Science Cheerleader

John Takao Collier writes:

Bizarre scientific things seem to happen to me between 4 and 5 am.

A couple of nights ago, a thunderstorm rolled in around 4:30 am.  The approaching storm woke me up, but basic laziness kept me from jumping out of bed to check for basketball-sized hail or untethered houses flying by. I laid in bed with my eyes closed, listening to the thunder getting closer and closer.  Then something very strange happened – across my visual field (or whatever you would call it, given that  I was “seeing” the darkness of the inside of my eyelids)  a moving pattern of random black and white specks, very much like television snow, flickered for a fraction of a second.

My immediate reaction was “Oh oh, the next one is gonna be really clo…”

CRACK!

The damn thing sounded like it was right outside my window.  It’s a good thing that I have adequate bladder control.

A minute or two later, when the spike of adrenaline wore off, I started to wonder just what had occurred.  Was my optic nerve, or the visual center in my brain, momentarily zapped by the nearby electrostatic field?  Did I briefly channel a vision from an alien analog TV?  Did I eat too much garlic the night before?

Recently, magnetically induced hallucinations were suggested as an explanation for  ball lightning, so perhaps my visual cortex was temporarily overloaded by lightning-induced magnetic fields.  Maybe lightning is attracted to garlic (sort of like an anti-vampire).

The next day, I did an Google search for “lightning” and “television snow” (and similar search terms)  but didn’t get any hits.  So, I’m curious if anyone else has experienced this phenomenon.  I ask my gentle readers, have any of you had a similar “TV snow” effect during a thunderstorm?  Comment away.

John-the-Tourist writes:

When: 4:00 am, February 10th, 2010
Where: My bedroom, about 30 miles west of Chicago, Illinois, USA…

Me: Zzzzz, Snort, Zzzzzz

Earth: RUMBLE, RUMBLE, THUNK!

Me (eyes popping open): What the hell was that?  An earthquake?

My wife, Lynn: Zzzzzz, snort, zzzzz.

Me (internal dialog): Maybe Lynn knocked the  book she was reading out of bed?  Hmmmm, probability of Lynn dropping the book = moderate.  Probability of earthquake near Chicago = low.  Occam’s razor* implies that it was Lynn’s book.**

Me: Zzzzz, Snort, Zzzzzz

Well, we actually did have a 3.8 magnitude trembler west of Chicago.  For those of you who live in areas of the world where there are three earthquakes every day before lunch, this news is rather ho-hum.  However, for those of us living in the Midwest of the USA, an earthquake is a novel event.

At first blush, one would think that Occam’s philosophical whisker-whacker failed, but since I didn’t jump out of bed to verify that a book fell into a gravity well or run to the computer to check the U.S. Geological Survey website, I did not examine the available evidence in order to answer the question at hand.  In other words, my scientific logic was faulty, so Occam slices and dices again.  However, my faulty logic did buy me 2 more hours of sleep.

The earthquake had a slight effect on high energy particle physics at Fermi National Accelerator Lab as reported by Fermilab Today…

Tilt meters strapped to Fermilab’s magnets recorded the vibrations at the laboratory. The earthquake shook the magnets and caused the beam to strike a collimater, losing its store.

Want to be a earth citizen scientist?   Check out Science for Citizen’s entry for “Did you feel it?” which allows you to enter information about your earthquake experience directly to the USGS.

So, what’s shakin’ near Chicago?  The earth, accelerator magnets and bedrooms.

* Occam’s Razor the philosophical concept, not Occam’s Razor, the Science Cheerleader.

** Yes, I actually did have this internal dialog with myself at 4:00 am in the morning.  What can I say?  I’m weird in this way.

Image Credit:  Fermilab Today

John-the-Tourist writes:

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas“.  Not quite true – my intrepid Science Cheerleader squad member John Ohab nabbed a snazzy Einstein T-shirt while he was recently in Las Vegas and presumably got the shirt outside the city limits.

Now, if you REALLY want to do something that you don’t want your mother to find out about, you need to be in the vicinity of a black hole, in which (as far as we know) nothing can escape.  My friend Matt (who works at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) quipped “What happens in the event horizon stays in the event horizon”.  Matt’s son Owen told the joke on “CBS Sunday Morning” and Matt’s wife Robin (who is a graphical designer) turned the quip into a T-shirt (modeled by their daughter Lindsay) that you can purchase from Cafe Press. There is also a light-background version of the design.

So, be bold!  Show the universe that secrets can be kept – as long as you are within the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole.

P.S. – Don’t forget our own nifty Science Cheerleader T-shirts!  Make a fashion statement and fill up your closet!

Image source:  Matt Crawford

John-the-Tourist writes:

In my attempt to keep up with high-energy physics news, I read the online publication, “Symmetry Breaking“.  “Symmetry Breaking” had an article with an fascinating set of photos of a sculpture (Quantum Man II, below). Based on your viewing angle, the sculpture would either appear solid or would melt away into an almost ethereal nothingness.  “Quantum Man II”  is a representation of the wave-particle duality of nature and is the work of artist and scientist Julian Voss-Andreae, of Portland, Oregon.

Julian has an interesting history:  During the 1990s he was a physicist and he participated in an experiment that showed the wave-particle duality of the largest object to date, the C₆₀ “buckyball”.  In the 2000s, Julian changed careers and is now crafting sculptures, many of which are based on scientific topics.   Several of Julian’s pieces are part of the “Worlds Within Worlds” exhibit, showing through April 16, 2010 at the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland (approximately 10 miles northeast of Washington D.C.).

