This Saturday in Other People's Science

I'm going to curse here. 

I don't want to because, as you all know, I am all about clean living and upright language. 

But I have no choice. 

So if you're of a delicate sensibility, or an extremely young person, pay very close attention.

You see, I can't do this post justice without using the "F-bmb" because, well, it's in the name of the thing I'm writing about.

As regular readers surely know by now, I often try to write about science on Saturdays, mostly because I find it interesting, certainly not because lots of readers are clamoring for it; at least not so far as the blog stats indicate.

Anyway, during the week I collect stories I find interesting and try, sometimes more successfully than others, to link them together into some kind of narrative.

Most of the stories come from newspapers and other things I find on the Interweb.

But for the few science fans out there among my readers, I am pleased to announce that putting these Saturday posts just got a lot easier thanks to my goofball teenage son.

On Facebook, he "likes" a page named (here comes the curse) "I fucking love science."

It's a great site and, frankly, I sit in awe of their industriousness.


Much like what I've been doing, the folks who run this site, whoever they are, just like the wonders science unveils, but they do a much better job of finding interesting scientific tid-bits than I do.

They are even careful, as I have tried to be, to include links to their original source articles.

All of which is to say I plan to crib shamelessly from them.

Best of all, they have their own show on YouTube.

Seriously.

Here is the latest:




I like the British accent, but I'm not sure what's going on with the giant bow she's wearing, but hey, it's science! Who cares?

Here are a few other sciency morsels the I fucking love science crew posted, which I now offer up for you to chew on.

Lucy? Is That You?

High pressures within the gas giant planets may be sufficient to turn carbon into diamond, according to planetary scientists. They hypothesise that lightning in the upper atmospheres of Saturn and Jupiter zaps molecules of methane, freeing the carbon atoms. These atoms then adhere to each other and form larger particles of soot, which are exposed to greater and greater pressures and temperatures as they fall through the layers of gaseous and liquid hydrogen. The soot is compressed into graphite and then solid diamonds, until the temperature reaches around 8,000°C, when the diamond melts, and potentially forms diamond raindrops.

Here is the link to the original article.

Tales from Topographic Oceans

(Yes, I confess I have been listening to a lot of Yes on You Tube lately, reliving my youth as it were...)

Astronomers have announced the first discovery of a rocky and watery body beyond our solar system. The rubble appears to be the remains of a destroyed planetary system around the white dwarf GD 61, 170 light years away. The debris may give insights into how planets get their oceans, as scientists theorize that the oceans on Earth arrived via comet and asteroid impacts.

Here is a link to the original article.

And no, it's not all space stuff.

Yes, But Why Can't We Cure the Common Cold Itself?

In terms of deaths from infectious disease, tuberculosis is second only to HIV/AIDS.

The vaccine has taken more than 10 years to develop and is meant to act as a booster for BCG, the TB vaccine that is currently available.

Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria, and symptoms include fever, fatigue, chills, and finger clubbing.

It can affect the pulmonary system by causing a chronic sputum-producing cough and it may even cause massive internal bleeding by eroding the pulmonary artery.

Here is the link to the original article.

And although I am excited about the content provided by these fellow science geeks, I don't want you to think I've lost my touch.

Here's one a found by my very own self from my most commonly cited site, The New York Times.

It turns out that although they may be squishy, problematic and occasionally sting the crap out of you,
jellyfish have at least one admirable characteristic.

They're really efficient swimmers, maybe the most efficient on the planet.

Here is the link to the original article, which has a pretty cool video that, due to the Times being all protective about content they produce, I cannot embed here but only recommend to you.

Here are the key elements as explained clearly reporter James Gorman:

Brad J. Gemmell at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts, and several other scientists, analyzed the movement of the jellies as part of a project funded by the Navy to look at what Dr. Gemmell called “nontraditional propulsion.”

The scientists used a new way of calculating energy called “cost of transport” that took

Moon jellyfish have so much energy for reproduction because they use to little on movement

account of what was happening throughout the two-phase swimming motion of the jellyfish. In the first phase, the jelly contracts its open bell and pushes water behind it, propelling itself forward. Then, the bell returns to its original shape and fills with water again.

Earlier studies had shown that the jelly got a second thrust during the rest and refill phase, but they had not calculated the jelly’s energy expenditure during that time. It turned out that the jelly was not actually doing any work in that phase. Instead the elastic tissue in the bell acted like a rubber band, re-forming the bell. That action produced water movement under the jelly, called a vortex, that pushed it forward.

T

We've all seen these washed up on the beach.

he study found that the secondary push was responsible for about 30 percent of the distance traveled by the jellyfish. And it worked even with anesthetized jellies that were pushed through the water. The recovery phase and its kick were purely mechanical. “That’s what makes them so energy-efficient,” Dr. Gemmell said.

The finding offers some ideas about propulsion that could be useful to the Navy. This kind of low-energy, high efficiency thrust would not power any kind of fast-moving, quick-turning ocean craft, but it might be useful for monitoring devices that need to maintain a position or move at a slower pace.

