Category Archives: Science

Sarah, aged 3, Learns About Soap

A Dialogue with Sarah, aged 3: in which it is shown that if your dad is a chemistry professor, asking “why” can be dangerous [the broken link was removed] by Stephen McNeil.

DAD: Why does the soap grab the dirt?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because soap is a surfactant.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why is soap a surfactant?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: That is an EXCELLENT question. Soap is a surfactant because it forms water-soluble micelles that trap the otherwise insoluble dirt and oil particles.

Great. I remember such discussions with Dad (Chemical Engineering professor). The only danger I saw was him getting tied of -why? (when I was older). And sometimes giving me answers the teacher didn’t like (a way of doing math problems that wasn’t the way my teacher was teaching).

Boiling Water in Space

Bizarre Boiling, NASA:

The next time you’re watching a pot of water boil, perhaps for coffee or a cup of soup, pause for a moment and consider: what would this look like in space? Would the turbulent bubbles rise or fall? And how big would they be? Would the liquid stay in the pan at all?

Until a few years ago, nobody knew. Indeed, physicists have trouble understanding the complex behavior of boiling fluids here on Earth. Perhaps boiling in space would prove even more baffling…. It’s an important question because boiling happens not only in coffee pots, but also in power plants and spacecraft cooling systems. Engineers need to know how boiling works.

I had trouble seeing what was happening in the first video. Try this video first.

Because a smaller volume of water is being heated, it comes to a boil much more quickly. As bubbles of vapor form, though, they don’t shoot to the surface — they coalesce into a giant bubble that wobbles around within the liquid.

Scientists Knock-out Prion Gene in Cows

Scientists Announce Mad Cow Breakthrough by Rick Weiss

Scientists said yesterday that they have used genetic engineering techniques to produce the first cattle that may be biologically incapable of getting mad cow disease. The animals, which lack a gene that is crucial to the disease’s progression, were not designed for use as food. They were created so that human pharmaceuticals can be made in their blood without the danger that those products might get contaminated with the infectious agent that causes mad cow.

That agent, a protein known as a prion (pronounced PREE-on), can cause a fatal human ailment, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, if it gets into the body. More generally, scientists said, the animals will facilitate studies of prions, which are among the strangest of all known infectious agents because they do not contain any genetic material.
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Prions remain poorly understood, but experiments suggest that it takes just one bad one to ruin a brain. That’s because a badly folded prion in the brain can strong-arm normal, nearby prions, turning good prions bad.

Robot Heading for Antarctic Dive

Robot heading for Antarctic dive, BBC News:

Isis, the UK’s first deep-diving remotely operated vehicle (ROV), will be combing the sea-bed in the region in its inaugural science mission. Researchers hope to uncover more about the effects of glaciers on the ocean floor, and also find out about the animals that inhabit these waters. The mission begins in mid-January and will last for about three weeks. While the scientists and engineers begin their long journey to the Antarctic at the start of January, Isis left the UK shores in November and has only just arrived at its destination.
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Ten kilometres of cable connect it to its “mother ship”, allowing scientists to control the vehicle and receive the data it collects in real-time. On the ROV, Mr Mason said, were lights, cameras to produce high-quality video and still pictures, sonars for acoustic navigation and imaging, and two remotely controlled manipulator arms to collect samples or place scientific instruments on the sea-bed.
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“We are hoping to see a whole bunch of large creatures such as star fish, sea cucumbers, sea fans, sea pens, etc, that inhabit the deep shelf slope and abyssal depths.” He added: “Essentially no-one has explored Antarctica using a ROV at these depths.”

So, You Want to be an Astrophysicist?

