions) about how & why this happened posits that a genetic mutation caused one or more individuals to mature very slowly, allowing them time to develop bigger brains. There is some genetic evidence for this theory … including the observable fact that mature humans resemble immature chimps more than mature chimps. And, humans take about five years longer than chimps to mature sexually. (Scientific American)
Humanity’s Birthplace. In a related story, genetic tracking by Dr. Sarah Tishkoff et al. has zeroed in on real estate near the present location of Ovamboland, close to the border of Angola and Namibia in Africa, as the place where the first humans emerged. Dr. Tishkoff’s team has also calculated the exit point from which a small human group — maybe a single tribal band of about 150 people — left Africa some 50,000 years ago and populated the rest of the world. The region is near the midpoint of the African coast of the Red Sea. All this is consistent with anthropological records.
Turtles. Japanese researchers have identified the genetic mutation that created the world’s first turtle about 250 million years ago. They did it partly by carefully observing the development of a turtle fetus. Apparently some tissue “folded” in a way that produced a lizard-like critter with its backbone and ribs outside its body, rather than inside. This formed the bony upper part, or carapace, of the turtle. The lower part of a turtle shell is mostly tough cartilage, much like fingernails. The odd “deformity” was quite successful.
Mr Science Newsletter, 2009, #10
The Psychology of Climate Change. While virtually all global climate change researchers agree that global warming is happening because we are adding greenhouse gasses to the air, there is still a lot of debate on the topic. On the one hand, some climate scientists believe that a human-induced climate tipping point may be reached, beyond which climate change will threaten civilization itself. It is easy to see why contemplation of this possibility would cause some of them to overstate their case now & then. On the other hand, there are those with a strong emotional attachment to the notion that climate change is all a part of some natural, or perhaps supernatural, master plan that we humble humans cannot really control. These skeptics are always looking for weaknesses in arguments by the alarmists. And since the alarmists have imperfect data & models, weaknesses are always there. Just understanding these opposing dynamics can explain a lot about the tone of the debate.
Climate Science: Converging. There was a trial in 2007 about the right of California to impose mileage restrictions on cars (43mpg by 2016). The rationale for this included climate, natural resource conservation & air pollution. Auto manufacturers & dealers were the plaintiffs (don’t regulate us); the state of California was the defendant. The expert witnesses were: John Christy, a sometime global warming skeptic, U of Ala., for auto folks; & Jim Hansen, NASA, for the state. In many important ways, the testimony of both was virtually the same. Namely: Global warming is happening, but even if the whole USA had the 43mpg standard, the effect on the climate would be too small to measure by 2100. California won this round. (Bulletin of the AMS)
Man-Made Earthquakes. In an effort to harness geothermal energy, a Swiss company bored about 3 miles under Basel, Switzerland and injected high pressure water in order to create steam. (As all coal miners know, the earth gets cooler down to a couple of hundred feet, then warms at a rate of about 5.5 deg F per 1000 ft). As an apparent (and unexpected) result of the cold water injection, many small earthquakes were recorded, along with several of magnitude 3 or greater. Minor structural damage was reported and about $7 million in claims have been filed against the company. One of the directors of the company is facing criminal charges. The project has been put on hold and an independent risk assessment has begun, due to be completed in 2009. (EOS)
Dino Feathers. The realization that dinosaurs are closely related to birds raised the obvious possibility of feathered dinosaurs. Fossils of Archaeopteryx include well-preserved feathers, but it was not until the early 1990s that clearly non-avian dinosaur fossils were discovered with preserved feathers. Today there are more than twenty types of dinosaurs with fossil feathers, nearly all of which are two-legged. Most are from the Yixian formation in China. The fossil feathers of one specimen have even tested positive for beta-keratin, the main protein in bird feathers. It has been proposed that Tyrannosaurus and other closely related dinosaurs had such protofeathers. However, skin impressions from large tyrannosaur specimens show mosaic scales. While it is possible that protofeathers existed on parts of the body which have not been preserved, a lack of feathery body covering is consistent with modern multi-ton mammals such as the elephant, hippopotamus, and most species of rhinoceros.
Mr Science Newsletter, 2009, #11
Global Positioning Systems & Climate. GPS had many serendipitous benefits for science; one being that for the first time there is a way to monitor global atmospheric water vapor content over land & oceans. Timing corrections for the GPS signal are related to atmospheric moisture. Earlier satellite methods just worked over oceans. Both methods tell us that water vapor content has been unusually low over the past few years. Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas & is an important variable in climate models. Evaporation (the source of the vapor) equals precipitation. The dry air is related to the La Niña phenomenon, and the air will likely moisten as we move into El Niño. The recent dry air helps explain why global temperatures have not risen much lately. If global warming does not resume within 5 years or so, major reassessments of global climate models will be necessary.
Blind Fish Can See. Many fish can “feel” their surroundings without making direct physical contact. Among them are eyeless “blind" cave fish, some fish that frequent murky waters (e.g., catfish) and many schooling fish. Blind Mexican Cave Fish can perceive structures in their surroundings and can easily avoid obstacles. Their remote sensing system uses the pressure and velocity fields in the surrounding water to detect nearby items. The lateral-line organs responsible for this are aligned along the sides of the fish's body and also surround the eyes and mouth. They consist of gelatinous, flexible, flag-like units about a tenth of a millimeter long. These neuromasts – which sit directly on the animal's skin or just underneath – are sensitive to the slightest motion of the water. A human analog would be the way you can detect a hot breath on the back of your neck and know something is there ... without seeing or hearing anything.
