So, Alex decided that he wanted to do three experiments while he was on break. We found them – as we have found most of the things we have done – in Pop Bottle Science, which features 79 easy experiments that are not too time-consuming or messy. And in addition to a book full of experiments, the Pop bottle breaks into two, yielding both a container and a funnel as necessary.

Firstly, Alex wanted to blow bubbles. You know those little bubble-blowing kits that you can buy that contain a small bottle with some kind of detergent in it, and have a hole on a dipping stick that you have to blow through? The bubble blowing experiment in Pop Bottle Science is based on the same principles.

Get a large bowl of water, and then add a few squirts of detergent and a spoonful of sugar. (The sugar is to help strengthen the mixture and thicken the bubble wall so it doesn’t pop too quickly. I’m guessing this is the reason why bubble gum is so sweet, although I don’t know that for sure.) Then dip the top half of the pop bottle in the mixture, and blow through the neck of the bottle.

At first, Alex blew too hard, and the bubbles popped immediately. But once he got the hang of it, the gentle, sustained stream of air that he sent through the Pop bottle neck yielded fantastic results. Big bubbles formed, grew, and then hung off the bottle neck like pendulous fruit.

Next up: an experiment to make a raisin ballet. A simple premise: add four tablespoons of vinegar and three tablespoons of baking soda to a half a container of water and then throw in ten raisins. The combination of vinegar and baking soda creates carbon dioxide, which should make the ten raisins rise and fall in the water, creating a raisin ballet.

Or not so much a ten-raisin ballet as a pas de quatre. We only managed to get four of the raisins to rise and fall. Even after we threw in some more vinegar and baking soda to liven things up, the six uncooperative raisins would not budge. It was a bit like an experiment we tried a while back to get a grain of rice to rise and fall in a glass of carbonated liquid. It took us a while to get that one right, too.

Lastly, Alex wanted to explore the principle of inertia. This started with a discussion we had about how if you pulled a tablecloth out from under a bunch of dishes, there was a chance the dishes would stay in place. Instead of putting the whole dining table at risk, we decided to try it on a micro level. We put a card on top of the empty bottom half of the Pop bottle, put a quarter on top of the card, and then Alex flicked the card to try and make the quarter fall into the container.

It took Alex a couple of tries to get the trajectory right. At first he was flicking the card upward, which dislodged the quarter. But eventually, he was flicking the card straight ahead, making the quarter fall into the empty container below. This one, Alex loved. He still likes to do it from time to time, just to make sure that the principle of inertia hasn’t changed its mind.

The first experiment came from the book One Minute Mysteries: 65 Short Mysteries You Solve With Science. I read a riddle to Alex that essentially asked if you had to build the solar system using a collection of different-sized sports balls, which ball would you select to represent Jupiter? (Spoiler alert: the answer follows.)

Alex knew right off the bat that given Jupiter’s size relative to the other planets in the solar system, the ball would have to be bigger than a tennis ball. He ummed and aahed for a little while, then suggested a soccer ball. Then he withdrew that answer and instead went for a basketball. The book agreed.

After that, we did two really quick experiments – both from Pop Bottle Science: 79 Amazing Experiments And Science Projects — still sticking with a solar theme.

In the first, we put a marble in a bottle and swirled it around, to demonstrate centrifugal force, one of the reasons why the Earth does not fly into the Sun. Then we tossed away the marble, filled the bottle with water, and positioned the bottle so that sunlight was shining through it, onto a blank sheet of white paper. The objective? To make a rainbow.

According to Pop Bottle Science, when sunlight hits water, the light bends and then separates into different colors. So we gave it a try. At first, we just had squiggly gray and white shadows on the piece of paper. But after a little bit of maneuvering, a tiny but utterly vibrant rainbow appeared on the paper, with each of the colors clearly visible.

Experiment Four came from the pages of The Magic School Bus In The Arctic. Alex loves The Magic School Bus series, which centers on a zany school teacher and a school bus that can transport kids into almost any situation.

Since the book was about staying warm in the Arctic, the purpose of the experiment was to figure out which material best keeps things warm. According to the instructions, we had to pick a number of different materials, and then wrap a slice of toast in each of them. After three minutes, we had to unwrap the toast, and see which slice had retained the most heat. For the materials, Alex picked cotton, plastic wrap, foil and paper. So we laid out a cotton napkin, and a sheet each of paper, foil and plastic wrap on our table. Then we cooked the toast, wrapped some in each of the materials and set the timer for three minutes.

While we were waiting, I asked Alex which material he thought would keep things warm. He said cotton. I thought it was more likely to be foil.

But when we unwrapped the toast, the results were surprising. The piece of toast that had been wrapped in paper was definitely the coldest. Then came the piece of toast that had been wrapped in plastic wrap. But the piece that had been wrapped in cotton and the piece that had been wrapped in foil felt the same.

Perhaps we had used a particularly efficient weave of cotton? Or our wrapping technique had not been consistent? It seemed so unlikely that cotton would have performed so well – even The Magic School Bus book advises folks not to go outside “dressed in a pillowcase.”

We will probably repeat the experiment in the future, to see if we get the same results. In any event, Alex was pleased that both the cotton and the foil got to share the limelight. “Do you know what?” he said, smiling. “The foil and the cotton both won!”

The Rock-it Science concert, an event held in conjunction with the Sensation and Emotion Network that took place under pink, blue and yellow strobe lights at the Highline Ballroom on Tuesday, March 3^rd, gave neuroscientists, geneticists, and PhD students in Systems Biology, among others, the chance to “get down.” Four of the rock bands in the long line-up of performers featured well-known scientists who, in the words of music producer Tim Sommer, “pursue music on a level that’s a little higher than that of a hobby.” It was difficult to know, for the most part, which of the performers were actually scientists –except, of course, when guest artist Rufus Wainwright announced unashamedly that ”I failed every science course I ever took.” The event was designed, in part, as a celebration of the interface between art and science and the musicians’ bios tell us what the concert did not. Pardis Sabetti, for example, the tall, and lanky, lead vocalist of the Boston-based alternative rock band “ Thousand Days,” has a formidable career offstage. A Rhodes scholar, Dr. Sabetti is the third woman ever to graduate summa cum laude from Harvard Medical School and she is now an Assistant Professor in the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

To further explore that nexus between music and science, I spoke to some of the performers, like Dr. Joseph LeDoux, guitarist, singer and songwriter for The Amygdaloids (named for the “amygdala”, the almond-like structure in the brain’s temporal lobe involved with emotional behavior). He is also Professor and Chair of the Center for Neural Science at New York University, author of two books on how the brain works, and the one whose idea it was to produce the Rock-it Science concert. Many of his lyrics have to do with mental disorders, as his songs titles suggest (Mind Body Problem, Memory Pill, and An Emotional Brain, to name a few ). His theory on why so many scientists play in rock bands? “Maybe all kids want to be musicians. Academics haven’t gotten over that very well.”

I also spoke to Dave Soldier, guitarist with “The Spinozas,” a group that performed soulful Flamenco-influenced songs in Hebrew, Arabic and Medieval Spanish. He is David Sulzer, Ph.D. in his non-performing life, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry-Neuroscience and Pharmacology at Columbia University. Musing briefly on the difference between musical composition and scientific discovery, Dr. Sulzer is convinced that, where John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Beethoven, and Mozart, Dr. Sulzer are concerned, “you can’t do it better than those people did it.” Not so, he believes, in the realm of science. “In science it’s the best we can do for right now, but it will be superseded. Your discoveries aren’t forgotten, but are no longer associated with you–you’re a building block”. And what about the similarities between musicians and scientists? “Their personalities are similar. They are insecure, driven and worried.” Well, world-class scientists performing on the Highline Ballroom stage, inspired by subjects as wide-ranging as Andalusian poetry, and the intricate workings of the brain, could shed what worries they may have had for just a few hours, and really let loose.

Recently I attended the opening of The Atom Smashers, a documentary by
Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross from 137 Films. It was held,
appropriately, at the Museum of Science and Industry. Unfortunately,
this had the effect of providing us with what is probably the smallest
screen in the city of Chicago. That can easily be forgiven because the
film itself was exceptional.

In blurb form, The Atom Smashers is about scientists at the Tevatron,
a 4 mile diameter machine hosted at Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory (Fermilab) in the suburbs of Chicago and currently the
worlds largest particle accelerator. They are racing to find something
called The Higgs Boson before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an even
bigger machine being built in Switzerland, is completed and beats them
to the discovery.

In contrast to what you’d expect from that description, very little
time is spent explaining what the Higgs is, or why people are looking
for it. Much of the sequence introducing the Higgs shows the
individual scientists’ deer-in-the-headlights reaction to the question
“What, really, is the Higgs Boson?” The most unexpected and surreal
setting — then director of Fermilab Leon Lederman appearing on
Donohue, complete with blackboard and multi-colored chalk — is notable
not for the exposition, but for what appears to be his complete
failure to communicate to the audience why the Tevatron was worth
building. In the few voice-over sequences the animation are
uncomplicated, they strive not for the Pixar sheen that seems the goal
of most current documentaries, but instead channel the disordered yet
simple blackboard of the working scientist.

