Imbrickle

Inlets

2009-02-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

This isn't an actual product, obviously, but a neat, simple idea. As part of a "Greener Gadgets" competition, this is an idea to implement "inlets" next to power outlets that would harvest energy from small-scale (think household) sources and feed that power back to the grid. The proposal includes ideas for getting power out of obvious kinetic sources such as door mats and trampolines (and doors and who knows what else), heat sources such as ovens and refrigerator coils, and installing generators in gym equipment.

And this leads to this Greener Gadgets contest, which is part of a Greener Gadgets conference that I've never heard of until now. It's happening here in NYC at the end of the month, so I might check it out. "Going green" is all the rage these days, and I never paid it much mind. The more I think about it, though, and the more attention I see paid to green thinking, the more it makes sense. It's forcing us to think about the efficiency and longevity of our artifacts, and will in the end create smarter products. And now I want to go off about spimes, but I'll save that for another post.

One more quick thing! Think about the gym equipment thing. If gyms would implement this, and come up with a very simple way to track who is on what machine, they could give back to their clients proportional to what those clients help the gym give back to the grid. It would be a small incentive, but a very real one.

The New Scientist: Origin of life found from 50-year-old samples

2008-10-16T15:36:00.001-07:00

In 1953 Stanley Miller used an apparatus like this one to simulate the chemical conditions on Earth before life evolved.

Miller's experiments produced amino acids, complex oily hydrocarbons, and other organic molecules - the building blocks of life. A graduate student at the time, Miller went down in history for
being the first to show that these essential molecules could have been generated on a lifeless Earth.

Stanley Miller passed away in 2007, leaving the contents of his office and lab to a former student.

Here, vials containing samples from the 50-year-old experiments were found and later reassessed using modern techniques.

It turns out that Miller's experiments were even more successful than anyone had imagined. Vials from his volcanic experiments contained a rich mixture of amino acids, including some that have never been found in simulated early Earth experiments before. The New Scientist has the details.

Link to the article: Volcanic lightning may have sparked life on Earth at The New Scientist

Also see:
The Miller Urey Experiment
Protobionts

The Universe on E8

2008-10-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

"Whoa, duuuude, I'm a surfer! I surf! Watch me surfing! And I'll talk about some physics too! Whoa!!!"

In a really intriguing TED talk, Garrett Lisi talks about his theory of everything, describing all particles and interactions of said particles as manifestations of mathematics' 'most beautiful structure.' Can't say I'm completely sold on the idea, but it sure is pretty. And it fits in quite nicely with my habit of seeing patterns within patterns within patterns, always thinking there's probably some structure to it. The biggest difference, of course, is that I'm just dreaming and this guy's actually creating maths and theories with it.

And you might not be seeing a video, instead seeing two buttons asking which version of flash you're using. Apparently TED's player is ancient, and a piece of garbage. Just click on 8 and you should be able to see it.

Brian Cox > Old People

2008-09-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

The debate here is whether or not the LHC was worth the cost, and Brian Cox dominates.

Via Bad Astronomy.

Big Bang Day

2008-09-09T14:50:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow's the big day! The LHC gets switched on for the first time! The TED Blog has a little writeup on it, which most importantly links to the CERN live webcast of the whole ordeal. So make sure to check that out tomorrow morning!

All about ATLAS

2008-08-23T20:51:00.000-07:00

What with the LHC preparing to open up and kill us all with its supermassive micro black holes of doom and destruction, finding the ATLAS channel on YouTube is a blessing. Aside from letting me enjoy some Holst, they've got plenty of extremely informative videos about how the ATLAS detector will work, and I highly recommend watching. Here, I'll make it easy to get started:

And as an added bonus, I couldn't help but notice some PROOF that ATLAS is evil and will destroy the planet. Here's a screenshot taken from their Episode 2 video. It's a slice of the detector:

Look familiar? I believe it does, and I believe it's so unmistakable that this can be considered official proof that dark forces are at work here, consciously plotting thee destruction of this entire planet.

How Long Can You Survive Space?

2008-08-19T15:38:00.000-07:00

How long could you survive in the vacuum of space?

Created by OnePlusYou

More Visual Goodness

2008-08-18T09:16:00.000-07:00

While I'm on the subject of great advancements in visual technologies, here's another project (also out of the University of Washington!) that's quite amazing, although this one can potentially lead to much more dire consequences.

The idea behind this paper and accompanying video is that by combining video with a few photographs of the filmed area, you can enhance or change the video in very convincing ways. Enhancement can include increasing film resolution, HDR, and outright film manipulation on the order of removing objects or completely replacing pieces with alternate content. Watch the video for a good idea of what this is all about.

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

Remember Photosynth?

2008-08-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

That might be a strange question, but I'm just going to assume that everyone else has also been drooling over this Microsoft research/University of Washington project. And in case you haven't, it's basically a tool that takes in a large volume of photographs of any given environment, figures out how they are stitched together, and thereby creates a three dimensional environment in which you can walk around. All from flat, 2D images! Well it would appear that the technology has made it into a future product called Photo Tourism. My guess is that they intentionally chose the most boring name possible to increase the surprise and awe that will be experienced upon using the product. Success is when such extreme surprise causes at least one fatal heart attack.

Anyway, what in the world am I talking about? Here, watch the video.

Aside from the terribly unattractive UI (which is temporary, no doubt), the video shows off a bundle of features that are new to me and make the virtual 3D world much more friendly to navigate. I can't wait to play with this, and I really can't wait to see how useful it might be.

Weight Loss Miracle Tea

2008-08-14T14:24:00.001-07:00

Loose oolong tea leaves. By Minato.

Surely you've heard of this tea, a "celebrity secret" and magical fat melter. Extremely aggressive advertising has made it difficult to ignore.

Bombarded with nine tea ads for every ten on facebook, I eventually started to wonder - just what are these guys actually selling people?

Turns out that this miracle draught is oolong tea. The same oolong tea you can buy at your grocer for 2-3$ a box.

Loose leaf oolong tea has a gentle flavour and contains polyphenols (the magical ingredient). Polyphenols are a group of plant molecules that may or may not have health benefits. (The science is inconclusive.) Polyphenols can be found in a large variety of food sources, including fruits, vegetables, beer, chocolate and other teas. [Wikipedia]

Despite the claims of fat melting properties, the only way anyone is going to loose weight drinking oolong tea is if they drink so much of it that it becomes a replacement for high calorie drinks, like pop and coffee with cream.

Not that my readers are likely tea-dieters, I'm just annoyed by the scamming.

Neat Lightning

2008-08-11T21:15:00.000-07:00

I've been watching this thing all day long. Might as well put it in a nice easy-to-find location so I can view it from anywhere.

Lightning! In slow motion! It turns out that the dancing sparks are called leaders, discharges originating in the negatively charged thundercloud and following ionized air, eventually drilling down to a positive charge (the ground) and creates a discharge path that we see as the big bright blinding and really really awesome bolt of lightning. I must harness this power.

For all the beautiful thunderstorms I've seen growing up in Texas, I've apparently never seen the mechanics of lightning before. Fascinating stuff.

From Today's Big Thing.

Tachikomas are Real?

2008-08-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

The Hexapod Robot is is the closest thing I've seen to a real life Tachikoma. Not just because of its insect-like limbs, every aspect of its movement comes off as inquisitive, which gives a really impressive effect. It reacts to humans in a number of interesting ways. He follows your movement. Get too close and he'll lean back, looking a bit frightened or cautious. Apparently if you stay staring at him for a while, he'll take your picture and upload it somewhere. Neat project!

Via Technovelgy by way of io9.

Leno's Steam Power

2008-08-07T07:33:00.000-07:00

I've known that Jay Leno has an impressive garage, but I had no idea he had steam-powered cars! I'm developing a minor obsession with steam power (but where to build my own in the city?), so seeing this video just makes me salivate.

Leno takes us through a typical day in the life of a turn of the century car owner, including the half-hour start-up process, getting yourself nearly blown up, and enjoying the one-gear wonder that is your steam-powered auto-mobile. Enjoy!

Via The Steampunk Workshop.

Update! Here's another Leno video showing off a later, much more refined, steam car.

Dinoflagellate Bloom in Halifax

2008-08-06T10:14:00.001-07:00

red_tide, originally uploaded by Laura Urquhart.
Been to the Halifax waterfront recently? You may have seen something like this.

From Red water a puzzler, NS Chronicle Herald:

It looks like weeks of dry weather followed by heavy rains may have brought a phenomenon known as red tide to Halifax Harbour.

The water behind the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic had a rosy hue on Monday. Mayor Peter Kelly said the federal Fisheries Department had taken samples but wasn’t able to process them because of the Natal Day holiday.

He said the department’s guess is the discoloration was caused by red algae.

Marlon Lewis, a professor of oceanography at Dalhousie University, said algae levels in the area around the harbour are the highest he’s seen in two years.

"It’s not a very big (red tide), I wouldn’t say," Mr. Lewis said over the phone Monday. "Not compared to the others I’ve seen where the water turns a kind of brick red."

Mr. Lewis said the algae levels are high, but nothing abnormal for Halifax. He said it probably won’t hurt anything.

When algae die, their decomposition eats up oxygen. Mr. Lewis said in years past the algae levels in the Bedford Basin have been so high that the lack of oxygen has actually killed fish. He said he’s seen lobsters crawl out onto the beach to get away from the choking water.

The recent weather has been great for algae growth, he said.

"We had a big amount of rain a couple weeks ago after a very, very long dry spell," explained Mr. Lewis.

"It was like a big pulse of nutrients coming in."

Cynara cardunculus - The Globe Artichoke

2008-08-05T11:23:00.001-07:00

Blooming Artichoke, originally uploaded by RemyOmar.

Favourite foods can take us by surprise when viewed in an unfamiliar context.

Artichokes - a favourite of mine - are actually the heads of a large (1.5-2 m tall), immature thistle. If left unharvested, they will bloom.

A Mediterranean native, Cynara cardunculus is considered invasive in the southern United States. Efforts are being made to eradicate the alien and replace it with native species.

Alien Invasion, originally uploaded by acastellano.

Swirling Tail: SEM of a Dinoflagellate

2008-08-04T19:24:00.001-07:00

The "Montauk Monster" is a little nasty looking. This SEM photograph is much nicer.

dinoflagellate, originally uploaded by sconartist.

I showed this image to introductory biology students, and some were able to identify the single-celled algae right away. The give away is the spiral-like flagellum resting in the central groove. (If you don't know what a flagellum is you can think of it as a tail that propels a single cell.)

The spiral-like tail causes the cell to spin as it moves through the water - thus it's name. "Dino" means spinning, and "flagellate" refers to the cell's tail.

The "Montauk Monster" - Identified!

2008-08-04T18:57:00.000-07:00

I first caught news of the "Montauk Monster" via Gawker last Tuesday.

Along with many others, I've been biting my lips in anticipation - just what the hell is this thing? (And why do we want to know so badly?)

Finding out is a matter of patience, and counting on the omniscience of the internet. I told my partner, "It's probably not a hoax, and eventually a savvy biologist will surface and tell us exactly what this thing is and what happened to it."