Fat, Dumb, & Happy? Rats fed a high-fat diet experienced a rapid and significant reduction in their physical endurance and a decline in their cognitive ability. After nine days they were only able to run only half as far on a treadmill as those that remained on the low-fat feed. The rats on the high-fat diet were also making mistakes sooner in a maze task, suggesting that their cognitive abilities were also being affected by their diet. The number of correct decisions before making a mistake dropped from over six to an average of 5 to 5.5.The research, funded by the British Heart Foundation, may have implications not only for those eating lots of high-fat foods, but also athletes looking for the optimal diet for training and patients with metabolic disorders. (Oxford & Cambridge Universities)
Liposuction Leftovers. In a related story, it has been discovered that globs of human fat removed during liposuction can be processed into stem cells for research. Furthermore, this can be done more quickly and easily than has been possible using skin cells, which is the current practice. Michael Longaker, MD, has called the readily available liposuction leftovers "liquid gold." Reprogramming adult cells to function like embryonic stem cells is one way researchers hope to create patient-specific cell lines to regenerate tissue or to study specific diseases in the laboratory. Clearly, the USA is resource-rich in this regard. (Stanford's School of Medicine)
Artificial Photosynthesis. Photosynthesis has supplied the overwhelming majority of stored energy available on our planet. This stored energy, which is mostly in the form of fossil fuels, has accumulated over billions of years, and it is only very recently that the stocks of fuel have started to be depleted at a rate faster than nature can replenish them. In natural photosynthesis, carbon dioxide & water are converted into carbohydrate & oxygen. Simply put, light energy is used to take electrons from water & give them enough energy to produce glucose. But it is very complex, requiring two kinds of chlorophyll and an apparatus of more than 100 kinds of proteins. Most of the chemistry associated with natural photosynthesis is understood quite well, but so far we have not been able to engineer an artificial leaf. If we could, we could possibly begin to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. No real progress has been made in artificial photosynthesis over the past 20 years, but as fuel becomes more expensive, and climate concerns grow, there will be more research on artificial (synthetic) photosynthesis.
Mr Science Newsletter, 2009, #12
Quantum Field Theory is one theory that encompasses all forces (gravity, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear) & matter (large particles & small ones) in just 6 different fields (4 for force, 2 for matter). According to QFT the entire universe is made of these 6 fields. QFT unifies quantum mechanics & relativity; and is intuitively accessible to most people. A field is simply a property of space. We are all familiar with gravitational and electromagnetic fields. They are why apples fall and magnets stick to the fridge. A quantum is the smallest possible amount of a field. Quanta are not localized. They do not have borders and they can spread out limitlessly. Force fields can overlap each other and multiply their intensity while maintaining their separate identities. Matter quanta cannot overlap each other. It is quanta of light that are absorbed by your eye & cause the sensation of color. Because field quanta are emitted and absorbed as indivisible units, they act very much like particles, but there are no particles in QFT, just quanta of fields.
Flu: Intellectual Property? The Health Minister of Indonesia, Siti Supari, MD, has been causing a big ruckus in the World Health Organization for refusing to allow blood samples of bird flu victims (humans & birds) to be shipped outside the country. She claims it is Indonesia’s intellectual property, just like, say, a newly discovered mummy found in Egypt belongs to Egypt. This is a big deal because H5N1 bird flu is way worse than H1N1 swine flu, and Indonesia is the epicenter for Asian avian flu mutation. The way things normally work; Big Pharma would use the donated infected blood to engineer a vaccine, and then would sell the patented vaccine to Indonesia and everyone else at a profit. One can understand her position, up to a point, and one would assume that everyone could work out a good-faith compromise of some sort. But one should also consider: She says she thinks that Big Pharma engineered the H1N1 pandemic to sell vaccine. O My. BTW, Vietnam is among the most cooperative countries in the Asian bird flu research arena. This is just one of many ways Vietnam War was not “lost”.
Moon Water. Recently, it was big news that copious amounts of water (probably ice) exist on the moon. This was discovered by slamming a big mass into the moon and analyzing the electromagnetic spectra of the ejected material (a practically foolproof proof). Many commentators considered this to be a startling discovery. But as is so often the case, it should have been expected when considered in retrospect. We know that most comets and some asteroids contain a lot of ice, and collision with these objects has for years been a leading theory about how earth got its water. Why not ditto for the moon? After all, there is ample evidence (some would say proof) of such collisions on the moon. All you need is a cheap set of binoculars to see the craters.
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #1
Universe Discovered on New Year’s Day, 1925. Edwin Hubble, at age 35, presented a paper at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Jan 1, 1925. Apparently astronomers had meetings on New Year’s Day in the 1920s. The title of the paper was: “Cepheids in Spiral Galaxies” and it made the then-startling claim that the universe was a lot bigger than our own Milky Way. His discovery was made possible by Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921), an office worker at Harvard College Observatory, who discovered of the period-luminosity relation of Cepheid variable stars. This allowed astronomers to estimate the distance to Cephied stars and radically changed modern astronomy, an accomplishment for which she received almost no recognition during her lifetime.
Presenting and Publishing Science Papers: Two Different Things. The scientific method is relatively structured and formal. If an idea is really startling, or important, or new, authors will select a high-quality refereed journal, prominent in the field most relevant to the paper, for publication. To a non-specialist, faulty science and work by charlatans can sound very convincing. Beware obscure journals or results published in a journal different from the subject of the paper (for example, a climate paper published in a medical journal). A quote from the Dec 2009 issue of Physics Today published by the American Institute of Physics, pp 51-52, by Robert Kirshner, Clowes Professor of Science, Harvard, describes the process succinctly: "Talks at conferences aren't real Papers. ... A flash of insight while working alone is good, but until you've made the case in a carefully prepared manuscript and answered objections from a referee, you haven't got a real scientific result."
Poor but Healthy. When analyzing US data from 1920 to 1940, the greatest increases in life expectancy (6.2 years, from 57.1 in 1929 to 63.3 years in 1932) and decreases in mortality rates coincide with the worst years of the Great Depression (as gauged by GDP and unemployment rate). When the economy improved, health apparently deteriorated a bit. In fact, of the various causes of death studied, only the frequency of suicides increased during the bad years. This is seemingly no fluke. Similar trends have been found for milder recessions. What's going on? For one thing, studies of the effect of health care tend to show that lifestyle is a more important variable than wealth (beyond a certain point). Hardly anyone starves during depressions & recessions in the US. They just have less money. When people have less means to indulge, they may have healthier habits. As for the latest recession, only time will tell. (Sci Am; Tapia Granados & Diez-Roux, U Michigan Ann Arbor; & Ruhm, U of NC Greensboro)
Primate Health Care: Instinctive. “In a study in Tai National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards, licking their blood, carefully removing dirt, and waving away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions, and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. (from THE AGE OF EMPATHY: NATURE'S LESSONS FOR A KINDER SOCIETY by Frans de Waal.)