I asked Julian for an interview, and he graciously accepted and answered my questions.  Note – In the following interview, [SC] = “Science Cheerleader” and [JVA] = “Julian Voss-Andreae.” (more…)

From John-the-Tourist:

At the risk of revealing how ancient I really am, I just missed the “Sesame Street” era when I was younger.  By the time the lovable Muppets were a staple on public TV, I was “too old” to watch such juvenile fare (although I have to admit that I secretly watched an occasional show because they were just too darn fun not to watch).

Now that I’m a lot older and don’t have to worry about “looking cool” any more, I can relish two excellent videos, starring puppets, that explain “science stuff” in an extremely fun and entertaining way.  The videos were produced by The Sounds of Science, “…a small group of graduate students and recent alumni of UC Berkeley that share a common love of science and music.”

Their first video, “The Nano Song” won an award from the American Chemical Society for clearly explaining what the heck nanotechnology is…

The second video, “The Safety Song”, shows why safety in the lab is very important (especially if you shed purple hair)…

The songs are informative, the puppets are funny, and Ms. Glory Liu is an impressive singer.  Now that I’m no longer in the 5th grade, I don’t give a hoot if anybody sees me watching a puppet video.

From John-the-Tourist:

Looking for that perfect holiday gift for the science cheerleader in your life?  Having a hard time finding it? I had that problem a couple of years ago, then I saw a blurb in the print version of Discover magazine titled “Micrograph Chic” which showed a pair of absolutely stunning earrings – the colors were vibrant and the pattern was beautifully abstract. The reason for the cool colors and impressive pattern was that the earrings were a photomicrograph of crystallized brain chemicals (dopamine, serotonin, etc), which was photographed through polarized light and then magnified about 600 times. Unfortunately, the Discover article didn’t include a URL, and my Google Search at the time didn’t come up with anything.  Sadly, I had to buy my wife some lame present like a frying pan.

Since I’m a cool science guy (and don’t want to get smacked on the head with another frying pan), I tried another Google search this year and I hit the jackpot!  (more…)

John-the-Tourist writes:

Getting information on how individual neurons fire was, until recently, nearly impossible in animals moving around because the detection devices were too delicate.  In the October 14, 2009 edition of Nature, a team of neuroscientists have figured out how to keep a mouse’s head stationary while it runs around on a Styrofoam ball that controls a virtual environment.  Keeping the mouse’s head still allows the delicate measurements to take place.  The virtual environment is created via the open source engine for the video game Quake 2.  So, in some sense, the mouse is playing a video game.  We do not yet know if mice are subject to video game addiction.

The information gleened from experiments like this will help scientists understand how brain cells work while animals navigate their environment.

The scientific community eagerly awaits the first Wii Sports playing guinea pig to see if rodents prefer baseball over tennis.

More details can be found at Wired Science (including a diagram of the apparatus)

John-the-tourist writes:

Research published in the October 13th online edition of the Journal of Infectious Diseases suggests that the reason why warm-blooded animals may have evolved was because fungal diseases can’t stand the heat.  The wide-ranging study, covering over 4000 different fungal strains, shows that fungi do not fare well at the body temperatures of mammals and birds.  Cooler operating animals (such as amphibians and reptiles) are rife with fungal diseases, while warm-blooded animals suffer from significantly fewer mushroom maladies.

Burning hotter does have a price – we have to eat a lot more than our cold-blooded cousins.

So, the next time you see an attractive person pigging out at the desert table, think to yourself “Ohhh, they are so hot – and free from fungus?!”

More details at EurekAlert.

Image credit:  The Frog Store

John-the-tourist writes:

The first “mainly vegetarian” spider known to science was announced today (as reported by EurekaAlert and other sources).  Of the 40,000 or so species of known spiders, all have been mostly carnivorous.  The Bagheera kiplingi is the first spider to dine primarily at the salad bar.

If the name of the spider sounds vaguely familiar, the genus was named after Bagheera, the black panther in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book”.  I find it rather ironic that the first vegetarian spider is named after meat eating mammal.

What’s next?  Tofu munching arachnids?  Stay tuned.

Image credit:  Seacoast Eat Local

Heeeeere’s John! About a year ago, Google announced it’s “10 to the 100th Power” contest to celebrate its 10th anniversary.  The intent of the contest was to get ideas from around that would help the most number of people.  Google would invest a big pot of cash to help kick-start some of those ideas.  The contest was a pretty neat; even I submitted several ideas in the hope of becoming the savior of all humankind.

Semi-finalists were supposed to be announced by January 27th, 2009, but got delayed until March 17th, and then  was put on hold again.  Apparently the company that handles a bazillion search requests each day got swamped by 150,000 ideas, but I digress.  On September 24th the semi-finalists were announced, and the public is invited to vote on their favorites.  I’m a little miffed because none of my obviously world-changing ideas were among the chosen, but I’ll just have to get over that small disappointment.

All of the ideas are meritorious, however there are a couple that readers of “Science Cheerleader” might find especially interesting…

1. Enhance science and engineering education
2. Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists

I’m really not trying to game the vote (well, OK, I am), but I encourage you to let your Google vote be heard.  Voting ends on October 8th, 2009.