Tag Archives: Science

Backyard Scientists Aid Research

Backyard scientists use Web to catalog species, aid research

When a scientist caught onto her efforts, Jirachareonkul and a friend assembled about 20 volunteers — a group she calls the “Toad NUTS” — to collect data on the endangered Western Leopard Toad. The information they collect is being used in scientific research.
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At a time when climate change and urbanization are poised to set off a new wave of extinction, some members of the scientific community are turning toward backyard biologists for the data they need to monitor ecosystems and protect struggling species.
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Project BudBurst, out of Boulder, Colorado, aims to collect so much amateur data about plant species that scientists will be able to tell how climate change is altering the seasons in North America.
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Technology is amplifying this passion for citizen science, which has been around since scientists started cataloging species. Researchers at several universities are working on iPhone applications and computer programs that could analyze digital photos of plant leaves and automatically identify the plant’s species.
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The relationship between formal science and citizen science is similar to that between professional news reporters and bloggers; some scientists worry that the information coming in from nonprofessionals will be inaccurate, said John Musinsky, a senior director at Conservation International.

Great stuff. And you can get involved if you want. Just follow the links or search around the internet to find projects that interest you. These projects can be great ways to get kids involved in science.

The Great Sunflower Project

photo of sunflower (Helianthus Annuus Taiyo)

Sunflower photo from WikiMedia – Helianthus Annuus ‘Taiyo’

The Great Sunflower Project provides a way for you to engage in the ongoing study of bees and colony collapse disorder. The study uses the annual Lemon Queen sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), that can be grown in a pot on a deck or patio or in a garden (and they will send you seeds).

How do bees make fruits and vegetables?

Bees help flowers make seeds and fruits. Bees go to flowers in your garden to find pollen (the powder on the flower) and nectar which is a sweet liquid. Flowers are really just big signs advertising to bees that there is pollen or nectar available – though sometimes a flower will cheat and have nothing! The markings on a flower guide the bee right into where the pollen or nectar is.

All flowers have pollen. Bees gather pollen to feed their babies which start as eggs and then grow into larvae. It’s the larvae that eat the pollen. Bees use the nectar for energy. When a bee goes to a flower in your garden to get nectar or pollen, they usually pick up pollen from the male part of the flower which is called an anther. When they travel to the next flower looking for food, they move some of that pollen to the female part of the next plant which is called a stigma. Most flowers need pollen to make seeds and fruits.

After landing on the female part, the stigma, the pollen grows down the stigma until it finds an unfertilized seed which is called an ovary. Inside the ovary, a cell from the pollen joins up with cells from the ovary and a seed is born! For many of our garden plants, the only way for them to start a new plant is by growing from a seed Fruits are just the parts of the plants that have the seeds. Some fruits are what we think of as fruits when we are in the grocery store like apples and oranges. Other fruits are vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers.

Sun Missing It’s Spots

Image courtesy of SOHO, shows an image of the sun on July 19th 2000 and March 18th 2009.

Sun Oddly Quiet

The sun is the least active it’s been in decades and the dimmest in a hundred years. The lull is causing some scientists to recall the Little Ice Age, an unusual cold spell in Europe and North America, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850. The coldest period of the Little Ice Age, between 1645 and 1715, has been linked to a deep dip in solar storms known as the Maunder Minimum.
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Sunspots, which can be visible without a telescope, are dark regions that indicate intense magnetic activity on the sun’s surface. Such solar storms send bursts of charged particles hurtling toward Earth that can spark auroras, disrupt satellites, and even knock out electrical grids.

Antigen Shift in Influenza Viruses

Antigenic shift is the process by which at least two different strains of a virus, (or different viruses), especially influenza, combine to form a new subtype having a mixture of the surface antigens of the two original strains.

Pigs can be infected with human, avian and swine influenza viruses. Because pigs are susceptible to all three they can be a breeding ground for antigenic shift (as in the recent case of H1N1 Flu – Swine Flu) allowing viruses to mix and create a new virus.

Continue reading →

Merck and Elsevier Publish Phony Peer-Review Journal

Elsevier is one of those publishers fighting open science. They try to claim that the government publishing government funded research in an open way will tarnish science. The argument makes no sense to me. Here is another crazy action on their part: they published a “journal” funded by Merck to promote Merck products. Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal:

Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website, according to The Scientist.
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What’s sad is that I’m sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, “As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications….” Said doctor, or even the average researcher wouldn’t know that the journal is bogus. In fact, knowing that the journal is published by Elsevier gives it credibility!

As I have said the journals fighting open science should have their credibility questioned. They are putting their outdated business model above science. We should not see organizations that are focused on closing science research through deceptive publicity efforts and lobbying efforts as credible.

