Category Archives: Science

Space Weather Radio: News and information about sunspots, solar flares and meteor showers

Thanks to Joanne, K9JKM for pointing out that Space Weather Radio is piping audio of Ursid Meteors crossing the radar fence which guards our country from the Ruskies. If you tune in, occasionally you’ll hear a rapid descending tone, caused by the radar bouncing off the ionized trails of meteors. Pretty cool.

Red State Rabble

Most often when I link to someone else’s blog, it is because a particular article has tweaked some small bit of my interest.  These blog entries are often isolated, and the blogs that I link to often have a high noise to signal ratio.  It is therefore with some pleasure that I recommend Red State Rabble for your consumption.  It is the work of Pat Hayes, a writer who lives in Kansas and directly addresses some of the silliness surrounding the current “debate” over Intelligent Design.   In addition to being something of continuing interest to me, he’s a good writer with many good insights.  It joins The Panda’s Thumb on my blogroll under daily reads.

[tags]Science,Evolution,Creationism,Intelligent Design[/tags]

NPR : Fun with DNA

Smiley Faces constructed out of DNAThis is just too cool! Need to make a few million nanoscale smiley faces?

Rothemund has developed a computer program that can analyze a shape, figure out the right folding pattern, and then tell you what DNA staples you need to make that shape.”It’s really easy and fun, actually, to make whatever you want at the nano-scale. You design it in the computer, you order the DNA sequences, they come in the mail, you add a little bit of salt water, you heat it up and cool it down, and then an hour and a half later, it’s ready to look at under the microscope.”

[tags]DNA,Science,NPR[/tags]

Minor Earthquake

A few minutes ago, I noticed the second minor earthquake of the day. I estimated the strength to be a little lower than a three, but it was enough that my next door neighbor Sam called me and asked me what I thought it was. I was already hitting the USGS website to see what the deal was, but he reminded me that you can get even faster realtime info from a finger server at berkeley:

% finger -l quake@quake.geo.berkeley.edu
[quake.geo.berkeley.edu]
Login name: quake                       In real life: EQs? USE finger -l
Directory: /home/dc1/quake              Shell: /bin/csh
Never logged in.
No unread mail
Plan:

RAPID EARTHQUAKE LOCATION SERVICE
U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California.
U.C. Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, Berkeley, California.
(members of the Council of the National Seismic System)

NOTE:  Information in this page is updated regularly.  If you are accessing
this page via the Web, you may need to RELOAD the page to get current data.

Below is a list of magnitude 2 or greater earthquakes recorded by the USGS
Northern California Seismic Network and the UCB Berkeley Digital Seismic
Network during the last 3 days.  All times are in UTC (Universal Time),
which is 8 hours ahead of PST and 7 hours ahead of PDT.  This catalog is
valid for Central and Northern California (approximately north of San Luis
Obispo along the coast and 37 degrees N at the Nevada border).

Magnitudes are reported as local magnitude (Ml) or coda duration magnitude
(Md) for small events.  Depth is in kilometers.  Q is location quality,
where the quality of the location solution is A=E (A=good, E=bad), and '*'
indicates the solution is from an automated system and has not been reviewed
by staff.

Note:  This is PRELIMINARY information.  Earthquakes before 00:00 UT today
which occur > ~50 km outside the boundaries of the network will not be
listed unless reviewed by seismologists.

