Category Archives: Students

Items for students and others, interested in learning about science and engineering and the application of science in our lives. We post many of the general interest items here.

Ancient Whale Uncovered in Egyptian Desert

photo of Basilosaurus fossil

The skeleton is 18 meters (50 feet) long and was found in Wadi Hitan in the Western Sahara of Egypt. The first Basilosaurus fossil was found in 1905 but no full skeleton has been discovered until now.

The new skeleton of Basilosaurus will be shipped to Michigan for preparation and preservation, University of Michigan paleontologist Philip D. Gingerich said. It then will be replicated in a casting material suitable for reconstruction and exhibition of the complete skeleton. The original fossil bones and a complete cast will be returned to Egypt for exhibition in public museums in Cairo and in the Wadi Hitan visitors center. Gingerich also hopes that a complete cast can be mounted in the University of Michigan Exhibit Museum.

The fossil whales of Wadi Hitan were first mapped in the 1980s and 1990s during expeditions led by Gingerich, a professor at the U-M Museum of Paleontology and Department of Geological Sciences. The 1989 team discovered that Basilosaurus still retained tiny, useless legs, feet, and toes representing hind legs that were lost at a later stage of whale evolution. No skeleton was collected at the time because of the remote location of Wadi Hitan and because of the large size of the whale skeletons.

Wadi Hitan is a remote valley in which hundreds of fossil whale skeletons are being exposed by the wind. They lie trapped in a sandstone formation that represents an ancient sea bed. “Here the wind sculpts the sand into spectacular shapes, which give the valley an unusual beauty in addition to its richness in fossils,” Gingerich said.

Sea-living animals found in the Wadi Hitan desert include five species of whales, including the Dorudon atrox, presently exhibited in the University of Michigan Exhibit Museum. There are also three species of sea cows (Sirenia), two crocodiles, several turtles, and a sea snake, in addition to a large number of fossilized sharks and bony fishes.

Full press release, April 2005. Photo via: Whale Found in Egypt Desert

Google Flu Leading Indicator

Google Flu Trends

During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.
…
So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.

For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could emerge and cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and — though we hope never to find out — pandemics.

This is an interesting example of finding new ways to quickly access what is happening in the world. Google must be doing significant amounts of similar things to see how usage patterns can server as a leading indicator.

Backyard Wildlife: Crows

bird dives at crow

Here is an action shot of a bird diving at a crow in my backyard, presumably to get the crow to leave. I noticed this for going on for several weeks (follow link for better view of the dive-bombing bird). The crow didn’t seem to mind too much most of the time.

I visited Madison this week and saw 4 wild turkeys wandering around in a residential area. I didn’t have my camera handy however, so I didn’t get a photo 🙁 It was a strange and cool site.

Crows Carry Cameras for Science:

The cameras look through the legs of the birds, transmitting what they record to a person holding a receiver several hundred meters away.
…
To understand more about how and why the crows use tools, researchers need a lot of details about their lives in the wild
…
Videos included footage of the crows using plant stems as tools to probe for food and even carrying a tool from one place to another. The images showed that birds on the ground pick up just 8 bits of food an hour.

Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth

Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth by Dr. Tony Phillips

During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn’t believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.

“It’s called a flux transfer event or ‘FTE,'” says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible.”
…
Researchers have long known that the Earth and sun must be connected. Earth’s magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) is filled with particles from the sun that arrive via the solar wind and penetrate the planet’s magnetic defenses. They enter by following magnetic field lines that can be traced from terra firma all the way back to the sun’s atmosphere.

“We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active,” says Sibeck. “We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.”
…
On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth’s magnetic field presses against the sun’s magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or “reconnect,” forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth.

See more posts on scientific inquiry and scientists advancing our understanding of how things work.

Static Stretching Decreases Muscle Strength

Stretching: The Truth

Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes’ warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds – known as static stretching – primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them.
…
A well-designed warm-up starts by increasing body heat and blood flow.
…
To raise the body’s temperature, a warm-up must begin with aerobic activity, usually light jogging. Most coaches and athletes have known this for years.
…
Athletes who need to move rapidly in different directions, like soccer, tennis or basketball players, should do dynamic stretches that involve many parts of the body. “Spider-Man” is a particularly good drill: drop onto all fours and crawl the width of the court, as if you were climbing a wall.