That resonance with work-day science is also the first hint to the
film’s strength. This is a documentary, not about the science, but
about the scientists; not about the highly structured world of ideas
in which they live, but about the emotional life surrounding that
world. We see the Fermilab model airplane club and the rock band,
complete with band leader Ben Kilminster’s dream of being a rock star.
We watch the tango lessons hosted by theorist Marcela Carena. We
follow the stresses of the life of Robin Erbacher and John Conway —
trying to start a family while commuting weekly between teaching in
Davis, California and researching in Batavia, Illinois. We are
invited, in contrast to the norm in science documentaries, to see the
scientists as ordinary people, with ordinary problems, ordinary
hobbies, and ordinary families.

The Atom Smashers’ stripping away of science exposition does not mean
that the science is lost. It shines through beautifully in two ways.
One of the main sub-stories concerns how John Conway and his group
found a “bump” in the data that hinted that the Higgs might be within
reach. (He blogged about this here and here.) The group members share
their excitement at the initial finding, the nervousness,
apprehension, and flat-out hard work as they extend the analysis in an
attempt to confirm the signal, and finally the disappointment when the
follow-up shows no effect. This is a treat in a science documentary: a
story about an exciting lead that turns out to go nowhere. It’s
understandable that these would usually be skipped, but ignoring them
presents a very skewed picture of life as a scientist. John’s story
represents the bulk of scientific work; follow a lead until it dies,
shrug, then go on to the next thing. The thought of making a
breakthrough is what keeps most researchers excited about going on,
but the moments of true discovery are far between.

Excitement is the second aspect of science that shines in the film.
The main plot-line concerns the race as Fermilab physicists try to
find the Higgs before the LHC is turned on. (With the LHC’s increased
energy and volume of data, a victory over the Tevatron is a fait
accompli once the new machine is running.) There is a clear sense that
every person working there wants desperately and whole-heartedly to
find the damn thing. While it’s entirely possible that someone seeing
the film will leave with no better idea what the Higgs is than when
they entered, no one could watch it without picking up the sense of
enthusiasm for the search. This is what completes the picture of
scientists as people. Their job is one of passion and drive. We are
not shown robots, mechanically pushing buttons on their colossal
machines and reading out the secrets of the universe off the
ticker-tape output, but instead people who are much more akin to
athletes, driven to extraordinary feats by the twin desires of wanting
to better themselves and to beat the other team.

It is in their pursuit of this sense of competition that the
filmmakers commit their only real error. They choose to portray the
Higgs search as a race between the Tevatron in the United States —
“us” — and the LHC in Europe — “them”. But, almost every physicist
working on the Tevatron is also involved with one of the experiments
at the LHC. As Erbacher said in the panel discussion after the
screening, in this case “them is us”. There is, in fact, a tremendous
amount of competition, but it is between the different experiments at
the same machine. These are CDF and D0 at the Tevatron, which have
been competing for years, soon to be replaced by ATLAS and CMS at the
LHC. While many would be happy to have one of the Tevatron experiments
make the discovery first, no one is going to complain if it’s found a
few years later, because they’ll be part of that as well. Even more
importantly, there is a point where the sports analogy fails. In
baseball there is a World Series every year and some team will win it,
the only question is which one. When hunting for a discovery the
question is whether there will even be a “World Series” for someone to
win. While everyone wants to be the team that wins, what they want
most is for the game to be played. In particle physics it’s been 13
years since an important discovery, and 25 since there was a
revolutionary one.

This one flaw is far from fatal, and The Atom Smashers is the best
treatment of the lives of physicists that I have ever seen. I would
highly recommend seeing it if given the chance.

By DNLee

This month marks the end of a two year journey of exploration, discovery, wonder, and advocacy. March 31st marks the end of International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2009.

In fact, Wednesday, March 18, 2009 is International Polar Day, celebrating Polar Oceans. The marine ecosystem is a very important part of the polar biome. The animals of the polar regions – both the north and south poles – depend on a variety of seafood species for nutrition: krill, fish, ocean birds, and ocean mammals. The polar food webs are complex and interesting. Polar Worlds – Life at the Ends of the Earth is a perfect text for IPY and International Polar Day – Polar Ocean is this book.

Title: Polar Worlds – Life at the Ends of the Earth
Author & Illustrator: Robert Bateman
Publisher: Scholastic/Madison Press

I became a fan of Robert Bateman when I read his book Birds of Prey. He is a very talented artist. All of his sketches and paintings of the Arctic and Antarctic animals look very life-like, more like photographs than paintings. The book gives a very thorough introduction to all of the types of animals that call the Arctic and Antarctic home. Though both of these polar regions are cold and remote, they are very different from one another.

The Arctic region has been inhabited by people for many thousands of years. The people of these many northern nations have had to survive the cold and depend on animals such as the polar bear, caribou, sheep, whale, and water birds for food, clothing, and fuel.

The Antarctic hasn’t had permanent human settlements, but human impact has been strong for a few hundred years. Sailing and whaling were once very important industries in the southern polar regions. But thanks to protective laws, the oceans of the Antarctic region are now protective and refuge area for sea animals, especially whales. Bateman introduces readers to the many bird and seal species that call the South pole and its waters home.

What I especially like about Bateman’s artistry is his ability to accurate portray animal anatomy. With his pen and colors he captures the shape and movement of animals very well. I also enjoy his very-easy to read text. This book is intended for young reader, intermediate school grades, he can also maintain the attention of adults, too. It’s a great science book for your school or home library.

Plus, as I mentioned during Week of the Blue, marine habitats and animals are in serious jeopardy. I enjoy learning about nature and animals and I love sharing what I learn with you. I hope I also inspire in you a desire to make our world a better ecosystem for all – humans and wildlife. I hope you join with me to help protect the endangered polar bear. Encourage the United States Secretary of the Interior, (the government department responsible for protecting our common heritage resources) -Ken Salazar to put into effect regulations to provide the polar bear the legal protections it needs to survive. This is a perfect community service activity for celebrating International Polar Day – Polar Oceans. After all, polar bears depend on the polar oceans for survival.
Click here to find out more and sign the petition.

When you think of your environment, what do you see? I imagine myself walking out the front door and facing the morning traffic on the Staten Island Expressway. I hear the farting noises the trucks and buses make as they climb the ramp off the service road. A plane whizzes by and the ground bumbles. Exactly fifteen steps from my front door take me beyond the front lawn onto the sidewalk. If I walk west along the service road, I hit a patch of trees, a mini-forest the size of two blocks by two blocks. If I continue walking northwest I hit a bigger patch of trees with a small farm the size of one of those new developments that cram twelve homes on what had been a plot for two moderate-sized detached houses. If I walk east from my front door, I would dodge some dog poop, step on sputum, or broken glass, on my way to Willowbrook Park where there is a pond, gaggles of giggling geese and a carousel. Between my house and the park is one campus of the many within City University of New York and a public library. There is a Starbucks, a bank, a strip mall with horrible neon lights, cars honking and breaks screeching as they approach the one stoplight with a camera. There are no bike lanes or permission for riding bikes inside the park. There are no green markets nearby, only fast food chains and mom-and-pop shops that use I Can’t Believe It’s not Butter.

Edward S. Casey wrote, “Just as place is animated by the lived bodies that are in it, a lived place animates these same bodies as they become implaced there.” There is a relationship between the place beyond my front door and myself that is reciprocal in its nature. When I’m not walking around, I am sitting in one of the farting express buses with other people heading to school, work or to a change of busied scenery— from crowded mall parking lot to the flooding river of Times Square; from South Shore mansion to Little Italy or smoke shops on Christopher Street.

Do we consider ourselves travelers or commuters on really long escalators that sometimes work? The point of escalators is to get you to the top faster. The point of cars is to get you there faster without getting wet. The point of an even bigger vehicle is to assuage that displacing break from private property as soon as you move beyond your front lawn and move onto  the realm of public space, or the vehicle is used to fit more groceries.

Where do groceries come from? A warehouse. A slaughterhouse. A farm. Not like the mini-farm in the mini-forest by my house where a man in his 60s rakes and plucks at the earth every few days. If you shop at the bigger chains, the products come from bigger farms animated by the lived bodies of migrant workers or eco-conscious college students when they are “taking a break from school.” A French-tipped mani-pedi wouldn’t last a day at a farm even if gloves were worn. If we each took turns growing produce in our mani-pedied backyards or front lawns, would the number of obese Americans still outnumber the amount of fat Americans ? We have to take turns because we have not yet given ourselves enough time to balance debt and eat healthy.

It’s not butter and it’s not O.K. It’s not O.K. to lie to ourselves about eating better by eating diet or substituting the real deal for something “just like it.” The body is starved for nutrition but abundant in calories. The practice of pushing agriculture away from my dinner table to China, or canning fish fillet from Lake Victoria in Africa reminds me of the childhood bully who steals his classmate’s lunch, who now has nothing to eat . My relationship to the space of my dinner table relates to the Tanzanian fisherman who can’t afford his own catch.

Toaster not working? Toss it out and buy a new one; our political and economic , environment demands us. Once tossed, the toaster will end up in a landfill in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio or Virginia . The traveling toaster! Once upon a time beyond my front door, my nostrils collapsed shut into the septum to block the stench of the landfill. Today the landfill is being transformed into a “green space” complete with bike trails, open water for canoeing, a memorial site for 9/11 (and mafia victims). Land is often recycled in surprising ways. What was once a riverbed through which fish migrated was turned into a landfill, was turned into a park and memorial site, which might be sold to a developer who will build a parking lot for the grocery, gourmet toaster shop or housing community.