Catalogs for other regions of the country can be obtained by using
`finger quake@computer'  for the following computers:
geophys.washington.edu (Washington and Oregon)
seismo.unr.edu  (Nevada)         scec.gps.caltech.edu (southern California)
eqinfo.seis.utah.edu (Utah)      fm.gi.alaska.edu (Alaska)
slueas.slu.edu (central US)      gldfs.cr.usgs.gov (large world-wide)
tako.wr.usgs.gov (Hawaii)

WWW access: for these lists, maps, and more go to http://quake.usgs.gov

Updated at Thu Mar  2 06:32:00 GMT 2006 a.k.a. Wed Mar  1 22:32:00 PST 2006

******************************************************************************

DATE-(UTC)-TIME   LAT    LON      DEP   MAG  Q  COMMENTS
yy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss   deg.   deg.    km
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
06/02/27 13:55:31  40.08N 123.49W   0.0 2.0Md C*  29 km E of  Redway, CA
06/02/27 14:24:41  39.72N 123.07W   2.0 2.1Md C*  19 km ESE of  Covelo, CA
06/02/27 16:43:04  37.27N 120.75W   0.5 2.2Md D*  13 km S of  Livingston, CA
06/02/27 20:46:44  36.50N 121.07W   3.6 2.3Md A*   7 km ESE of  Pinnacles, CA
06/02/28 01:09:55  39.01N 122.80W   2.6 2.4Md B*   5 km NNE of  Kelseyville, CA
06/02/28 03:32:42  35.67N 121.08W   0.0 2.2Md D*  10 km ENE of  San Simeon, CA
06/02/28 03:52:50  38.82N 122.80W   1.9 2.0Md A*   3 km N of  The Geysers, CA
06/02/28 19:39:39  37.86N 122.24W   9.5 2.3Md A*   3 km ESE of  Berkeley, CA
06/03/01 19:24:02  37.86N 122.20W   8.9 2.8Md A*   4 km SW of  Orinda, CA
06/03/01 19:34:52  37.86N 122.20W   8.8 3.4Ml A*   3 km SW of  Orinda, CA
06/03/02 00:11:55  36.55N 121.15W   7.6 3.2Ml A*   3 km N of  Pinnacles, CA
06/03/02 02:11:37  37.16N 121.55W   8.1 2.1Md A*   9 km ENE of  Morgan Hill, CA
06/03/02 04:53:30  40.48N 125.53W   2.5 3.3Ml D* 106 km W of  Petrolia, CA
06/03/02 05:11:11  38.36N 119.43W   1.1 2.1Md C*  20 km WNW of  Bridgeport, CA
06/03/02 06:08:15  37.86N 122.24W   9.8 2.9Md A*   3 km ESE of  Berkeley, CA

I just thought I’d archive that here for future reference.

[tags]Earthquake,Earthquake Server[/tags]

Save a Snowflake for Decades – Popular Science

We don’t get much snow here, but I thought I might archive this for future reference, just because it’s cool.

Save a Snowflake for Decades – Popular Science

1. Set microscope slides, coverslips and superglue outside when it’s 20°F or colder to chill them. Catch flakes on the slides or pick them up with cold tweezers.
2. Place a drop of superglue on the snowflake. Note: Gel glue doesn’t work. Find a brand that’s thin and runny.
3. Drop a coverslip over the glue. Don’t press down hard or the flake could tear or melt from the heat of your finger.
4. Leave the slide in a freezer for one or two weeks and don’t touch it with warm hands. The glue must completely harden before the snowflake warms up.

Tick destroying rover

Courtesy of hack-a-day comes this awesome story of a student project to make a robotic rover whose purpose is to eradicate ticks.   It basically follows a buried underground wire along the perimeter of the property, all the while releasing carbon dioxide gas.   Ticks are apparently attracted to the CO2, anc collect along the course, and then the ticks are sprayed with Permethrin.  Since the hill behind my house is literally teaming with ticks, I think it’s a darned cool idea, although I suspect their rover would find climing my hill to be rather challenging.

[tags]Science,Mad Science,Hack[/tags]

Science Word of the Day: “Shrimpoluminscence”

Apparently the peakcock mantis shrimp packs a mighty wallop, which can even shatter the glass of aquariums. They also are responsible for the introduction of a new word to my vocabulary: “shrimpoluminescence”. Catch the linked video below.