Hibernation. Some animals can sleep through cold weather in a state of hibernation. In a state of hibernation, the animal can be moved around or touched and not know it. But don’t try this with bears, which only go into a torpor or temporary sleep and can wake up quickly. For bears, some prefer to use the term "denning" rather than hibernation. With true hibernation, the animal appears dead. Body temperature drops so that it almost equals the ambient temperature. Heartbeat and breathing slow down, too. There is no movement and it takes a long time for it to wake up enough to even walk around. During a bear's winter sleep state, the degree of metabolic depression is much less than for smaller mammals. The bear's body temperature remains relatively stable (depressed from 37 °C (99 °F) to approximately 31 °C (88 °F)) and it can be easily aroused. Some hibernators store food in their caves and burrows. The ones that do this do not sleep straight through the winter. They wake up once in awhile, walk around a little, and eat before they go back to sleep. Some warm-blooded hibernators are: Badgers, bats, nighthawks, raccoon, ground squirrels & skunks. Cold-blooded hibernators include: Bees, earthworms, frogs and toads, lizards, snails & snakes.
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #2
Earthquakes. Wherever the Earth is under stress, earthquakes can happen. They most commonly occur where the Earth’s plates meet, but also occur in the interior of continents along fault lines where rocks have bent and then broken under stress. The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti (magnitude 7) happened where the Caribbean and North American plates come together. Loma Prieta, CA (1989, mag 7) and San Francisco, CA (1906, mag about 7.8) quakes also occurred where continental and oceanic plates meet. But big quakes can occur in the middle of continents. Sichuan, China (2008, mag 8) and the New Madrid, MO (1811-1812, mag 7 to 8) quakes were mid-continent. Where plate boundaries meet, the relative motions between plates can be quite fast, 10 to 100 mm per year. When quakes occur in these areas, aftershocks can often be detected up to a decade or two after the quake. Intra-plate movements are much slower, usually less than a mm a year. But when quakes occur in these areas, aftershocks can sometimes be detected for hundreds of years afterwards. (Physics Today)
Appalachians Spring Up. The Appalachians are some of the oldest mountains on earth. 460 million years ago, during the Ordovician era, volcanoes along the edge of what is now the Atlantic Ocean issued enough lava to form the Appalachian Mountains. They also added large amounts carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, many time current levels, turning the world into a very warm place. For about 10 million years, the volcanoes continued to add carbon to the atmosphere as the Appalachians & other areas removed it, so the hothouse conditions remained fairly stable. Life flourished in the warm oceans. Then, about 450 million years ago, the volcanoes stopped adding carbon dioxide to the air, but the Appalachians &c. kept removing it. By 445 million years ago, glaciers were growing & in that ice age, two-thirds of all species perished. (Scientific American)
Creationism’s Silver Lining. Most well educated scientists lament that so many Americans shun evolution and embrace creationism. But this is not all bad. A general populist skepticism is, in some ways, healthy. Almost all of us have been cheated by scoundrels who are cleverer than we are. These instances, where we have been robbed, share a common thread: We did not understand what we were agreeing to, and we were duped. This is as true for the one-on-one small-time bunko artist as it is for the early 21st century world market fiascoes. So Everyman is understandably skeptical of clever people making unfathomable claims. And to many, the notion of evolution is just such a claim. It is up to future science educators to make evolution, one of the most successful scientific theories ever propounded, understandable to nearly everybody.
Pardon My French, For Crying Out Loud. Babies start listening & learning while they’re still in the womb. As newborns, it has been shown that they know their mother’s voice. Knowing this & following a hunch, a team of scientists recorded the cries of 60 newborns: 30 from French-speaking families and 30 that heard German in the womb. Sure enuf: French infants usually cry on a rising note, while the Germans tend to cry a falling melody. Those patterns match the cadence of their native languages. (Scientific American)
Horse Sense. During the late 1800s, jockeys learnt that they could speed things up if they hunched themselves over (like they were crawling) and held their weight up on their legs instead of sitting on their butts. This made a big difference and increased world speed records by 5%, a bigger 1-decade jump than has ever been experienced since. Here’s why. Most folks figured that the streamlined nature of the hunched position reduced wind resistance, and that was correct. But it was only a part of the answer. Equal to or larger than the wind resistance savings was the energy the horse saves when the jockey cushions the up-down motion with his legs. This means that the horse does not have to do all that lifting work. Instead of the horse lifting the jockey up & down, the jockey’s legs are doing the work. (Scientific American)
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #3
No River Runs Thru It. A few large countries have no river as all. Libya and Saudi Arabia are examples. Libya is 95% desert, but it was not always thus. At various times in the past the Sahara contained grasslands, forests, and civilizations. One lake, Megafezzan, was about the size of England, but that was 200,000 years ago. The most recent wet phase started phasing out about 5,000 years ago, but some humans stayed on using “fossil” water that was accumulated in water tables thousands of years ago. The reason for the wet-dry spells in the Sahara involves changes in the general circulation … large atmospheric roils of rising (rainy) and descending (dry) air that are influenced by variations in temperature (e.g., ice vs no ice), land cover, &c. Maybe Kaddafi (of Libya) tried to figure all this out & it drove him crazy.
Serotonin & “Gut Reactions”. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, i.e., a chemical which relays, amplifies, & modulates signals between the nervous system & other cells (like muscle). It is produced & located mainly (80-90%) in the gut, where it is used to regulate intestinal movements. The remainder is synthesized in the central nervous system where it has various functions, including the regulation of mood (e.g., gut reaction), appetite, sleep, muscle contraction, & some cognitive functions including memory and learning. Serotonin is found not only in animals, but also in fungi and plants, including fruits and vegetables. So maybe veggies have "gut reactions" like critters.
Big Snake. Titanoboa is the largest snake ever discovered. It lived approximately 60 million years ago, in the Paleocene epoch, a 10-million-year period immediately following the dinosaur extinction event. By comparing the sizes and shapes of its fossilized vertebrae to those of extant snakes, researchers estimated that the T. Cerrejonensis reached a maximum length of 40 to 50 ft, weighed about 2,500 lbs, & measured about 40 inches in diameter at the thickest part of the body. In 2009 the fossils of 28 individual T. Cerrejonensis were found in the coal mines of Cerrejón in La Guajira, Colombia. Because snakes are ectothermic (cold blooded), the discovery implies that the tropics, the creature's habitat, must have been warmer than previously thought, averaging approximately 90 °F. The warmer climate of the Earth during the time of T. Cerrejonensis allowed cold-blooded snakes to attain much larger sizes than modern snakes. Of ectothermic animals today, larger ones are found in the tropics where it is hottest, and smaller ones are found farther from the equator.
