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.

From Science to Science Fiction and Back Again (Gold Edition)

It's another thrilling installment of (drum roll):

This Saturday in Space Science!

This week has a space theme and we begin with a piece about a very earthly concern -- Gold.

Credit: Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital, Inc.

The collision of two neutron stars can create rare elements like gold. Image released on July 17, 2013. 

Space Bling

So did you know that all the gold in the earth may come from the stars?

Me neither.

But thanks to Time magazine, I, and now you, know that scientists think all the gold in the universe may be

formed by the collision of neutron stars.

Yup, it all comes from space.

It seems that back in the universe's early days, "there was nothing but hydrogen, helium and lithium. Heavier elements, on up to iron, were forged later by the heat and pressure deep inside stars. 'We are all star stuff,' as Carl Sagan loved to say, in his inimitably geeky way," time science writer Michael Lemonick wrote in his July 18 article.

"Even stars can’t make elements as heavy as gold, however. For that, you need some sort of powerful shockwave, and until now it’s been unclear what could set it off. But a team of Harvard astronomers has come up a possible answer. The gold in our fillings and our jewelry and in Fort Knox may have been created during titanic collisions between neutron stars, the unimaginably dense husks left over after a massive star dies," Time reported.

Evidence for this theory materialized last month when NASA’s orbiting Swift telescope initially spotted a burst of high-energy gamma rays that lasted just two-tenths of a second.

Astronomers quickly trained the twin, Chile-based Magellan telescopes on the spot, and caught a glow of visible light, which let them gauge the distance to whatever had exploded at 3.9 billion light-years from Earth. When they aimed the Hubble at that piece of sky a week later, the light

was still there, but it had faded until it shone only in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The light’s characteristics can best be explained, say Berger, by a burst of brand new atoms totaling more than 3,000 times the mass of the Earth. Some are radioactive, which causes the glow. Some are atoms of platinum and lead and other heavy elements. And some, totaling several times the mass of the Moon, are pure gold.

"We estimate that the amount of gold produced and ejected during the merger of the two neutron stars may be as large as 10 moon masses - quite a lot of bling!" lead author Edo Berger, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement, published by Space.com. "To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we are all star stuff, and our jewelry is colliding-star stuff."

So next time, you get a golden necklace for Christmas, give proper props to those neutron stars.

If you want to see video of two neutron stars colliding from Space.com, click here.

A scene from "Europa Report

'Reality' Science Fiction 

The following is from a July 12 Yahoo News report:

The new science fiction movie "Europa Report" is billed by some admirers as one of the most accurate depictions of human spaceflight ever put on film, and that realism is no accident.

Screenwriters, expert consultants, actors and others worked to bring a sense of reality to "Europa Report," paying meticulous attention to the world they were creating in the spaceship and depicting on the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

The movie follows the journey of a crew of astronauts sent on the first manned mission to Europa. It is shot documentary-style and features interviews with various people involved in the harrowing undertaking to seek out alien life in the solar system. You can watch the "Europa Report" trailer here.

The filmmakers also added a few hidden gems for fans of space travel. The rocket launch shown at the beginning of the film was footage from the 2011 launch of NASA's Juno spacecraft, expected to arrive at Jupiter in 2016.

"Europa Report" is currently available in the iTunes store and is set for release in theaters on Aug. 2.

The European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, captured this image of a gigantic coronal hole hovering over the sun’s north pole on July 18, 2013, at 9:06 a.m. EDT.

Solar to the Max 

Blogger's Note: Karen C. Fox wrote the following for the NASA web site:

The European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, captured this image of a gigantic coronal hole hovering over the sun’s north pole on July 18, 2013, at 9:06 a.m. EDT. Coronal holes are dark, low density regions of the sun’s outermost atmosphere, the corona. They contain little solar material, have lower temperatures, and therefore, appear much darker than their surroundings.

Coronal holes are a typical feature on the sun, though they appear at different places and with more frequency at different times of the sun’s activity cycle. The activity cycle is currently ramping up toward what is known as solar maximum, currently predicted for late 2013. During this portion of the cycle, the number of coronal holes decreases. During solar max, the magnetic fields on the sun reverse and new coronal holes appear near the poles with the opposite magnetic alignment. The coronal holes then increase in size and number, extending further from the poles as the sun moves toward solar minimum again. At such times, coronal holes have appeared that are even larger than this one.