That biologist is Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology.

He's written an excellent article with new photographs, skull comparisons and decayed details photoshopped in.

Check him out to discover the true identify of the Montauk Monster!

The Big Picture: Large Hadron Collider nearly ready

2008-08-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

I know that you all added The Big Picture to your RSS feeds when Daniel linked them back in June pointing out the Cassini and Chaiten Volcano collections. That's why you've already seen these amazing images of the LHC - right?

Image Caption:
View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel(TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is one of two general-purpose LHCexperiments designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, theenergy region where physicists believe they will find answers to thecentral questions at the heart of 21st-century particle physics. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN)

Or - if you're like me, you neglected to add TBP, have been missing out, and needed a friend to remind you of what you've been missing out on!

Going To Space

2008-07-30T08:26:00.001-07:00

Found a great post on the Flickr Blog this morning. Some guys in Oklahoma sent a Pentax camera into space on a balloon. Over 104,000 feet straight up, photographing all the way up and back down. They wrote software to model balloon flight dynamics and used weather data to predict where the balloon would travel; the camera and related gear landed about twelve miles from its launch point.

This is seriously cool stuff. There are some really detailed descriptions of their process on the Pentax Forums here, here, and here. Also, make sure to check out the entire Flickr set.

LHC & Neurochip Rap

2008-07-29T11:52:00.000-07:00

Physicists rap to you from CERN and... somewhere with lots of statues to inform you about the awesomeness of the LHC, the Higgs Boson, extra dimensions, and imprinting rudimentary memories onto networks of living brain cells. Woah! I actually learned something.

These videos are simultaneously so awesome and so campy that it hurts. You've been warned.

Large Haldron Rap

N3UROCH!P Rap

Daniel discovered these gems, but he didn't post them (?). He has totally been scooped!

The Smiling Parasite: Giardia lamblia

2008-07-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

When I first showed my brother this picture of an axolotl he said, "Go away. That doesn't exist." (Too cute.)

What a great reaction! So when I received a similar reaction to Giardia lamblia this evening I knew it was time to blog.

See more images of giardia. (The scientific diagrams are especially cute looking.)

Giardia lamblia is a single celled organism. What we perceive as eyes are actually twin nuclei (spherical compartments that contain DNA) and the "mouth" is a parabasal body (don't ask).

This notably cute protozoan is responsible for giardiasis (better known as beaver fever and backpacker's diarrhea) and symptoms include "loss of appetite, lethargy, fever, explosive diarrhea, hematuria (blood in urine), loose or watery stool, stomach cramps, upset stomach, projectile vomiting (uncommon), bloating, flatulence, and burping (often sulphurous)." [Wikipedia] Giardia lamblia lives in the small intestine and spreads when infected fecal particles are able to contact food or water that will be ingested.

Despite appearances, giardia is quite nasty.

levelHead

2008-07-28T16:01:00.000-07:00

I saw this a while back, but it wasn't nearly this refined. Amazing.

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Via 3 Quarks Daily

My Very First Brain

2008-07-25T21:46:00.001-07:00

, originally uploaded by rachaeldawn.

Tonight I began work on my very first brain. This photograph is proof that I obviously know what I'm doing. Never mind the excessive protective gear... it's totally not because I'm terrified of the soldering iron.

Do you need 8 glasses of water a day?

2008-07-22T12:43:00.001-07:00

Everyone's heard this bit of conventional wisdom and some folks struggle awfully hard to maintain it - but do you actually need 8 glasses of water a day? The answer is a simple "NO".

Nobody seems to know where this health myth originates, but it is not based on scientific evidence. For most people, having a drink when thirsty is enough to meet daily liquid requirements. Pushing oneself to drink additional water is not only unecessary, but can be damaging to your health. Water intoxication occurs in extreme cases and can result in altered mental states and death.

Woman dies after taking part in "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" competition (a water drinking competition).

Science in Art: The Illustrations of Carl Buell

2008-07-21T19:08:00.000-07:00

Therapsid Morph

Caption:
This is another of the illustrations I did for Don Prothero's book,"Evolution, What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters". The caption in the book reads... "The transformation from primitive synapsids like Ophiacodon and the fin-backed Dimetrodon to the predatory gorgonopsians to the weasel-like Thrinaxodon and finally to true mammals is one of the best transitional series in the entire fossil record."

The fossils of these animals were found and this transition took place from the early Permian period through the Paleozoic/Mesozoic extinctions to the Triassic.

Thylacine Dingo Comparison

Caption:
Although we talk all the time of the incredible diversity of life on our planet, that diversity is really an amazing amount of variation on a relatively very few themes.

Here we have a recently extinct, marsupial Thylacine (3.) and its ecological equivalent (and replacement in Australia), the Dingo, a placental canine carnivore. These mammals have had separate evolutionary histories since at least the early Cretaceous. Both are the descendants of little insectivorous creatures that lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs. So are aardvarks and elephants, but in this case both these creatures evolved to do the same ecological task. And apparently the best functional form for a cursorial mammalian predator is “doggish”.

Seems that Carl doesn't have a change to update much, but he keeps a fabulous blog called "Dealing with the Beasts" under the pen name Olduvai George. Don't miss his flickr photostream.

Found Carl via Visualizing Evolution.

Dragon Fruit (Hylocereus undatus)

2008-07-20T14:13:00.001-07:00

Maybe you have eaten one of these? Every now and then you can find them at the supermarket for 8$ a piece. The skin is bright fuchsia and the inside is pure white with black seeds. They are very striking.

The fruit (also called pitaya) grow on long slender branches of the cactus around a woody trunk.

Exotic Plant, originally uploaded by Lazy Soup.

I have been growing this plant from seeds taken from the last dragon fruit that I ate. Most (if not all) of the seeds planted germinated, and this happened very fast. Keeping them moist, they continue to grow surprisingly quick.

Dragon Fruit (Hylocereus undatus), originally uploaded by rachaeldawn.

What amuses me about these seedlings are their two cotyledons (seed leaves). Being a cactus of it's particular sort, these are the only leaves this plant will ever have - a nod to it's heritage as a dicot (one of the two major groups of flowering plants) much like our embryonic gill slits are a nod to ours.

It will be several years before these cacti are ready to produce large night-blooming flowers, and bear fruit.

Flowers and trunk, Slowdevel @ Flickr

Sliced fruit, **Shutterbug Gal** @ flickr

Science in Art: Myosin 2,000,000X

2008-07-14T07:53:00.001-07:00

Myosin 2,000,000X, originally uploaded by David Goodsell.

Dr. David Goodsell makes exquisitely detailed to-scale watercolour and digital paintings of cells and the molecules of life.

The molecule featured in the image above is myosin, which was discussed a few posts back in "How Rigor Mortis Works".

His webpage is a little difficult to navigate, but worth your time for all the fantastic and colourful illustrations viewable there.

Giant Golden Book of Biology

2008-07-12T18:05:00.001-07:00

Giant Golden Book of Biology - Illustrations by Charles Harper, originally uploaded by Grain Edit.com.

This beautiful little book from 1961 was designed to introduce children to biology. I just love the cute and stylish illustrations, which touch on the major concepts of a first year biology class.

In this image you can see a cnidarian, a pterophyte, a dinoflagellate and a member of hemiptera... to name a few!

Click to view more images of these great illustrations by Charley Harper.

Wouldn't it be grand to own a copy?

The Biology of Sexual Preference and Behaviour: Perspective from Drosophila

2008-07-11T13:21:00.001-07:00

Mating Fruit Flies, originally uploaded by arbil.

Drosophila mating. (Above.)

Smell plays an important role in who a fruit fly chooses for a mate. That's because fruit flies rely on smell to tell them the sex (male or female) of the other Drosophila they encounter.

Typically, when a male fly smells a female he will engage in sexual behaviour and approach her. She will reciprocate by engaging in correspondent female sexual behaviours. Why do they do this? Let's explore the genetic basis of sexual behaviour in Drosophila.

Fruit flies have a gene called the fruitless gene. The fruitless gene produces a protein called Fru. The Fru protein is expressed (that means that it's working in and on) areas of the antennal lobe, in particular - Fru works on brain cells (mAL neurons) located there. The fruitless gene is only expressed in male fruit flies. A fruit fly smells through it's antennal lobe.

Catch all that? The fruitless gene in fruit flies affects cells that process smell in Drosophila, but only in males. Smell is very important in mate selection and sexual behaviour.

So what exactly does fruitless do?

Early in development both males and females have the same number of mAL neurons in their antennal lobe. As both sexes develop, mAL neurons die. Mature females typically have 5 mAL neurons remaining and these have a female-specific shape. Mature males on the other hand, have 30 mAL neurons remaining and these have a male-specific-shape. Only male mAL neurons grow extensions that connect to the subesophageal ganglion, an area of Drosophila's brain that processes smell and initiates male sexual behaviour. These male differences are all due to the work of Fru.

In other words, the fruitless gene causes brain cells that process smell to connect to more brain cells that initiate male sexual behaviour in a fly.

So, what do you think will happen if the fruitless gene is turned on in a female fly? What do you think will happen if the fruitless gene mutates so that fru is not expressed in male flies?

In the first case, the expression of fru will cause the female to develop mAL neurons like a typical male, and she will exhibit male sexual behaviour when she smells another female.

In the second case, the lack of fru expression will cause the male to develop mAL neurons like a typical female, and he will exhibit female sexual behaviour when he meets up with another male.

I hope you guessed the correct answer! Fru may be expressed atypically in nature, as well as in the lab.

At this point you may be wondering what happens to the male sexual area of the subesophageal ganglion in female flies. It becomes a vestigial area. You may be surprised to learn that many female animals have vestigial brain areas that control male sexual behaviour, including most mammals. Hmmn!

So, we've learned that a single gene can control what sort of sexual behaviour a fruit fly exhibits - male typical or female typical. Isn't that neat?

Of course, human sexuality is far more complicated than Drosophila's! (And even Drosophila's is more complicated than described here. Other genes and mechanisms have important roles to play, as do environmental factors.) Experts agree (based on quite a lot of good evidence) that when it comes to humans, both biological and environmental factors play an important role in sexual preference. And the role these factors play in sexual orientation varies considerably between individuals.

All the same, it's not unlikely that similar mechanisms are at work in creating human sexual behaviour and researchers are on the hunt for our own copy of the Fruitless gene.

Glossary

Fruitless gene - A gene studied in fruit flies that produces the protein Fru.
Fru - A protein that alters the development of mAL neurons in the antennal lobes of Drosophila.
Antennal lobe - For Drosophila, this is the first stop in processing smells. It is the rough equivalent of the olfactory bulb in humans.
Neuron - Cells of the nervous system are called neurons. When people talk about brain cells they usually mean neurons.
Subesophageal ganglion - An area of the fruit fly brain, part of which controls male sexual behaviour.

Recommended reading:
- Seattle Times: Born gay? How biology may drive sexual orientation.
- Wikipedia
- Nelson's "An Introduction to Behavioral Endocrinology" 3rd ed. p.209-213

Also see:
Fruitless specifies sexually dimorphic neural circuitry in the Drosophila brain

Written for Homosecular Gaytheist in response to some comments on Reed's post on homosexuality in penguins. Unfortunately, some folks hope homosexuality is simply a product of lonliness, while others think that it's about aggression (and irresponsibly enough, feel quite confident asserting that scientists do too). Questions are welcome.