Lightning Fatalities. Although the US population increased from 177 million in 1959 to 298 million in 2006, lighting fatalities decreased markedly during that period. Considering data from the 48 contiguous states, average fatalities have dropped rather steadily from an average of 156 per year for the 1959-1963 pentad, to 57 per year for the most recent 5 years of data, 2002-2006. Apparently NOAA’s lightning safety campaign is paying off. The worst states (most deaths per 100,000 people per year) are Wyoming (17), New Mexico (16.1), Arkansas & Colorado (tied, 11.7) and Florida (10.6). The best are Calif. & Washington (tied, 0.4), Oregon (0.8), Mass. (1.0) and Conn. (1.1).
Drinking water from air humidity. Customarily, water desalting plants require large volumes of seawater and energy, and give off atmospheric pollution and harmful salt wastes. But if you have adequate sunshine and reasonably humid air, it is theoretically possible to extract pure water from the air, using no fossil fuel and producing no waste. The resource is readily available. Even in the Negev desert in Israel, annual average relative air humidity is 64 percent, meaning that every cubic meter (a cube about 3.2 ft on a side) of air contains 11.5 milliliters (0.4 fl oz) of water. The theory says that if we pass hygroscopic brine, a salt solution which absorbs moisture, thru the air, it will absorb water. Then, the salty solution is passed thru a solar distiller to extract the pure water & the cycle begins anew. The pumps are driven by solar energy. Whether or not the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology in Stuttgart can get this to work on a practical level remains to be seen.
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #4
Nat Geo Trivia. In vol. 1, no. 1 of the National Geographic Magazine (Oct, 1888), the very first color illustrations, or pictures of any kind, for that matter, were weather maps of the great storm of 1888 (Mar 11-14). In vol. 1 no. 4 (May 1889) there is a 10-page article by one Bailey Willis, US Geological Survey, titled: "Round About Asheville." He marvels at the views from the "Beau-catcher hills." He also describes a May 1880 trial of "several well-known moonshiners" and states that "the town street was crowded with their sympathizers, lean mountaineers in blue and butternut homespun" and admitted that "the attentions of the crowd were not reassuring." The article includes a color map of the Asheville area. Other articles in the 4th issue are about Panama, Nicaragua, and irrigation in California. Nov 1896 was the first issue containing a bare breasted (African) female. Quite racy for Victorian times.
Sea Ice. Fresh water freezes at 0 degrees C (32 degrees F), but the freezing point of sea water is colder. For every 5 parts per thousand (ppt) increase in salinity, the freezing point decreases by 0.28 C (0.5 F); thus, in Polar Regions with an ocean salinity of about 35 ppt, the water begins to freeze at -1.8 C (28.8 F). When the ice freezes, the ice itself is frozen fresh water. Interspersed among the fresh ice crystals are droplets of brine, which are typically expelled back into the ocean. This raises the salinity of the near-surface water. Some brine droplets become trapped in pockets between the ice crystals. These droplets are saline, while the ice around them is not. The brine remains in a liquid state because much cooler temperatures would be required to freeze it. At this stage, the sea ice has a high salt content. Over time, the brine drains out, leaving air pockets, and the salinity of the sea ice decreases. (NSIDC)
The Greenhouse Effect 101. To balance incoming short-wave solar energy, the earth constantly radiates long-wave heat energy (infrared photons) back out to space. This is how the earth maintains a fairly constant temperature. Some of the outgoing radiation is absorbed & re-radiated back to earth by various trace gases like carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, & ozone. This gives us the greenhouse effect, & keeps the earth from becoming a ball of ice. The warming effect works according to the laws of quantum physics. When an infrared heat photon of a specific energy collides with a greenhouse gas molecule, that photon will be absorbed & an excited electron will jump to a higher orbit. However, that new electron orbit is not stable & will soon fall back to its "rest" energy level & emit a photon of the same energy level (frequency) that was absorbed. While the original photons were on their way out to space when they were absorbed, the new photons will be radiated in a random direction. Some will continue up, some will return toward earth. It is this back-to-earth radiant energy that causes the underlying earth to warm to a new equilibrium temperature. Because of its complexity, only computer models can adequately quantify the greenhouse effect. The exact magnitude of this effect caused by gases humans are adding to the air is not yet precisely understood, but all models to date have shown various amounts of warming. None show the earth cooling or remaining the same.
Dead Zones. Oxygen exists in water as atoms tightly bound to hydrogen - which critters can’t “breathe” - and as dissolved oxygen gas, which supports sea life. Ocean and lake areas where dissolved oxygen has been significantly depleted are called Dead Zones because most fish & shellfish can’t live in them. Oceanographers began noticing Dead Zones in the 1970s. Many such zones exist in the world, the most well known one being a New Jersey sized area in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi River dumps high-nutrient runoff. This fertilizes algae, which use up most of the oxygen. Another, more complex, more speculative, & less well understood way to create dead zones is by enriching the oceans with carbon dioxide (which we are now doing). High concentrations of carbon dioxide make it harder for marine animals to respire (to extract oxygen from seawater). At the same time, ocean surface waters are warming and becoming more stable, which allows less oxygen to be carried from the surface down into the depths. These are emerging stories worth keeping an eye on.
