Category Archives: Science

Plastic Balls for the Resevoir

photo of Los Angeles resevoir

This photo looks like a April fools joke but I think it is real. Los Angeles Drops 400,000 Balls in Reservoir to Fight Suspected Carcinogen

So why deploy these balls — which are typically used by airports to prevent bird congregation on runways — in particular? Some of the other alternatives, such as a large tarp or metal cover, were considered too costly or impractical. The balls, on the other hand, are (relatively) cheap — costing 40 cents each — and are safe for drinking water; black is also the only color able to deflect UV rays.

The DWP has ordered 6.5 million of these balls, 3 million of which it plans on using to blanket the Ivanhoe and Elysian reservoirs. So, yeah, this probably isn’t the best solution for the city’s water woes but, given the circumstances, maybe the only “realistic” option in the short-term.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power drops 400,000 balls onto Ivanhoe Reservoir:

The water needs to be shaded because when sunlight mixes with the bromide and chlorine in Ivanhoe’s water, the carcinogen bromate forms, said Pankaj Parekh, DWP’s director for water quality compliance. Bromide is naturally present in groundwater and chlorine is used to kill bacteria, he said, but sunlight is the final ingredient in the potentially harmful mix.

Photo by (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Call me a bit skeptical. Adding a huge number of plastic balls to a water supply in order to try and prevent a chemical reaction caused by added chemicals and sunlight seems a bit crazy to me. But who know maybe it is a good idea.

Bacteria Evolutionary Shift Seen in the Lab

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait. And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.
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sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use. Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species.
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The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, only the original population re-evolved Cit+ – and only when he started the replay from generation 20,000 or greater. Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.

Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit+ mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.

Big Drug Research and Development on Campus

Big Drug R&D on Campus

Merck and Harvard just signed an agreement to develop treatments for the bone disease osteoporosis. On Apr. 25 rival Pfizer (PFE) invested $14 million in an alliance with four universities to study diabetes and obesity.

Drugmakers are counting on these deals to solve a persistent problem: underperforming product pipelines. Merck, Pfizer, and others have been losing sales of one blockbuster drug after another as patents expire and competitors charge in with generics. Big drug companies have fought back by spending more on research, yet the number of new medicines approved each year is falling. In the last week of April alone, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration rejected two of Merck’s experimental drugs, prompting the company to lay off 1,200 salespeople.
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Past deals between industry and academia have been hampered by patent disputes and tussles over publication rights, as companies tried to thwart academics who want to share their discoveries with colleagues around the world. So now the companies have devised policies allowing their Ivory Tower partners to patent and publish their discoveries, even as they draw the professors more deeply into corporate affairs.

Funding university activities this way can lead to conflicts and problems but realistically huge amounts of funding are entangled with possible conflicts of interest. The biggest concern I is that universities will bow to the almighty dollar instead of their missions. And inadequate oversight can damage their credibility (not one failure, most likely, but if a pattern emerges). For example: Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay (“The Harvard group’s consulting arrangements with drug makers were already controversial because of the researchers’ advocacy of unapproved uses of psychiatric medicines in children.”). Then find out the companies were paying them well, the professors failed to disclose that and the advocacy is rightfully questioned.

Pax Scientific

Nature Gave Him a Blueprint, but Not Overnight Success

Mr. Harman is a practitioner of biomimicry, a growing movement of the industrial-design field. Eleven years ago, he established Pax Scientific to commercialize his ideas, thinking that it would take only a couple of years to convince companies that they could increase efficiency, lower noise or create entirely new categories of products by following his approach.
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His radical ideas have so far found a cautious reception in the aircraft, air- conditioning, boating, pump and wind turbine industries. Mr. Harman’s experience is not unusual. Rather than beating a path to the door of mousetrap designers, the world seems to actively avoid them.
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Even in fields such as the computer industry, which celebrates innovation, systemic change can be glacial.
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In another hopeful sign, a world that long ignored energy efficiency is suddenly thinking of nothing else. “We tried for years to promote energy conservation, and we couldn’t find one who was interested,” he said. “Now the world has done a U-turn.”

