Category Archives: Science

Science Museums Should Grow Minds Not Revenue

The dumbing down of science by Karen Heller

Our largest science institution simply became the Franklin, as if it were some glistening condo development or waterfront casino. Which is fitting, given all the sizzle, pyrotechnics and cost. Adult admission has soared to $23.25 if you want to see the current exhibits “Real Pirates” and “Chronicles of Narnia,” the latter – correct me if I’m wrong – based on a fictional world and $1 billion global movie franchise.

“Adults” happens to mean anyone over 11, a rather severe view for an organization geared toward students. Imax? That’s $5.50 extra. Audio tour? Yo ho ho, and an additional $6. For that kind of money, I left my two adults, 12 and 14, at home. New York’s American Museum of Natural History, a superior museum, offers $17 student tickets for ages 13 through 17
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The rub was that neither group appeared well-served by science. “Sports Challenge” is more Dave and Buster’s than lessons in physiology, a homage to hyperactivity where kids run around without ever stopping to learn.

“Sir Isaac’s Loft” contains one of those George Rhoads kinetic sculptures found in airports. “Sometimes you just can’t avoid science,” the caption reads, almost as an apology. “My intention is not to exemplify scientific principles,” Rhoads states on the plaque. Oh, great.

Frequently, the Franklin seems as scared of learning as it does of science. Lopping off the “Institute” is an indication. What I watched was kids dashing madly, going from one pit stop to the other, without absorbing much. There was so much insistent fun (!) and no, this-isn’t-really-science stuff that the place is transformed into just another consumer palace.

I think she makes very good points. I fear many museums are more focused on growing revenues than growing minds. That is a very sad state of affairs. I have nothing wrong with focusing on making money – just with museums (and even moreso science museums) doing so. Museums should focus on building minds (which does require balancing finances to stay in business, I understand). If you want to be a Dave and Busters like organization, go ahead, just leave our science museums to those that want to build minds.

Viruses and What is Life

Viruses are generally considered not to be alive (they must use a host cell of something else to reproduce). However, defining exactly what life is, is not as easy as you might think.

The debate about what counts as a living thing is fuelled today by the discovery of the first virus that is able to fall “ill” by being infected with another virus.
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the discovery of a giant virus that itself falls ill through infection by another virus seems to suggest they too are alive, highlighting how there is no watertight definition of what exactly scientists mean when they refer to something as “living”.

“There’s no doubt, this is a living organism,” the journal Nature is told by Prof Jean-Michel Claverie, director of the Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology in Marseilles, part of France’s basic-research agency CNRS. “The fact that it can get sick makes it more alive.”

Werner Heisenberg

photo of Werner Heisenberg

Read a very nice biography from Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics for Werner Heisenberg, the founder of quantum mechanics, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle:

Heisenberg set himself the task of finding the new quantum mechanics upon returning to GÃ¶ttingen from Copenhagen in April 1925. Inspired by Bohr and his assistant, H.A. Kramers, in Copenhagen, Pauli in Hamburg, and Born in GÃ¶ttingen, Heisenberg’s intensive struggle over the following months to achieve his goal has been well documented by historians. Since the electron orbits in atoms could not be observed, Heisenberg tried to develop a quantum mechanics without them.

He relied instead on what can be observed, namely the light emitted and absorbed by the atoms. By July 1925 Heisenberg had an answer, but the mathematics was so unfamiliar that he was not sure if it made any sense. Heisenberg handed a paper on the derivation to his mentor, Max Born, before leaving on a month-long lecture trip to Holland and England and a camping trip to Scandinavia with his youth-movement group. After puzzling over the derivation, Born finally recognized that the unfamiliar mathematics was related to the mathematics of arrays of numbers known as “matrices.” Born sent Heisenberg’s paper off for publication. It was the breakthrough to quantum mechanics.

Martian Water

NASA Spacecraft Confirms Martian Water, Mission Extended

“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”

With enticing results so far and the spacecraft in good shape, NASA also announced operational funding for the mission will extend through Sept. 30. The original prime mission of three months ends in late August. The mission extension adds five weeks to the 90 days of the prime mission.

“Phoenix is healthy and the projections for solar power look good, so we want to take full advantage of having this resource in one of the most interesting locations on Mars,” said Michael Meyer, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The soil sample came from a trench approximately 2 inches deep. When the robotic arm first reached that depth, it hit a hard layer of frozen soil. Two attempts to deliver samples of icy soil on days when fresh material was exposed were foiled when the samples became stuck inside the scoop. Most of the material in Wednesday’s sample had been exposed to the air for two days, letting some of the water in the sample vaporize away and making the soil easier to handle.

“Mars is giving us some surprises,” said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. “We’re excited because surprises are where discoveries come from. One surprise is how the soil is behaving. The ice-rich layers stick to the scoop when poised in the sun above the deck, different from what we expected from all the Mars simulation testing we’ve done. That has presented challenges for delivering samples, but we’re finding ways to work with it and we’re gathering lots of information to help us understand this soil.”

Continue reading →

An Appetite For Science

An Appetite For Science by Corinne A. Marasco

episodes titled “Churn Baby Churn” and “I Pie” explain, respectively, how sugar crystallization affects the texture of ice cream and what happens to a pie crust in the oven as it bakes. These are the sort of processes that chemists and materials scientists address everyday.
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Yogurt contains beneficial bacteria, such as Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, that love lactose, the sugar found in milk. Adding a starter culture of plain, store-bought yogurt to milk at 110 Â°F, Brown shows that the bacteria will convert the lactose into lactic acid. The heating pad helps to maintain a steady temperature to allow the bacteria to incubate. If the temperature of the milk is too low, the bacteria won’t grow to make yogurt. If the temperature is too high, the bacteria will die.
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He’s confident he could teach a high school or college science course with nothing but a kitchen. For labs he could demonstrate how heat denatures protein by cooking an egg, how yeast cells execute gas-liberating reactions by baking a loaf of bread, or how fermentation occurs by making pickles. As a bonus, the class would get to eat the experiments, enabling observation of cause and effect.