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #5
Victorian Era Tornado Warning Idea. A seemingly viable tornado watch system was invented in 1883 by a polymath called Edward S. Holden. He was inspired by work done by Sgt John P. Findley, who analyzed over 600 tornado reports and had as good a feel for storm physics as anyone of the day. In the Holden plan, a string of telegraph poles were to be fitted with wind sensors (set to 70 mph) that would break the circuit, causing a warning cannon to be fired. The poles were to be aligned south & west of a settlement because tornadoes move from those directions (mostly). It would be activated only during stormy weather. But it was never tested. The powers that be of the era feared false forecasts & public panic, so they banned the word "tornado" from public forecasts from 1886 to 1938! We'll never know if it might have worked, but today power line breaks are sometimes used to confirm the existence of a tornado. (Bulletin of the AMS)
Whale Fall. In 1987, while viewing the desert-like landscape of the deep ocean's abyssal plain, the crew of the submersible Alvin was surprised to observe a thriving colony of various scavengers on a whale carcass that appeared to have been dead for years. They called this newly-discovered habitat a whale fall, and subsequent research established that whale carcasses can host these communities of creatures for periods of decades to centuries. They last longest in the abyssal deeps, where no light & little dissolved oxygen exist. One of the charming critters that feasts for years on the lipids in the bone is the tiny 1-cm Zombie Worm (Osedax … bone eater in Latin), which grows roots into the bone, much as plants do in the ground. All adult Zombie Worms are female. They maintain little colonies of larval males in their bodies as a source of sperm for whenever they’re in the mood to reproduce. (Sci American)
Oil Sands. The country with the largest petroleum deposits in the world may not be Saudi Arabia, but Canada. Of the 2.5 trillion barrels of crude held in the oil sands of Alberta, 172-315 billion barrels are economically recoverable … about the same as the Saudi stocks of 264. The Canadian oil is called bitumen and the oil-sands ore (yes, it can be called ore) contains about 10% bitumen. It costs a lot to mine, about $30 a barrel, compared with a few dollars a barrel for conventional oil wells, but is competitive when oil prices are high. Mining & using bitumen creates more greenhouse gas than conventional oil recovery. It is a bit ironic that the country with the most bitumen is also one of the countries for whom global warming might do more good than harm. (Physics Today)
Terrestrial Cosmogenic Nuclide Geochronology (!). TCN geochronology is a fancy name for using the effects of cosmic radiation on rocks to estimate the date that they were exposed to the surface. It can be used to say when glacial scour, faulting, sediment deposition, exhumation, &c., took place. A nuclide is an atom defined by its number of protons, neutrons, & energy content. The TCN technique is ingenious in its simplicity. Imagine a glacier advancing over the landscape and scouring the rocks underneath. As the glacier retreats, fresh rock surfaces become exposed to the atmosphere. Galactic cosmic rays then bombard the fresh minerals exposed at the Earth’s surface, producing rare nuclides such as beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 in the process. So, measuring the concentration of TCNs in rocks at the Earth’s surface allows scientists to estimate how long a surface has been exposed and/or the rate of surface denudation. TCN has been used to determine the timing and rates of crustal displacement, define the timing of past glaciations and climate change, & measure rates of soil formation, erosion, & landscape evolution. (AGU)
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #6
Ulcers. Well into the 1990s, stomach ulcers were thought by many medical professionals (and most of the rest of us) to be caused by emotional stress and other lifestyle issues. But in 1981, a practicing MD in Australia, Barry Marshall, and colleague, Robin Warren, began research that uncovered the true culprit: bacteria called Helicobacter pylori. Since the mid-1990s antibiotics have been the standard treatment for ulcers and gastritis. Stomach ulcers and their deadly side effect, stomach cancer, once quite common, are now reasonably well controlled. This march towards a cure (and a 2005 Nobel Prize), was not a smooth one. Lacking proper research resources, Dr. Marshall infected himself, and then proceeded to cure himself, to help establish the cause and effect relationships necessary discover a cure.
Addictions: After We've Kicked Them, Why Do They Kick Back? Carefully controlled psychological testing at Northwestern University has revealed that the more confident we are that we can kick an addiction (smoking, in the case of these tests), the more likely we are to resume the risky behavior. The researchers concluded that overestimating our self-control was a very common mental, or emotional, error. In the experiments, they randomly administered bogus "placebo" tests to smokers trying to quit. Then they told one randomly selected group that they possessed low self control, and told the other group that they had excellent self control. Those who were told that they had low self control subsequently avoided smoking significantly better than those who thought they had high self control. The lesson we can take from this is the very essence of folk wisdom: If you want to succeed, don't get cocky. (Scientific American)
The Metric System: Will the USA Ever Budge? The December 1927 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reports that Rep. Fred A Britten of Illinois has introduced The Metric Standards Bill in Congress. Following the advice of the All-American Standards Council, it was envisioned that we would have “decimal metric units for general use in merchandising throughout the United States after 1935.” Well … “after 1935” was certainly true. The USA remains virtually alone in failing to adapt to the metric system. Had our forebears the gumption to get on with it in 1927, we’d all be conversant with metric now. One wonders how our descendants will view us on such matters.
Laser Cooling. We all know about the widespread use of industrial lasers to cut thru things like steel. But a lesser-known use for lasers is to cool some atoms and molecules to near absolute zero. In its most common form, this "Doppler Cooling" process irradiates atoms with laser light whose frequency is tuned just below the atomic resonance (a natural vibration that atoms exhibit at a given temperature). Each atom absorbs photons that oppose the atom’s motion. The atom then reradiates the light in a random direction and returns to its ground state a tad cooler. (This works much the same as greenhouse gases do in the atmosphere.) Repeating that optical cycle thousands of times bleeds energy away from the atom & can cool the atomic sample to below a thousandth of a degree Kelvin. Zero Kelvin is absolute zero … nothing is colder. (Physics Today)
Rocks & Minerals. A mineral is a naturally occurring solid, formed through biological &/or geological processes, that has a specific, highly ordered (crystal-like) atomic structure. A rock, by comparison, is an aggregate of minerals & need not have a specific chemical composition. Minerals range in composition from pure elements and simple salts to very complex silicates with thousands of known forms. Although only a dozen minerals are known to have existed when the Earth formed 5 billion years ago, there are now about 4,400 mineral species, over half of which owe their existence to biological transformations which began 2 billion years ago. (Sci Am)
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #7
Turning Water into Hydrogen Fuel. University of Wisconsin scientists have designed a way to harvest small amounts of waste energy and harness them to turn water into usable hydrogen fuel. They use a new process called the piezoelectrochemical (PZEC) effect. In the process, nanocrystals are placed in water & pulsed with ultrasonic vibrations. The nanofibers flex and catalyze a chemical reaction to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. This is similar to the piezoelectric effect, which is the science behind quartz clocks. The difference is that in addition to producing electrical energy, they also produce a chemical effect. So far only very small scale experiments have been conducted, but the idea could contribute a bit to overall future energy strategies. The Madison, Wisconsin science team included Huifang Xu, Kuang-Sheng Hong, Hiromi Konishi, & Xiaochun Li. Globalization is alive & well. (Science Daily)
