milhayser | July 15, 2011
On Dean's Corner, Jeffrey Toney reports the winners of Google's first Science Fair, and in all age groups the winner was a girl. They researched some very challenging and relevant topics: Lauren "studied the effect of different marinades on the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled chicken," Naomi "endeavored to prove that making changes to indoor environments that improve indoor air quality can reduce people's reliance on asthma medications," and Shree "discovered a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients when they have built up a resistance to certain…
milhayser | July 13, 2011
The Universe is a little less than 14 billion years old. Humanity, maybe 200,000. We have reached for knowledge at every step, and recorded what we could. The pace of our knowledge seems to accelerate; the 20th century tranformed our understanding of reality, as had the previous millenium. In 2011, we gather more information than ever before, and our knowledge seems almost complete. But it's funny how things change. On Built on Facts, Matt Springer says James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic equations are as good today as they were in the 1860's, despite a little thing called relativity. Matt…
milhayser | June 14, 2011
On Brookhaven Bits & Bytes, Kendra Snyder shows us new images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, which analyzed the light of 14,000 distant quasars to map the ancient universe in 3-D. Hydrogen gas absorbs the light from quasars at certain wavelengths, generating a pattern known as the "Lyman-alpha forest" and allowing researchers to model the gas as it was distributed 11 billion years ago. Ethan Siegel puts this time period in context in his exhaustive cosmic history, which starts before the Big Bang and stretches a quadrillion years in the future. The universe eventually "goes dark…
milhayser | June 4, 2011
Corvids are among the smartest animals on the planet, and Mo reports that the United States military considered tactical uses for their intelligence. The dream of "spy crows" sprang from research conducted at the University of Washington, where researchers donned rubber masks in the likenesses of Dick Cheney and 'cavemen' to study facial recognition among crows. Perhaps untrue to form, the cavemen molested the crows while the Dick Cheneys left them alone. For months and even years afterward, the crows harassed anyone seen wearing a caveman mask on campus. Now all the Pentagon needs is…
milhayser | May 27, 2011
Jellyfish aren't reknowned for specialized organs; they lack brains, guts, hearts, and lungs. But some of them have eyes in spades. Mo writes on Neurophilosophy that box jellyfish have "24 eyes contained within a club-shaped sensory apparatus called a rhopalium, one of which is suspended from each side of the cube-shaped umbrella by a flexible, muscular stalk." A crystal called a stratolith weighs down each of the four rhopalia and ensures that the "upper lens eyes remain in a strictly upright position, regardless of body orientation." For the first time, researchers have shown that the…
milhayser | May 26, 2011
Time goes on and turns our attention, but radioactive isotopes take a long time to decay. On Greg Laden's Blog, Analiese Miller and Greg update us on the nuclear crisis in Japan. Although the dangers faced at the Fukushima power plant have diminished, the long term consequences have just begun. Greg writes "it has been a while since extensive fission has occurred in the leaking reactor" and "there is real progress in hooking up the plants to outside power sources." Meanwhile, Ana's extensive news feed documents irradiated produce, neglected and euthanized livestock, and a widened evacuation…
milhayser | May 22, 2011
On the USA Science and Engineering Festival blog, astronaut John Grunsfeld describes what it's like to rocket into space. Astronauts first spend two hours strapped in on the launchpad, "flipping switches and thinking about our training and the jobs we have to do." They count down to ignition, mindful of the 4.5 million pounds of explosive in the fuel tanks. After liftoff, the shuttle accelerates out of Earth's atmosphere in less than nine minutes, causing each astronaut to feel like they weigh 700 pounds. An instant later, they are weightless. On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel shares…
milhayser | May 21, 2011
On Built on Facts, Matt Springer writes that "there's really no such thing as a purely continuous monochromatic light wave" and "any pulse of light that lasts a finite amount of time will actually contain a range of frequencies." Pass this pulse of light through a medium such as glass, which "can have a different refractive index for each frequency," and some very weird things start to happen. On Life at the SETI Institute, Dr. Lori Fenton explains her study of "aeolian geomorphology - how wind shapes a planetary surface." As it does on Earth, weather makes wave patterns in the dunes of…
milhayser | May 20, 2011
The moon entrances us—it is near yet far away, familiar, yet unremittingly mysterious. In synchronous rotation, it has a face it never shows. It pulls the oceans; it stirs the blood. It beckons into the unknown. On Universe, Claire L. Evans says that in 1969, six artists snuck "a minuscule enamel wafer inscribed with six tiny drawings" onto Apollo 12's landing module. Claire writes, "the artistry of this 'museum' is as much about the gesture of sneaking it, illicitly, onto the leg of the lunar lander, as it is about the drawings themselves." On Starts With a Bang!, Ethan Siegel…
milhayser | May 19, 2011
On Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer considers the evolving relationship between patent law and DNA, as the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit hears the appeal of Association for Molecular Pathology v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. At stake are patents that Myriad Genetics holds on two genes—BRCA1 and BRCA2—that it earned in the 1990's. These genes correlate with breast cancer risk, and Myriad is the sole supplier of BRCA diagnostic tests in the United States. Jess explains that such patents do not mean a biotechnology company owns the DNA in our cells, but "a patent holder may have…
milhayser | May 13, 2011