Wanna hear a story about attempted MURDER, BOMB THREATS and more ... ?

2008-07-09T23:03:00.000-07:00

If you've spoken to me at all within the last week, then you know that I've been pretty fascinated with the Church of Scientology.

There's an incredible story to hear here, and the more you learn the weirder, scarier and more incredible it gets.

You may already know that this religion was founded by a science fiction writer, and that high ranked members believe that the insane souls of aliens cause all human suffering.

You may have already seen Tom Cruise in a cape.

But you may not know that this story includes:

an internal secret service agency and a secret navy
high suicide rates and high pressure abortions
attempts to destroy critics through harassment, litigations and framing
destroyed families and abandoned children
100,000,000 year labour contracts
salvation that costs 350,000$

And a whole lot more...

... rolled in with a historically unique fight with Anonymous - a group of unorganized geeks who read the same websites and who are raising awareness about Scientology, originally provoked by attacks from the church designed to shut down popular websites and destroy the lives of contributing critics.

Wikipedia

The Church's Official Website

Scientology's Religious Freedom Watch Web Site (Warning: Intense, litigious and very bizarre.)

Critics
http://youfoundthecard.com
http://whyweprotest.net
http://goanonymous.org
http://xenu.net
http://enturbulation.org
http://exscientologykids.org
http://whyaretheydead.net
http://xenutv.com

YouTube
A former Scientologist Tory Christman's YouTube channel.
Xenu TV on YouTube
CNN interview with Scientologist Tommy Davis
Annonymous: Call to Action
Footage from a meeting of Scientologists, including Miscavige and Cruise

Anti-Terrorism LOL

2008-07-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

Picture from today's Big Picture post, Anti-Terrorism Exercises in China. Loltype through Splow's AirLolCatGenerator

Crocuta Crocuta - The Spotted Hyena

2008-07-08T23:54:00.001-07:00

Fighting, originally uploaded by laurentrouas.

Spotted hyenas have a reputation for gross behaviour. No surprise since:

They have a bone crushing bite which helps them to break up the skeletons of their prey, which they eat.

They are an aggressive species. It is not unusual for new cubs to kill their siblings within hours of birth.

Spotted Hyaena (01129), originally uploaded by giamplume.

However, this isn't quite fair. For one, spotted hyenas are highly intelligent and exhibit a wide array of sophisticated social behaviours including:

deception
recognizing trustworthiness

Their intelligence and social ability makes them comparable to certain primate groups.

Combat, originally uploaded by laurentrouas.

But Corcuta crocuta is most famous for it's unusual sex role and appearance reversals.

Women rule. Females are larger and more aggressive. Even the lowest ranked female in the dominance hierarchy comes before the highest ranked male.

Females have masculinized external genitalia that closely resembles the male genitalia and is capable of producing erections. This structure allows them to choose absolutely who they will and will not mate with. Amazingly, they even deliver young through this pseudopenis.

About that:
Males are less aggressive and more submissive, but in adulthood have higher levels of circulating androgens than female hyenas. Androgens are male hormones that are associated with aggression and dominance behaviour in mammals, including humans.

We don't understand why females develop masculinized genitalia.

Some background: In most mammals (again, including humans) a fetus exposed to high androgen concentrations will develop male reproductive structures. Human women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia may have moderately to severely masculinized genetalia. Alternately, genetic males with faulty androgen receptors (AIS) can develop completely as females.

With this in mind, you might expect that female spotted hyenas are exposed to unusually high concentrations of androgens while in the womb and you would be correct. However, steps taken to block the effects of androgens on the developing fetus have no effect on the development of masculinized genitalia. For scientists, this is quite surprising and weird!

Just sayin' ...

More Please:
The Paradoxical Predator
Who's Laughing Now?
Spotted Hyena @ Wikipedia

Science in Art: Animal Form and Function

2008-07-08T16:44:00.001-07:00

The artwork below isn't too accurate, but it encourages viewers to think about the relationship between form and function.

Xray for air travel, originally uploaded by danjrule.

"All wings are airfoils, including those of planes." - Biology: Concepts & Connections

via Street Anatomy

ps. This guy's other art isn't sciencey, but it is pretty cool and view-worthy.

Crinoids / Feather Stars

2008-07-07T07:30:00.001-07:00

Crinoid art (SDV_5886)
Originally uploaded by Sven De Vos

Image caption: Crinoids, or Feather Stars, are not only spectacular by themselves, they also host spectacular commensal animals like small shrimps, cling gobies and tiny lobsters, most perfectly disguised within the Crinoid. I will post some pictures of those later.

As Echinoderms, they are family of Starfish and Urchins. However they have their mouth on the upside, unlike their family members.

Crinoids are suspension feeders. With tiny tube feet on their arms they catch plankton and detritus, to be directed trough a central channel towards the mouth.

Over 500 distinct species are described. The earliest traces of those animals go back almost 500 million years!

How Rigor Mortis Works

2008-07-07T07:05:00.001-07:00

Rigor Mortis
Originally uploaded by M.H - Ghosts_&_Spring

Background

Very generally, a muscle consists of bundles of muscle fibers and the nerves that excite them. Muscle fibers are very long cells that contain bundles of myofibrils. And myofibrils consist of repeating units called sarcomeres. Sarcomeres can contract, and when many sarcomeres contract simultaneously their muscle does too.

So, our nested units from largest to smallest are:
muscle > muscle fiber > myofibril > sarcomere

The contracile mechanism of a sarcomere consists of thin filaments and thick filaments. Thin filaments are made of a protein called actin and extend lengthwise into the sarcomere from either end. Thick filaments are made of a second protein, called myosin which also extends lengthwise in the space between the thin filaments.

This diagram will help you visualize the arrangement of the thin and thick filaments within a sarcomere. Thick filaments also have regions called "heads" depicted as circles in the diagram.

ATP is a high energy mollecule and is the molecular currency of energy transfer within a cell. When ATP interacts with a thick filament head it loses a phosphate group and energy is transferred from the ATP mollecule to the head, causing the head to extend into what is called it's "high energy position". The head will stay in it's "high energy position" until a message is send to the sarcomere telling it to contract. The message comes in the form of calcium ions.

When a nerve excites a muscle fiber a cascade sequence of events occur that lead to the release of calcium from compartments made of fatty membrane that surround myofibrils. Released calcium ions enter sacromeres and attach to the thin filaments causing them to change shape so that docking sites for the for the thick filament heads appear. The cascade continues as thick filament heads bind to these docking sites and undergo a change in shape that pulls on the thin filament bringing it closer to the center of the sarcomere. This act effectively shortens or contracts the muscle on a molecular level, and (as stated earlier) when many sarcomeres contract simultaneously their muscle does too.

The thick filament head is now in it's "low energy position" and will stay attached to the thin filament docking site until another ATP mollecule interacts with it, releasing it back into it's "high energy position". ATP also powers pumps that remove calcium ions from the sarcomere and place it back inside it's membrane bound compartment.

Two more pieces of background. 1. ATP is produced within a cell for use by that cell. 2. When a person dies ATP production comes to a halt, and cellular supplies are rapidly depleted.

From "Biology: Concepts and Connections"

"A whole muscle can shorten about 35% of its resting length when all its sarcomeres contract."

"A typical thick filament has about 350 heads, each of which can bind and unbind to a thin filament about 5 times per second."

Rigor Mortis

If you haven't been bamboozled by all the new science jargon then you may have already guessed how this anatomical set-up results in the post-mortem condition known as rigor mortis (from Latin, meaning "stiff death").

Remember that in a relaxed muscle, thick filament heads are in their "high energy position" and are not bound to the thin filament. Unlike other molecules that expend the energy gained from ATP right away, the heads are waiting for calcium to arrive and unlock their docking sites.

Have you guessed now?

The membrane compartment that surrounds the myofibril decomposes before the sarcomeres that make up the myofibril do. No longer contained in it's membrane compartment, calcium ions may enter sarcomeres and unveil the docking sites for thick filament heads. The heads expend the energy that they acquired prior to death by binding to the thin filaments and sliding them towards the center of the sarcomere, contracting the sarcomere...

... and when many sarcomeres contract simultaneously their muscle does too, resulting in the disturbing twitches and gruesome postures of rigor mortis. Eventually the sarcomeres decompose too, muscles relax and rigor mortis comes to an end.

Glossary

Muscle fiber - A muscle is a bundle of muscle fibers which are long, multinucleate cells that contains bundles of myofibrils.
Myofibril - Myofibrils are strands of repeating sarcomere units surrounded by a modified endoplasmic retriculum called the sarcoplasmic retriculum which acts as a calcium sequestering compartment.
Sarcomere - Are the fundamental contractile units of muscles consisting of thin and thick filaments. The thick filaments have heads that pull the thin filament to the center of the sarcomere, contracting it.
ATP - Adenosine triphosphate, the molecular energy currency of cells. When it loses a phosphate group and becomes ADP (adenosine diphosphate) energy is transferred.
Protein - Proteins are long chains of amino acids which form a diverse group of mollecules. Proteins carry out a wide array of functions and can be thought of as the mollecular machinery of cells.
Thick filament - Made of myosin, the thick filament has portions called "heads" which can attach to the thin filament and pull it towards the center of a sarcomere.
Thin filament - Made of actin, the thin filament protrudes from either end of the sarcomere. When calcium binds to the thin filament docking sites for the thick filament heads are revelealed which they may bind to causing contraction.

Microscopic view of Utricularia, a carnivorous plant.

2008-07-04T18:52:00.001-07:00

Utricularia_2006-09-30, originally uploaded by Penet.

Caption:
The carnivorous aquatic plant Utricularia produces those curious organs which are bags it uses to trap small animals and digest them...

Ultricularia (aka bladderwort) on Wikipedia

Sunday Science Finds

2008-06-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

Zombic cateripillars are slaves to developing Glyptapanteles wasps:
The Voodoo Wasp @PopSci.com
(Also see A Fluke of Nature @ Damn Interesting.)

Photosynthetic Marine Microorganisms do it for less oxygen:
Startling Discovery About Photosynthesis: Many Marine Microorganism Skip Carbon Dioxide And Oxygen Step @Science Daily

Cute & clever taxonomy:
Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature

From the main page:
"Scientific names of organisms are not usually known for their entertainment value. They are indispensable for clarity in communication, but most people skip over them with barely a glance. Here I collect those names that are worth a second look.

Some names are interesting for what they are named after (for example, Arthurdactylus conandoylensis, Godzillius), some are puns (La cucaracha, Phthiria relativitae), and some show other kinds of wordplay (such as the palindromic Orizabus subaziro). Some have achieved notability through accident of history, and many show the sense of humor of taxonomists."

