Cocktail Party Physics

up close and personal with paper

I'm here! Where's the beer? Oh, right, it's a virtual cocktail party. *waves* Hi, folks; me again, your friendly neighborhood, er, whatever. If you've been hanging around here for awhile, you've seen me before. This is my twelfth post for the Cocktail Party (unbelievable, I know) and I'm delighted to have been invited to be a regular. I'll try to live up to the—ahem—highbrow nature of the company.

Even though I'm a science geek, you've probably noticed I have a few other interests, like science fiction and poetry. One I haven't talked about much here is my love of paper, which follows naturally from my love of books. Books, for people like me, are not just media to convey knowledge or entertainment; they're objects of beauty in and of themselves. It's not just the binding that makes books artistic objects, either. The paper the text is printed on can be a sensual delight too. Fine cotton rag paper has a great texture, doesn't turn brittle the way wood pulp paper does because it's generally acid-free (the acid is why your old paperbacks are yellowing and falling apart), and holds ink beautifully as well,  especially when mechanically printed with plates or lead type (rather than, say, laser or inkjet printed). But most paper is also far stronger than you'd suspect, for a reason that might surprise you: its water content.

Remember those old Bounty paper towel commercials where Rosie the waitress stacks a full coffee cup on a wet paper towel to show how strong the paper towel is? In case you don't, here's a clip to refresh your memory (bear with it; this is from back in the day, when when we all had extended attention spans and commercials were a full minute long).

Watch Old Bounty Paper Towel at EncycloMedia.com

The standard wisdom about paper is that what makes it strong is the fibers it's made from. The tougher the fibers and, often, the longer they are, the stronger the paper. Or so conventional paper makers will tell you. Not Charles Kazilek, who calls himself the Pied Piper of Paper. (Say that fast five times!) Kazilek is a Senior Researcher at Arizona State University, where he teaches a class in scientific data presentation, including electron microscopy (more about which, later). Kazilek got interested in paper when one of his colleagues was making it out of silk fibers, a protein (as opposed to the polysaccharide cellulose), and wondered whether that still qualified as paper. (My take? Sometimes there's a fine line between cloth and paper.)

Let me digress briefly here and talk about how paper is made. Strictly speaking, you can make paper out of darn near anything that's fibrous. A while back, I made a recipe/scrapbook using papers made with various vegetables like spinach, and some embedded with chili seeds. People use cattails, bark, grass, palm fronds,  cloth rags (cotton, linen, flax), reeds (to make papyrus, a slightly different animal), sliced and dried fruits, even elephant, er, excrement, which is largely vegetal in composition. To make paper, you beat the crap out of whatever plant or other matter you've decided to use with a lot of water (this breaks down the lignin holding the fibers together), until you have a thin, gruel-like, watery soup. Chemicals and cooking will accomplish the same thing, but may add undesirable residues. Once you've got the slurry, you dip a screen into it, lift it out (wash, rinse, repeat to the desired thickness), and sponge the water through and out of it, then wait for it to dry. When it's dampish, you can peel it away from the screen and hang it up to dry completely.

Here's a little video on Korean papermaking with mulberry bark fibers:

Making Hanji from Aimee Lee on Vimeo.

Because it just settles out of the slurry, handmade paper tends to not have much of a grain while machine made paper, which is usually laid down in in a more organized way, often has a pronounced grain. This just means that the fibers line up more or less parallel rather than randomly. That's why newspaper tears more easily one way than another: tearing along the grain produces a straight tear; tear across the grain and it goes every which way. Machine-made paper may also have fillers and finishes added to it and tends to be extremely uniform in color, finish and size, like that ream of printer paper sitting on your desk, which has been bleached, and probably has a little clay in it too, to make it smooth and finish it. Handmade paper has more texture, varied thicknesses, can be made with inclusions such as petals or seeds, and can even be sculpted when wet. Depending on what it's made of, it can also be incredibly strong, which is the case with many Japanese papers, especially those made from long mulberry fibers. Mulberry or kozo paper is tough even when wet, and is often used in book repair to hold pages or spines together. It actually works far better than tape and lasts far longer.