Does buying endless products that you don’t really need actually make you happy? Do we only crave objects because of clever marketing? Wild Talk speaks to writer Alistair McIntosh about what it will take to make the world’s economy truly green and how ordinary people will have to change their values to make the dream come true. To listen, click here.

This month more than 25,000 people will converge on Istanbul in Turkey to discuss the world’s water issues. Big business, developers, conservationists and governments will gather in an attempt to place water high on the international agenda. Mark Smith, Head of IUCN’s Water Programme, talks to Wild Talk about whether this will happen and explains the importance of water in the climate change debate. To listen, click here.

Wild Talk paid a visit to the Geneva Motor Show this month to see just how committed car companies are to the green movement. With more and more electric cars on display, it’s clear that every brand wants to get in on the act. Wild Talk speaks to technical experts who talk us through some of the cars on offer, customers who are keen to buy them, and a new company which is planning to set up a grid for charging electric cars using only renewable energy sources.

By Hugh Lippincott

In a comment on the quantitative Doppler effect post, my mother had the following to say:

“Mom again. I have a feeling that however clearly you explain it, some people who have never taken advanced math in any form will never really understand it. I like much better the idea of the dark matter, the neutrinos racing through my finger-tips, etc. Perhaps you should select your subject-matter differently – when you say you are a physicist, what questions do people at cocktail parties ask you? I’m sure not about variables. The best stuff is the underground machine etc. You may think I am trivial or superficial-minded, but I speak honestly.”

I understand her point, but I think I’d like to keep trying with the quantitative posts every now and then anyway. The problem I have with separating this blog from the quantitative aspects is that without the math behind it, physics is reduced to a matter of faith. It’s nice to talk about neutrinos going through fingernails and underground mines, but at a cocktail party I inevitably have to say something like, “trust me” or “you’ll just have to believe me.” We can’t actually feel neutrinos going through our fingernails. With this blog I’m trying to show that the rather general, romantic and literally intangible idea of dark matter is actually based on years and years of physics research and that most of what goes into it is fully understood and not a matter of faith at all (although, I will be the first to admit that much of it is speculative – after all, we don’t truly know what we are looking for, just that it is there).

As physics arguments are generally expressed in mathematical terms, I think I’ll keep the math arguments in there from time to time, even if my mom generally ignores them. I think she could understand it if she really wanted to and it was explained well (which this blog probably will not do as it’s probably the wrong vehicle anyway), but in the end, it really doesn’t matter to her if she can derive an expression for the Doppler effect or not, does it? The main point that I would be trying to illustrate, then, is that such a derivation exists and could be understood.

By Hugh Lippincott

The first version of the qualitative post contained a paragraph at the end in which I did some real math (I have since removed that paragraph, as it appears in a different form in this post). My mother loved the bit about the tennis and thought she had really grasped the general idea; alas, when confronted with a paragraph containing algebraic variables, she felt somewhat bewildered and lost because I hadn’t given it enough of an introduction. I was reminded that she hasn’t really done any advanced math in several years. Mom, I apologize, and I’m going to take some time now to talk a bit about the philosophy of mathematics in physics because I do plan on using math in this blog whenever it’s applicable (which will be, presumably, often, as this is a physics blog).

First, I’ve titled these two posts as “qualitative” and “quantitative.” This is a standard and very useful division in physics. When discussing a subject “qualitatively,” one is really trying to grasp the basic idea or gain a sense of intuition. Then, after gaining that first level of understanding, one begins to approach a problem “quantitatively” by actually working the math. I would not be surprised if many of the subjects I broach in this blog will be handled in a similar fashion.

Next, I want to say that one purpose of introducing abstract variables in a mathematical treatment of a problem is to generalize the solution. For example, in the last post, I tried to explain the Doppler effect using a very specific situation. If my mom is hitting tennis balls every two seconds, then decides to run towards the ball machine, she will have to hit tennis balls at a faster rate. We’ve solved the Doppler effect for that one case. But that situation doesn’t apply if we wished to talk about listening to a police siren on a street corner or the rotational speeds of galaxies in an argument about dark matter. That’s why the abstraction of math is so useful in physics – we can deal with the problem in such a way that we can use the same language and solution in each instance.

Finally, I’m going to be using variables to represent various parameters in the problem. Specifically, I’m going to use the following:
f₀: the frequency at which the balls are emitted by the ball machine
v: the speed or velocity of the tennis balls
v_r: the speed or velocity at which my mom runs
f: the frequency at which she hits each tennis ball.

The choice of these variables is completely arbitrary; I could have used anything to represent the quantities of interest. In general, however, we try to use variables that are easily associated with what they represent, like “v” for velocities and “f” for frequencies. The subscripts are then used to delineate different quantities of the same type. f₀ is given a “0” because in a sense, it is the original frequency or the initial frequency. My mom’s velocity is given the subscript “r” because she is the receiver, in contrast to the source (if the ball machine were moving, I would have described its velocity as “v_s“).

If there are any questions or comments about this introductory stuff, please do comment below.

Onto the problem. Given the variables defined above, I want to define a couple more terms. If the machine spits out balls at a frequency f₀, then the time between each ball, T₀, is 1/f₀ (in the example, I said that the time between each ball was 2 seconds, so the frequency is then 1/2 per second).

In the time elapsed before the next ball is fired, the previous ball has traveled a distance equal to its speed times the time elapsed, or v*1/f₀. This is the distance between each ball.

To determine the time between each ball that my mom observes, we will need the absolute distance between balls (v*1/f₀) and the speeds of both my mom and the balls. At the instant when my mom hits a ball, she is v*1/f₀ away from the next ball. However, she is still running towards that ball, and the ball is still moving towards her. Therefore, that distance will be covered by the combination of her running towards the ball and the ball moving towards her, i.e. with a velocity equal to the sum of her velocity and the ball’s velocity, v+v_r. Therefore the time it takes for her to see the next ball is the total distance divided by the total velocity,

T = v * 1/f₀ * 1/(v+v_r).

To calculate the frequency at which she observes each ball, we invert that time, so

f = (v+v_r)/v*f₀.

In the example, f₀ = 1 per 2 seconds, v = 12 m/s, and v_r = 12 m/s, so f = (12+12)/12 * 1/2 = 1 per second, which is exactly what we saw. However, this equation is now general for any similar situation. The equation can be generalized still further to take into account a moving source as well, in which case

f = (v+v_r)/(v+v_s)*f₀.

Now we can talk about listening to sirens on a sidewalk or galactic rotation curves and use the same equation to represent all 3 situations.

In my first post, I talked about how the Doppler effect is a shift in the observed frequency of a wave caused by the relative motion of a source and an observer. In this, my first detailed post, I will try to explain how that actually works. As my mom plays tennis, and this blog is ostensibly aimed at her, I’m going to use a rather tortured tennis analogy.

Suppose my mother is using a ball machine to practice her ground strokes. The ball machine spits out a tennis ball every 2 seconds and each ball moves at the same speed. To use some real numbers, a tennis court is about 24 meters long from baseline to baseline, and let’s assume that the balls take 2 seconds to go from the machine to my mother standing at the other baseline (or the ball takes 1 second to get to the net, and then another second to get to my mom). Therefore, as my mom hits a ball, the ball machine is in the process of shooting the next one. As my mom continues to practice, she hits a stroke every 2 seconds.

In this picture, my mom hits ground strokes every 2 seconds, and the next ball is released as she hits the previous stroke (this is some pretty great animation, huh? Unfortunately, the timing is not quite right, so it’s not 2 seconds in real time).

Now, suppose she wanted to work on her volleying and therefore decides to run to the net. She hits a stroke (a nice approach shot, presumably), and then starts sprinting to the net as the ball machine spits out the next ball. assuming she runs really fast (like Usain Bolt), she can make it to the net in 1 second. When she gets there, the next ball from the ball machine will already be there to meet her (remember, the ball takes 1 second to get to the net, so while my mom was running in, the next ball was also heading towards the net). Instead of hitting a ball every 2 seconds, she’ll hit this one after only 1 second, because she was moving relative to the ball machine. Then, once she’s stationary at the net, she will once more see a ball every 2 seconds. In a sense, this is the Doppler effect. When my mom, the observer, was moving relative to the ball machine, the source, the frequency with which she hit balls changed (from once every 2 seconds to once every second). Then, when she was no longer moving, the frequency returned to its usual value.

In this one, my mom hits a ground stroke and runs to the net, at which point she is confronted with the next ball after only 1 second, instead of the usual 2. This is caused by the relative difference between her speed and the ball machine, or the Doppler effect (again, the timing isn’t quite right, but you get the idea).

By Hugh Lippincott

In the last post, I said that dark matter could be a new type of particle that only interacts weakly, which is why we’ve never seen it before. The goal of my research is to build a very sensitive radiation detector and directly detect a WIMP (by observing the energy released on that rare occasion when a WIMP does interact with something in the detector). This is hard. Given our current limits on dark matter, we expect to see maybe a handful of events per year in our detector. That means we would run our detector continuously for an entire year, and we might see a single event that we could point to and say that it was a WIMP.