Greg Laden draws our attention to an object named Vesta, which by itself makes up 9% of the asteroid belt. Greg says "if you take the largest handful of objects in the asteroid belt, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas and 10 Hygiea, you've got half of the mass of the entire thing, according to the most current estimates." According to NASA, Vesta is even differentiated, meaning it was once hot enough to form a core, mantle, and crust. On Life at the SETI Institute, the Analysis Lead on NASA's Kepler project explains how to spot a planet from hundreds of millions of miles away. Dr. Jon Jenkins says "We…
milhayser | May 11, 2011
On Tetrapod Zoology, Darren Naish acquaints us with all manner of vesper bats, a group which comprises 410 of the 1110 bat species worldwide. In Part I, Darren provides an overview of the group as a whole, including their snub-nosed morphology, invertebrate eating habits, echolocation frequencies, and migratory tactics, which may have "evolved at least six times independently." In part III, he looks at a sister group to vesper bats called bent-wing bats, which "have the smallest reported genome of any mammal: it's about half average size." And in part VII, Darren explains that desert long-…
milhayser | May 9, 2011
Bridging new media and old, The Open Laboratory takes the best scientific blogging of the year and prints it on actual paper. For 2010, forty reviewers narrowed down nearly 900 submissions to fifty of the very best. This year's edition also includes six poems and a cartoon! Editor Jason G. Goldman announces availability of the book on The Thoughtful Animal, suggesting you "buy one for yourself, buy one for your significant other, buy one for each family member, buy one each for as many neighbors, friends and colleagues you can think of, and buy a copy for the local library." In another…
milhayser | May 6, 2011
On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk sees a future filled with nuclear power, deepwater drilling, hydrofracking, and mountaintop removal. To hell with the consequences, just give us the juice! But when the oil, gas, and coal are gone, the landscape pulverized, and the depleted cores of uranium piling up in the background, we'll have to change our energy habits the hard way. Sharon says if we want to start stopping now, we must create a new narrative. She writes, "You can endure anything—as long as it is part of a story of heroism and transformation." On Confessions of a Science Librarian,…
milhayser | May 4, 2011
We are excited to introduce a new blog dedicated to The Art of Science Learning. This project will culminate in the spring with conferences across the United States. Funded by the National Science Foundation, The Art of Science Learning will explore "how the arts can strengthen STEM skills and spark creativity in the 21st-Century American workforce." Over the coming weeks and months, voices on this blog will "lay out the landscape and articulate many of the issues and challenges we'll be discussing at the conferences." To start things off, David Green suggests we bring science into the…
milhayser | May 3, 2011
The staggering 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan March 11 sent a thirty foot tall tsunami raging up to six miles inland, with diminished waves reaching all the way to the Pacific Islands and the shores of North America. In Japan, thousands are dead, and the devastation is stunning. On Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau reflects that due Japanese diligence may have spared millions of lives, noting "the earthquake in Haiti last year, which was 100 times weaker, killed 230,000." On Observations of a Nerd, Christie Wilcox recounts her experience in Hawaii, from…
milhayser | May 2, 2011
On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel differs with Neil Degrasse Tyson, saying that scientific thinking isn't that new, or that exclusive, and in fact has defined humanity from the very beginning. Chad describes science as "a method for figuring things out: you look at some situation, come up with a possible explanation, and try it to see if it works." We start with idle hands, move on to stone tools, furrowed fields, Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and now the pinnacle of our drive to master the universe, the iPad 2. In a follow-up article, Chad dismisses stereotypes of the scientific…
milhayser | April 27, 2011
The universe remains a mysterious place, and one of the biggest mysteries confronting astronomers today is that "the amount of mass we can see through our telescopes is not enough to keep galaxies from spinning apart." Since the 1930's, this shortfall has been covered by dark matter, a hypothetical substance which has never actually been observed. On the Weizmann Wave, we can consider an alternative called MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) which "posits that gravity works differently on the intergalactic scale." In fact, University of Maryland researcher Stacy McGaugh recently published…
milhayser | April 11, 2011
On Confessions of a Science Librarian, John Dupuis considers the keys to writing a successful science book, such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Most important, says John, is crossover appeal: "normally picky reviewers loved TILoHL because it's more than 'just' a science book. They saw it as a book that's also about people and society and ethics." John has a list of specific strategies to make a book appeal to a broader audience. Meanwhile, Chad Orzel offers insight into the writing process behind the sequel to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, a popular science book from 2009…
milhayser | April 8, 2011
The science of cartography has come a long way over the centuries, from the caricatured coastlines of antiquity to the highly-detailed satellite images of today. We know our terrestrial boundaries very well, and until all the polar ice melts and raises sea levels, mapmakers are busy looking elsewhere. Greg Laden explores the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone, which was modelled by observing the transmission of shock waves through the earth's crust. Greg explains, "This sonar-like approach allows the mapping of underground three-dimensional structure," and he has the pictures to prove it…