One of the reasons even the thinnest of papers can be so strong is not just because of the tensile strength of the fibers. As Kazilek explains, "True paper, again, is not only the fibres intertwining but actually that really small microscopic amount of water where there's hydrogen bonding, and that's really key to it and that's where that strength comes in." Hydrogen bonds are among the strongest molecular bonds and one of the factors that gives the DNA molecule its relative stability. Turns out that cellulose, the primary constituent of plant matter, is hydrophilic too, which means it easily bonds to water molecules as well. So that microscope amount of water actually binds to the cellulose and to other water molecules making a microscopically gluey mass.

This was news to me. I don't tend to think of paper as having a lot of water in it. But then, I rarely think of paper on a microscopic level, either. Kazilek does. In fact, he and colleagues Gene Valentine and Jennifer Tsukayama thought about it enough to collaborate on The Paper Project, which bills itself as "a new light on paper. " That new light is one of Kazilek's specialties: electron microscopy, specifically, a scanning laser confocal  microscope.

One of my very earliest serious encounters with real world, hands-on science was at one of the first science museums on the continent in the '70s: the Ontario Science Centre (OSC) in Toronto (the Exploratorium in San Francisco was founded shortly after the same year the OSC opened in 1967 1969. Their 40th Anniversary is coming up!). If you haven't been to a good science museum, it's geek heaven. There are demos of basic scientific principles for you to not just watch, but participate in, and gadgets to "play" with while doing real science. I was particularly mesmerized by the working electron microscope, which I'd only just learned about. Hardly surprising that OSC would have one of these babies; they were first developed at the University of Toronto in 1938, by Eli Franklin Burton and students Cecil Hall, James Hillier, and Albert Prebus. In fact, OSC's was one of the early transmission models, not a scanning one, but it was still amazing to be able to see something, anything, at thousands of times its normal size. I had a low-power microscope of my own (what? Doesn't every junior science geek?) but this was, excuse the pun, another several orders of magnitude better. I don't even remember what I looked at on the screen now, but I staggered away in complete awe. There was so much there in the little teeny realm of matter! And it all looked so marvelously . . . alien.

Transmission electron microscopes work on the same basic principle that light microscopes do. In the latter, light (photons) bounces off the object you're looking at, passes through a magnifying lens and spreads out against your cornea, making the object appear larger. Stacking various types of lenses changes how the light is bent and increases or decreases the magnification. The difference is that electron microscopes use an accelerated and focused electron beam as the illumination source rather than light. The beam passes through the prepared specimen, some of which is transparent and some of which is opaque to electrons, and scatters the beam. The scattered beam is magnified by the microscope's objective lens and recorded on a phosphor-coated screen or photographic plate to produce an image, since it can't otherwise be seen by the nekkid eye. Confocal scanning laser microscopes like Kazilek uses are one of the Cadillacs of microscopes. Or maybe the Prius. They're sort of like MRIs in that they can produce in-focus images of all the layers of thick specimens by scanning them point by point and reconstructing them via special software onto a screen or photographic plate. In this case, the laser is the light source rather than an electron beam.

Depending on the type of microscope and what the specimen is, it may need to be prepared in one way or another: mounted, stained, embedded in resin, chemically fixed, dehydrated, coated, sectioned, flash frozen, etc. Staining is one of the most common preparations of samples because various types of stains work better on different substances and differentiate them more clearly. Some stains bind better to proteins, some to starches, etc., or make parts of the specimen opaque or transparent to the beam. The upshot is that photomicrographs from the newer electron microscopes can produce some amazing colors along with those fascinating patterns.

But the photomicrographs taken by Kazilek don't employ any special preparation. The laser used to illuminate the samples makes the materials of the fibers themselves fluoresce in these marvelous colors. At right is a plain, undyed Sugikawa (cedar bark) & Tenjyo paper, and you can see here the lack of "grain" that characterizes handmade paper. This is what gives Japanese paper its strength, even when it's tissue-fine: there's no grain for a tear to follow, and no inherent weakness. To give you an idea of how densely woven these fibers are, this is a 100x image of an area no larger than a period. And what's in there between the fibers? Water, bonding on a molecular level to the fibers and to other water molecules. Dude, it's like the Force! It binds the galaxy, er, sheet of paper together.