Dynamic Architecture

2008-06-26T08:56:00.000-07:00

While we're on this whole skyscraper kick, how about a wind-powered tower? David Fisher, a French architect, is in the approval stage for two towers—one in Moscow and one in Dubai—where each floor rotates independently of one another, driven by wind turbines fitted in between each floor (which also creates the electricity to power the building, and possibly other nearby buildings as well). And Fisher's buildings will be less expensive to build because the core is all that's built on-site. The rotating pieces will be built elsewhere in a modular fashion, attached to the core and sent up. They'll be built from the top down!

Fisher's company, the Rotating Tower Technology Company, has these two projects on display at its website, and the videos are really quite stunning.

Via The Guardian by way of io9.

Taipei 101 on flickr

2008-06-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

Just because I'm taken...

by Fishtail@Taipei

The Golden Egg (or: 660tons at 380metres), originally uploaded by heritagefutures.

See more of flickr's most interesting images of th Taipei 101 building here. Many are very striking. For New Years the whole building produces fireworks.

Taipei 101 Damper movement on 12 May 08

2008-06-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

Video caption:
Happened to be visiting Taipei 101 when the tremors from the earthquake in Sichuan was felt in Taipei..The damper is 660 ton in weight suspended on the 92 floor to 87 floor..

Also:
YouTube video of the Long Now technology display at Maker Faire 2008

Massively Gigantic Pendulum

2008-06-25T07:13:00.000-07:00

So the Long Now Foundation, a group established to think about culture in the framework of 10,000 years as opposed to our current norm of thinking about this year, this moment, fast/faster/fastest, has been working on what they call the 10,000 Year Clock. It will be an entirely mechanical device that will tick once every year and last as long as the name says. From what I've seen so far, it's a beautiful piece of machinery, and it's been quite a bit of work for these guys.

In a new post on their blog today, they mention something they found while researching pendulums for their clock. In one of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, the Taipei 101 building, right up near the top, is a 728 ton tuned mass damper to help prevent the building from swaying during harsh conditions such as storms and quakes. The thing sways, and it offsets the sway of an entire skyscraper!

Look at that thing! It's humongous!

Also, while I'm writing about the Long Now Foundation, I should also mention that they have regular seminars which have become available as a podcast that I highly recommend. If that link doesn't work, you should be able to search the iTunes store for Long Now or SALT.

Tiny endemic, on flickr

2008-06-24T21:08:00.000-07:00

Image by Nuysia@Tas.

Endemic species are found in one area, and no where else in the world. As such, they are extremely sensitive to habitat degredation and easily threatened.

From the caption:
The Tasmanian viviparous seastar, Patiriella vivipara. Adults achieve a full size of 13mm across. This tiny species is endemic to Tasmania, is known from a handful of locations and is considered threatened. Rather than going through the usual planktonic larval stage that most seastars go through, this species hold the larvae in it's gonad until they are fully formed. These minute baby seastars emerge from the backof the parent. This reproduction method limits the spread of this species to suitable habitat elsewhere along the coast.

View distribution map.

Patriella vivipara at Parks & Wildlife Service Tasmania web site.

Open Letter to Ministers re: Bill C-61 from LibriVox founder

2008-06-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

An excellent open letter to our Minister of Industry from LibriVox founder Huge McGuire.

I am the founder of LibriVox, an all-volunteer, web-based project to make audio recordings of public domain texts and give them away for free. Since our inception in 2005, we’ve run on a yearly budget of $0; yet we’ve become one of the most prolific makers of audio books in the world, with a production rate recently topping 100 books per month. We’ve got a catalog of some 1,500 audio books, including authors such as Dickens, Cervantes, Austen, Dante, Darwin, Sun Tzu, Hobbes, Einstein, and Plato. We also have a number of Canadian classics from Leacock, Lucy Maude Montgomery, and others. We have thousands of volunteers around the world, who make audio versions of texts and give them away because they believe access to knowledge and great literature is one of the most precious gifts we can give to each other. We’ve gained some fame over the years, with articles in the NY Times, radio spots on the BBC, as well as many more mainstream and web media mentions and profiles. The Vice President of Creative Commons recently called us “perhaps the most interesting collaborative culture project this side of Wikipedia.”

LibriVox is the sort of project that is on the outer edge of copyright case law, because what we do was not possible even a few years ago. At our core, we are about reading old books, but we use digital recording software, distributed production models, mass online collaboration, bit torrents, blogging and podcasting, online forums and wikis, bandwidth, mp3s and zip files, all to make recordings of old texts and give them away online for free.

I have some personal objections to Bill C-61 as it has been tabled, objections you’ve heard no doubt from thousands of concerned and angry Canadian citizens. But I wanted to outline two concrete examples of how Bill C-61 would criminalize legitimate activities of Canadian LibriVox volunteers.

Read whole letter here.

* I tried to contribute to LibriVox a year or two ago, but found that I'm no good at reading at a slow, good-for-listening pace. I also have several audio books from their site on my iPod including The Origin of Species and the autobiography of Olaudah Equino.

Charlie Angus on Bill C-61, Canadian DMCA

2008-06-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

So, not science - but definitely technology and ethics. I promise to get on with some fun science posts once I've finished this terrible summer class.

"But C-61 is about greed, not just rewards, about stifling the age-old enjoyment of sharing music with friends. It imposes a rigid black-and-white legal framework on a multihued, free-flowing landscape. It's about insisting on horse-and-buggy etiquette in an automotive age." - From The beat will go on despite the federal Conservatives @ The Vancouver Sun

The Big Picture

2008-06-18T11:46:00.001-07:00

This isn't necessarily science-y, but this is probably my favorite new blog of all time.

The Big Picture is a daily photoblog full of very hi-res pictures focusing on a theme a day. It's a very young blog, and already there are too many good choices to link to here. But I'll try to exercise some restraint and link to the Cassini collection and the Chaiten Volcano collection.

So amazing!

Heads Up!

2008-06-12T12:18:00.000-07:00

Canadian DMCA is worse than the American one!

Also: Michael Geist Blog.

Any suggestions on who to write besides the usual MPs and PM?

Edit: I received a mass email from Ministers Prentice and Verner and have already sent a reply cc: everyone I could find without spending too much time since I have a big exam tomorrow. I suggested that these two debate Doctorow and Geist live and air it on YouTube.

Wouldn't it be phenomenal if they actually did . . .

Can Life Evolve in Simulated Worlds?

2008-06-02T15:58:00.000-07:00

Many cute little characters like this "Norn" are the stars of a computer game called "Creatures". In the game, the little characters hatch from eggs, then proceed to learn, forget, eat, get old, get bored, become curious, etc, etc, all seemingly without the player's interference. Could these little creatures really be called alive? Steve Grand, the head programmer of the game believed the answer to be "Yes", and he wrote a whole book to explain why.

The book is called "Creation: Life and How to Make it". On the whole I recommend it, though the cockiness of the title rears its head in the writing as well. My opinion is that the author's philosophies about what life is, and his critiques of other such philosophies are a little hasty, however there are one or two very valuable ideas I came away with.

The first is the idea that while simulations (of life) never become the real thing (actual life), a simulated world or substrate is able to give rise to things that have every right to be called real. For example, one could write a computer program to simulate the behaviour of atoms in some physical space. Under no interpretation would those atoms ever be called real atoms. However, should they begin to cluster into molecules, then perhaps those molecules could be called "real". I think the argument gets more compelling if one takes it up to an even higher level, to proteins, cells, etc. How would a cell "know" that it's constituent atoms were simulated? Does it make a difference?

Regulars to the blog take note: this argument made me think of my objection to things like the "Big Dog" robot displaying real intelligence. Its behaviour is directly programmed, rather than arising naturally from some lower level ideas of gravity, orientation, etc (and perhaps essentially, a desire not to fall!).

Of course, Grand claims in his book that his game provides detailed rules for a virtual world, and for both neural and "digestive" systems for his creatures, and from this substrate springs what he claims is bona-fide life. This leads me to the second thing I liked about the book; the details about the extremely clever design required to program learning (and forgetting!) creatures using very finite computer memory. I admit, after scoffing at his philosophy, his programming ideas about how to simulate lifelike neurons and chemistry in his creatures were nearly inspiring.

For two disappointing final notes, Grand admits he doesn't believe his creatures are conscious; just alive (he says consciousness is tied up with models of the world which his creatures do not have). Secondly, I downloaded a free mini-version of the game called Docking Station, and found that despite all the intelligent simulating I knew was going on, the game was gaudy and somewhat boring. However, you may be interested to know that at the printing of Grand's book, the population of both Creatures, and Creatures players worldwide numbered several million each.

Artificial selection produces an impressive array of wild mustard varieties.

2008-05-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

- "Artificial selection is the selective breeding of domesticated plants and animals."
- "For example, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbages, Brussels sprouts and kale are all varieties of a single species of wild mustard."

Wikipedia entry on Brassica oleracea, Brassica.

Textbook cited: Biology: Concepts & Connections. 5ed. Campbell, Reece, Taylor & Simon.

Vegetarianism is about human rights; an argument from biology.

2008-05-31T21:01:00.000-07:00

This week (of June 2) my biology students will be reading a chapter on communities and ecosystems.

Here are a few selected facts from their readings, for your consideration:

- "Each day, planet Earth receives about 10^19 kcal of solar energy." The textbook compares this amount of energy to the energy of 100 million atomic bombs. For your reference, one kcal is equal to 4184 joules.
- "Most of this energy is absorbed, scattered, or reflected by the atmosphere or by Earth's surface."
- " . . . only 1% is converted to chemical energy by photosynthesis."
- " . . . on a global scale this is enough to produce about 170 billion tons of organic material per year"
- "When energy flows as organic matter . . . much of it is lost at each link in (the) food chain."
- "The efficiencies of energy transfer (from one level of the food chain to the next) usually range from 5 to 20%. In other words, 80 to 95% of the energy . . . never transfers from (one level) to the next."
- "An important implication of this stepwise decline of energy in a trophic tructure is that the amount of energy available to top-level consumers (carnivores) is small compared with that available to lower-level consumers (herbivores)."
- This explains why "food chains are limited to three to five levels; there is simply not enough energy . . . to support another (level in the food chain)."

For example:
1,000,000 kcal of sunlight > 10,000 kcal of plant vegetation > 1,000 kcal of primary consumers > 100 kcal of secondary consumers > 10 kcal of tertiary consumers

- "Eating meat of any kind is an expensive luxury, both economically and environmentally."
- "Based on the rough estimate that 10% of the energy available in a trophic level (level of the food chain) is available at the next higher level up ... the human population has about ten times more energy available to it when people eat corn than when they process the same amount of energy of corn through another tropic level and eat corn-fed beef."
- "It is likely that as the human population expands, meat consumption will become even more of a luxury than it is today."
- Demand for meat drives up the prices of grains, fruits and vegetables because "potential supply of plants for direct consumption as food for humans is diminished by the use of agricultural land to grow feed for cattle, chickens and other meat sources."

And the pièce de résistance: Boss Hog: America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history.

What do you think of this post format? It makes it much easier for me to share interesting facts & ideas that I'm thinking about on a short time budget, but it's no good if you guys find it unpleasant to read. If it's a hit, then let me know if there are any topics in biology you'd like me to cover.