If that was the only requirement, building such a detector wouldn’t be so hard. The difficulty arises in the fact that there is radiation flying all over the place all the time that is not associated with dark matter, and our detector is sensitive to that as well. This is known as background. It’s as if you were trying to have a conversation with someone at a loud party who refused to raise his voice. Because of all the background conversations, it would be very hard to understand what that person was saying. A dark matter detector has a similar problem. For example, because of energetic particles passing through the atmosphere called cosmic rays and other ambient sources of radiation, a standard radiation detector (a Geiger counter is shown in the picture) goes off about 100 times per second. Or 10 million times a day. Or 3.7 billion times a year. And we want to be sensitive to 1 event. Imagine trying to hear what one particular person was saying when half of all the people on Earth were speaking at the same time and that’s what dark matter experimentalists are trying to do.

How do we plan to do this? First, we will put our detector underground (in an active nickel mine in Sudbury, ON). This has been done with great success by neutrino experiments in the past – if the detector is underground, the earth helps shield the detector from cosmic rays, knocking the background down to say just the population of the USA. Second, we want to use very clean materials in our detector – if you can purify and clean everything very well, you can get rid of many sources of background that are always just lying around. Specifically, we plan to use liquid argon or liquid neon as our detector materials. These elements are very easily purified, so that we can remove anything that might produce radiation before filling our detector. Argon and neon have the great property that when exposed to radiation, they will “scintillate” or produce light. That will be our signal, in that we will look for flashes of light produced by a WIMP interacting in the liquid. In addition, the size of an argon or neon detector can be quite large, helping increase the size of our dark matter “target.”

Finally, we hope to reduce the majority of our backgrounds by using the timing of the light produced by an interaction. Most backgrounds in our detector are caused by radiation scattering off of electrons – these are called “electronic recoils.” A dark matter event would occur from a WIMP scattering off a nucleus, or a “nuclear recoil.” These two types of events have different time signatures in the scintillation light, and we can use the timing to tell them apart.

Our plan is to build a sensitive detector, eliminate all the backgrounds, and listen for that one interesting conversation.

By Hugh Lippincott

In the first post of this blog, I briefly discussed how galaxy rotation curves provide evidence for the existence of dark matter – I didn’t really said anything about what dark matter actually is. We’ve only said that it exists, that it has mass (i.e. it interacts with gravity), and that it doesn’t interact with light like every day matter. The truth is, even though dark matter is 85% of the total matter in the universe, we don’t know what it is because we’ve never seen it directly. That’s one of the reasons we’re looking for it. There are a number of theories for what dark matter might be, but for now I’ll just talk about one of the most popular, the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle or WIMP (again, a cute name that is quite a literal description of a particle that has mass and interacts weakly).

There are four forces in nature. The first is gravity, by which mass attracts other mass. The second is electromagnetism between charges, such that like charges repel and opposite charges attract (electromagnetism is also the interaction between matter and light). The third force is the “strong” force, which holds protons and neutrons together. The final force, and the one of interest here, is the “weak” force, which is involved in nuclear reactions. The weak force is weak mainly because its range is very small. You have to be really, really close to something to interact weakly. For example, there is a very light particle called the neutrino that only interacts weakly (neutrinos are too light to constitute dark matter). Neutrinos are produced in nuclear reactions, including nuclear reactors. As the Sun is basically a giant nuclear reactor, it emits neutrinos all the time – 60 billion solar neutrinos go through each one of our fingernails every second, but they just don’t hit anything; basically, because neutrinos only interact weakly, we are transparent to them.

A heavy particle that interacts weakly, or a WIMP, is exactly the kind of thing that could be the dark matter – we simply wouldn’t have observed it before because the weak interaction is so rare.

Clive Tesar, Head of Communications at WWF’s Arctic Network initiative, talks to Wild Talk about the upcoming Catlin Arctic Survey, an expedition from Northern Canada to the Arctic that will measure the thickness of the sea ice. He explains how this will help scientists make models of the rate at which the sea ice is melting and explains the implications for all creatures, both great and small, that live in the Arctic. To listen, click here.

“We’re going to talk about intelligent design,” Luis Campos opened his talk about “Genetic Engineering from the Experimental Garden to Synthetic Biology” at the at the CUNY Graduate Center Wednesday evening. “No, not the intelligent design you often hear about in the news, but life by design.”

The talk was put together by the Liberal Studies Program of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, the Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society, and the Section for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Luis Campos, historian at Drew University, gave a historical perspective of genetics in what he calls the “long 20th century.” In the early 20th century, there was a focus on breeding for the best traits. From the middle of the century to today, interest in genetics shifted to creating life. Although Campos does not go into the ethics or implications of engineering life, his lecture frames the historical context for controversial genetics.

Campos started by tipping his hat to the birthday boy of the year, Charles Darwin, who was out of fashion in 1900. Darwin established a theory for the survival of the fittest, but he did not have a theory for the “arrival of the fittest,” as Campos would say. Many investigators at this time looked for another way to explain heredity, for example by a divine creator on one hand.

“Plant Breeding is like Architecture”
On the other hand, there was botanist named Luther Burbank (1848-1926) who published “New Creations in Fruits and Flowers” in June 1893. Burbank produced new varieties of plants and fruits including the Russet Burbank potatoes used for McDonald’s fries today and was used in 1871 to help combat Ireland’s potato famine. This Massachusetts native was inducted to the Inventor Hall of fame in 1986. His bio reads, “His over 800 new plant varieties have been used around the world to increase the food supply.”

However, Burbank’s use of the words “creating new plants” left many other people uneasy. A priest was going to give a sermon on the topic of “new creations” and invited Burbank to a front row seat where he was “forced to listen for three quarters of an hour,” after which, he was vilified some more by the churchgoers. Burbank referenced many different dictionaries to seek the proper use of the term “creator” and was confident that he was, indeed, using it quite accurately. His plant creations were patented posthumously.

“Evolution Must Become an Experimental Science”
Campos then moved on to talk about Hugo de Vries (1848-1935), who created a mutation theory of evolution. Darwin explained evolution as a process of graduated equilibrium in which changes occur slowly over a long period of time. De Vries’ research in “Mutation Theory” added to Mendel’s laws of heredity and Darwin’s evolution by claiming that some changes may happen in bursts, also known as punctuated equilibrium. Organisms might mutate via the use of radiation de Vries concluded.

A.M. van Harten wrote in his book “ Mutation Breeding:”

“The word ‘mutation’ was coined by de Vries for sudden genetic changes, ‘leaps’, ‘shocks’ or ‘saltations’. It may be interesting to mention that the term ‘mutation’ had been used before in different ways, for instance in the seventeenth century to indicate changes in the life cycle of insects and in the nineteenth century by palaeontologists for clear abnormalities in fossils.”

“What was once called a monstrous form is now ‘mutant’,” Campos summarized before he moved on to Charles Davenport, a major proponent of American eugenics.

From Garden to Man…

Dr. Daniel Trembly MacDougal (1865-1958) was the director of the Department of Botanical Research of the Carnegie Institution in 1906. In his “New Wonders of Science in Dealing with Plants” he concluded that man might be able to change the form and color of flowers. “By injecting into the ovary osmotic regents and solutions of stimulation mineral salts he could cause changes in the egg cells of a plant before fertilization so that the altered eggs would give rise to a new form of species,” wrote the New York Times in 1906.

Curious about human genes and fitness, Charles Davenport (1866-1944) became director of Long Island’s Cold Spring Harbor Station for Evolution in 1904. Davenport determined to prove, not only the heredity of phenotypes, but also the heredity of character. Davenport published “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics” in 1911, which ignored social philosophy and the role of environment on the individual. Sadly, Davenport’s eugenics was a major influence on the Holocaust. Perhaps, this is why, and rightly so, there would always be a controversy about how to proceed with genetic research.

…But Don’t Forget the Animals!

A year later in 1912, Jewish biologist Jacques Loeb published the “Mechanistic Conception of Life,” which showed that changing the concentration of salt in the water would cause the eggs of sea urchins to develop without sperm, also known as artificial parthenogenesis.

”It is in the end still possible that I find my dream realized, to see a constructive or engineering biology in place of a biology that is merely analytical,” Campos quoted Loeb.

“Can Life Be Produced by Radium?”
June 21, 1905 the New York Times published an article on Prof. John Butler Burke of Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge about his work on spontaneous generation. The article reported on Burke’s discovery of radiobes, which he concluded were neither crystals nor bacteria:

“He used gelatine and radium…he boiled tubes of bouillon containing radium and tubes of pure bouillon. Nothing happened in the plain bouillon tubes, but in the others was grown like that seen when bouillon is inoculated with bacteria. This growth, grown in a medium absolutely lethal to all forms of life, consisted of minute rounded objects which looked like bacteria, thought not corresponding to any known kind…the objects were not bacteria, yet they seemed alive.”

Although, the research was inconclusive, the importance of Burke’s experiment was that it allowed for thought about the relationship between inorganic and organic environments. His radiobes were believed to be some sort of protein, which is the basic form of DNA.

International Genes

“Albert Blakeslee (1874-1954) paid attention to what was happening on the chromosomal level,” Campos introduced this American botanist who worked with the poisonous jimsonweed to know how chromosomes affected phenotype.

Herman J. Muller (1890-1967) won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for the discovery of the production of mutations by means of X-ray irradiation.” He grew up in Harlem, participated in activist peace groups, studied at a prestigious genetics lab in Germany right before Hitler rose to power and became one of Carl Sagan’s teacher’s at University of Indiana. During the war, he was not able to return to the United States, nor continue to work in Germany so he followed his Jewish secretary to the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.