I love it when two of my passions come together, but even more so when one of them is science and it leads to one of those "Science is Everywhere!" moments. In addition to the dozens of book and paper arts blogs I read, I cruise a number of science blogs and sites, and it's surprising how often those two areas collide. I found one of Kazilek's gems on National Geographic News which covered the year's ten best microscope photographs chosen by Nikon. Nikon chose another for special mention the year before, too. One of the images even appeared on the Jumbotron in Times Square. But the object of The Paper Project, Kazilek points out, is as a vehicle for science education: "This is what's so fun because what we've started to do is engage the public, in particular young scientists and young students that may not even think about doing science. We get them excited about the images, and we can decide what we want to talk about. Do we want to talk about chemistry? We could talk about hydrogen bonding. Do we want to talk about xylem and phloem? We can do that. If we want to talk about, say, photosynthesis and gas exchange you can see in their little mouths or what look like little eyes [stomata]..." Kazilek sees a strong connection between art and science, and that connection seems pretty clear in the images he produces. If you look below the surface of just about anything that's what you'll find: science.

into the deep

Friend of the Blog (FOB) Tom Levenson over at Inverse Square has tagged Jen-Luc Piquant with a meme for the chronically narcissistic and self-absorbed: naming six random things about yourself that are not widely known. Nothing delights her more than expounding upon the subject of her glorious pixelated self -- this is an avatar who scored off the charts on a narcissism quiz, after all -- so Jen-Luc is delighted to offer these six personal tidbits to her fans out there in the blogosphere:

1. Jen-Luc has a mega-crush on the Spousal Unit's Second Life avatar, Seamus Tomorrow. She has seriously considered joining Second Life herself, in order to cyber-stalk Seamus more properly, except apparently the surname "Piquant" is not one of the options in that virtual world. (Hint, hint.) She could always join the "Tomorrow" clan but that would make her and Seamus related, dashing her romantic hopes from the outset. So for now, she pines from afar.

2. Jen-Luc is responsible for Sarah Palin's $150,000 shopping spree, having served as her personal cyber-stylist. She is non-partisan in her quest to bring haute couture to the needy -- Joe the Plumber totally needs a makeover; Armani could do wonders for him -- and besides, Nicole Wallace asked very nicely. You can't go on national television wearing clothes from a consignment shop. As for the RNC's insistence that the clothing will be donated to "charity," Jen-Luc hopes that's a euphemism for her sweet Cyber-self. She was promised the clothing once the election was over in exchange for her fashionista services. Every avatar has her price, and she covets that Louis Vuitton bag little Piper's been hauling around.

3. Jen-Luc secretly admires 18th-century French assassin Marie-Charlotte Corday for the sheer chutzpah of walking into Marat's private home and murdering the lecherous revolutionary in his bath.

4. Her trademark black French beret was actually manufactured in Taiwan.

5. Yes, that is her "real" hair color. Purple hair runs in the Piquant family tree.

6. Jen-Luc is secretly hatching a nefarious plot to hack into electronic voting machines on election day to vote herself into the Oval Office as a write-in candidate. Talk about an upset! Her first act as president will be to amend the constitution to insure equal rights for avatars. She thinks it will appeal to all those voters in Second Life. Perhaps then Seamus Tomorrow will notice her, and agree to be the First Cyber-Dude.

There you go! Meme accomplished! Jen-Luc is far too self-absorbed to tag six others in turn; as far as she's concerned, all Internet memes reach their zenith with her, and thereafter cease to be relevant. But perhaps her new party "guests" might choose to weigh in at some point, by way of introduction.

And now, it is time to move on to actual science -- remember science? I've been completely immersed in the stuff of late, and finally have time to write about it. Just prior to the NASW meeting, I was in Boston for the annual Industrial Physics Forum (my bloggy musings-for-hire can be found here), focusing this year on frontiers in imaging ("from the cosmos to nano"). I especially enjoyed the session on marine and terrestrial imaging, perhaps because it's not something I write about very often. Or maybe it's just because two of the talks were about fluorescent coral and other examples of bioluminescent ocean creatures, each featuring lots of pretty pictures. That always livens things up a bit. A couple of years ago, I blogged about Bob the Hawaiian Bobtail squid:

He's a nocturnal creature at heart, and doesn't really need the sun, since he has a natural glow about him. Literally. He has a built-in flashlight to help him navigate those murky nighttime waters, hunt for prey, and hide from predators in turn. It's a special organ on his underside, a convenient little cavity that serves a dual purpose as home to colonies of a specific species of bacteria, Vibrio fischeri.