How Snakes Slither. Snakes flex very thin, overlapping belly scales to grab rough features, even tiny ones, on surfaces and propel themselves along via friction. (Even very smooth surfaces usually appear rough under a microscope.) The scales work kind of like our fingernails do, but are much more sensitive. Snakes flex their muscles to raise parts of their body that are not involved in the motion, much as we raise one foot while striding. Some materials with very little friction, like velvet, offer a serious (and probably somewhat humorous) challenge to snake slitheryness. (Nat Geo)
Slime Molds & Railroads. Nature abounds with trade-offs and often comes to the same optimized solutions to its problems as clever people do. Slime molds are fungus-like organisms that use spores to reproduce. Some slime molds feed by growing little tubes out to food sources & channeling the nutrients back to their center, called a syncytium , (sin-'sish-ee-um) which is essentially a bag of cytoplasm. Some scientists in Japan (with way too much time on their hands) created a map of the Tokyo rail transit system containing only station locations (no rail lines). They placed slime mold at the city center & food at the three dozen or so station locations. Sure enuf: In a day the slime mold grew its tubercles along the same routes that the railway designers selected to lay the tracks. (Physics Today)
Clean Water. Those ubiquitous plastic water bottles actually can purify water using only sunlight. If the unsafe water source (e.g., a creek or lake) is relatively clear and contains no chemical toxins, then it can be purified for drinking using only sunlight. Simply seal the water in a clear bottle & leave it for a day in bright sun. The ultraviolet radiation will kill off enough of the biological contaminants to make the stuff potable. PET plastic bottles work better than glass because they are more transparent to the UV. If you try this, don’t forget to remove the labels. (Nat Geo)
What IS a ROBOT? Even experts in the field don’t agree on how to define a robot. Some prefer a simple definition: A machine that does work for people; or even simpler, a mechanism that can move automatically. But by these lights, an dishwasher appliance would be a robot. Others prefer to define it as a machine that uses intelligence to perform work external to itself … like a dishwasher that loads itself. In any case, we don’t have to worry about robots taking over any time soon. The best robots now cannot perform: the object recognition of a 2-year-old, the language capabilities of a 4-year-old, the manual dexterity of a 6-year-old, nor the social skills (recognition of “the other”) of a 9-year-old. (Discover)
The Nose Knows, Sometimes. Although the best human sense of smell is not a good as some critters’, it’s pretty darned good. Dogs have about 220 million olfactory receptors & people have only 5 to 6 million. But still, 5 million is a lot. A keen person can detect some substances in ratios of one part in 10 billion. The best research to date says we can distinguish different smells because scent molecules of a given shape & type bond only with certain olfactory neurons. These smell neurons are each a single cell that runs from our nose all the way into our brain. They are the only kind of sensory cell in the central nervous system that is exposed directly to the outside air. People can when an odor is present quite well, at least, initially, before we grow accustomed to it and don’t notice it anymore. But we can’t identify smells very well in blind smell tests. We are wrong about half the time when trying to identify common fruits, for example. Nonetheless, we usually know when it’s good & when it’s bad, even without the visual cues. (Discover)
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #8
Global Warming’s Evil Twin. As carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere go up, pH levels in the oceans come down because the CO2 & sea water produce carbonic acid. The sea does not actually become an acid, it just becomes more acidic (i.e., less basic or less alkaline). This means the sea will contain more bicarbonate ions & less carbonate ions. This is bad news because carbonates are used by corals and shellfish. Fewer carbonate ions means less coral and shellfish growth. This state of affairs is not as widely discussed as the weather and sea level aspects of climate change, but if the trend continues, it is expected to wreak all manner of havoc with sea life.
Acids & Bases. An acid (Latin acidus = sour) receives electrons in a chemical reaction because it has a positively charged hydrogen atom (an ion, H+) that attracts electrons (which are negatively charged). A base (Latin basis = foundation) donates electrons to a chemical reaction via a negatively charged hydroxide ion, (oxygen & hydrogen, OH-). Bases react with acids to produce water and salts (or their solutions). Strong acids are said to be corrosive, & strong bases are referred to as caustic (which can also mean corrosive). In chemistry, pH is a measure of the acidity or basicity of a solution. The H means hydrogen, but the exact definition of 'p' in pH is unknown (!). On the pH scale, 7 is neutral (pure water), lower than 7 is acidic, and greater than 7 is basic. Mnemonic: A (as in acid) is lower than B (as in base) in the alphabet. Here are some examples of pH readings:
Bases (strong to weak)
13 Bleach
12 Soapy water
11 ammonia solution
10 milk of magnesia
9 baking soda
8 sea water
Neutral
7 pure water
Acids (weak to strong)
6 urine
5 black coffee
4 tomato juice
3 orange juice
2 lemon juice
1 stomach acid
Sea Level Rise & Gravity. Experts in the devilishly complex field of sea level science agree that sea level is rising and will continue to rise, but rate of change is still pretty much unknown. One relatively new piece of the puzzle to undergo scrutiny is the gravitational pull of ice masses on the surrounding sea level. Until recently this had been mostly ignored, but it turns out to be important. What happens is that the ice mass attracts the water mass (according to the classical laws of gravity) and thereby makes sea level higher near the ice mass, and lower elsewhere. As ice sheets melt, this effect means that distant places (e.g., the tropics) will see more sea level rise than areas adjacent to the melting ice. (Scientific American)
What is Intelligence? The very essence if intelligence is an ability to learn & apply that knowledge. Since there are so many kinds of knowledge, it follows that there must be many different types of intelligence. Furthermore, intelligence is a capacity to learn, not a sum of knowledge, so different people (or animals) can have similar intelligence but possess quite different testable knowledge. Trying to measure something this complex may be partly why schools mostly don't even try to measure IQ anymore. Another way to define intelligence is: the ability to predict. Russell Poldrack, professor of Psychology and Neurobiology, University of Texas at Austin, has said: "Learning seems to rely on prediction error because if the world is exactly as you expected it to be, there is nothing new to learn." (Science Daily)
Blood Oxygen. Among the modern miracles of medicine is the pulse oximeter, a non-invasive method for monitoring oxygenation of the hemoglobin in our blood (and pulse rate). Usually attached to a fingertip, light containing both red and infrared wavelengths is passed thru the finger to a photometer (light sensor). Based upon the ratio of changing absorbance of the red and infrared light caused by the difference in color between oxygen-rich (bright red) and oxygen-poor (dark red or blue, in severe cases), blood hemoglobin, a measure of oxygenation (the per cent of hemoglobin molecules bound with oxygen molecules) can be made. Two wavelengths are used to allow determination of the absorbances due to the pulsing arterial blood alone, excluding venous blood, skin, bone, muscle, & fat. Development began in 1935, and limited practical application was achieved in 1964. Improvements in 1975 led to wide scale pulse oximetry beginning in the 1980s. By 2009, home-based systems had become available.