Evolution of the Superhuman

“Fast forward to 1965,” said Campos. At this time people started talking about the risks of studying genetics, especially after WWII. Scientists were interested in creating the bigger, better, stronger and faster human being.

The term “synthetic biology” entered the vocabulary in the 1970s.

Campos cited Michael Roger’s coverage of the Asilomar meeting in California for Rolling Stone magazine. In his 1975 article “The Pandora’s Box Congress,” Rogers described the meeting’s location in a church by the sea as either a corny joke or rather apt joke. The conference focused on the ethics of genetic manipulation. “Nature does not need to be legislated, but playing God does,” Rogers quoted a scientist.

By the latter half of the century, scientists focused on making biology easier to engineer. Bacteria that can detect land mines by glowing, eat oil at spill sites and bacteria used for medicines are some useful reasons for genetic manipulation.

The First International Meeting on Synthetic Biology was held in the summer of 2004 at M.I.T.. Synthetic Biology 1.0, another name for the conference, referenced the 1975 Asilomar conference where the main interest was just breeding. By Synthetic Biology 2.0, the trend had become extreme genetic breeding.

Democratizing Biology

From the M.I.T. and Berkeley run conferences on genetics we arrive at the internet age with websites like DIYbio.org where amateurs attempt genetic engineering at home.

One of the final words of the evening came from Yale University’s Daniel J. Kevles who is also a science historian. He posited the notion of exploiting the essence of life and the conflict we have about genetics: genetic engineering is good when it leads to the production of better medicines but GMOs in food are bad because many people are allergic and the repercussions are not yet known.

Additional Links:

Intracellular Pangenesis by Hugo de Vries

Davenport Papers

“Breeding a Better Citizenry Through Science” by Johnahan Marks, Department of Anthropology , University of North Carolina

My five-year old son, Alexander, has already developed a strong interest in math and science. At his request, we recently enrolled him in an after-school astronomy class, where he draws stars and shoots the galaxy breeze with the other pupils. He has settled on Saturn as his favorite and most interesting planet; he loves the rings.

As part of a plan to nurture Alex’s interest in science, I decided that each week, he and I should try some form of scientific experiment. With that in mind, TalkingScience helped me out by giving me access to Mick O’Hare’s great book, How to Fossilize Your Hamster And Other Amazing Experiments for the Armchair Scientist.

Alex particularly wanted to try one experiment from the book; Bouncing Rice — where a grain of cooked rice bounces up and down in glass of fizzy drink. Sounds easy enough, right? Alex and I thought so. Hmmm. As it turned out, instant armchair scientists we weren’t.

BOUNCING RICE

According to O’Hare, the armchair scientist need only drop a grain of cooked rice into a glass of soda and wait for the rice, buoyed by the bubbles of carbon dioxide in the soda, to start rising and falling. Where did Alex and I go wrong?

We started by filling two shot glasses with seltzer water. We put a single grain of rice in one, and three grains in the other, watched them sink to the bottom, and waited. Nothing. The grains twitched a little, but showed no sign of rising up anywhere. Alex had his face inches from the shot glasses, willing the rice to move. At one stage he also went and got his magnifying glass, to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. Still no luck.

We discussed that maybe the rice was the problem, because it was boil-in-the-b ag. But it was all we had, so we decided to change beverages, and we filled another shot glass with Diet Coke, dropped in a grain of rice and waited. Nothing. Although we could barely even make out the rice through the m urky gloom of Diet Coke brown, it definitely was not moving.

CHAMPAGNE, ANYONE?

With Alex’s attention starting to wander, we started to wonder if it was the ratio of liquid to the grain of rice that was the problem. So we decided to diversify both the range of glasses and – to be on the safe side –the beverages we were using for the experiment. Half an hour after we started, we had nine vessels full of fizzy drinks, including two shot glasses full of seltzer water, one shot glass of diet coke, one large beer glass and one small mug of seltzer water, one champagne flute full of ginger ale, another champagne flute full of tonic water, one Bob-The-Builder tumbler full of ginger ale, and an Irish coffee glass full of tonic water. And at the bottom of each? Stubborn grains of rice, all lying very, very still.

SO THAT’S WHY THEY CALL IT “SPRITE”

Then Alex spied the remains of a bottle of Sprite in the refrigerator and suggested we use that. I was worried that it might be flat, but I emptied it into a regular-sized tumbler. Then Alex added the grain of rice, and we watched and waited.

But not for long. The rice went berserk!! It bounced up and down like a jumping bean. Alex squealed with delight, and declared the experiment ‘cool.’ Then, in order to reassure ourselves that it was the Sprite, and not the size of the glass that triggered the success, we repeated the experiment by pouring Sprite into a shot glass, and then adding a grain of rice. The rice nearly jumped out of its skin it was moving so fast.

Alex and I are going to try one experiment per week. Next week, we’re tossing up between testing the dynamics of our freezer door, or trying to create ‘clouds’ of smoke inside a plastic bottle. We’ll keep you posted.

This week I am pleased to introduce Martin Waugh, a physicist turned artist. Martin is trained as a physicist and he has transformed his basement into a high speed studio dedicated solely to photographing water droplets. There is little doubt that he is the world leader in the field. His images have been used by companies as diverse as Coca Cola and the Discovery TV show “Time Warp.” It is hard to envision how something so simple as a droplet of water hitting a pan of water can keep an active mind like Martin’s occupied for so many years, but then you see his images. I was fortunate to meet Martin this past April at a show featuring his work in Hickory North Carolina. Below are descriptions of his images in his own words. For more images please stop by his website.

Notes on Liquid Sculpture® Images

“Inside and Out”
This is a drop of water falling into a deep pool as seen from water-level. This was taken as the coronet is collapsing. The surprising feature is the texture of the portion below the surface. What started out as a very smooth bowl-like depression is now a strangely irregular surface with sharp spikes protruding from it.

“Earth Rebounds”
This is a drop of blue food coloring splashing into a pool of clear water. It is remarkable how the food coloring rebounds upward with essentially all of it returning to the top of the spike. This is a testament to the balance of forces and “equal and opposite reactions.”

“December”
This shows a drop landing on top of the spike created from the splash of a previous drop. The two drops fell about 1/10 second part in time, so that just as the first one is rebounding, the second one arrives. The resulting shape displays some of the same features as a drop splashing in a thin film (the knobs forming around the “coronet,” and the turbulent waves in the sheet that is formed). However, since the collision occurs in mid-air, there is no effect from a vessel bottom.

”Narcissi”
This is a drop of water onto a shiny, dry surface that had 15 beads of red water placed in a circle. As that drop lands, it spreads outward as a thin sheet along the surface. When it runs into the beads, it cuts under them, kicking them upwards.

Standing at 6’7″ tall, Will Allen’s height is obviously one of the first things people notice about the CEO and founder of Growing Power, Inc. I had the privilege of hearing Allen speak at a Yale University sponsored Sustainable Food seminar. The aspects of Allen that stuck out most to me were not his physical height, but the height of his character. Symbols of that character were his wide grin, faded blue hoodie, and cracked, rough hands. Shaking those hands, I caught a glimpse of the type and magnitude of life that Allen has lead and the service he has rendered to his community in Milwaukee, WI and throughout the world. For his work, Allen was recently awarded a MacArthur Genius Fellowship and invited by former President Clinton to speak on a large discussion panel at the University of Texas- Austin on “The Future of Food”. With all the acclaim and fanfare, Allen simply and humbly carries on his work, working daily in the fields and greenhouses at Growing Power. Allen showed numerous images of himself working hard in the fields and greenhouses, training people, getting his hands dirty, and loving every minute of it: “I have to touch the soil everyday to feel like a human being.”

Allen started Growing Power in a rundown section of Milwaukee as a place where he could grow his dreams of healthy food for the urban poor. Allen described Growing Power’s mission as producing healthy soil and food for urban areas, developing efficient and cost-effective urban farming technologies, and most importantly, educating the world’s future urban farmers. Regarding their mission, Allen said, “We know that our food system is broken…We have to change that…We have to redo this whole system…We need 50 million new food producers to even begin to put a dent into the industrial farm system…A lot of the work that I do is around that question, ‘How do we grow farmers?’” During Allen’s presentation, he made it clear that education and community involvement were key pieces to Growing Power’s activities, “You can actually learn how to do something, so you can take it back to your community and roll it out in your community…Youth are the very key…they are a very powerful piece of what we do, in terms of how we proceed in the future, because these are the future farmers. They won’t come from rural America. They’ll come from universities like here, and other universities around the country and from our young people that live in central cities, not from rural America.” Growing Power takes in children, teenagers, and their families as interns until they graduate and go off to college. Part of Allen’s education is training the young people to work hard, study hard, and excel at their chosen profession, “When the youth come to our facility, the expectations is so very high. They can’t have radios. They can’t have stuff in their ears. They come here, it’s not a playground. It’s an adventure, an experience for them to learn. So if we set those expectations, I try to make it as hard on them as I possibly can, because many of those kids are going to have tremendous struggles in their lives. So we are really preparing them for that. Not all of them are going to make it. That’s why when I take on kids, I take on their whole family and then I am honest with them. I tell them…this will be the hardest job that you’ll ever have…It really starts with the kids.” It was apparent that Growing Power not only trains these young people to be farmers, but it trains them how to be self-sufficient, hard-working, and successful.