The cavity organ is lined with threadlike cilia that sweep bacteria from the surrounding water into the cavity, and the bacteria, ever adaptable, busily set up their own little colony. Once that colony reaches "critical mass," they emit the telltale glow. The glowing bacteria are surrounded by stacks of reflective plates to focus the light outward. That light helps Bob hunt for prey in dark waters. It also provides camouflage from any organisms trying to eat him, because Bob doesn't cast that telltale shadow on the ocean floor as a result of the moon's rays shining down into the water. Bob can even control the "wattage" of his bio-flashlight, simply by limiting the amount of oxygen that reaches the cavity organ. (The bacteria need lots of oxygen for the chemical reaction that produces the light.)

Large concentrations of bioluminescent bacteria are also, it seems, behind an ocean phenomenon called the "Milky Seas": glowing white patches of sea water stretching across an expanse as large as Hawaii. It's the stuff of urban legend, a rare occurrence that has mystified mariners for over 400 years. Certain algae have this ability, too. According to Edie Widder, a scientist with the Ocean Research and Conservation Association in Fort Pierce, Florida, the ancient Polynesians may have used the phenomenon of bioluminescence as a navigational aid -- yes, just like Tom Hanks' character in Apollo 13, regaling an interviewer about the time his instruments malfunctions during a flight and he followed the trail of fluorescing algae churned up in the wake of his air craft carrier to land safely.

The point is, the ocean environment is filled with light, not just from jellyfish, but also coral, some fish, some shells, bristleworms, and crabs. "Almost everything down there makes light, for different reasons," says Widder. In 1960, Jacques Piccard and Donald Walsh dove to the bottom of the Mariana trend -- some 35,797 feet deep --in a bathysphere to witness bioluminescence in action. It's pretty dark at those depths, but nonetheless, they reported seeing fish with eyes. That bioluminescent glow turns out to be darned useful for organisms in the murky depths, which seem to employ it for a wide range of purposes.

In 1887, Rafael Dubois began studying clams and discovered a class of organic molecules called luciferins, found in many marine creatures that glow when stimulated or agitated in some way. But the really exciting discovery occurred in the mid-1950s, when young Japanese grad student named Osamu Shimomura was assigned the thankless task of figuring out what made the remains of a crushed mollusk (Cypridina) glow whenever it was moistened with water.  A leading US group had been trying for years to do just that, and failed, but in 1956 Shimomura succeeded in isolating a protein that glowed 37,000 times more brightly than the crushed mollusk from which it had been extracted. Nagoya University awarded him a PhD in gratitude, and he set off to join the Princeton faculty in the US.

That's where Shimomura stated studying another naturally luminescent creature, the jellyfish known as Aequorea victoria, which evinced a green glow around its outer edge when agitated. He and his Princeton colleague, Frank Johnson, spent the summer of 1961 gathering jellyfish, cutting off their edges and pressing them through a filter to get a "squeezate." This didn't seem to be all that interesting at first, until one day when Shimomura poured some of the squeezate into a sink containing seawater. It flashed brightly! He realized the calcium ions in the seawater were causing a chemical reaction. The odd thing was that the light wasn't green -- the color the jellyfish glows -- but blue. Eventually they managed to purify the material and they named the protein aequorin.

Most of you have probably heard by now that Shimomura was a co-recipient of this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of a different protein they'd managed to isolate, one that glowed green in sunlight, yellow under a light bulb, and fluorescent green under UV light. This became known as green fluorescent protein (GFP). By the 1970s, Shimomura had figured out that GFP contains a special chromophore that absorbs and emits light. Shining UV or blue light on the chromophore causes it to absorb the energy, become excited, and then emit the excess energy as light -- and this process transforms the blue light from the aequorin into green light, which is why the jelly fish and isolated aequorin glow in different colors.

GFP has since become a standard tool for researchers all over the globe, enabling them to study biological processes previously invisible to the naked eye at the cellular level. (They use GFP as a tagging material.) While GFP was first isolated from a jellyfish, a substantial fraction of the stuff used in labs these days is derived from coral reefs. Coral, too, can fluoresce very prettily for the camera, in a wide range of hues, and the proteins that cause this are in the same family as GFP, according to Charles Mazel of Physical Sciences, Inc. in Boston.

Mazel spent years making night-time dives to photograph coral reefs under UV light, armed with little more than an LED flashlight and a barrier filter fitted over his diving mask to block out any ambient light that would otherwise backscatter and ruin the image.