USATODAY.com – Shrimp spring into shattering action

The speed of the strike (up to 50 mph, or 23 m/s) creates cavitation bubbles between the shrimp’s hammer-like heel and the struck snail. The bubbles collapse, and generate heat, light, and sound. The shell shatters with a flash too-fast-to-see, and a bang. Watch the flash (called shrimpoluminescence for another species) in the video, slowed by a factor of 900. (Courtesy of Sheila Patek, Wyatt Korff and Roy Caldwell/UC Berkeley) Though the mantis shrimp’s tough heel is impregnated with hard minerals, still she must shed the pitted, damaged surface every few months, and grow new heel armor.

I have heard of the word triboluminescence before, which might provide a few minutes of goofy fun crushing Wintergreen lifesavers.

[tags]Science,Tribolumiscence,Shrimpoluminscence,Shrimp,Livesavers[/tags]

Addendum: Link to a bonus cartoon that only makes sense if you are as geeky as me, or read the above links.

1001 things to do with liquid nitrogen

I was a little bit disappointed when I found out the total was a bit short of what the header proclaimed, but you should still check out 1001 things to do with liquid nitrogen

LN2 also works great for sweeping and cleaning hard floors such as concrete or wood.
Get a couple liters in a container, and dump it on the floor in the direction
you want the debris to travel. It picks up everything in it’s wave and if it hits a wall,
the wave will boil off and deposit the junk there. Now all you have to do is go
around the perimeter and sweep up the clutter.

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin…

Charles Darwin, born Feb 12

Q: If Charles Darwin were alive today, what would he be known for?

A: Longevity.  He’d be 197 years old.

For some reason, churches around the world are apparently taking the opportunity to reassert the claim that the findings of science (in particular, biological evolution) are compatible with their religious faith.  You can check out this lengthy list of articles to find out more about “Darwin Sunday”.

Frankly, I’m a bit skeptical about the wisdom or the aim of this.   If you would like people to realize the compatibility of science and your religion, why not work 364 days a year to make sure that they understand the compability, instead of participating in a stunt on a single Sunday.   In my mind, all this really accomplishes is to provide further fuel to the claims of creationists that evolution is really just another type of religion.

[tags]Charles Darwin, Evolution[/tags]

Parasites on the Brain

Just in case you didn’t have enough to worry about on this fine Thursday, check out this interesting article:

Damn Interesting » Parasites on the Brain

Toxoplasma gondii may be the most prevalent human parasite. As many as 50% of humans worldwide, and up to 80% in urban areas, have been infected with it at some time in their lives. An estimated 60 million people in the US have active cases at any given time. It’s a single celled parasite whose favored host is cats. However it can infect and live in a host of other creatures including rats and humans. Most infected people, and most infected rats, show no particular signs of illness when infected. They continue on with their daily life and work completely unaware they’ve been parasitized. But they may not be as unaffected as they seem.

You could also pick up the book  Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer for more fun parasite information.  It’s part of my bookshelf that justifies my increasing paranoia about squishy things in biology.
[tags]Parasite,Brain,Carl Zimmer,Parasite Rex[/tags]

Bush administration aggressively prosecutes war… on science.

It seems that a collection of public relations officers appointed by the Bush administration are giving NASA a black eye by trying to “recast” (if one is charitable) or “rewrite” (if one is accurate) the scientific research that the technical staff at NASA produce.  In particular, Bush appointee George Deutsch pressured NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen to refrain from talking about global warming, threatening him with “dire consequences” if he continued.   He also worked to change the NASA website so that every mention of the Big Bang was changed to the Big Bang theory, since it was a just “a matter of opinion”.

Deutsch appears to be one of those people who think that the role of federal employees is to serve the commander in chief, when in reality they are supposed to serve the people of this nation and uphold the Constitution.

Phil Plait is even angrier than I, so go read his blog for more info.

[tags]Politics vs. Science, NASA, George Deutsch,Abuse of Power[/tags]