Textbook cited: Biology: Concepts & Connections. 5ed. Campbell, Reece, Taylor & Simon.

OLPC XOXO

2008-05-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

From One Laptop per Child, this is the design for the XOXO, planned for a 2010 release. The current iteration looks very much like a toy, but this thing is just sleek. Oh, to be a child in 2010!

They showed off the current design at the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit, and before that I wasn't terribly interested in the project, but getting close certainly piqued my interest. They're creating a new interface designed to be natural for children to use, which indeed means natural to anyone not entrenched in the current (am I really about to say this?) desktop/window paradigm. Which plays a part in a larger move towards natural interfaces that I'm very much thrilled to be in the midst of. What will a generation of children raised on this mean for computing? For communication? I can't wait to see!

Via TED.

‘At least 12% of US biology teachers are creationist’

2008-05-20T08:36:00.000-07:00

So says research reported on in The Great Beyond. What in the world is wrong with us?

Bioluminescent Tides

2008-05-17T14:01:00.000-07:00

"Bioluminescent dinoflagellates (Lingulodinium polyedrum) lighting abreaking wave at midnight. The blue light is a result of a luciferase enzyme (like firefly luciferase, but the enzyme in L. polyedrum shares no similarity with that of the firefly enzyme). Under the right conditions, the dinoflagellates become so numerous that the water takes on a muddy reddish color (hence the name "Red Tide"). The bioluminescence is only visible at night. The photo was taken 6/26/2005with a Canon Rebel XT - 6s, f5.6, ISO 1600, 85mm (135mm equiv)."(Images and text from Flickr's msauder. Click to view the rest of his photostream.)

Apparently, "the last sinking of a German U-boat in WWI occurred in 1918, when dinoflagellate bioluminescence revealed its location (Tarasov 1956)." (Live Marine and Freshwater Phytoplankton)

Fractal Furniture

2008-05-17T09:28:00.001-07:00

zomg.

Shrimp Eyes

2008-05-14T11:12:00.000-07:00

Apparently the most enviable species on the planet is not the ant eater. Far from it, in fact. It's the mantis shrimp.

Look at that guy. He can do so many things that you can't. Specifically, he's got 11 or 12 primary colors ranging from infrared to ultraviolet and can apparently, as researchers have recently discovered, also see six forms of polarization. You see something like one form. An interesting fact from the linked press release is that "the physics we used to understand what was going on [in the mantis shrimp's eye] is the same physics that we use in quantum computing for optimal storage of information."

Via The Great Beyond.

Bird Brain!

2008-05-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

For a couple weeks I've had a tab open in my browser with the sole intent of writing a quick post about it. I came across an old Neurophilosophy article talking about avian intelligence, crows in particular. It cast birds in a completely new light for me, which is always a welcome event. They went from being creatures that lived in a completely foreign way to being more familiar thinking beings, problem solvers. There are videos included in that article that demonstrate the ability of these crows to learn and adapt to our environment in what I think are remarkable ways. They craft tools with whatever they have lying around; they use traffic to crack nuts!

A perfect followup to that article is this video of Joshua Klein talking at this year's TED conference in which he discusses the intelligence of crows and explores the possibility of humans working symbiotically with them. Definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Blue Brain

2008-05-01T17:54:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in Switzerland, a team of researchers has spent a great deal of time learning exactly how a neocortical column works and they've built a supercomputer to simulate it perfectly.

It didn't take long before the model reacted. After only a few electrical jolts, the artificial neural circuit began to act just like a real neural circuit. Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together. Different cell types obeyed their genetic instructions. The scientists could see the cellular looms flash and then fade as the cells wove themselves into meaningful patterns. Dendrites reached out to each other, like branches looking for light. "This all happened on its own," Markram says. "It was entirely spontaneous." For the Blue Brain team, it was a thrilling breakthrough. After years of hard work, they were finally able to watch their make-believe brain develop, synapse by synapse. The microchips were turning themselves into a mind. #

Henry Markram, the director of the Blue Brain project, takes issue with the strictly-empirical nature of neuroscience and favors a more model-based approach akin to physics. It's in that spirit that he and his team have come up with Blue Brain, where its "virtual neurons are more real than reality."

After scaling up the current iteration of Blue Brain, he plans to give his virtual brain a body in the form of a robotic rat (all his work is being modeled around the likeness of a two-week old rat) and watch it grow into a real mind, learning through its body just as any 'real' animal.

This is one of the most exciting articles I've read in ages, and I urge you to take the time to read it yourself. I always sort of wondered how we'd get from our current state of technology to Kurzweil's Singularity, and this has the distinct feel of being the direct course to that end.

Resistors, Inductors, Capacitors... Memristors?

2008-04-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

It seems HP Labs has brought to fruition the physical realisation of an additional, theoretically predicted, fundamental circuit element: the memristor. Originally described in Chua, 1971, numerous sources are claiming that HP has produced a 'practical' (for some value of practical) physical incarnation of the predicted device. ("The Missing Memristor Found" abstract)

My understanding is that the memristor functions as a time-varying resistor whose resistance varies depending on the history of its voltage. What will the consequences be? So far there is a lot of talk about practical applications including persistent memory and faster pattern recognition... I want to hear about the (presently) impractical applications.

"Building an analog computer in which you don't use 1s and 0s and instead use essentially all shades of gray in between is one of the things we're already working on," says Williams. -- Wired, Scientists Create First Memristor, April 30th, 2008

Next thing... a neural interface?

Richard Dawkins this Saturday

2008-04-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

I may just be the only reader of this blog in the NY area, but I believe this is worth mentioning anyhow. Richard Dawkins will be giving a talk bright and early this saturday morning, and you can apparently RSVP in the comments section of this post to get put on the list to attend.

There's probably a catch, but I'd say it's worth a shot.

Update: Full! My new plan is to crowd around the entrance and scream like a teenage KISS fan the second I see someone I've seen a picture of before. They'll be forced to let me in.

Beautiful Robots

2008-04-29T12:58:00.000-07:00

AirJelly:

AquaJelly:

Those are via Engadget.

Also there's the AirRay:

I got to see the AirRay as well as a couple pneumatic water-dwelling robots on display at the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the MoMa on Sunday. I'll be posting some details of all I saw there here or on the other blog before too long. So neat!

OH! And this is a natural place to link Theo Jansen's Strandbeasts, kinetic sculptures that Jansen speaks of as living beings that will roam the beaches.

The View From Heaven

2008-04-29T11:21:00.001-07:00

The Earth Observatory site has an article about nighttime shots of various cities around the world taken from the ISS, as well as some thoughtful commentary on certain features and trends that can be found in the images. They also link to a 126mb quicktime video tour that I highly recommend pulling down and watching.

A while back an astronaut put together a barn door tracker out of spare parts that allowed him to take long-exposure shots and keep the target in the center of the frame while the ISS hurdled through space above it. It's really spare parts, too--he's using an electric drill to turn the knobs!

The picture above is of Tokyo. Its bluish-green color, they say, is indicative of all Japan for their use of mercury vapor lighting. Something else I found interesting (hand-picking from a great many interesting things here) was that some cities bear a striking resemblance to other nasa images, particularly of nebulae found way on the other side of the ISS.

Via Kottke.

Science in Art: H2O

2008-04-28T21:34:00.000-07:00

Paintings by an anonymous artist with a Ph.D in DNA crystal structures. View more molecules at Art of Chemistry.

Photos for thought. Allometry.

2008-04-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

Human and chimpanzee babies share a similar skull shape. As chimpanzees develop certain facial bones grow rapidly compared to others resulting in the characteristic pronounced brows and elongated jaw of an adult chimpanzee. These facial bones grow in humans too, but at a much slower rate. A consequence of this is that our adult skulls look more like the juvenile skulls of both species, but a mature chimpanzee's skull looks pretty different!

Growing different parts of the body at different rates is called allometric growth and it plays a central role in proportioning the adult form. Because a small genetic change can alter relative growth rates significantly, mutations that affect allometric growth can result in very different looking adult forms in closely related species.

An image of Pinkie, a chimpanzee who lives in a sanctuary for orphaned primates in Tacugama. Her unusual coat of white fur makes this infant picture of her quite striking. Click it to see a larger version.

Math Followup

2008-04-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

What's more fun than math toys?

Math food.

Science in Poetry (or Song)

2008-04-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

PhaWRONGula is a blog of verse inspired by Pharyngula, a blog of biology and atheist polemic. The poetry is sharp, scientific, progressive and very topical -- funny too. It's a lyric collection that easily connotes a modern day Swift and Twain.

Martin Luther, Christian hero,
Rated all the Jews as zero:
Work them! Out them! Purge the stain!
We're at fault for Jews not slain.

Charlie Darwin fancied finches,
Measured up their beaks in inches,
Gathered gobs of evidence...
OMG! This all makes sense!

Martin Luther gave the stinking
Nazis all his Christian thinking:
When you meet an evil Jew,
Ask: What Would Jehovah Do?

Charlie Darwin, keen observer,
Used his brain, not Christian fervor,
Found that Mother Nature works
By keeping beneficial quirks.

Adolph Hitler used his Bible,
Buoyed by Luther's lurid libel,
To support his sick solution--
Roundup, rail truck, execution.

Christian anti-science kooks
Seem ill at ease with history books.
Rather than accept the shame,
Guess which hero gets the blame?

Read more about the content of this poem at Pharygula: The Great Godwinization.

Better intuitions about biology: Paedomorphosis

2008-04-25T22:22:00.001-07:00

This charming little salamander doesn't look much like other salamanders you've seen! That's because this species of salamander exhibits a condition called paedomorphosis, a condition in which a species retains certain juvenile characteristics of their ancestors through adulthood.

It is an axolotl, and is closely related to the tiger salamander.

While these two species look awfully different in adulthood, it can be difficult to tell a larval tiger salamander and an axolotl apart.

Scientists may administer hormone treatments to axolotls that cause them to metamorphose, losing their juvenile features. These artificially metamorphosed specimens look like adult tiger salamanders.

While the weird cuteness of an axolotl is enough to make it interesting by itself, it's example of paedomorphosis shows us that a small genetic change can result in species which look and live very differently from their closest ancestors.

Toothbrush Robotics

2008-04-25T19:46:00.000-07:00

These bristlebots look cheap and easy to make, as well as like a lot of fun!

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories -- Bristlebot: A tiny directional vibrobot

These guys move surprisingly fast and produce interesting and unpredictable movements.

Speaking of brushbots, here's a short sci-fi piece about another sort: Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush.

Math Toys

2008-04-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

In my spare time, I like to play with math. And flash. And now, I'll share a couple with you. Do keep in mind that the following experiments are completely bare bones and share little consistency with one another at this point, but I digress. Clicking these two titles will take you to a new window in which to experiment with two rather fascinating mathnerd toys.

Cellular Automata:
A very simple application of a one-dimensional cellular automata, allowing you to manipulate the rule (0-255), the initialization value (string of 1s and 0s), the total number of steps (Flash allows up to 2000), and the constraint (some value less than twice the length of the steps value). There are some great explanations of cellular automata on Wikipedia and Stephen Wolfram's Mathworld site. This is about a straightforward an implementation as possible. Changing a value takes effect by either changing then hitting enter, or tabbing out of the text field.