Another aspect that struck me about Allen was the ingenuity, wisdom, and calculating cunning with which he approaches challenges in his company. Growing Power pulls in food waste from many different sources and churns out nutritious, productive soil from the decomposing food and the help of millions of worms. They then use that soil to efficiently grow food in their fields and greenhouses or sell the soil to garner funds for the support of their programs. Allen’s years as a marketing executive with Procter and Gamble became clear as he described the competitors his company faced (Waste Management and food wholesalers), the profit that each square foot of soil needed to make, and the numerous contracts that he had setup for collecting waste, organizing the community, and distributing Growing Power products. Surrounding themselves with simple, yet brilliant, individuals, Growing Power has developed low cost and effective methods for building and maintaining greenhouses, aquaponic assemblies, and even “green” energy generators in urban areas. Aquaponic systems use recycled water to grow fish and vegetation. Growing Power uses a motor to pump the water from a fish breeding area up to the roots of plants, which clean and filter the water for reuse by the fish. It is a self-contained apparatus that allows for the production of fish, water cress, and other leafy plants. Allen also explained that by heating the water slightly, the entire greenhouse is kept warm during the cold Wisconsin winters through the ability of the water to trap and slowly release heat. The energy generators use pureed food waste and anaerobic bacteria (bacteria that live without oxygen) to generate acetic acid (diluted acetic acid is vinegar). The acetic acid can be used for fertilizer or the production of methane/natural gas. These are just some of the simple, yet efficient, devices that Growing Power has created and distributed throughout the world.

Despite increasing threats from global warming, industrial pollution, contaminated soil, and dwindling food health and supply, Will Allen’s Growing Power is thriving to grow farmers and farming supplies to meet the farming needs of large cities across the world. Through his techniques in teaching young people, hopefully we will also have many more generations of Will Allens to stave off the destructive direction humanity is heading towards.

Images: 1. Flickr/NatalieMaynor 2. Flickr/grifray 3. Flickr/mjmonty 4. Flickr/mjmonty 5. Flickr/grifray 6. Flickr/{just jennifer}

I remember kissing my first girlfriend, Barbara, in her backyard when I was 17. It was a warm spring day and things were starting to warm up when she suddenly pushed me away and said, “Why are we doing this?”

I tried the answer most likely to reapply my lips to hers, “Because it feels good.”

That didn’t work. “I mean,” she continued, “would we kiss if the whole culture hadn’t taught us to kiss? Would people naturally want to push their tongues into someone else’s mouth?”

I don’t remember where the conversation went from there, but I can assure you that it did not lead to kissing. In fact, it didn’t lead to much of a conversation. I really had no idea how to respond to her questions, other than with adolescent anger and hurt feelings.

Now, I think I have the answers. Or at least some of them, thanks to a seminar on “The Science of Kissing” held at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting on –when else — Valentine’s Day. The session began at 8:30 AM, early enough to discourage lazy morning celebrations of the day. By the time I arrived, the double-sized room was jammed with scientists and reporters standing in the back and sitting along the walls.

The seminar featured several notable researchers in the field of philematology. Leave it to academics to invent a long, Greek-sounding name (that doesn’t even appear in Merriam-Webster) for something as common as kissing. Perhaps this is because they need to distance themselves from the obviously arousing nature of their work. Science, of course, should be objective. Still, I was encouraged to hear the promise made by one scientist who measured hormones in the saliva of student volunteers who kissed for 15 minutes in the campus health center. She planned to conduct her next round of research in “a more romantic setting.”

And speaking of saliva, that’s what kissing is all about. You and I might think of warm lips and soft probing tongues. Scientists see our mouths as small chemical reactors of swirling chemicals that not only turn us on, but also help us assess the health and childbearing status of potential mates.

Testosterone, a hormone associated with sex drive in men and women, is one. Men prefer sloppier kisses with more open mouth, says Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher. This lets them transfer more testosterone to stimulate their partner’s sex drive. Fisher, who studies the brain chemistry of love (check this video), speculates that men might be able to assess a woman’s fertility from estrogen or other hormones in her saliva.

Wendy Hill, a neuroscientist (and provost) at Lafayette College, finds that kissing reduces stress (associated with the chemical cortisol) and increases pair bonding (associated with oxytocin).

Of course, there are always surprises. Hill ran her experiments on couples in the sterile confines of the student health center while playing romantic music. (Sounds as kinky as R-rated experiments get.) After 15 minutes of kissing, she found that oxytocin rose in men and so they showed more interest in bonding. Yet it declined in women, indicating less interest.

This was a surprise, since most researchers believe women are more interested in bonding than men. She plans to try the tests again in a more romantic setting (I hope she keeps the music).

This may make a difference. Or perhaps men really are more interested in bonding when they are aroused. As anyone knows who has listened to Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” arousal can make a guy feel intensely (and not think wisely). But those feelings may be quick to cool. That’s why I’d like to see Hill take a second blood sample an hour or two later. Let’s see who has elevated oxytocin levels then.

Another important chemical in saliva may be androstadienone, a steroid that maintains positive mood and increased focus in women and some men, said Duquesne University neuroendocrinologist Sarah Woodley. “It may not be a sex attractant, but it plays a role in enhancing responsiveness to other stimuli. It makes them feel better,” she explained.

Woodley also thinks smell plays an important role in kissing. She flashed the famous Burt Lancaster-Deborah Kerr kiss on the beach from the movie “From Here to Eternity” onto the screen. “Notice the skin-to-skin contact,” she said. Even 55 years after that scene was shot, it was hard not to notice the body-to-body contact.

Speaking strictly scientifically, Woodley believes we may smell one another’s skin and breath to determine the health of our partner. (Eyes apparently deceive, since I think both Lancaster and Kerr looked incredibly healthy.) She also thinks the area under the armpit, including skin, hair, and the local bacteria, is also an important turn- on. So not too heavy with the deodorant.

Clearly, kissing triggers an avalanche of hormones, steroids, and other chemicals. So many, in fact, that Fisher believes humans have evolved three separate mating mechanisms.

The first is testosterone-driven lust, the turned-on, feels-good type of exploration that compels us to look at a range of partners.

The second is romantic love, which Fisher says is stronger than our sex drive. “The first kiss is wildly novel,” Fisher told her audience. That novelty can trigger a release of dopamine, a hormone associated with pleasure. Mix in some norepinephrine (heart pounding) and – this really makes sense – serotonin (obsessive thinking) and you have a recipe for romantic love.

Finally there is attachment. It is associated with high levels of oxytocin that “enable a couple to tolerate each other long enough to raise a child,” said Fisher.

Fisher, who is also chief scientist at www.chemistry.com, a dating site, has written a book, Why Him, Why Her?, on how different temperaments associated with neurochemical systems may determine our relationships.

It may explain why the chemistry created by initial flirting sometimes turns sour after a first kiss. In fact, a survey of 1,041 college students by evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup of SUNY Albany found that 59 percent of men and 66 percent of women backed off from someone they thought was attractive after a first kiss.

And yes, kissing is common. Charles Darwin studied it in the first global ethnographic study, sending letters to missionaries around the world and asking them to describe behaviors. Studies in the 1950′s showed that kissing played a role in 90 percent of all cultures. Even those societies that didn’t kiss found ways to get intimate face time. Eskimos, for example, blew and tapped at each other’s faces. (They were probably afraid of frozen tongue syndrome.)

Hey, even chimpanzees and bonobos, among our closest cousins, kiss. One researcher in another seminar mentioned a bonobo that once tried to tongue a zookeeper. Other animals do the best they can. Foxes lick noses. Birds touch beaks. And bees? Well, who knows?

So now, after more years than I care to remember, I can finally answer Barbara’s questions. Yes, kissing is natural. We would probably do it even if our culture hadn’t taught us. And yes, there are many reasons why someone might want to push their tongue into someone else’s mouth.

I guess maybe it just wasn’t the right chemistry.

Incidentally, if you want to read a really good article on the latest in post-feminist sex research, I recommend “What Do Women Want” by Daniel Bergner in the January 25 New York Times Magazine. After all, who could resist a story whose first line is: “Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography.”

BRYANT PARK, NYC- As the stock market continues to plunge and daily news reports remain bleak, the 2009 Mercedes-Benz fashion week offers more than slight stimulation of the local economy- it’s a study on the rules of attraction.

Headbands in the Alexandre Herchcovitch collection, Anna Sui’s multi-patterned Bohemian dresses and Calvin Klein’s symmetrical tight-fitted men’s suits all enhance our perception of the wearer’s good genes. Therefore, the runway at a time of economic distress is not a self-indulgent waste of resources; it is a display of Darwinian fitness in a dire environment.

In his paper “The Evolution and Design of Animal Signaling Systems,” biologist Amotz Zahavi writes: “For example, wasting money is a reliable signal for wealth because a cheater, a poor individual claiming to be rich, does not have money to throw away; the message of strength may be displayed reliably by bearing heavy loads; and confidence may be displayed by providing an advantage to a rival.”

Zahavi, who coined the term ‘handicap principle’, argues that, “for signals, an investment is necessary, because it ensures the reliability of the message encoded in the signal. The larger the investment the more reliable the message.”

“For example, when a person spends inordinate amounts of money on a status symbol fashion item, especially on that is challenging to wear (like Christian Laboutin stilettos link: HYPERLINK “http://www.christianlouboutin.com” http://www.christianlouboutin.com/ ), then this is like the handicap principle because, like a peacock with it’s tail, the human is advertising that she has excess resources on non-survival things,” explains evolutionary biologist and science writer, Hilary C. Walton.