The holes are important to our understanding of space weather, as they are the source of a high-speed wind of solar particles that streams off the sun some three times faster than the slower wind elsewhere. While it’s unclear what causes coronal holes, they correlate to areas on the sun where magnetic fields soar up and away, failing to loop back down to the surface, as they do elsewhere.

A Little Perspective (Very Little)

We came across this image recently in NASA's Twitter feed.

It shows how the earth looks from Saturn.

(Hint: The "you are here" arrow shows where we are....)

So next time you're whizzing past Saturn, this might help you find your way home.

Of Robots, Wasps, Jellyfish and Dragonflies ... Oh, and Asteroids Too

We're excited here at the Digital Notebook Complex dear readers, and we hope you are too.

That's because it's time for another exciting installment of....

THIS SATURDAY IN SCIENCE!!!!!!

When you're too busy to keep up with the world of science, we do it for you. Just another of the many, many services provided by the energetic staff at The Digital Notebook. 

Since head Digital Notebooker Evan Brand intends to finish the latest in the "Game of Thrones" books this weekend, titled, appropriately, "Dances With Dragons," let's begin with news of the high-flying dragonfly.

Move over Miramar, according to this very interesting article in the April 1 edition of The New York Times, the best pilots in the world, drone and otherwise, is the dainty but deadly dragon fly.

Cool graphic stolen shamelessly from The New York Times.

The blue line shows the dragonfly's flight path, the red line the prey.

The Times explains:

Dragonflies are magnificent aerialists, able to hover, dive, fly backward and upside

down, pivot 360 degrees with three tiny wing beats, and reach speeds of 30 miles per hour, lightning for an arthropod. In many insects, the wings are simple extensions of the thoracic box and are moved largely as a unit, by flexing the entire thorax. In the dragonfly, the four transparent, ultraflexible wings are attached to the thorax by separate muscles and can each be maneuvered independently, lending the insect an extraordinary range of flight options.

According to the article, which you should check out because it has some awesome video of dragonflies hunting and avoiding being a fat frog's meal but which we are too technically inept to embed here, dragonflies are 95 percent effective when they hunt.

It seems they do so by paying attention, and with the help of a set of nerves they have have evolved that connect eyes, brain and wings, specifically designed to improve their flight abilities.

The Times explains again:

In a string of recent papers, scientists have pinpointed key features of the dragonfly’s brain, eyes and wings that allow it to hunt so unerringly. One research team has determined that the

A dragonfly's eyes and brain work together. 

nervous system of a dragonfly displays an almost human capacity for selective attention, able to focus on a single prey as it flies amid a cloud of similarly fluttering insects, just as a guest at a party can attend to a friend’s words while ignoring the background chatter.

Other researchers have identified a kind of master circuit of 16 neurons that connect the dragonfly’s brain to its flight motor center in the thorax. With the aid of that neuronal package, a dragonfly can track a moving target, calculate a trajectory to intercept that target and subtly adjust its path as needed.

Of course not everything in the insect world is so super cool.

Take, for example, the discovery of a giant wasp nest in an abandoned home on the Canary Islands.

Very, very uncool dude.

It kind of looks like The Blob doesn't it?

The nest was found in the town of San Sebastián de la Gomera, which from this point forward, I will translate as meaning "town with giant freakin' wasp's nest."

This thing was so huge, 22 feet, that it is said to have housed literally millions of wasps. Scientists think it may be an invasive species from Africa, Morocco to be specific.

(Why is it that all the insects that come over from Africa beat the crap out of all the native inspects. Remember Africanized bees?)

Now on to our planet's oceans which are, quite frankly, a frackin' mess; mostly thanks to us.

But what man messes up, teenagers can clean up (at least that's the motto in my house.)

19-year-old Boyan Slat (OK, barely a teenager) has come up with a way to collect and recycle much of the plastic that is now floating around the ocean, thanks to our everything-is-disposable culture.

"The device consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Instead of moving through the ocean, the array would span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling."

It could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans. When can we start?

Probably not until someone figures out how to make money doing this.

Sorry sea life.

If you would like to watch an 11-minute video of this super-teen talking about this idea and demonstrating it, we have embedded it below for your viewing pleasure:

In keeping with our ocean theme, we now move on to the U.S. Navy.

While apparently the Air Force could learn a thing or two about effective drones by studying dragonflies, it seems the Navy wants to learn more about underwater robots by studying jellyfish.

Giant jellyfish.

(We pause here to ask you loyal reader, where else do you get cool stories like these that combine giant

The Cyanea capillata on which the robot is based.

jellyfish and robots? Just at The Digital Notebook, that's where!)