President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

Today, during remarks at the National Academy of Sciences, President Barack Obama announced the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

PCAST is an advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers who will advise the President and Vice President and formulate policy in the many areas where understanding of science, technology, and innovation is key to strengthening our economy and forming policy that works for the American people.

President Barack Obama said, “This council represents leaders from many scientific disciplines who will bring a diversity of experience and views. I will charge PCAST with advising me about national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation.”

PCAST will be co-chaired by John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Eric Lander, Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project; and Harold Varmus, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, former head of the National Institutes of Health and a Nobel laureate.

Members of the council include: Shirley Ann Jackson, Craig Mundie, Eric Schmidt and Ahmed Zewail.

Lenz’s Law in Action: Eddy Current Tubes

Eddy Current Tubes — Drop the Magnets down the tube. An eddy current is set up in a conductor in response to a changing magnetic field. Lenz’s law predicts that the current moves in such a way as to create a magnetic field opposing the change; to do this in a conductor, electrons swirl in a plane perpendicular to the changing magnetic field.

Because the magnetic fields of the eddy currents oppose the magnetic field of the falling magnet; there is attraction between the two fields. Energy is converted into heat. This principle is used in damping the oscillation of the lever arm of mechanical balances.

Home Experiment: Deriving the Gravitational Constant

Deriving the Gravitational Constant by Joe Marshall

In the summer of 1985 I was at home convalescing and being bored. It occurred to me one day that if Cavendish could determine the gravitational constant back in 1798, I ought to be able to do something similar
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Cavendish cast a pair of 1.61 pound lead weights. I found a couple of 2-pound lead cylinders my dad had lying around. I used duct tape to attach them to a 3-foot wooden dowel. Cavendish used a wire to suspend the balance, I used nylon monofilament. To determine the torsion of the fiber, you wait until the balance stops moving (a day or two) and then you slightly perturb it. The balance will slowly oscillate back and forth. The restoring force is calculated from the period of oscillation. Cavendish had a 7-minute period. My balance had a 40 minute period (nylon is nowhere near as stiff as wire).

Cavendish used a pair of 350 pound lead balls to attract the ends of the balance from about 9 inches away. I put a couple of 8 pound jugs of water about an inch away. The next trick was to measure the rotation of the balance. Cavendish had a small telescope to read the Vernier scale on the balance. I used some modern technology. I borrowed a laser from Tom Knight (Thanks again!), and bounced it off a mirror that I mounted on the middle of the balance. This made a small red dot on the wall about 20 feet away. (I was hoping this would be enough to measure the displacement, but I was considering an interferometer if necessary.)

To my surprise, it all worked. After carefully putting the jugs of water in place, the dot on the wall started to visibly move. Within a few minutes, it had moved an inch or two. I carefully removed the jugs of water and sure enough, the dot on the wall drifted back to its starting position.

Very cool example of a home physics experiment.

Bacteria Communicate Using a Chemical Language

Each person has about 1 trillion human cells and about 10 trillion bacterial cells. In the webcast Bonnie Bassler, Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, discusses the chemical language that lets bacteria coordinate defense and mount attacks (quorum sensing). The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry — and our understanding of ourselves.

Bacteria do all sorts of amazing things for us: educating your immune system to keep bad microbes out, they digest our food, they make our vitamins…

E.O. Wilson: Lord of the Ants

This is a great webcast on E.O Wilson‘s career studying ants and animal behavior from NOVA.

Not only is the scientific knowledge very interesting it again shows that challenging conventional wisdom, while part of the scientific method, does not mean it is an easy process for those pioneers. From his web site:

In 1971 Wilson published his second major synthesis, The Insect Societies, which formulated the existing knowledge of the behavior of ants, social bees, social wasps, and termites, on a foundation of population biology. In it he introduced the concept of a new discipline of sociobiology, the systematic study of the biological basis of social behavior in all kinds of organisms. In 1975 he published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which extended the subject to vertebrates and united it more closely to evolutionary biology. The foundational discoveries of sociobiology are generally recognized to be the analysis of animal communication and division of labor, in which Wilson played a principal role, and the genetic theory of the origin of social behavior, which he helped to promote and apply in his 1971 and 1975 syntheses. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was later ranked in a poll of the officers and fellows of the international Animal Behaviour Society as the most important book on animal behavior of all time, and is regarded today as the founding text of sociobiology and its offshoot, evolutionary psychology.

Related: Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration
by Bert HÃ¶lldobler and Edward O. Wilson – Huge Ant Nest – Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria – Royal Ant Genes – posts on ants – Encyclopedia of Life