If Laboutin’s stilettos are described on the website as “highly fetishist shoe with his 14cm curve is a piece for museums…or for people who don’t use them to walk,” then why would anyone wear it?

“It shows that [the wearer] has the physiology and anatomy to move gracefully in such challenging footwear,” says Walton.

In evolutionary biology, the phenomena of advertising excess resources on ‘non-survival’ things, for instance, expensive handbags and colorful shoes, is referred to as ‘direct benefits’ or non genetic benefits that are realized instantly. Wearing the shoes in an environment that does not seem practical infers that the wearer’s good genes can handle the challenge is called ‘indirect benefits’ or genetic benefits that are not realized instantly.

What does it mean to have good genes?

“Development is influenced by both genes and the environment. Good genes facilitate the organism’s development according to [genetic] plan regardless of the environment,” says Walton.

How do organisms know the developmental stability of another organism?
According to Zahavi, an organism’s handicap communicate an ‘honest signal’ of good genes. This explains why a peacock would invest 60% of his life’s energy developing its signature fan of feathers when it would make him an easy target for predators or why a woman would wear stilettos to work when she risks spraining her ankle on the uneven NYC sidewalks and roads.

Zahavi says, “A high quality individual can develop a symmetrical body or any other perfect structure, which the decoration [high heels and peacock feathers] helps to display, but a low quality individual may face difficulties in doing so because it may not grow a perfect structure.

(NOTE: The difference between a peacock’s handicap of feathers and a high-heel-wearing woman is that a peacock’s growth is an interaction of genes and environment, whereas wearing shoes is a conscious decision.)

In other words, a peacock’s elaborate feathers flaunt its symmetry, thus signaling developmental stability. Similarly, high heels allow women to strut their stuff– demonstrating their ability to move gracefully and with agility.

Walton continues, “Biologically speaking, we are programmed to detect asymmetry as well as symmetry. They both give us vital information.”

“Symmetry in a phenotype is indicative of good genes. tIt indicates consistency of development on both sides of the organism. For example, fish show symmetry by jerking around the water, an asymmetrical move. This is analogous to how an asymmetrical single-strapped dress actually show’s the model’s symmetry.”

What is the message behind fashion week?

“Fashion objects are social status symbols, honest indicators of the wealth of their bearers. But they are often more than that. They can also enhance our perception of the wearer’s genetic quality– as demonstrated by symmetry and/or ability to flourish with a handicap,” Walton analyzes.

“Fashion is amazing because it can do both. Instead of being a random, extremely expensive thing {general handicap], it often follows the rules of attraction– mimicking what sexual selection has driven animals to display..their good genes and developmental stability.”

The rules of attraction are essentially about advertising and communicating honest signals. First, an organism advertises to a potential mate its direct benefits, for instance wealth and resources. Second, an organism needs to demonstrate its gene quality, or indirect benefit.

Walton concludes, “A flashy car, private jet, or vacation home could accomplish the first goal of honestly advertising resource availability. However, only fashion worn on the body can accomplish the second.”

By Blair Bolles

A Neanderthal man, as depicted at the American Museum of Natural History. If we put this fellow in some clothes and sent him on his way, how would he do?

As reported previously on Babel’s Dawn, the draft version of the Neanderthal genome was presented in Chicago last week (press release here) and it confirms the earlier finding that Neanderthal’s share the same FOXP2 gene found in humans. FOXP2 is the most important gene known to support language. Without it in its human form, rapid speech and the ability to learn speech sounds is limited. The gene’s presence in Neanderthals is very strong evidence that the human lineage was speaking fluently before the Neanderthals split from the line that became Homo sapiens. The original dating of the appearance of the FOXP2 gene in its human form put it between 200 and 100 thousand years ago. Many arguments about the recency of language have claimed authority based on that date, and now find their cards are very weak.

The oceans are home to some of our most fascinating creatures, as well as those most at risk of extinction. Photographer Juergen Freund has spent the last 14 years taking underwater images of many threatened marine species, particularly in waters off the Philippines and Australia where he lives. Through his award-winning photography he hopes to shed some light on the majesty and the plight of ocean dwelling organisms. He speaks to Wild Talk about three of his pictures. To listen and see the pictures, click here

Portrait of a Minke Whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) 2008 IUCN Red List status: Least Concern	Whale Shark (Rhincodon typus) caught by hunters in the Philippines 2008 IUCN Red List status: Vulnerable
Chambered Nautilus (Nautilus pompilius) in Red Whip Coral

Deep sea explorer Sylvia Earle has led more than 50 expeditions and clocked up some 6,000 hours underwater. A dedicated champion of the deep ocean, Wild Talk catches up with her over the phone from her home in California, to ask how she felt when she won the 2009 TED prize. Sylvia discusses the dire situation planet ocean is in and speaks of her hope that we still have time to turn the situation around. To listen, click here.

Will the world finally agree this year on how to combat climate change? All hopes are pinned on the United Nations climate change meeting in Copenhagen in December, which should come up with an agreement to succeed the Kyoto protocol that runs out in 2012. Wild Talk speaks to IUCN’s Climate Change Officer, Ninni Ikkala, about the challenges ahead and what IUCN is doing to help keep negotiations on track. To listen, click here.

Looking for the Eurasian Lynx (Lynx lynx) in Switzerland’s Jura mountains is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Although they were re-introduced to the country in the 1970s, there are only about 100 alive today. Wild Talk took to the hills with wildlife biologist Fridolin Zimmermann to check the camera traps set up in the Jura to monitor the population. To listen, click here. To take a peek at the lynx favourite whereabouts in the Jura and the camera traps, see below .

More than just lynx

The camera traps are so sensitive that the slightest movement sets them off. The traps in the Jura mountains capture a lot more than just lynx photos. The photos below are just a small example of the types of creatures caught in the spotlight so far.

Alpine Ibex (Capra ibex). Photo: Kora	Blue Tit (Parus caeruleus). Photo: Kora
Brown Hare (Lepus europaeus). Photo: Kora	Eurasian Lynx (Lynx lynx). Photo: Kora
Family of badgers (Meles meles). Photo: Kora	Northern Chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra). Photo: Kora
Red Fox (vulpes vulpes). Photo: Kora	Roe Deer (Capreolus capreolus). Photo: Kora
Western Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus). Photo: Kora	Wild Boar (Sus scrofa). Photo: Kora
Wild Cat (Felis silvestris). Photo: Kora

The University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau (Alaska’s capital) is the recipient of federal NASA and NOAA grants to develop a digital network to monitor climate change on the Juneau Icefield. UAS is the only university in North America with access to several glacial watersheds. The UAS SEAMONSTER (Southeast Alaska Monitoring Network for Science Telecommunications Education and Research) program gives undergraduates extraordinary opportunities to engage in cutting edge research.

A comprehensive network of communications infrastructure, mobile sensors with moving data streams, existing weather stations and Global Positioning System measurements of glacier motion will alert scientists, in real time, about the effect of climate change on North America‘s fifth largest Icefield

“Climate change is the defining issue of our generation and this grant gives UAS professors and students an opportunity to contribute to the dialogue. By engaging students on the undergraduate level we make a difference in our students’ lives and potentially on a global scale.”

–UAS Physics Professor Matt Heavner

SEAMONSTER PHOTO LOG:

Photo: UAS Environmental Science senior Josh Jones.

“It’s overwhelming, there is so much going on, people researching similar information, but going about it in different ways,” said first time participant and UAS ENVS senior Josh Jones. “It’s been both humbling and mind blowing.”

Jones presented his poster on using a computer model to calculate the melt from Lemon Creek Glacier to compare with measured runoff in Lemon Creek. “A Partially Glaciated Watershed in a Virtual Globe: Integrating Data, Models, and Visualization to Increase Climate Change Understanding” documented the use of the SEAMONSTER sensor web data as an input into Regine Hock’s glacial melt model, and provided visualized model output (as maps or graphs) in a format that can be used in Google earth. The output can be used to study glacial hydrology and dynamics relative to climate conditions, to study mathematical modeling of the environment, or generalize how climate change is affecting parts of the Juneau Icefield over the period that data is available.

UAS undergraduates Nick Korzen and Josh Galbraith also presented at the conference. Jones notes that UAS is the only university in the U.S. that is within several glacial watersheds. “If you want to do undergraduate environmental science research, UAS is the perfect place,” he said.

*The South East Alaska Monitoring Network for Science, Telecommunications, Education, and Research is a NASA-sponsored smart sensor web project designed to support collaborative environmental science with near-real-time recovery of environmental data. Initial geographic focus is the Lemon Creek watershed near Juneau Alaska with expansions planned across the Juneau Icefield and into the nearby coastal marine environment. http://robfatland.net/seamonster.

When I came to Juneau, Alaska in January of 2007, I never thought I would get such a great opportunity. Thanks to UAS professors Matt Heavner and Eran Hood who took me on the SEAMONSTER (South East Alaska Monitoring Network for Science, Telecommunications, Education, and Research) team.

Within the first couple weeks of work, I was building weather stations and solar panel mounts, which were then deployed in the surrounding Juneau area. Since these areas are somewhat remote, I was able to take many helicopter trips to various places like Cairn Peak, Lemon Glacier, and the Lemon creek watershed. I learned about networking and what the instruments can tell us about certain aspects of what we are measuring. I even got the opportunity to take a float plane trip up to Lituya Bay to help out a well known glaciologist with GPS and isostatic rebound.