Fibonacci Game:
Very recently I've been working on a Flash adaptation of a very old Javascript app I created years and years ago with the hope of playing around and exploring the intricacies of these patterns in ways I couldn't before. The idea centers around the Fibonacci Sequence, specifically exploring the patterns found in isolating the final digits within all possible bases. (IE: base ten, then base in which we tend to think.) I talked to a 2nd degree friend at my very favorite IHOP many years ago. While the idea is almost entirely his, I took it upon myself to create a program that would automate the whole process. The application is slightly interactive; press 'h' to toggle the help window.
Also keep in mind that with the Fibonacci app, the higher the base, the computation time increases more or less exponentially, depending on the number of sets required to complete the entire sequence. This will require a fair amount of optimization, as it times out on my macbook pro some time around base 71, but it's fun up until that point!

This was a very brief introduction to these. I'll post a much more detailed exploration either here or at my personal blog soon enough. Just wanted to get this out and let you play!

Edit: This post has been severely edited, because (as is now obvious to me) I should never be trusted to write anything in the middle of the night after an enjoyable evening at the local pub. So if you read this last night and anything struck you as making zero sense, I've hopefully noticed that too and corrected it.

Cooking Korean Food with Maangchi!

2008-04-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

I just came across this very informative site, "Cooking Korean Food with Maangchi", which describes in great detail traditional Korean dishes including ingredients, recipes and techniques along with comprehensive video demos of cooking steps. Is it possible that I might learn some cooking after all..?! (Well, at least I have to learn to make jja jang myun ['black bean noodles'] which I used to eat 'instant noodles'-style when I lived in Ottawa!)

The Mysterious Stranger

2008-04-19T17:24:00.001-07:00

Oh wow.. I totally forgot about this. I saw it when I was young. It seems the 80s was an edgy era for children's television.

Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists save empty space and you, and you are but a thought. -- An Angel

What a bizarre segment. Courtesy of Mark Twain and a very random post on, of all places, gamefaqs.com.

Podcast Round-up

2008-04-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

Long walks with the demanding new pup prompted me to go searching for something to amuse the brain with while strolling about. Here are a few of my finds:

1. The history of modern physics, at Berkeley -- a broad overview of changes in theory and practice, given context through discussions of government, politics, industry and war.

2. In a parallel universe, Cory Doctorow battles the MAFIAA and sciomancers amidst a flurry of red cape and goggles. A fanfic peice by Kyt Dotson entitled "Hello Cory".

3. NeuroPod appears to be a derelict podcast from Nature: Neuroscience, which is unfortunate -- because I enjoyed every episode that I listened to very much, and I think that they're accessible enough that you will too.

4. "The Tech Guy" -- an ongoing netcast from This Week in Tech hosted by Leo Laporte

Restful Living?

2008-04-17T21:25:00.001-07:00

I wish I could live in this low impact woodland home! There's something deeply calming and attractive about it's organic lines and humble design. Built by two full-time parents with nothing more than time and £3000 -- it's enough to prompt my first feelings of buyers regret over our small condo.

Eco Villages

These communities are super neat. Residents live in sustainable homes like the one featured above, they grow their own food, and raise their own livestock -- but that much we expect when we hear the words "eco village". What you might not expect is that these groups are also making an intelligent and concentrated effort to foster community, democracy and human happiness wherever they take root.

If that sounds like a plateful -- it isn't so much as it sounds. Methods include farmer's markets, sharing skills and buying locally, and physically integrating eco villages with the towns they reside in. The Village at Cloughjordan in Ireland has included buying into, and revitalizing the main street of this town with new shops, activities and local artworks. The entrance to the eco village intersects this main street, encouraging village and town members to interact and get to know each other as neighbours.

Click image to see a full size planning layout for The Village at Cloughjordan.

You can learn more about eco villages by watching these short, documentary style videos entitled "Living in the Future". I recommend them, they're interesting and fun! And they might make you wonder if eco village living isn't a little slice of paradise...

A dated mathematical estimate of technologically advanced civilizations in the galaxy, and it's tangents.

2008-04-15T17:55:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed this cute clip where Carl Sagan uses some simple math to estimate how many alien civilizations capable of radio astronomy might exist within the Milkyway galaxy.

Some points of interest:

- At every step, Sagan is able to make a highly conservative estimate (about how many habitable planets there might be, how many with civilizations, etc.) and still retain an excitingly large number -- with one exception. When Sagan attempts to estimate how many civilizations might survive to technology maturity (as opposed to destroying themselves), he finds it takes optimism rather then conservatism to retain any number at all. A fair reminder of how close we have come.

- Sagan uses radio astronomy as the measure, and seems to envision the sort of alien civilizations that have dominated all but the most recent sci-fi. But today, images of enlightened civilizations composed of humanoid artisans and interstellar spaceships seem increasingly naive. Like Sagan, we're able to fuel our imaginations with the science of our time -- modern microbiology, computing, nanotechnology and even the subatomic physics that I understand so poorly. Personally, I find Kurzweil's view both intuitive, and difficult to find challenges for (criticisms of timescale aside). Which leaves my imagination in wondering: What does intelligent matter of astronomical proportions look like? What sort of conditions might allow it to spread explosively rather than gradually? How might we detect this stuff, and if we can't ... what are the implications of that?

Science in ... parody, rap and hilarious animation?

2008-04-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to put this here, but I just have to.

How often do you get to see one of your heroes (and a bunch of other interesting folks) rap dancing to a song with so many clever references from science history? (Mixed with some rather rude, but fair, one line zingers.)

Listen for a swift kick at the prime mover argument, and references to the 1860 Oxford evolution debate and Scopes trial -- to pick out just a few.

This one was above my head, but apparently the bit about soap is a second jab at "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce.

Eugenie Scott rubbing her belly makes me smile every time.

As an aside, I'm constantly amazed at the way the Internet + creative tools in the hands of regular people are allowing us to have and frame the great discussions of our time.

Science in Art: Brendan Monroe

2008-04-12T07:35:00.000-07:00

Brendan Monroe is a long time favourite artist of mine, and it's likely that some of you will recognize his artwork from visiting my home. While his earlier works (which I'm frequently sore I didn't acquire more of when I had the chance) seem to deal with more interpersonal themes, his recent work -- with names like "Increase of Ciculation", "Greater Mitosis" and "Building Blocks" (a peice reminiscient of epithelial tissue) -- manifest the uniquely modern experience of living with microscopic knowledge of one's own biology.

Sequence of Thoughts

See more of Brendan's work here, and at the Richard Heller Gallery.

Why is Relativity Necessary?

2008-04-10T05:45:00.000-07:00

Anyone who reads science fiction probably knows that something strange happens when objects move at high speeds relative to each other. A space traveller can take a one year journey in a high speed ship, only to return and find out that hundreds of years have passed for the rest of humanity. More realistically, one of two synchronized clocks can be taken up into a fast moving plane and, on its return, found to read earlier than the one that remained stationary.

How can we possibly believe that time slows down for objects/beings moving with respect to us? Even stranger, to the moving being, WE are the ones moving, and they would view our time as slowed. Well, to my mind, all this strangeness springs quite naturally from a single strange starting point: the speed of light is constant.

Imagine I clap my hands, and you can measure the speed of the soundwave as it passes you by. If you were to turn and run away from me at 5m/s, then the speed you measure would of course be reduced by exactly 5m/s. Moving away from the source of the sound seems to slow the speed of the sound wave. Well, with light waves, this is not the case! Say I flick on a lightbulb instead of clapping my hands, and you measure the speed of the passing light wave using a stopwatch and a meter stick (no comments on the quick reflexes required please!) You could stand still, run away at 5m/s or fly away in a jet at half light speed. In all cases, you'll measure the speed of light to be exactly the same! (this of course is straightforward - if not easy - to verify experimentally)

Here's an example to show how this ruins our intuition about time. Imagine the bulb is flicked on, and we have two observers, one (call him A) is stationary with respect to the bulb, and the other (call him B) is flying away at half light speed. By the time A sees the wave travel 1km from the bulb, B has of course travelled half a km, so for B the wave has only moved half of one km. Yet, when each measures the speed of the wave, they get the same result, though B only saw it move half as far!

Something has to give in this contradictory scenario, and it turns out to be time (actually, distance as well, but let's not get too complicated...). The reason A and B can agree on the speed of light, but disagree on it's distance travelled is that they also disagree on how much time has passed.

Does this make anyone else's heart beat quickly?!

It turns out that some creative high school trigonometry can give you the exact formula to determine at what rate B's clock is moving as observed by A (slower), but as the textbooks say, I'll leave that as an excersize :)

Daily caffeine 'protects brain'

2008-04-10T05:31:00.000-07:00

This popped up in my morning reads, and I couldn't help but think of you Ashley.

Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests. -- BBC News

I've also heard of other studies that indicate a neuroprotective role for caffeine in ischemic attacks (restriction of blood flow in the brain, for example - due to stroke or cardiac arrest).

Of course, these claims should all be taken with a grain of salt. Even if they do stand, a lot more work will be required to show what sort of net effect caffeine has on the brain and body.

Caffeine molecule painting by Ali, at Ali's Art Adventures.

Are there parts of the brain that are genuinely not used?

2008-04-09T16:41:00.000-07:00

Trauma and Cortical Map Plasticity

Generally, the answer to this question is no. However, certain types of trauma can result in brain areas that are no longer being used – at least for a little while.

For example, imagine that you've just lost your middle finger in a wood workshop accident. Oops! Now the area of your brain that received sensory input from this finger is receiving silence – it's no longer being used.

But the competition for cortical space is fierce and the price of not using is often losing. Thus, during the weeks of subsequent disuse following your accident the area of your brain that was once devoted to your middle finger undergoes a major rewiring. In time, no sensory representation of your middle finger remains; instead, the space it once occupied has been overtaken by neurons that represent your two adjacent (healthy and attached) fingers.

Another outcome is possible and it is responsible for the “phantom limb” sensations reported by a majority of amputees. In the case of phantom limbs neurons become cross wired as the deprived cortex seeks input and active, adjacent cortex pushes into it's area.

The image to the right depicts the location of sensory representation for different parts of the body across the primary sensory cortex. Notice that the area of your brain that receives sensory input from your hand is adjacent to the area that receives sensory input from your face. Where you to lose your entire hand in the workshop accident you might wind up like many amputees who have also lost a hand -- that is, feeling sensations from your “phantom” hand when someone touches cross wired regions of your face! Some amputees have complete maps of their missing hand on their faces.

Note, you may have heard that violinists have unusually large sensory areas devoted to the fingers of their left hand (this is the hand that fingers the strings). This is true! Just as disuse leads to atrophy and replacement, increased stimulation leads to expansion. Cortical maps are constantly changing and adjust proportionately to the amount of stimulation they experience. This type of plasticity occurs in the visual, auditory and motor systems as well.

iTunes U and the NYPL

2008-04-08T14:11:00.001-07:00

So this seems neat. I've never heard of iTunes U before, but according to Apple's site it "puts the power of the iTunes Store to work for colleges and universities, so users can easily search, download, and play course content just like they do music, movies, and TV shows."