Federal Circuit Decides Software No Longer Patentable

The Bilski Decision Is In: Buh-Bye [Most] Business Methods Patents

This was an appeal against a rejection of a business methods patent, and the appeals court has now agreed with the rejection. At issue was whether an abstract idea could be eligible for patent protection. The court says no.

Buh-bye business methods patents!

Court Reverses Position on Biz Methods Patents

The ruling in the case, called In re Bilski, largely disavowed the controversial State Street Bank case of 1998. There, the Federal Circuit opened the door to business method patents, which had until then been excluded from patent protection, by granting protection to a system for managing mutual fund accounts. The decision, according to its detractors — which included several members of the Supreme Court — had led to the issuance of weak patents and exposed financial services companies to high-dollar litigation over business method patents.

Documentary on 5 Women Majoring in Science and Math at Ohio State

In the clip, Jennifer Jones, a civil engineering student who talks about her challenges and determination to overcome obstacles in her honors program at Ohio State University. The clip is from Gender Chip Project, a documentary following 5 women majoring in the sciences, engineering and math at Ohio State University.

Toward a More Open Scientific Culture

Michael Nielsen wrote a great post, The Future of Science, which is also the topic of a book he is writing. He discusses how scientific advancement has often been delayed as those making discoveries did not share them openly. And how 300 years ago scientific journals and reward systems created ways for scientists to be rewarded for publication. And he continues with the need for the process to again change and promote more open sharing of scientific knowledge, which I agree with and have written about previously: Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science, Science Journal Publishers Stay Stupid, The Future of Scholarly Publication, etc..

Why were Hooke, Newton, and their contemporaries so secretive? In fact, up until this time discoveries were routinely kept secret.
…
This cultural transition was just beginning in the time of Hooke and Newton, but a little over a century later the great physicist Michael Faraday could advise a younger colleague to “Work. Finish. Publish.” The culture of science had changed so that a discovery not published in a scientific journal was not truly complete. Today, when a scientist applies for a job, the most important part of the application is their published scientific papers.

This has been a great advance. Now we need to continue that advance to use the internet to make that publication open and increase the advantage of shared knowledge to society.

The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals, and not in more modern media.
…
This means: making many more types of content available than just scientific papers; allowing creative reuse and modification of existing work through more open licensing and community norms; making all information not just human readable but also machine readable; providing open APIs to enable the building of additional services on top of the scientific literature, and possibly even multiple layers of increasingly powerful services. Such extreme openness is the ultimate expression of the idea that others may build upon and extend the work of individual scientists in ways they themselves would never have conceived.
…
To create an open scientific culture that embraces new online tools, two challenging tasks must be achieved: (1) build superb online tools; and (2) cause the cultural changes necessary for those tools to be accepted.

I agree we need to take advantage of the new possibilities to advance the practice of science. His full post is well worth reading.

Extra-Universal Matter

Unknown “Structures” Tugging at Universe, Study Says

The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger – a multiverse – and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The theory could rewrite the laws of physics. Current models say the known, or visible, universe – which extends as far as light could have traveled since the big bang – is essentially the same as the rest of space-time (the three dimensions of space plus time).
…
Not everyone is ready to rewrite physics just yet. Astrophysicist Hume Feldman of the University of Kansas has detected a similar, but weaker, flow. He said the Kashlinsky team’s study is “very interesting, very intriguing, [but] a lot more work needs to be done.

“It’s suggestive that something’s going on, but what exactly is going on? It basically tells us to investigate,” he said. David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, echoed the sentiment. “Until these results are reanalyzed by another group, I have strong doubts about the validity of the conclusions of this paper,” he wrote in an email.

Very interesting stuff and another example of the scientific process of discovery.

Yogurts Used to Combat Superbugs

Yoghurts used to combat superbugs

Dieticians at Addenbrooke’s have said evidence suggested the yoghurt might cut the risk of contracting C.diff. Caroline Heyes, dietetic services manager at Addenbrooke’s hospital, said: “Probiotic yoghurts may play a role in preventing C.difficile infection so we have been running a pilot on three of the care of the elderly wards for six months.
…
“We can’t say for sure how much of that benefit is down to the yoghurt and how much they are down to a whole range of infection control procedures that the hospital has in place such as the deep cleaning programme, the bare-below-the-elbow programme, and the increased isolation procedures,” Ms Heyes said.