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #9
Clever Babies. Many who raise young children have thought that babies are not the irrational, egocentric, amoral critters that some psychologists have made them out to be. Now, modern research methods have allowed scientists to test how well babies understand cause and effect, imagine the experiences of others, & tell the difference between reality and fantasy. The truth seems to be that even the youngest children learn about the world in much the same way that scientists do: They conduct experiments, analyze the data, & form intuitive theories about the physics & psychology of their environment. Since about 2000, researchers have started to understand the computational, evolutionary and neurological mechanisms that underpin these early abilities. Scientific American calls this work "revolutionary" & that may be so. Indeed, learning more about babies may improve our understanding of adult human nature, which often seems babyish. (Alison Gopnik)
How Our Brains Plan For Retirement. Electronic brain activity research (via MRI) and behavioral studies strongly imply that our ability to plan for the future is linked to our ability to imagine our future self as the self, as opposed to thinking of the future self in the abstract way we think about other people. How distant we feel from our future self varies from person to person. An area of the brain called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex is activated more when you think about yourself than when you think about another person. It can also be more active when you think about yourself now as compared with imagining yourself a decade or more in the future. These individual differences appear to influence financial decisions. People who saw their current self and future self as more alike had real-world financial assets that were worth more. That is, the more similar you (and your MRI) report feeling to your future self, the more savings you report having in your bank account. (Sci Am)
Supercooled Water. Supercooling is the process of lowering the temperature of a liquid or a gas below its freezing point, without it becoming a solid. Water below its standard freezing point will crystallize in the presence of a seed crystal or nucleus around which a crystal structure can form, or at a point when homogeneous nucleation occurs (−42 °C/−43.6 °F). It’s all perfectly natural. Droplets of supercooled water often exist in clouds. One way to supercool water is to chill it in the freezer.
1. Place an unopened bottle of distilled or purified water in the freezer.
2. Allow the bottle of water to chill, undisturbed, for about 2-1/2 hours. The time needed varies depending on the temperature of your freezer. One way to tell your water is supercooled is to put a bottle of tap water (impure water) into the freezer with the bottle of pure water. When the tap water freezes, the pure water is supercooled. If the pure water also freezes, you either waited too long, disturbed the container, or else the water was insufficiently pure.
3. Carefully remove the supercooled water from the freezer.
4. You can initiate crystallization into ice in many ways … shake the bottle, or open the bottle and pour the water onto a piece of ice. In the latter case, the water will often freeze backwards from the ice cube back into the bottle.
OR … see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpiUZI_3o8s
Contrails, Distrails, Hole Punches & Canals. We are all familiar with the contrails (short for "condensation trails") that aircraft sometimes leave behind them when engine exhaust, and/or air pressure decrease (and cooling) cause artificial clouds to condense. The reverse, distrails (clear paths thru a cloud), are rarer, and occur when the aircraft causes clouds to evaporate, or causes the water to condense and precipitate out the cloud. It was previously thought that this only happened in supercooled conditions below about -40C (which is, coincidentally, is also -40F), where homogeneous nucleation occurs (i.e., supercooled water spontaneously condenses). However, new (21st century) research has documented distrail-like holes (“hole punches”) and clear trails (“canals”) thru stratiform clouds at temperatures around -15C (+5F). One reason this was not learnt earlier: Cloud physics is horrendously complex. (AMS)
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #10
Dark Matter & Dark Energy. The universe is expanding, and one theory says that dark energy, so named because we cannot directly detect it, is pushing the galaxies apart. But to account for the motions of celestial objects, we need more gravitational mass than we can see, and so theorize the existence of dark matter, so named because we cannot directly detect it. However, other theories may help explain things a little better. Part of the dark matter may not be dark at all, but may be conventional diffuse gas, known as the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), recently observed by NASA & others. Furthermore, part of the dark energy may be conventional gravitational forces from matter that exists beyond the farthest measurable reaches of the universe, 2.5 billion light-years away. This unseen matter could be pulling the entire cosmos toward it. Footnote: The age of the Universe is about 13.7 billion years, but due to the expansion (inflation) of space we are now observing objects that are considerably farther away than a static 13.7 billion light-years distance. The edge of the observable universe is now located about 46.5 billion light-years away. (SPACE.com & Physics Today)
Kudzu … an invasive vine that is spreading across the southeastern United States and northward, is a major contributor to increases of the near-surface pollutant ozone (three atoms of oxygen bound together), according to the National Academy of Sciences. It produces the chemicals isoprene and nitric oxide, which, when combined with nitrogen in the air, form ozone, an air pollutant that causes significant health problems for humans. Ozone also hinders the growth of many kinds of plants, including crop vegetation. This increase in ozone may completely overcome the reductions in ozone realized from automobile pollution control legislation. (Science Daily)
Addiction’s Link to Sleep. The genetic deficiency that causes narcolepsy (a propensity to fall asleep a lot, e.g., at traffic lights) involves a disruption of the ability to produce & use a protein, orexin, that promotes wakefulness. Serendipitously, it was discovered that narcoleptics fed large doses of amphetamines (to keep them awake) did not become addicted to the stuff. This led to further research into orexin – sleep – addiction relationships that have led to improved sleep medications & may lead to new addiction treatments. In common addiction, substances like alcohol, nicotine, &c., can cause the nerve cells (neurons) to grow receptors that tell the body: I want more of that stuff. Orexins may soon help break this cycle for some people. (Sci Am)
Electron Microscopy. While a conventional microscope uses light, an electron microscope uses a beam of electrons to create a magnified image of a specimen. It works in much the same way as an old picture tube television. A stream of electrons (which all carry a negative charge) is aimed at the sample material whose atoms form its outline. Since the electron shells of all those atoms are on the outside, their negative charge deflects the electron beam and, after focusing, form a TV-like image you can view or photograph. Because electrons have wavelengths about 100,000 times shorter than visible light (photons), they can achieve magnifications of up to 1,000,000x, whereas light microscopes are limited to 2000x magnification.
Logical Emotional Evolution. Any student of history & human nature knows we are not purely logical creatures, and that our emotional responses to life’s challenges can be quite irrational. Since the 1960s, science has even managed to classify some of our inherently illogical behaviors, e.g.: Confirmation Bias (selectively remembering only evidence that supports our belief); Motivated Reasoning (looking harder for flaws in arguments we don’t agree with); Sunk Cost Bias (irrational loss aversion, e.g., I wasted my money on this opera ticket & don’t want to go to the opera, but I’m going anyway). The evolutionary reason for these behaviors seems to be that we humans evolved to win fights & flights (via action & emotion), not necessarily to be logically correct (e.g., sitting and thinking about imminent danger).