It also could be one reason, Dr. Gemmell said, why the jelly has so much energy to spend on reproduction, producing those problematic population explosions.

Well that's it for today.

I hope you enjoyed it and that you share my joy at having easy access to even more cool science info.

Looking for Life in All the Right Places

Forget Mars, is there life on one of Jupiter's moons? The conditions may exist.

Blogger's Note: HA! It's Science Saturday on SUNDAY! Bet you didn't see that one coming dear reader.

Some people look for God, or the gods, among the stars, while others limit their search to Switzerland.

Here on Science Sunday, we can accommodate both.

Zeus and Europa had a non-traditional

relationship.

And to be fair, what they are really looking for in the stars, at least in this case, is not so much God, but life, or at least the proper environment for it. Scientists are  just looking for it among the Roman gods whose names we appropriated for the planets of our solar system.

And it looks like there may be hope not on Mars, where we're focusing most of our scientific energy these days and where signs of former life may be present, but on a moon of Jupiter named Europa.

Named after a lover of Zeus, who had a lot I'm told, Europa is the sixth closest moon to the gas giant Jupiter, was discovered by Galileo and is only slightly smaller than Earth's own single moon.

Most important about Europa is the fact that it's covered in water and, apparently, that water is pretty toasty warm because of gravitational forces and the moon's warm interior.

According to this article in Time magazine:

Gravitationally plucked by the tidal tugging of its sister moon Io and Jupiter itself, Europa retains a hot interior, which keeps the water comparatively warm and even pulsing. If that doesn’t sound like a place that could cook up life, nothing does. The only ingredients missing to make Europa’s ocean a potential home to living things have been salt and organic compounds. Now, according to a study about to be published in The Astronomical Journal, they’re not missing anymore. A dip in the waters of Europa, the paper concludes, could be very much like a dip in our oceans, perhaps with all the biology that implies.

When the Galileo probe showed up, it became clear that Europa’s ice coating was thick—but more important, the cracks, now clearly evident, meant the ice was floating, forever being fractured and re-fractured by the movement of the ocean below and the flexing of the moon itself. Neighboring Io is continually squeezed the same way, but there isn’t much water there, so the internal heating leads instead to sulfur-spewing volcanoes.

The Keck observatory in Hawaii.

None of this meant Europa had the ingredients for life: you could keep a tank of sterile water warm and churning for 4.5 billion years and at the end, all you’d have would be the same tank of sterile water. Finding evidence of the organics and salt was the key, and that has at last been provided, thanks to a set of observations by the giant Keck II telescope in Hawaii.

There is not absolute proof of salt in Europa's waters, just speculation, based on it's magnetic field, which would not be generated by fresh water, and with other chemicals being ruled out.

Still, it’s a speculation with big implications. The fractures on the surface have always suggested that the water in the ocean is not entirely trapped by the crust, but instead bubbles up and back down, with the chemistry of the ice above and the water below commingling. It’s statistically inevitable that Europa has been bombarded by many comets during its long lifetime, and since comets are known to contain carbon-based organic compounds, the oceans would be laced with the stuff too, rounding out the recipe for biology.

When Nasa's Galileo probe visited Jupiter and Europa in

the 1990s, its electronics were vintage 1970s.

“I’m not an expert on life,” says Caltech planetary scientist Mike Brown. “But I do know that if you dip a net in the ocean here, you’re bound to pick up something.” Even if you could not get your net two miles deep into the Europan ocean, simply sampling the surface ice would tell you a lot. “You could just land on the surface, dig up a scoop, and know what the chemistry of the ocean really is,” says Brown.

That kind of hands-on study is not likely to happen soon; even a robot lander would be too ambitious (read: too expensive) for the current NASA. Instead, the agency is thinking about a probe called the Europa Clipper, which would orbit Jupiter and make flybys as little as 10 miles above the Europan surface. Armed with far better instruments than Galileo’s vintage electronics, it would nail down the chemistry on the moon’s surface. If that chemistry is life-friendly, the case for a lander would be much stronger—and perhaps irresistible. We’ve never before encountered seawater, after all, that didn’t have at least a little something swimming around in it.

So enough about gods, how about God? Or at least, the "God particle.."

According to this Associated Press article in your very own ever-lovin' Mercury, the search for the next big clue in The Big Bang Theory (no, not the one with Sheldon Cooper) may have been found this month.

In what could go down as one of the great Eureka! moments in physics — and win somebody the Nobel Prize — scientists said Thursday that after a half-century quest, they are confident they have found a Higgs boson, the elusive subatomic speck sometimes called the “God particle.”

I prefer DaVinci's depiction of God over this modern

art version.

The existence of the particle was theorized in 1964 by the British physicist Peter Higgs to explain why matter has mass. Scientists believe the particle acts like molasses or snow: When other tiny basic building blocks pass through it, they stick together, slow down and form atoms.
Scientists at CERN, the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced in July that they had found something that looked like the Higgs boson, but they weren’t certain, and they needed to go through the data and rule out the possibility it wasn’t something else.

On Thursday, they said they believe they got it right.

“To me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,” said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN, each involving about 3,000 scientists.

 So, we've got that going for us....