Science Cheerleader

Presenting Science Cheerleader.com’s newest, regular commentator, Occam’s Razor…our skeptical cheerleader.  Take it away, Occam…

This year we honor Charles Darwin’s 200^th birthday. Few scientists are celebrated so ardently for so long as Darwin, and many institutions are using this year to stage a variety of events to celebrate his work and his life with lectures, symposia, conferences, etc. Just like many other pioneers he caused a massive paradigm shift, forcing us to think about something in a whole new way, not unlike Linda Lovelace, for example, who changed the way we thought about movies; both of these brave trailblazers understood how to use evidence to make certain concepts easier to swallow. Of course on the flip side, this pro-Darwin vibe has caused a rise in tensions in the communities typically involved in the debate over his work – those with ideas in opposition to Darwin have been raising their voices lately and the Darwinists have become less tolerant of any dissent…example: new reports from Connecticut indicate that that crazy xanax-laden chimp who attacked that woman did so after he heard her speak poorly of a recent performance of “Inherit the Wind
Yes, it’s been a veritable scientific Darwinpalooza around the U.S., so much so that it’s easy to forget the guy actually was not called a “scientist,” but is commonly referred to as a “naturalist,” which in today’s vernacular can also mean “nudist.” This would explain this often-discussed entry from his Notes from the Beagle: “As I hopped from rock to rock at Galapagos, I did so free and uninhibited of wardrobe, causing the tortoises to observe me in a queer manner…and truly the chill breeze in the air that morning did so cause my parts for reproduction to evolve to a state of such shrinkage that were a potential mate to see me thus I think I would stand a fair chance of natural de-selection!”
But what brought Darwin to this role in history? A love for knowledge? The search for deeper understanding? Maybe, but here’s my theory as to why he was obsessed with this stuff. Have you seen a picture of this guy?  Take a look at that forehead and descending brow! Notice any similarities to this?  I bet when you get called “monkey head” for most of your formative years you sort of become obsessed with the idea and want to legitimize the whole thing somehow!
All of this Darwin stuff is only on my mind because a photo of this pretty cool new bust of him in the National Academy of Sciences Building was recently sent to me. If you’re on the western end of the Mall, north of the Lincoln, check it out. It’s not so much that the bust itself is cool but there was some advanced science used in the creation of it. According to a plaque at the site, “A virtual model was created by (digitally) scanning the original sculpture at the New York Academy of Sciences, which graciously consented to the creation of a second replica to be located at the NAS Building. Using a rapid prototype process, a form was created from which a bronze will be cast.”
Three observations: 1. isn’t “second replica” redundant? Unless there is already one replica and that seems unlikely since they had to graciously consent to this. 2.in situ is Latin for “in the nude,” another reference to his naturalism. 3. Again note the graciously there. This is the NATIONAL Academy of Sciences we’re talking about but of course the New York Academy of Sciences, like everything else in NY, thinks it’s the center of the solar system (ironically ignoring the discoveries of Copernicus, one of their own). Being smarter and more sophisticated (and oh by the way more likely to destroy most of the wealth in this country), New Yorkers must let it be known they are condescending to share something of theirs, even if it’s something for a like-minded institution that seemingly outranks them.
One fascinating piece of information not noted on the plaque regarding the bronze casting: The plan is to create the final sculpture by initially making 20 large sculptures, which when completed will be toppled from their pedestals. The sculptures which do not shatter will be melted down and mixed together to make another several sculptures, which will then also be dropped. Again, the unbroken sculptures will be melted together and so on for several iterations. It’s hoped that after this is done enough times the sculpture will also form legs, eyes, consciousness, animation, etc. Check back in a billion years.

Here’s Dr. John Ohab, reporting for Science Cheerleader.com as part of an original series of first-person citizen science reports!

Trees are good. They provide shade, recycled paper, wood, and probably other things. In fact, trees are the only living organisms on earth that cannot possibly do anything bad. In Medieval times, trees could talk, walk, and transport miniature people to different places. However, global warming, industrialization, and other human factors have contributed to a more vulnerable and quite stationary tree population.