Anyway, according to this report by National Public Radio, the U.S. Navy is funding "development of a giant jellyfish robot."

Cyro, which measures 5 feet 7 inches in diameter and weighs 170 pounds, is based on Cyanea capillata, the giant lion's mane jellyfish indigenous to the cold waters of Arctic, the northern Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

It is being developed at a lab at Virginia Tech, funded by a grant from the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center and the Office of Naval Research.

Here's a video of it being tested at Virginia Tech:

Virginia Tech: Autonomous Robotic Jellyfish from virginiatech on Vimeo.

Discovery News says it will be used for "ocean monitoring, exploration, and even clean-up in the case of an oil spill."

Yeah.

I'm sure that's ALL the Navy wants to use it for...

And if THAT wasn't enough science-fiction-turned-science for you, finding the above on Discovery News led to the discovery of this other super-cool thing below -- giant robot turtles.

The latest in robot turtle technology.

Mechanical engineers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have been hard at work on a robotic sea turtle project called "Naro-Tartaruga" since 2008. Led by masters student Cedric P. Siegenthaler, the project has support from Disney Research Zurich and the Center of Structure Technologies.

It was set for an open water test last fall. No word yet on how the tests went.

"The most recent robot prototype features a large waterproof torso that can pack in a bunch of sensors and batteries needed to keep it working. The robot is several feet long, primarily made of aluminum, and can move a meter per second, which translates into 6.6 feet. Each fin contains three actuators for 3-D movement and the robot has a diving depth of more than 300 feet," Discovery News reports.

And what's a science post without news of space?

Not terribly complete, that's what kind.

So we bring you our grand finale, NASA's plans to capture an asteroid and tow it into orbit around the moon, a satellite's satellite if you will, and put it in a holding pattern for later mining.

USA Today reports:

President Obama's just-released federal budget proposal for 2014 requests $17.7 billion for the space agency, up from the $16.6 billion that Congress eventually approved for last year's budget.

The asteroid project would send astronauts to a 500-ton nearby asteroid by 2021. They would later move the roughly 30-foot-wide space rock into orbit around the moon for later prospecting. The mission would use the space agency's now-under-development Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, modified to allow space walks by astronauts, to make the capture happen. The proposed budget next year would add $78 million to develop asteroid lassoing technology to NASA's budget.

If you don't mind repetitive space music that is almost as boring as the soundtrack from the first Star Trek movie, check out this NASA video showing (but not telling) how the mission would work.

That's it for this edition of This Saturday in Science folks.

Come back again.

'Gale Crater I Am in You!!!'

This image from a truly hilarious video: "We're Nasa and We Know it" which I have embedded below.

Regular readers of this blog, both of you, will know that I occasionally post information about science discoveries or topics I find to be cool.

Trend-setter that I am, apparently I'm not alone.

I'm not tech-savvy enough to know whether blog posts count as "social media," but according to a New Year's Eve article in The New York Times, science is hot on social media.

Now I take issue with the article's lead-off, which puts Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic, record-breaking jump from a balloon 24 miles above the New Mexico desert in the 'science' category.

I put it more in the 2012 version of Evel Knievel category, but why quibble?

More interesting, to me anyway, is how popular the Mars rover Curiosity's Twitter account has become.

Now I will confess I am one of the hordes which follow these tweets, as much because they have a sense of humor as because of their science value.

"The first Twitter message on Aug. 5 from @MarsCuriosity, NASA’s official rover handle — “Gale Crater I Am in You!!!” — was retweeted more than 72,000 times," the Times reported.

See what I mean? (BTW, this video is really good.)




Less heralded and, sadly, without their own Twitter accounts, the other two rovers on Mars have, Spirit and Opportunity, kept on chugging long after their warranties expired. Spirit finally stopped communicating with Earth in March 2010 and was declared dead a year later. Opportunity is still going strong, exploring clay deposits on the rim of Mars' Endeavour Crater, according to this article in the Huffington Post.

The post reported that "together, the two robots have covered 26.82 miles (43.16 kilometers) to date, with Opportunity racking up the lion's share (22.02 miles, or 35.44 km). While Opportunity is showing some signs of its advanced age, such as an arthritic arm, the rover remains in good health and continues to return interesting data to its handlers back on Earth."

Other hot science news involved the movement of the retired space shuttle Endeavor to its final home in Los Angeles, and James Cameron's "deepest tweet" from the Pacific Ocean's Marianas Trench.