Dynamics of Cats (good name don’t you think) has an interesting series of posts: So, you want to be an astrophysicist? The latest is: Part 2.5 – grad school by Steinn SigurÃ°sson:

Think very seriously about whether you want to do theory, observation, data analysis or instrumentation.
You may end up doing things you never imagined out of necessity (like theorists go take observations, cause if they don’t no one else will; or observers running simulations, or building the instrument they need to do the observations etc etc).
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Finally: READ!!! Pro-actively.
Check arXiv regularly and thoroughly. Read the papers relevant to you and anything else that looks interesting.
Read the references! They are there for a reason. Read the citations – if a paper is interesting, papers which cite it are also likely to be interesting. Use the ADS “C” option liberally and look through it quickly. If in doubt ask you advisor, or just read it anyway.

Next, the slightly tricky issue of what we actually “do”, research wise type of thingy. Might take a while…

arXiv.org is a (even the) great open access article resource. “Open access to 400,419 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology.”

State Foster Science for Future Jobs

State eager to foster young scientists for future jobs

The challenge for Massachusetts is to figure out how to inspire more youths to take the same steps. Across the region, observers from chief executives to policymakers are fretting that Massachusetts is not grooming a work force for the future. Part of that includes funneling enough young people into math, science, engineering and related professions to sustain the state’s companies and economy.
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“I think as citizens we need to have a basic literacy of principles of science and technology, and that the level of literacy needed to sift through decisions and certain public policy debates has become greater,” Mr. Schneider said. “As science is more in the public policy arena, having fundamental knowledge of basic scientific principles is key.”

I agree. Education in science and engineering is needed both to provide skilled workers for a strong economy and to provide a level of understanding for people to participate in the modern world.

Smallest Known Living Organisms Found – 200 nanometers

Shotgun sequencing finds nanoorganisms by Robert Sanders:

Once Baker had found gene segments (ribosomal RNA) from three Archaea, he was able to fish the microbes out of the slime soup and found that they were extremely small, around 200 nanometers in diameter, the size of large viruses. Bacteria average about five times this diameter. These therefore could be the smallest organisms ever found, though Baker needs to culture them before confirming this. Because they’re so small, however, they may not be free-living.

“We’re not sure they can live independently, whether they have enough genes to fend for themselves, but instead are symbiotic with another organism or are feeding off another organism,” Baker said. Baker now is trying to find the right conditions for these Archaea to thrive in a culture dish. For now, he has dubbed them ARMAN-1, -2 and -3, for Archaeal Richmond Mine Acidophilic Nanoorganisms.

Science and Engineering Search Engine

The December 2006 Newsletter of the Google Librarian Center mentions the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Custom Search Engine. As they state it “searches a combination of lay and official sites for science and engineering information.”

The search box for this search is conveniently located on the right hand side of each page on our blog (there is a search box for this search and one for searching just this blog). The science and engineering Custom Search Engine (CSE) uses our selection of sites along with Google search technology to provide search results. We hope you find it useful. Please share your feedback.

UK Science and Research Funding

UK Science and Innovation Awards from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council:

University of Oxford – over Â£3.3 million has been awarded to establish a forward looking world class research centre in the Analysis of Non-linear Partial Differential Equations (PDEs).
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Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and Imperial College London – almost Â£6 million to create a new collaboration of complementary expertise between the Physics Departments at Cambridge, Imperial & Oxford in the area of quantum coherence…

Universities get Â£31m research awards:

The money is going to leading research-intensive universities. Four out of the seven awards are for joint projects, indicating how even players like Cambridge and Imperial are having to collaborate to keep up with the international competition.

Nanotechnology Education

Teaching the Notion of Nanotechnology

Scientist Robert P.H. Chang of Northwestern University had no trouble persuading education officials in Mexico to introduce the burgeoning field of nanotechnology to schools there, but it’s been a far tougher sell in the United States. In Mexico, Chang said he had only to speak about the subject to top government officials, who then simply ordered school officials to teach it.
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Nanotechnology presents an especially difficult challenge in education. It is not a traditional discipline but rather a combination involving physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, engineering and technology.
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That’s what Chang has been developing as he directs Northwestern’s new national center for the university’s Materials World Modules program, charged with creating materials on nanotechnology for students in grades seven through 12.