Enter Casey Trees, a DC-based non-profit organization dedicated to restoring, enhancing, and protecting the tree canopy of our Nation’s Capital. Casey Trees leverages community volunteers known as “Citizen Foresters”, who employ basic forestry skills, lead teams of volunteers during weekend events, and advocate for a green, sustainable city.

Last weekend, I took part in a Casey Trees tree and shrub inventory. I talked with Casey Trees employees and Citizen Foresters and learned what motivated citizens are doing to improve our environment. Check out the above Science Cheerleader report!

Casey Trees offers many opportunities for citizen scientists interested in the environment, including their Trees 101 course, design and planting workshops, and urban forestry inventory training. For more information, visit the Casey Trees website.

PROJECT SNAPSHOT:

• Topics: Environment, Nature and Outdoors
  
• Location: close to home
• Duration: several hours per event
• Cost: free
• Gear: provided on site
• Level of Difficulty: easy – moderate

NASA has been in the news a lot lately – President Obama just named Charles Bolden as its new administrator a few days ago, the Hubble Telescope was repaired successfully, and soon NASA will prepare to launch the space shuttle Endeavour for a jouney to the International Space Station.  For those citizen scientists interested in learning more about astronomy and physics, NASA has an excellent citizen science website filled with many ways that you can both access and contribute to their ongoing collection of observations.  I am thrilled that NASA is beginning to make access to their research more public in the hopes that other governmental organizations will soon follow suit.  Listed below are ways that you can become more involved in the future of space travel.

• Night Sky Network: Are you a part of an astronomy club?  Like looking at photos from space?  Or maybe you are interested in spreading the word about NASA missions to your local community?  All of these resources and more are available in NASA’s Night Sky Network.  One particular note of interest are the funding resources on this site that are available for high school astronomy groups.
• MY NASA DATA:  My NASA Data, or Mentoring and inquirY using NASA Data for Atmospheric and earth science for Teachers and Amateurs (say that three times fast!) is an excellent resource for classroom teachers interested in new ideas to enrich next year’s astronomy curriculum.  Teachers can make custom data sets from published data sets collected by NASA that their students can learn how to analyze, or students can simulate what an actual satellite orbit patterns might look like.
• What’s Observable Tonight?: Visitors can search by an observation date, location and other constraints to find all asteroids and comets that are observable on that night.
• Space Calendar: The Space Calendar covers space-related activities and anniversaries for the coming year. Included are over 1,700 links to related home pages!

There are many more activities where this short list comes from, and I hope all of you will check out the vast amount of information on the NASA website.  Many thanks to Paul Shin, one of our Science Cheerleader subscribers, for suggesting this citizen science resource.  As always, should you have any citizen science information that you would like to share with our readers, feel free to contact us here.

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Rover, scheduled to head to Mars in 2011, will carry the names of earthlings on a microchip. Want your name included? NASA has made it easy as pie right here.

The Mars Science Laboratory is a rover that will assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support life. Hope so. Particularly hopeful the martians have a solid baseball team. Then, when my Phillies whip the Martians, we can say, without doubt, that we are indeed the World Champions.

Hey, as of today, this rover is named “Curiousity”. It was named by a 6th grader from Kansas who entered NASA’s essay contest. Check out her winning essay. Congratulations, Clara!

(And thanks, Bart, for sending in this news item.)

The “distributed computing” project known as SETI@home just celebrated its 10th anniversary. For the past decade, thousands of volunteers have loaned the experiment a little bit of their personal computers’ idle capacity to help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. There’s no sign of ET yet, but the San Francisco Chronicle’s Science Editor David Perlman reports that the quest continues–and has a lot to be proud of.

The same technology that stitches together 235,000 PCs around the world to create a supercomputer for SETI@home now powers nearly a hundred other such research projects, according to Perlman. These range from Rosetta@home, which helps chart possible new designs for proteins, to Einstein@home, which sifts satellite data for evidence that may prove Einstein’s prediction of gravity waves.