Yet another example that new knowledge is not enough. It takes much longer for good ideas to be put into practice than seems reasonable (until you get your head around the idea it takes a fair amount of time for new ideas to be adopted).

One positive aspect of this reality is that if you can take advantage of new ideas before others you can gain an advantage. It isn’t necessarily true that just because now everyone knows about some new idea that you have no opportunity to use the knowledge before others.

Why did China’s Scientific Innovation Stop?

Why did China’s scientific innovation, once so advanced, suddenly collapse

By the time Joseph Needham died in 1995, he had published 17 volumes of his Science and Civilisation in China series, including several that he wrote entirely on his own.

The Chinese began printing 600 years before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the technique in Germany. They built the first chain drive 700 years before the Europeans. And they made use of a magnetic compass at least a century before the first reference to it appeared elsewhere. So why, in the middle of the 15th century, did this advanced civilisation suddenly cease its spectacular progress?
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Needham never fully worked out why China’s inventiveness dried up. Other academics have made their own suggestions: the stultifying pursuit of bureaucratic rank in the Middle Kingdom and the absence of a mercantile class to foster competition and self-improvement; the sheer size of China compared with the smaller states of Europe whose fierce rivalries fostered technological competition; its totalitarianism.

The Science Barge

The Science Barge is a prototype, sustainable urban farm and environmental education center. It is the only fully functioning demonstration of renewable energy supporting sustainable food production in New York City. The Science Barge grows tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce with zero net carbon emissions, zero chemical pesticides, and zero runoff.

From May to October 2007, the Science Barge hosted over 3,000 schoolchildren from all five New York boroughs as well as surrounding counties as part of our environmental education program. In addition, over 6,000 adult visitors visited the facility along with press from around the world.

NY Sun Works: The Science Barge

Limited growing space means growing upwards, with stacked pots for strawberries, and vines that grow up to the ceiling and are then folded over to grow back down. Instead of using pesticides, pests are kept in check using ladybugs, parasitic wasps, and other predators as needed. Environmentally friendly substrates such as rice husks, coconut shells, and Earth Stone (recycled glass), are used to aerate the root systems for the plants.

Most fascinating of all was the Aquaponic system for providing nutrients to the plants using catfish. Nutrients from the plants and worms feed the catfish, who produce nitrogen-rich waste, which feeds the plants. Tilapia were originally used, but eventually replaced with catfish, which were better suited to the climate. The result of all this effort is a bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables given out to all the children who visit the barge.

Cause of Super Heated Ground

Unexplained ground heat burns boy’s feet

There was no fire, but the ground was hot enough in a Colorado Springs park to burn through an eight year old boy’s shoes and cause at least second degree burns on his feet.
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After the boy was treated and sent to the hospital firefighters took surface readings that showed hard to believe temperatures. According to Chief Matthews, “The highest temperature we got at the surface of the soil with the sun shining on it was 800 degrees, which is pretty darn significant. Radiant heat from the sun will get it up around 150, 160 degrees, but not to that level.”

Firefighters have taped off the area and are monitoring it until they can figure out what’s causing the ground to get so hot. Tests by hazmat team members show there are no dangerous gases. Crews have cut a fire-line around the area to prevent the heat from potentially starting a wildfire.

Early assessments show the problem area is coal dust. Neighbors say the area has appeared blackened as long as they can remember. What has to be determined is if it was dumped here years ago or if there’s something happening underground. Crews from the state geological are on the way to figure out an explanation.

So can you figure it out? I was happy I could (if not I didn’t I would just leave off this sentence).

Cause of super-heated ground found

What they found has a relatively simple solution according to Kurt Schroeder with Colorado Springs Parks, “What the state representatives indicated to us is that the coal spoil that’s been on top of the ground for years and years reacts with the sun, heat of the sun and it spontaneously combusts.”

