I Wish I Was a Scientist

On May 16th 1960 scientists demonstrated the first working laser.  Since then lasers have been elevated to a grand level as a piece of both pragmatic and entertaining technology.  Without lasers we wouldn’t have CDs and DVDs.  Without lasers some super precise measurements would be nearly impossible.  Without lasers kids wouldn’t have their annoying laser pointer key chains that they use to annoy teachers and try and blind one another.  All I have to say is what a great invention. 

I first heard about graphene some month back but didn’t really pay all that much attention to it then.  But it seems like lately discussion of the stuff is turning up more and more. Graphene is atom thing sheets of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in a design like chicken wire.  It is suppose to even stronger than diamond (which, as you may be aware, is also made of carbon).  Graphene can be used to make carbon nano-tubes which are also generating a lot of publicity in the science and manufacturing world lately.  This Discovery New article this morning provides some good details on graphene and some of its potential future uses.  Who doesn’t love this nano-tech shit?

Boy, I feel like the Internet is just on a roll with providing cool science things today.  First I found WorldWide Telescope (see previous post) and now Discovery News points me to FoldIt.  FoldIt is an online game in which players fold and manipulate proteins to solve puzzles.  I think the coolest thing about FoldIt is that it presents the possibility of solving some actually scientific challenges.  The proteins in the game are all real proteins and the problems are all real problems.  This just seems really cool and innovative.  People like puzzles and many of the challenges that modern science faces are nothing more than complex puzzles.  I wonder if FoldIt experiences some good success if other branches of science will try and follow with their own versions of puzzle games.  Think of how cool it would be to play a nano-material synthesizing game!

What is the coolest discovery online today?  Try Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope!  Picture something that is pretty similar to Google Earth but instead of looking down on Earth this application it is looking up from our planet and out into the vast cosmos.  I first became aware of WorldWide Telescope this morning while scouring the Internet for good press releases to put up on GSATC.  Reading Microsoft’s press release for the beta launch and then checking out the actual WorldWide Telescope website got me really excited.  I’ve downloaded the free program and played around with it some already and it is great.  Even if you are not a space enthusiast this is a really fun application to explore.  The images are dazzling and the interface is relatively easy.  I can be pretty critical of Microsoft a lot of times but when they put out something like this I have to give them big thumbs up.  WorldWide Telescope rocks!  Check it out!

Ever since it’s initial discovery in Eastern Australian in the late 18th century the bizarre platypus has been baffling people.  Here is an animal that seems to have the body of beaver, a ducks beak, webbed feet, and and it lays eggs but nurses its young like other mammals.  But wait there is more!  The males have poison barbs on the backs of their feet with venom that is actually very similar to some snake venom.  And it turns out that the strange leathery duck beak can emit subtle electromagnetic fields to help the animal navigate in murky water.  Like I said bizarre.  But the strange has just gotten stranger with the decoding of the platypus genome.  It turns out that this strange animal, which is classified as a monotreme, has genetic similarities to reptiles, birds, and mammals.  Not only in appearance is it a patchwork creature but in actual genetic make up too! Then there are the weird features like the fact that the platypus relies on ten chromosomes to determine the sex of an individual (in contrast humans only need two x and y).  Quite literally this animal is probably one of the strangest living things on our planet.  But it is important for science in that the new genetic studies are helping us understand the emergence and evolution of mammals.  The platypus is on the very edge of the mammal definition.  It is a solely unique creature.

read about the studies in National Geographic or the AP article appearing in Discovery News

also the official study as appearing in Nature is here platypus

This fossil bird found in china is really old.  By really old I mean that the only other fossil animal which is considered a bird and is older than this one is that of Archaeopteryx.  The newly discovered (actually found in 2005-2006) dinosaur days bird has been named Eoconfuciusornis zhengi.  The fossil looks amazingly well preserved to me (of course this might not mean much considering I don’t know a lot about fossilization and what constitutes well preserved verses poorly preserved).  Read about the find in this National Geographic Article.

For the past two years there have been significant bee deaths in the United States.  Some may be tempted at first to overlook this matter but in actuality it is rather serious.  Bees are one of the best pollinators for flowering plants and if they continue to die off we could see adverse effects on both crops and wild plant species.  An AP article appearing on CNN this morning talks about the latest bad.  Hopefully a solution will be discovered before we start to feel serious impact from the loss of these insects.

I don’t know why I haven’t posted here for the last couple of days.  I’ve been around and there has been some pretty interesting stuff going on in science news.  Hopefully I will catch up some today and over the rest of the week.  Happy Wednesday everybody!

While I’ve come to be rather accepting of the fact that astronomers and astrophysicists probably know what they are doing, I still find it hard to understand how they can determine that a dim little white dwarf star, some 800 light years away, is made mostly of pulsating, super hot carbon.  Okay, I know it has something to do with light spectrum and red/blue shifts but all and all I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.  Anyway, feel free to read about this new star in Discovery News.

What is the similarity?  Well a new study as detailed by National Geographic suggests it is along the lines of decibels (which, if you are wondering, is a measurement for sound pressure).  It turns out that bats are able to produce up to 140 decibels in their high pitched voices which they use for echolocation.  A loud rock concert might do up wards of 115 to 120 decibels.  So why are we not hearing noisy bats all the time.  because humans ears are not made to hear the frequency at which bats make their shrieks.  Further the bat noise doesn’t maintain it’s strength that far (only a few inches from the animals mouth), the sound quickly diminishes in decibel power.