Want to volunteer your computer to pitch in whenever it’s not fully occupied? (Many of these programs have cool dashboards that let you tune in to the analysis and learn a bit about the underlying science.) Visit the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing and check out the list of projects to choose from.

Guest post from Stephen Zachary.

The past few weeks have seen a number of entertaining and interesting animal behavior articles published in academic journals.  Entertaining because, well, who doesn’t get a kick out of the video above?  Interesting because the findings prompt us to rethink, yet again, the nature of cognition. (more…)

Love this! Coming soon, another promising citizen science application for your smart phone. The Extraordinaries — On-demand crowdsourced volunteerism via smartphones. 20 minute volunteer activities you can do from your cell phone.
(from The Extraordinaires website):

“We created mobile smartphone software designed to facilitate crowdsourcing (a large task, broken into little pieces, and worked on by many people). Typically, these tasks are small, requiring only a few minutes to complete.

Many successful businesses use crowdsourcing. In only two years, iStockPhoto dominated the stock photo industry by crowdsourcing its photographs. InnoCentive has solved tough scientific problems by crowdsourcing solutions from amateur scientists. Wikipedia uses crowdsourcing to generate millions of articles from writers all over the world.

We bring the concept of crowdsourcing to volunteering and community engagement, and we’ve created a mechanism for organizations to take advantage of previously inaccessible volunteer labor.”

The universe was born at a specific time in the past, and it has been expanding ever since.

The American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered two important facts about the universe.  First, he showed that matter is clumped together into large collections of stars called galaxies, and, second, he showed that galaxies are moving apart from each other. If you think of “running the film backward,” you see that the Hubble expansion implies that the universe began at a specific time in the past—a little more than 14 billion years ago, in fact. The idea that the universe began in a hot, dense state and has been expanding and cooling ever since is the main tenet of the Big Bang picture of the universe.

We now know that  visible matter is actually only a small part of what the universe contains. Over 90% of the mass of a galaxy is made of dark matter. We do not yet know what it is, but we can see its gravitational effect of stars. Furthermore, we now know that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down. This means that there is another kind of material in the universe, dubbed dark energy, that is capable of exerting a force that overcomes the attraction of gravity. Understanding dark matter and dark energy are the primary goals of cosmology.

Today, scientists can trace the history of the universe back to within a tiny fraction of a second of the beginning, both through experiment and theory. Understanding the beginning of the universe is another goal of cosmology.

A colleague’s son recently launched the Hope Phones Foundation. Consider spreading the word about this life-changing effort.

Every cell phone given to community health workers connects distant patients to a medical clinic. A $10 cell phone will give 50 families access to emergency medical care, health information, transport services, and clinic resources. Consider donating your old cell phone to one of medical centers listed on the site.

Stars live and die.

Stars are born in the gravitational collapse of dust clouds is space. As the material is packed together in the collapse, the temperature at the center increases until fusion reactions start, converting hydrogen into helium in the process. The energy from these reactions creates a pressure that counteracts the force of gravity and stabilizes the star. A star like the sun, which is in this ‘hydrogen burning’ phase, is said to be on the main sequence.

Once the hydrogen in the core is used up, the collapse starts again. It continues until the temperature gets high enough to start fusion reactions that convert helium to carbon.  For stars up to about 5 times as massive as the sun, the temperature never gets high enough for further fusion reactions, and when the fuel is used up the collapse starts again. It keeps going until the electrons can’t be pushed together any more—this will happen when the sun is the size of the Earth, for example. At this point the star is a white dwarf, a cooling cinder in space.

The sun was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and will become a white dwarf in another 5.5. billion years.

Stars more massive than the sun continue the fusion process, ‘burning’ carbon and forming silicon, magnesium, and other heavy elements, until it starts to make iron. No energy can be obtained from fusing iron, so the iron builds up in the core. Eventually, nuclear reactions convert the protons in the iron nuclei to neutrons, and the core collapses, triggering a massive explosion known as a supernova. The debris from the supernova is blown back into space, where it is incorporated into new generations of stars.

After a supernova event, the neutron core forms a neutron star a few miles across. For very massive stars, the collapse continues until a black hole is formed.