Because it’s coal refuse likely dumped at this spot years ago, the recommendation from geologists is capping it. Crews will dump two feet of fill over the spot to keep the sun causing the coal remnants from igniting again.

Good old scientific thinking leads to understanding what happens in the world around us. See more posts with scientific explanations for what we experience.

Still Just a Lizard

Still just a lizard by PZ Myers

in 1971, scientists started an experiment. They took 5 male lizards and 5 female lizards of the species Podarcis sicula from a tiny Adriatic island called Pod Kopiste, 0.09km2, and they placed them on an even tinier island, Pod Mrcaru, 0.03km2, which was also inhabited by another lizard species, Podarcis melisellensis. Then a war broke out, the Croatian War of Independence, which went on and on and meant the little islands were completely neglected for 36 years, and nature took its course. When scientists finally returned to the island and looked around, they discovered that something very interesting had happened.

The original population of P. sicula was still present on Pod Kopiste, so we have a nice control population. These lizards are small, fast, insect-eaters in which the males defend territories. Sadly, P. melisellensis on Pod Mrcaru had been extirpated. So we had a few innocent casualties of the experiment.

The transplanted P. sicula thrived and swarmed over the island of Pod Mrcaru, but they were different, and they had evolved in multiple ways.

The original P. sicula were insectivores who occasionally munched on a leaf; approximately 4-7% of their diet was vegetation. The P. sicula of Pod Mrcaru, though, had adopted a more vegetarian diet: examining their gut contents revealed that 34% of their diet was plants in the spring, climbing to 61% in the summer…and much of this diet was hard-to-digest stuff, high in cellulose. This is a fairly radical shift.

There were concomitant changes. The lizards’ skulls were wider, deeper, and longer, and they had stronger bites — a necessity for chomping off bits of tough plants, instead of soft mosquitos. Instead of chasing bugs, they’re browsing stationary plants, and their legs are shorter and they are slower. Population densities are higher. The Pod Mrcaru lizards no longer seem to defend territories, so there have been behavioral changes.

Still just a lizard, I know.

Now here’s something really cool, though: these lizards have evolved cecal valves. What those are are muscular ridges in the gut that allow the animal to close off sections of the tube to slow the progress of food through them, and to act as fermentation chambers where plant material can be broken down by commensal organisms like bacteria and nematodes — and the guts of Pod Mrcaru P. sicula are swarming with nematodes not found in the guts of their Pod Kopiste cousins.

Engaging the YouTube Generation in Hands-on Science

Cherlyn Anderson is one of eight Einstein Fellows spending this academic year at NSF. In her other life, Anderson is an eighth-grade science teacher in South Carolina. She has used an experiment involving Mentos candy and Diet Coke as a teaching tool. The accompanying video offers a demonstration of the experiment, and discusses its benefits for eighth-grade science students.

Follow the link for a webcast. Somewhat ironically the NSF headline mentions YouTube but fails to take advantage of one of the things that has made YouTube (and others sharing videos: TED…) so successful. The ability to embed the videos on web sites, blog posts… The technical quality of the video is very nice (more pixels than YouTube videos).

Materials Engineers Create Perfect Light “sponge”

Materials engineers create perfect light “sponge”

The team designed and engineered a metamaterial that uses tiny geometric surface features to successfully capture the electric and magnetic properties of a microwave to the point of total absorption.

“Three things can happen to light when it hits a material,” says Boston College Physicist Willie J. Padilla. “It can be reflected, as in a mirror. It can be transmitted, as with window glass. Or it can be absorbed and turned into heat. This metamaterial has been engineered to ensure that all light is neither reflected nor transmitted, but is turned completely into heat and absorbed. It shows we can design a metamaterial so that at a specific frequency it can absorb all of the photons that fall onto its surface.”
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The metamaterial is the first to demonstrate perfect absorption and unlike conventional absorbers it is constructed solely out of metallic elements, giving the material greater flexibility for applications related to the collection and detection of light, such as imaging, says Padilla, an assistant professor of physics.