Via tuaw.com they've added a new institution: The New York Public Library. Put together by NYPL Labs, this thing has all sorts of talks and transcripts and whatnot. I've barely explored, but it seems pretty exciting already! To check it out in iTunes, just follow this link.

Whitney Music Box

2008-04-07T20:27:00.000-07:00

Jim Bumgardner offers us (two years ago; sorry!) a tantalising visualisation which triggers musical notes. It is something akin to a music box and inspired by John Whitney's attempts to capture music graphically.

Stay awhile and listen! (also old but good)

A matter of changing perspectives.

2008-04-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

Check out this weird and very striking "spinning silhouette" optical illusion. The effect is so strong that many people accuse the computer of playing a trick on them; it's not! The switch that you feel you see is the result of your brain changing it's interpretation of ambiguous data.

If humans use 100% of their brain, what would happen if you used only 50%?

2008-04-04T23:53:00.000-07:00

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor thinks she knows.

The most fascinating part of this talk for me was listening to Taylor describe the experience of her stroke in amazing detail. She's also a highly engaging, and engaged speaker.

While I can't advocate for the amount of lateralization she seems to believe in, her portrayals of the right and left brain are interesting.

From TED Talks: My stroke of insight.

Video length < 19 min.

If humans only use 10% of their brain, what would happen if you used all of it?

2008-04-04T23:30:00.000-07:00

It's not uncommon to hear people use this familiar adage while surmising that full use would lead to telepathy, world peace, and the ability to fry soup cans with eyebeams. If only!

Well, it happens that a small percentage of the population have managed to use all of their brains all at once -- these people have experienced what is called a grand mal seizure (the kind we think of when we imagine epilepsy) and it's characterized by a loss of consciousness and violent bodily contractions.

Of course, it's not true that we only use 10% of our brains. We use all of it, but we selectively activate and inhibit certain parts as appropriate for getting things done.

For example, there's a part of thalamus (the VLo) that we want to keep turned off (inhibited) most of the time. This part of the thalamus transmits voluntary motor commands and we allow it to turn on exactly when we want to transmit them, the rest of the time we keep it turned off so that static firing doesn't send our muscles into wonky contractions. A loss of this inhibitory ability results in ballism, a serious condition involving violent and uncontrollable flinging movements.

To get any idea of just how active your brain is consider that the brain represents about 3% of your body's weight and uses almost 20% of your body's energy.

How The Internet Lets Us Share the Love (and cost us our private lives).

2008-04-04T18:59:00.000-07:00

Yup, I discovered the awesome and articulate Clay Shirky this evening.

This first clip is very The Wealth of Networks -- Shirky describes how the organizing power of the web allows us to power operating systems, encyclopedias, relief efforts and protein folding on love. ;)

After watching this, I couldn't help but think of independent mini-MMO developer Eskil Steenberg -- who named his project Love. (The screenshots for Love are just beautiful.)

In the second clip, Shirky discusses personal privacy in a world with Facebook and MySpace -- to name only the most salient pair.

And hay, he has his own book -- Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations -- which is going straight to my wishlist.

Cory Doctorow says, " -- not only is he smart and articulate, but he's one of those people who is able to crystallize the half-formed ideas that I've been trying to piece together into glittering, brilliant insights that make me think, yes, of course, that's how it all works."

You'll definitely have a few of those moments if you watch these clips. The big "aha" for me was listening to Clay nail exactly how I feel about respecting (and invading) other's privacy on the Internet. If only I could have been so articulate when the person we bought our house from brought up personal information from the web in conversation; at the time I wrinkled my nose and said, "You Googled me?!" (implied: you creepy fucker).

So, in summation -- awesome stuff. Have a look see.

Queen Rania addresses YouTube, "Send me your stereotypes".

2008-04-03T17:51:00.000-07:00

Queen Rania launched her first YouTube video March 30th and is asking viewers to send her their stereotypes and questions about the Arab world. After a summer of collecting messages from YouTubers, she'll reply -- answering questions and breaking down stereotypes. Her intention is to foster a world with fewer barriers and more understanding.

A fantastic move on her part, and it's already generated a lot of attention! Almost 500,000 views in just four days.

World Science Festival

2008-04-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

It was just announced that the 2008 World Science Festival will be held this year in New York City, my own town!

Brian Greene is apparently one of the co-founders, and it looks like they've got a pretty thrilling lineup. I'll get to see Daniel Dennett. :] So! Anyone want to come to Manhattan the end of May and hang out with me?

Correction, some thrilling things. Lots of filler.

A Patient's Paradox

2008-04-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

The patient in question is a living embodiment of the familiar Liar's Paradox ("this statement is false") -- a deeply delusional man whose delusions are nevertheless completely accurate. Psychiatrist and philosopher Bill Fruford describes him in his enticingly titled book Philsophical Psychopathology:

[There is an] even more fundamental sense in which delusions may not be false beliefs, namely that for some patients this would present us with a paradox.

I have reported one such case that occurred in Oxford... The patient, a 43-year-old man, was brought into the Accident and Emergency Department following an overdose. He had tried to kill himself because he was afraid he was going to be "locked up". However, this fear was secondary to a paranoid system at the heart of which was the hypochondriacal delusion that he was "mentally ill".

He was seen by the duty psychiatrist and by the consultant psychiatrist on call, neither of whom were in any doubt that he was deluded. Indeed, both were ready on the strength of their diagnosis to admit him as an involuntary patient.

Yet had their diagnosis depended on the falsity of the patient's belief, as in the standard definition, they would have been presented with a paradox: if the patient's belief that he was mentally ill was false, then (by the standard definition) he could have been deluded, but this would have made his belief true after all.

Equally, if his belief was true, then he was not deluded (by the standard definition), but this would have made his belief false after all. By the standard definition of delusion, then, his belief, is false, was true and, if true, was false.

via Mind Hacks

Scholarpedia

2008-04-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

I stumbled on Scholarpedia this afternoon while searching for computational neuroscience articles.

From the Scholarpedia main page, "The approach of Scholarpedia does not compete with, but rather complements that of Wikipedia: instead of covering a broad range of topics, Scholarpedia covers a few narrow fields, but does that exhaustively.

Currently, Scholarpedia hosts Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems, Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence and Encyclopedia of Astrophysics."

Authors include a slew of famous names, including Koch, Minsky, Damasio and Ramachandran. Indeed, the Scholarpedia isn't shy about telling you that amongst it's contributors are 12 Nobel Laureates and 4 Fields Medalists. All these in the computational neuroscience section alone.

Eventually editions of the encyclopedia will be made available in hard copy, as well as online where they will continue to be updated.

Amazing! Why haven't I seen this before?

Particle smasher 'not a threat to the Earth'

2008-03-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

I'm loving the near-apocalyptic sci-fi-esque headlines that are cropping up as the LHC nears it's summer 2008 completion date.

Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe.

Particle Smasher 'not a threat to the Earth'

My grasp of black holes, strangelets and strings is tenuous at best. So while I'm willing to trust the experts on this one, I still frequently wish that I understood the physics better. This comment from QuantumLeap at BoingBoing seems informed and helpful (if somewhat foreboding in it's final line):

First, let me disclaim that I worked for CERN for a few years and now work for a US National Lab, doing research work for an experiment within the LHC (the ATLAS experiment, http://www.atlas.ch )

This mini-black-holes we expect to generate at LHC don't look at all like what most people associate to them. Have a look: http://atlas.ch/events.html

In fact what we see is the Hawking Radiation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation) emitted by the evaporating black hole, which should disappear in about 10e-25s. Meaning, if it were traveling at the speed of light it would cover a distance of less that the radius of an hydrogen atom. This is a 8TeV black hole.

And . . . particle collisions way more energetic that that happen every day in our atmosphere, and we're still around...

The danger of strangelet conversion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet) is even more exotic since it's not only merely a vague theoretical possibility as it needs matter densities way higher that what you have on earth to be of any concern. A strangelet, if it exists, is even more unstable that a mini-black-hole and so at the speed of light will barely cover more than the distance of a proton radius before disintegrating. Only in a very packed and dense environment (like a neutron star) it would be able to propagate.

Anyway, soon all this debate will be over...

From the virtual LHC center:

LHC is the Large Hadron Collider, an accelerator being built at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. When it is complete in the summer of 2008 it will be the largest and highest energy accelerator in the world. Here are the stats:

* Type of collision: proton-proton
* Center of Mass Energy at Collision: 14 TeV (7 times energy of the Fermilab Tevatron)
* Diameter of Ring: approx 27 km
* Average depth of ring below ground: approx 100 m
* Main particle Detector Systems: ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, ALICE
* Hoping to Discover: Higgs boson, Graviton, Supersymmetric Particle, Extra Dimensions...

Ideas Worth Waiting For

2008-03-31T05:51:00.000-07:00

This is a plug for a program called Ideas, broadcast on that bastion of Canadian national pride, CBC Radio One. In an impatient age, this is a 55 minute show that usually simply hands over a microphone to a learned and entertaining speaker, and lets him or her speak for an hour. The topics are varied; here are some sample abstracts from shows over the last couple of weeks:

Evelyn Fox Keller is both a scientist, a philosopher and a historian of science. In her book The Century of the Gene, she argues that the idea of genes has outlived its usefulness. She explains why we need a new biology

We are healthier than ever before, and we live longer, but improvements in health are not distributed evenly. The rich outlive the middle classes, who outlive the poor. Swedes and Japanese live longer than Canadians, and Canadians, longer than Americans. Freelance journalist Jill Eisen discovers that the reasons have little to do with our health care systems.

Religious passions are stirring up politics around the globe. The West has learned to separate religion from politics. But Islam has another political theology—one that places God at the center. Historian Mark Lilla surveys this intellectual landscape.

Does that say it all? Sure there are some boring shows... but here is a rare place where truly abstract and/or original thought is given its own way with no advertising for an hour. Some of the shows are available as podcasts or mp3 downloads. Users all over the world can listen live online, and for the Haligonians I know are reading this, you can listen at 9pm every weeknight.

I've noticed that many of my favorite shows are not easily available online, so your best bet is really to tune and listen to it on the air. That requires some patience... but the journey deeper into your own mind is worth it, because some ideas really do take an hour to explain.

Also check out The Age of Persuasion, and Spark on Radio One.

Quake!

2008-03-29T21:42:00.001-07:00

Nature ran an article about some researchers at Stanford in California that are creating a new distributed computing platform (think SETI@home) that uses computers equipped with accelerometers to detect earthquakes. Many modern laptops have them built in, and they'll soon be offering them at a cost to allow more machines to join their grid.

As the researchers have stated, the trick is just throwing more and more machines at the system, called the Quake-Catcher Network. The more machines they have, the less important it is for all those nodes to be accurate. When a laptop is picked up or moved, its not going to signal some alarm.