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #11
Floating Ice & Sea Level Rise. Ever since Archimedes discovered his famous buoyancy principle, it has been more-or-less assumed that when floating ice melts, it does not change sea level. However, this is not technically correct. Sea ice is fresher (less salty) than sea water. And fresh water is less dense than sea water. So when sea ice melts, the ocean becomes less salty & less dense. All else being equal, the less salty sea will take up more volume that the saltier sea, so its level will rise. The effect may be negligible , but like other troubling aspects of sea level rise, it has not been robustly modeled. (AGU)
The Younger Dryas was a geologically brief cold period that interrupted the warming from the last ice age. It lasted from about 12,800 to 11,500 years ago & was felt in areas of Europe, Greenland & North America, with varied timing & effects in other places. It is named after an alpine/tundra wildflower, Dryas octopetala, which provided early evidence of this cold era. One cause of this abrupt climate event is thought to be changes in ocean circulation caused by fresh meltwater as the glaciers melted. Some theories also include the impact of a celestial object (like a comet) because of the existence of carbonaceous spherules and nanodiamonds in certain geological layers. However, closer examination by modern methods finds that the spherules are actually fossilized balls of fungus and fecal matter. This shows that sometimes scientists don’t know shit. (AGU, edited)
Crookes Radiometer, aka a Light Mill, is now made chiefly as a novelty, but can be used to measure radiation by the speed of its spin. It is made of an airtight glass bulb containing a partial vacuum. Inside is a set of vanes, each black on one side and white on the other, which are mounted on a spindle. The vanes rotate when exposed to light, black side retreating. It was invented in 1873 by William Crookes, who noticed a disruption when sunlight shone on a balance while weighing samples in a partially evacuated chamber. Crookes incorrectly suggested that the force was due to the pressure of light. In fact, it is a heat engine, and can be driven by light, or warming, or cooling. The black sides of the vanes get hotter than the white sides. Hot molecules travel faster than cold ones. The gas molecules hitting the dark warmer side of the vane (& near the edges) bounce off the vane with increased speed, thus spinning it. The actual quantitative physics of how this works is complex. Both James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein worked on the problem.
Immortality on Earth. The Turritopsis Nutricula, or immortal jellyfish, is the only "immortal" animal known, but having no brain (or digestive, or respiratory, or circulatory systems), it presumably does not know. Here is how that works: It starts out as a tiny polyp, attached to some surface wafting in the ocean currents. It then transforms to a bit of zooplankton & drifts about in the sea until it grows up to be an adult jellyfish. (An adult jelly is called a medusa, and isn’t really a fish.) After a while, it undergoes cell transdifferentiation, whereby the adult alters the state of its cells and transforms them into new kinds of sexually immature polyp cells (eating its body & tentacles in the process). It is the only known case of an animal capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature organism after having reached sexual maturity. The previously adult jellyfish then becomes a colony of polyps & starts the process all over again.
Human Immortality. Cell division starts with a parent cell and results in two daughter cells. There is not a parent and offspring at the end … just two offspring. So every cell has a part of the parent in it. In that sense, we humans are immortal, sort of.
Mr Science Newsletter, 2010 #12
Floppy Ears. Of all mammals ever domesticated, only the human slave contained no variety that had naturally floppy ears. Even some cats & horses have droopy ears. Furthermore, drooping ears are unknown in the wild, except for elephants (who don’t have many non-human predators). Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev (1917–1985) established via fox breeding that the anatomical and physiological changes seen in domesticated animals can be the result of selection on the basis of one behavioral trait alone: Tameness around humans. Apparently changes like wavy or curly hair & fur, floppy ears, altered reproductive cycles, & shortened or curly tails can all result from hormonal changes related to tameness, even without selective breeding for other factors. (Sci Am)
What will you do with your extra 4 hours today? According to the US Census Bureau, life expectancy in 1960 was 69.7 years (66.6 for males, 73.1 for females). In 2010 it has grown to 78.3 years (75.7 for males, 80.8 for females). That’s an average increase of 8.6 years (or 75,388 hours) over a period of 50 years (or 18,263 days). That means that lifespans are increasing by a little bit more than 4 hours a day over recent decades (!).
Colombian Geography. Many of us were taught in school that Columbus had way underestimated the circumference of the earth, which had been worked out reasonably well by Eratosthenes about 240 BC. But it was not that simple. Columbus probably thought that the earth was 86% land and 14% ocean, when it is really 70% ocean. So he likely thought the Indies were a lot bigger than they are. Here's why he thought that: Latin Esdras or 2 Esdras is the name of an apocalyptic book in many versions of the Bible, and is also (confusingly) known as 4 Ezra, after its author. It is considered a false (Apocryphal) book by many Protestant churches. But it was well known to Catholics in Columbus' day and contains the passage 4 Ezra 6.42: "Upon the third day thou didst command that the waters should be gathered in the seventh part of the earth: six pats hast thou dried up, and kept them, to the intent that of these some being planted of God and tilled might serve thee." Columbus, being a sailor & map maker, knew there was an awful lot of ocean out there. And if ocean was only 14% of the earth, there must be a lot of unknown land. In that, he was partly right.
Amerigo Vespucci was quite a bright fellow, in spite of being slandered & libeled by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who falsely claimed that Amerigo's expeditions never sailed. When current dogma said that life could not exist near the equator because of the heat, Amerigo said otherwise. In a letter to Lorenzo de Medici c. 1500, he said: "Rationally, let it be said in a whisper, experience is certainly worth more than theory." Using the midnight positions of the "moon and other planets" at various places, he determined the best estimate to that time of the circumference of the earth at the equator. He was only off by about 50 miles. (At the time, the moon was considered a planet.) He was, in fact, the first cartographer to realize that the America was not Asia, but a new continent.
Stress & Strain. In physics, stress is a measure of the internal forces acting within a deformable body. Being a measure of the average force per unit area of a surface within the body on which internal forces act, its units are the same as pressure, e.g., pounds per square inch (same as tire inflation). Beyond certain limits of material strength, this can lead to a permanent change of shape or physical failure. Strain, on the other hand, is a measure of the deformation itself. A deformation has units of length, and strain is measured in units of length per unit of length. Hence strains are dimensionless and are usually expressed as a decimal fraction, a percentage or in parts-per notation (e.g., inches per inch). So feeling stress, stain, or under pressure are all fitting analogues to the mechanics of stuff.