"In an age of despair over math and science acuity, it appears that what was once considered uninteresting or unfathomable has become cool and exciting," reporter Mary Ann Giordano wrote sardonically.

No doubt, the numbers are impressive.

Curiosity's Facebook page is near to a half-million "likes" and its Twitter account hit one million shortly after the August landing.

I don't pretend to understand why this is happening, although my own personal theory is that it has something to with the popularity of the "Big Bang Theory," the "Seinfeld" of the aughts and now running in endless, and hilarious, re-runs on TBS.

If you haven't seen it, it's a comedy about some socially dysfunctional science geniuses who hang out together and try to figure out how to get girls when they are not postulating about string theory.

Despite hitting all the geek stereo-types -- comic books, Star Wars, Star Trek et al -- they still manage to be hip in their own way and occasionally even get the girl.

So I think maybe some people are watching this and thinking "yeah, why not science?"

In any case, its one of the few things in 2013 that gives me hope for our species.

Get Your Space Geek On!

No, it's not the cover of a 1950s Sci-Fi pulp fiction novel. It's a rendering of what NASA did yesterday on Mars.

So if you grew up watching Star Trek re-runs on a black and white TV like I did; saw the first "Star Wars" movie in a theater with only one screen; or read Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov science fiction novels until your eyes bled, chances are you're got your space geek on this weekend about what we did on Mars yesterday.

I never understood Star Trek "red shirt" jokes until I got
a color television.

In case you don't know, we landed a rover the size of a Mini-Cooper on the red planet by lowering it on cables from a platform hovering above the plant's surface that was held aloft by rockets.

James Bond would have been proud.

The maneuver was so complicated and difficult, that the NASA engineers who created it dubbed the approach and landing "Seven Minutes of Terror." Their terror turned to joy, (as the video below shows), when the entire landing went off without a hitch.

(In case the video embed didn't work, you can click here to watch the video.)


Their anxiety was understandable, I suppose, when you consider that the whole shebang was approaching the Martian surface at 13,000 miles per hour.

And while James Bond gets to drive cool cars wherever he goes, he's got nothing on Scott Maxwell.

Maxwell is one of a dozen people trained to drive Curiosity, as the rover is named, from a driver's seat more than 100 million miles away.

Photo poached from CNN
Why is this man smiling? Because Scott Maxwell
gets to drive a car on Mars.

Maxwell has a pretty simple explanation of what he does, offered on his blog, called, appropriately, "Mars and Me."

He wrote:  "At night, there's a small red light in the sky. On that light lives four hundred pounds of thinking metal sent from Earth. I tell that metal what to do, and it does it."

(You can also follow him on Twitter @marsroverdriver, as I just did, where he answers questions like "what kind of mileage does that thing get?")

I am not the only person in the Pottstown area excited about this.

The folks over at the Chestmont Astronomical Society had some links to the landing posted on their web site, which is where I found the video I posted above.

They have good reason to be excited.

The timing gets people excited about space exploration just in time for their annual Starfest star gazing event.

Dozesn of amateur astronomers set up some pretty spectacular telescopes, trained in specific celestial objects that you can view with their help.

The event is free, although making a donation would be much appreciated.

Held this Saturday from 4 to 11 p.m., this year's Starfest will be held at a new location: Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site. (The rain date is Sunday.)

This year's guest speaker, Dr. H. John Wood, is the lead optics engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope.

 Mars and Starfest have a strong local history together.

Back in 2003 when Mars got closer to Earth than it had been in 50,000 to 60,000  years, the Starfest held in Warwick County Park had a huge turn-out, estimated at 2,500 people.

In the lead up to that event, I had about as much fun as I've ever had writing something for The Mercury when I wrote a two-day package of stories about Mars, the history of our fascination with it, it's role in our culture and the science behind the latest discoveries about the planet.

(This link will take you to the first day's story, about the science of Mars close approach, published on Aug. 17, 2003.

This link will take you to the second day's story, published on Aug. 18, 2003, which dealt with how Mars has affected human culture and civilization. That day's package also had a timeline of Mars through human history.)

Oddly enough, in all my science fiction choices as a kid, and yes, currently as well, I always passed over works about Mars (with the exception of Bradbury's Chronicles) because it seemed too close; not exotic enough.

But given the stage we human beings are at with our space travel, you've got to play the game that's in town and I imagine, we will be focused on Mars for a long, long time.