I find this particularly interesting because one of my favorite bloggers, the eminently badass Robert Hodgin over at Flight404, recently wrote about his interest in tracking quakes and what could be done with real-time data, lamenting the fact that the only way to get at such information cost thousands of dollars. A system like GCN has the potential to provide just such a service, partly due to the fact that it can be deployed for next to nothing. I hope they have the foresight to pass on those savings to the web community at large, and it would be especially wise to open source the whole thing. Imagine being able to hook into the system at a lower threshold and pick up on more localized events. It could be used for all sorts of potentially interesting things. Tie it in with some sort of news reporting and you can track the more-or-less exact location of an explosion. Expand the service to a place like my own (NYC!) and with enough users you might be able to keep track of the movement of trains underground. How neat would that be!?!?

I digress. This system is teeming with potential, and it really kind of makes me wish I lived on the other coast to be a part of it.

EDIT: Upon diving a tiny bit into the QCN website, QCN is built atop the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC!), as does SETI@home. It's open source!

Pre-Edison Sound Recording

2008-03-27T09:01:00.000-07:00

Ok this is awesome. An article at IHT tells of a recording that was made something like thirty years prior to Edison's first recording and playback. This recording, called a phonautograph, was very recently played back for the first time. It was created by a French typesetter and librarian named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, and what really fascinates me is that he had no intention of trying to play it back. His interest was in capturing sound as a written, permanent thing. This is something more akin to the very recent interest in audio visualization (Reactable, for example) as opposed to Edison's intent, and that of the entire audio industry that followed in his wake.

To me, seeing a sound wave really strikes me as a very modern thing, though maybe that's completely wrong. It's more a symbol of a questioning, experimental nature than of the concrete marketability of the phonograph. For this reason, it really feels to me like Scott was 150 years ahead of his time.

More Crimes Perpetrated by Infinity

2008-03-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

Here's another brain teaser involving infinity...

One afternoon at 4pm, an old man was pulling a bucket of water up from his well, and was delighted to discover that ten golden coins were in the bucket, and they were strangely numbered 1 through 10. He took them inside, and stacked them lovingly in his cellar, and puzzled over their origin.

At 4:30, he returned to the well, and drew the bucket again, and shouted for joy when he saw ten more coins, these labelled 11 through 20. Unbeknownst to him, back in his cellar, a curious mouse had found his stack of coins, and stolen one from the bottom. When the mouse heard the old man returning, he fled to his hole, holding coin number 1. The old man entered the cellar and added coins 11 through 20 to his pile.

At 4:45, he could not resist going out again and checking the well once more, and sure enough, he discovered coins 21 through 30. He hurried inside with them, by which time the little mouse had managed to work coin number 2 out from under the pile. Since there were still 18 coins remaining, the old man didn't notice that any were missing as he put coins 21 to 30 on top of the pile.

The old man made further trips to the well in shorter and shorter times, after 7.5 minutes, then 3.75 minutes, etc, each time making the trip from well to cellar in half the previous time (he was a spry old man), each time adding ten new coins to the top of his ever-growing pile. Also each trip, the mouse managed to creep back out and sneak a single coin from the bottom of the ever growing hoard.

(Take a moment here to convince yourself that infinitely many trips to the well will have occurred by 5pm... and kindly suspend disbelief!)

At 5pm, the old man was very tired, having moved infinitely fast, but was also satisfied that he had gathered the infinitely many numbered coins that the well seemed determined to offer. He returned to his cellar to view his spoils, and was shocked at what he saw!

What did the old man see?

And the really crazy question: What would be different if a sparrow had been stealing coins from the top of the pile instead of a mouse from the bottom. It matters! Think of the numbers on the coins.

Space Aliens

2008-03-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

It's true, there are aliens floating around the center of our very own galaxy. They're called amino acetonitriles.

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, has a writeup about this little guy, which is a precursor to amino acids and thus a precursor to what we call life. Researchers in Germany have apparently found this stuff in space, which is apparently an awesome thing.

And as a sidenote, his fancy picture of an amino acetonitrile looks nothing like the one I've got here, which was the result of a quick google image search. I don't really know how to read these things anymore, but who am I to question the all-knowing google? No one, that's who.

And as another sidenote, why does the picture look so goofy? Why can't I align it properly to begin at the same height as the text? Silly Blogger.

In case you forgot about it...

2008-03-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

now would be a good time to re-discover Astronomy Picture of the Day.

How It Works

2008-03-24T17:11:00.000-07:00

Given my previous post, this seems appropriate. xkcd.

The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism

2008-03-24T16:41:00.000-07:00

Meet Sarah.

Sarah can “identify and anticipate what [her husband] is feeling—often before he is conscious of it himself.” Like the magician who knows that you’ll pick the seven of diamonds before it’s even left the pack, Sarah can amaze her husband at whim, thanks to her lucky knack of knowing what he’s feeling before he even feels it. (Ta-DA! Is this your emotion?) Sarah is neither a fairground psychic nor the somewhat irresponsible owner of a futuristic brain wave interpreting machine. She is simply a woman who enjoys the miraculous gift of mindreading that, apparently, is bestowed on all owners of a female brain:

‘Maneuvering like an F-15, Sarah’s female brain is a high performance emotion machine—geared to tracking, moment by moment, the non-verbal signals of the innermost feelings of others.’

Sarah is just one of the many curious characters who populate lay science books about gender. She can be found in Louann Brizendine’s book The Female Brain, one of several recent popular and influential books arguing for fundamental and ‘hard-wired’ differences in male and female psychology.

Unfortunately, scientific accuracy and commonsense are often casualties in the ugly rush to cloak old-fashioned sexism in the respectable and authoritative language of neuroscience.

These are the opening sentences in a piece by philosopher Cordelia Fine. She's responding to the recent wave of literature that attempts to parse sexist hunches in the language of neuroscience, pretending that there's science to prove that the stereotypes are really "hardwired sex differences" when the science we have says just the opposite.

Full text, entitled "Will Working Mothers' Brains Explode? The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism." with citations available here.

I'm so sick of seeing the sort of articles and books Fine writes about.

Take for example, this NY Times article which was among the most emailed of the week when it was released. The article explores Leonard Sax's new book "Why Gender Matters" which asserts that female teachers (who according to him are "soft spoken" *) bore boys with their gentle tones. In fact, according to Sax, boys would be doing much better in grade school if we could just get them away from all the soft and pretty girly stuff that grade school is apparently inundated in -- 'coz the boys need a cool, steely room where they're encouraged to draw pictures of people kicking each other to really learn. Riiiiight.

It's been my hope since I started this blog to produce a series of posts debunking these sorts of claims and laying out the science the way it really is. It's just a matter of finding the time. Until then, I'm glad Fine has the ball rolling.

* Somebody should let all those ham-fisted (and strong voiced) ladies who taught me grade school know about this.

Slow and Infintely Steady Wins the Race

2008-03-21T05:46:00.000-07:00

It must be confessed, this is my first post to any blog, ever. I know, I'm a cave man. So for my 'test post', I thought I'd try a little mathematical riddle that may or may not be familiar...

Fast Fred and Slow Susan propose to have a race; a marathon of 100km. Given their (literal) track records, the outcome seems utterly predictable – Fred will easily outpace the slower Susan. As a result, he gives her a head start. Since she is 32 years old, he will allow her a 32 km head start before he even begins to run. Fred knows he runs at twice Susan’s pace, so that any head start of less than 50km should pose no problem for him. So that he may know when to begin, they will both carry phones with GPS devices, and be in constant contact.

The race begins, and Fred faithfully waits until Susan’s little blip shows her 32km along the route. Then he begins. After very little time (since Fred is so fast), he notices that he himself has come to the 32km mark. “Susan”, he says into his phone “I’ve reached your 32km already”.

“One point for you,” she replies “but I am still ahead; I have reached the 48km mark… I’m nearly half done!” Fred fixes the 48km mark in his mind's eye and presses on.

Before long, he reaches the 48km marker. “Susan”, he says “I’m at 48km now, and I’ll pass you before long”.

“two points for you, but I’m still ahead,” she replies “56km and counting… do you suppose you’ll have passed me by the time you reach 56 km?” Something bothers Fred about her comment, but he puts it our of his head and runs, the destination of 56km firm in his mind.

He soon reaches the 56km mark, and again calls his opponent “Susan, I’ve reached 56km”

“Very quick, three points” she says “and have you passed me yet?” Fred snorts in response. “I’m at 60km now. Do you suppose you’ll have passed me by the time you reach 60?”

“Surely, you’ll have gained some ground by then” Fred replies.

“Of course. In the time it takes you to reach my current spot, I’ll have moved on ahead. In fact, EVERY time you reach a spot where I’ve already been, I’ll have moved on further! Even when I'm saying 'a million points for you', I'll still be in the lead! We can keep this up forever, and I guess you can never catch me. It looks as though the race is mine Fred, you may as well give up!”

The easy question is, who will win the race? The harder question is: Why do we have a never-ending sequence of events in which Susan is winning, when it seems that Fred should win? The original version of this little riddle is called Zeno’s paradox, but I challenge you to use your head before your web browser to find the answer. So much more satisfying!

Marbled Icebergs

2008-03-20T21:29:00.000-07:00

These stripey "marbled" icebergs are just incredible looking. The stripes are formed during periods of thaw and refreezing and get their colours from different gas and salt concentrations, as well as mixing with sediment and algae.

Iceberg Gallery 1
Iceberg Gallery 2

Seeing Sounds, and Colours from Another World

2008-03-19T18:57:00.001-07:00

Synesthesia must have made a splash in the news recently, because all of the sudden it's on everyone's lips. Synesthesia means "together perception" and refers to a sort of crossing of senses. Oddly enough, people who have this condition may taste what they hear or see what they smell.

One common type of synesthesia is grapheme -> colour synesthesia, in which individual letters and numbers appear coloured. Autistic rights and awareness person Amanda Baggs recently posted a beautiful set of images illustrating how she sees the English and Arabic alphabets.

Another common type of synesthesia is sound -> color synesthesia. In this great art video, animator and director Norman McLaren illustrates sound as he saw it.

Perhaps the most surprising phenomena associated with synesthesia is the ability of colour blind people with the condition to experience "martian colours". These are people who lack the necessary photoreceptors to make red-green or blue-yellow discriminations -- however, this deficiency is located in the retina of the eye -- on the opposite side of the brain from the primary visual cortex. Colour blind synesthetes may report colourings of letters or sounds that they don't see with their eyes, colourings that they are missing the appropriate photoreceptors for, "martian colours" as one synesthete notably put it.

See the following article and lecture for the neuroscience to synesthesia as well as some interesting perspective on the origin of metaphor and abstract thought. It's all about the angular gyrus!

Hearing colours, tasting shapes. Scientific American, 2003
Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese. Reith Lectures, 2003

Identical Twins may have Unidentical DNA

2008-03-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

Results from a study conducted at the University of Alabama at Birhamgham indicate that identical (monozygotic) twins do not actually have identical DNA. Instead, even identical twins vary in the number of copies they have of a particular gene.

If this is true it might mean abandoning the notion that the environment plays a critical role in a number of diseases and conditions that we know to be largely genetic.

For example, we know that genes are very important in autism, but because an autistic's identical twin has a ~35% chance of being neurologically typical an important role for environmental factors has been reserved.

Article at the NY Times.