I helped install a water probe instrument in Lemon Creek that determines glacial melt and signs of climate warming. The Lemon Glacier feeds into Lemon Creek. The water probe measures creek temperature and turbidity. Another instrument used was a pressure transducer which was put in a glacial lake at the top of the Lemon Glacier. Sometime during the summer the glacial lake will drain. With the pressure transducer in the lake, we’re able to take the data and match it up with the data from the water probe and derive an exact date when the drain occurred.

I canoed across Mendenhall Lake to work on the network camera and even made a few time lapse movies. While working on the weather station out at Mendenhall Glacier I was able to witness many glacier calvings which was pretty extraordinary. I would be working on the station when all of a sudden I would here this loud cracking and splash, the glacier just calved while we were only working a few hundred feet from it! I was able to explore ice caves, and learned self-arrest and glacier crevice rescue techniques.

Some days were gorgeous and other days were blowing snow with winds to 40 mph. Not the most opportune working conditions, but it’s all about the experience. One time up on Cairn Peak right after the heli dropped us off, the weather turned sour, and we ended up walking out, which was something like a 10 hour hike through the rain, down pretty steep snowy slopes. Man I wish I had my skis!

I also spent many days in the lab building battery packs, soldering, and wiring up harnesses for Motes (mini robots). I even got a chance to learn a little about networking. With some help, I’m able to set up local area networks, and I have a basic understanding of the language. I’m also able to diagram power, connectivity, and the local area network of a weather station.

Spending a week in Lituya Bay on Cenotaph Island I was able to experience the pure beauty and remoteness of Alaska. I took part in helping out a well known glaciologist named Roman Motyka with carrying batteries and setting up GPS units which measured uplift. I learned that only a few centuries ago the entire bay was covered with ice which was truly amazing, to think that this 14 mile long by 3.5 mile wide island was completely covered with ice! This trip also provided great wildlife viewing. Flying to the bay we saw brown bears on the beach feeding on salmon which were swimming up river.

Working with SEAMONSTER is like nothing I could have asked for or even imagined, with great experiences and wonderful people. Alaska is a land of opportunity. I experienced this first hand. I plan to continue to stay on the SEAMONSTER project and learn as much as I possibly can while I’m here.

This is the first of a three-part series about Breakfast, Obesity & Juvenile Diabetes. Please take the time to write a comment or relate some personal experience — help us make a connection through your stories.

So, Why is Breakfast So Important?

Confused? Well you’re not alone. Over 50% of people regularly skip eating breakfast. At one time or another everyone reading this has done it, and left home for school or work without taking just a few minutes to start the day properly, with a nutritious breakfast.

We’re not talking 3 course meal – how long does a bowl of granola take to eat? Even a piece of fresh fruit on the go would be a good start – yet alarming numbers of people skip breakfast every day. One can make the case that breakfast not only shouldn’t be missed, to take things even further breakfast is believed by some nutritionist and dietitians to be the most important meal of the day.

To properly understand the total dynamics let’s first establish what are the immediate and positive effects of eating an easy and nutritious breakfast:

• Improves Concentration and Focus
  
• Weight Control (more on this later)
  
• Better absorption of vital nutrients
  
• Helps boost energy levels
  
• Sustainable Strength and Endurance
  
• May help lower cholesterol levels
  
• Promotes a Positive Mental Attitude
• Blood Glucose Management for everyone not just Diabetic
• 
  

For children, eating breakfast dramatically affects their abilities with regards to concentration, problem solving skills, better focus, creativity, and their immune system. Imagine being a teacher and dealing with the possibility that 1 in 2 children sitting in a classroom come to school without having eaten breakfast, and are therefore being ill-prepared to learn.

On Jan. 28, TalkingScience presented a panel on “Science 2.0: Science Outreach Options in an Online World.” The discussion focused on methods of reaching new audiences for science via both new and old tools, as well as how to develop a career in science outreach.

Panel Moderator: Ann Marie Cunningham

Ann Marie Cunningham is executive director of TalkingScience, the nonprofit partner of Science Friday, the weekly live news/talk program on science and science policy broadcast on NPR. TalkingScience’s mission is to attract new audiences, especially young people, to science via their medium of choice, the Internet. Ms. Cunningham is a veteran science journalist with experience in print, broadcasting, and the Web. She is co-author of the bestselling Ryan White: My Own Story, and has won a George Foster Peabody Award for Distinguished Public Service Broadcasting.

Panelists

Alexis Gambis




Alexis Gambis expects to complete his Ph.D. in cancer genetics at Rockefeller University in July 2009. He hopes to continue his studies in filmmaking at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is founder/artistic director of the Imagine Science Film Festival, an annual festival of feature films about science and scientists that made its debut in October 2008, attracting 1,500 people to screenings in three of New York City’s five boroughs. Mr. Gambis is the youngest member of their five-member Sloan Film Advisory Committee. Mr. Gambis’ short films have been a feature of TalkingScience’s bi-monthly science variety shows, TalkingScience Cabarets.




Cindy Maria Quezada, Ph.D.

Cindy Quezada will complete her post-doctoral fellowship in infectious diseases at Rockefeller University in April 2009. In 2005, she won a L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship, and used her prize money to study drug-resistant tuberculosis in Rwanda. She has emceed the TalkingScience Cabaret, and produced a Web photo blog and videos in both Spanish and English for TalkingScience’s Web site.

Talia Page

Talia Page is TalkingScience’s Projects Manager, in charge of the TalkingScience Cabaret and other public events. To extend students’ involvement in science after school Cabarets, she has developed PodCast Pals, a Web 2.0 version of pen pals. A future astronaut with Virgin Galactic, she writes a blog, “Space Cadet,” about space for TalkingScience.org.

Video Credits: Katrina Boston, Kenyatta Thompson, Jesse Medalia-Strauss

Thank you to Alice Ly and Yale University for hosting the panel

The first couple of days I spent getting to know the place and exploring the trails with Rebecca, who’s been very helpful in introducing me to the possibilities here. At Kirindy I’m going to focus on the experimental component of my lemur health project. Experiment you say? Like white lab coats and cooking up chemicals? Not quite, but I am trying to make it a controlled study in the midst of field conditions that are hard to control.

I’m interested in how the intense dry season here in the west affects the health of lemurs.

I’ll be looking at general body condition, stress levels, and parasite diversity in Microcebus over the course of the dry season in both disturbed and less disturbed habitat.

My hypothesis is that as the dry season progresses, which decreases the amount of nutrients and water available to lemurs, their stress levels and general body condition will decrease, which will leave them more susceptible to parasite infections and disease. And all of this will be worse in the more disturbed habitats. More than you wanted to know, right?

I’ve marked out two of the four grids for my health study so far, and I set up the evaluation room (well, …tent), where I’ll check out all of the mouse lemurs that I capture.

To test out methodology I set out 10 traps a few nights ago, and had some success on the first day! Meet our first subject, KM 001. A cute little guy, if I do say so myself.

That’s right, I’m taking the temperature…of one of the smallest primates on earth. It’s important to monitor how the mouse lemurs are doing during the evaluation, and it’s also quite interesting to see how their body temperatures range, especially since mouse lemurs are capable of daily torpor during the colder winter season. We’ve seen body temperatures that range from 92.7° to 98.7° Fahrenheit so far.

See This Video

By KL Bates

Working with Indris last summer definitely captured my interest. They are beautiful, graceful and stately lemurs, and they possess a great importance to the Malagasy people. Tradition states that the Indri, or Babakoto in Malagasy, is the “grandfather of the forest,” an ancestor to the inhabitants of Madagascar.

Click to hear the eerily beautiful call of the Indri. Groups of Indri use this call to communicate and demarcate their territory.

It seems as though there are new Microcebus species popping up every week…what once had been defined as an eastern and a western species now has been amended to include several species. This has caused some ongoing controversy as scientists debate which species should be considered separate and which should not. But the DNA will tell the tale– that’s why we’re sure to collect small samples of skin to use for genetic analyses. In addition to this data, we’re also noting all the variations in color and size that we see in the mouse lemurs. Armed with this combination of information, we hope to figure out the complex mystery that is mouse lemur speciation in Madagascar.

Watch the Video Here

This is a relatively simple image of a drop of water. The images from a simple drop are dependent on the speed of the drop– in this case the height it falls from, the viscosity or the fluid, and the depth of water the droplet falls into. The time the image is taken after the water’s collision with the surface will also greatly influence the image. If the high speed flash it triggered too soon, the droplet will still be in mid-air. Too late, and the collision is over. The set up involves placing a pipette about two feet above a shallow pan of water, as the drip falls though an infrared light beam, a microprocessor starts counting time. After a specified time a high speed flash is triggered. This image represents a slice of time of 1/20,000 th of a second. This is often called freezing time, this image looks like frozen water.

The simple collision of a drip of water and a surface is actually quite complicated. The physics of this situation influences everything from an ink jet printer to an industrial water cutting jet. The fluid dynamics has fascinated many scientists over the years, but Dr. A.M. Worthington was so taken by the process that he wrote two books on the topic in 1908. These books were compiled from his earlier lectures and greatly influenced the use of high speed photography. In the coming weeks I will write more about high speed photography.