Science Policy Research Virtual Intern

externs.com is another curiouscat.com web site that lists internship opportunities. I am surprised that virtual internships and externships have not grown much more popular in the last 5 years. Scientists and Engineers for America do have such a virtual internship:

Members of the first Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) virtual intern class can be located anywhere in the world and will work remotely on specific SEA projects. Intern will research the positions elected officials and candidates for office take on science policy issues.

The internship is for between 10 to 20 hours per week and can be done anywhere, as long as you have a computer, internet connection, and telephone. The dates of the internship are flexible accepted on a rolling basis.

Also see the externs.com science internships and engineering internships. If you have an internship you would like included, please add it (there is not cost for the site, listing or using).

University Web Presence Rankings

The Webometrics Ranking of University Web Sites provides some interesting data. I don’t remember reading this last year, but they state on the site now: “The original aim of the Ranking was to promote Web publication, not to rank institutions. Supporting Open Access initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material are our primary targets.” I support those goals, I am not totally convinced this is the most effective measure to do that but it provides one way of ranking web presence of universities. I am not that convinced this does a good job of ranking the web presences of universities but I think it is of some interest so I decided to post on the results.

graph of universities web presence

Country	% top 200	% top 500	% World Population	Jiao Tong top 101
USA	53	37.8	4.6	54
Germany	7.5	9.4	1.3	6
United Kingdom	5.5	7.2	0.9	11
Canada	8.5	5	0.5	4
Australia	3	2.8	0.3	2
Italy	0.5	2.8	0.9	1
Japan	1.5	2.4	2	6
France	0.5	2.4	0.9	4
Netherlands	4	2.2	0.3	2
Sweden	3	2	0.1	4
Switzerland	2	1.6	0.1	3
Taiwan	0.5	1.6	0.4	0
Finland	0.5	1.4	0.1	1
China	0.5	1.2	20.1	0
Portugal	0	1.2	0.2	0

Pseudogap and Superconductivity

MIT physicists shed light on key superconductivity riddle

Hudson’s team is focusing on the state of matter that exists at temperatures just above the temperature at which materials start to superconduct. This state, known as the pseudogap, is poorly understood, but physicists have long believed that characterizing the pseudogap is important to understanding superconductivity.

In their latest work, published online on July 6 in Nature Physics, they suggest that the pseudogap is not a precursor to superconductivity, as has been theorized, but a competing state. If that is true, it could completely change the way physicists look at superconductivity, said Hudson.

“Now, if you want to explain high-temperature superconductivity and you believe the pseudogap is a precursor, you need to explain both. If it turns out that it is a competing state, you can instead focus more on superconductivity,” he said.

DNA Passed to Descendants Changed by Your Life

How your behaviour can change your children’s DNA

Until recently that would also have been the opinion of most scientists. Genes, it was thought, were highly resilient. Even if people did wreck their own DNA through bad diet, smoking and getting fat, that damage was unlikely to be passed to future generations.

Now, however, those assumptions are being re-examined. At the heart of this revolution is a simple but controversial idea: that DNA can be modified or imprinted with the experiences of your parents and grandparents.

According to this new science, known as epigenetics, your ancestors’ diet, smoking habits, exposure to pollutants and levels of obesity could be affecting you today. In turn, your lifestyle could affect your children and grandchildren.
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If we drink heavily, take drugs, get fat or wait too long to reproduce, then epigenetics might start tying up some of the wrong genes and loosening the bonds on others. Sometimes those changes will affect sperm and egg cells.

It seems to me this area is still far from having conclusive proof. But it is another great example of scientists seeking to improve our knowledge of how things work.

A Whale of a Turbine

A whale of a turbine

a flipperlike prototype is generating energy on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, with twin, bumpy-edged blades knifing through the air. And this summer, an industrial fan company plans to roll out its own whale-inspired model – moving the same amount of air with half the usual number of blades and thus a smaller, energy-saving motor.

Some scientists were sceptical at first, but the concept now has gotten support from independent researchers, most recently some Harvard engineers who wrote up their findings in the respected journal Physical Review Letters.
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when models of the bumpy flippers were tested in a wind tunnel, Fish and his colleagues found something interesting. The flippers could be tilted at a higher angle before stall occurred.

The scientific literature had scant reference to the flipper bumps, called tubercles. Fish reasoned that because the whale’s flippers remained effective at a high angle, the mammal was therefore able to manoeuvre in tight circles. In fact, this is how it traps its prey, surrounding smaller fish in a “net” of bubbles that they are unwilling to cross.

In 2004, along with engineers from the US Naval Academy and Duke University, Fish published hard data: Whereas a smooth-edged flipper stalled at less than 12 degrees, the bumpy, “scalloped” version did not stall until it was tilted more than 16 degrees – an increase of nearly 40 percent.

Fish then partnered with Canadian entrepreneur Stephen Dewar to start WhalePower, a Toronto-based company that licenses the technology to manufacturers.
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It has all been a bit of a culture shock for Fish, who is more at home in the open world of academia than the more secretive realm of inventions and patents. Two decades ago, his only motivation was to figure out what the bumps were for.

“I sort of found something that’s in plain sight,” he says. “You can look at something again and again, and then you’re seeing it differently.”