Eventually, with the dawn of the digital camera and the ability to limit exposure times, Mazel discovered that he didn't need to dive in the dark anymore. He realized that the creatures' fluorescence was all happening whenever the flash went off, and focusing on just that moment also removed the ambient light effects, without special shading. Voila! Now he could photograph coral reefs 24/7! In fact, it's something of a hobby for many amateur aquarium enthusiasts, who keep sending Mazel their own stunning pix.

Thanks to advances in fluorescent imaging, scientists are learning a lot more about its significance in the marine environment, according to Mazel, mostly because of the superior contrast and level of detail gained from the technique. It's possible to tell the difference between various species of coral, for example, and between the coral and the symbiotic algae that live inside them, doing their bit to keep the food coming via photosynthesis. Also, "Little things that are difficult to see in natural light in a complex marine environment can be seen quite easily under fluorescence," says Mazel -- things like baby coral polyps, a strong indicator of the overall health of a coral reef. "Juvenile corals are very small -- on the order of 1 millimeter -- and are next to impossible to find in the complex surroundings of a reef," he says. "By diving at night with the right equipment, many of these small corals can be excited to glow brightly, making them easy to find against the darker background."

One question that hasn't yet been answered is what function fluorescence in coral reefs is supposed to play biologically -- although hypotheses abound. Maybe its purpose is to help capture light on behalf of the symbiotic algae so they can more efficiently go about their photosynthetic business, or perhaps it's meant as a sort of "sunscreen" to protect the algae from excess light. Mazel doesn't think either of those is likely -- or at least not exclusive explanations. There's even some evidence that fluorescence could play a role in coral spawning behavior.

Marine organisms most likely fluoresce for lots of different reasons, as Mazel discovered when he took his passion for marine fluorescence to the deep sea. He mounted a UV light on a submersible manned vehicle and descended 3000 feet, where he spotted a fluorescent sea anemone, a lizard fish, and snagged a first look at a fluorescent shark. A manta shrimp with fluorescent spots appeared to use them as part of its threat display -- a defensive maneuver to warn off predators. I wouldn't mess with the manta shrimp if I were a fish, however; aquarium owners know all too well that a manta shrimp will rapidly kill everything else in your tank.

So, there are very definite survival advantages to be gained from bioluminescence, which might be why, as Widder maintains, the ability has evolved "more than 40 separate times" over the course of evolutionary history in various creatures. Creatures use it to attract mates or prey, to warn off other predators, as camouflage, or as a blinding attack display, never mind the relatively mundane purpose of getting a bit ambient light for better navigation.

As a grad student, Widder was measuring the electrical activity that triggers bioluminescent displays in dinoflagellates when her thesis advisor assigned her to develop an instrument for measuring the color of the very dim flashes of light associated with the phenomenon. She eventually became the lab expert with the High Intake Defined Excitation Bathyphotometer (HIDEX-BP), a technology also used by the military for missile defense, and got to tag along on some actual exploratory field missions aboard marine biology trawlers. This led to her association with a research cruise organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) to test a new type of diving suit called WASP. The suit features a display of various dials, switches and gauges in front of the diver's face to so s/he can monitor things in real time.

Anyway, Widder got to make several dives in WASP, and became hooked on the strange, eerie beauty of these glowing creatures of the deep. Her very first dive  in WASP was to 800 feet; she turned out the lights and expected to see a little bioluminescence. Instead, "There were explosions of light everywhere, like being in the middle of a silent fireworks display." And these creatures are capable of emitting quite a bit of light, too, not just very faint glows. On another dive, Widder was deep enough that almost no sunlight seeped down through the water, when suddenly her surroundings exploded with blue light. "It was so bright I could see all the dials and gauges inside the suit without a flashlight," she told PBS. "I had brushed against one end of a siphonophore chain, a colony of jellyfish more than 30 feet long. By bumping it I had stimulated its bioluminescence."

After numerous dives in WASP and other submersibles, Widden still wondered what sorts of creatures and behaviors still eluded observation because the bright lights and loud thrusters of the equipment scared them away. So she scrounged together enough components and funding to built the Eye in the Sea, a passive camera/observational platform that just sits quietly at the bottom of the ocean recording whatever creatures happen to pass by, and occasionally activating an "electronic jellyfish" lure -- a blue LED light programmed to repeat certain display patterns when activated -- to test Widder's hypothesis that bioluminescence might, among other things, prove very attractive to large predators. One species of deep sea jellyfish, Atolla Wyvillei, apparently uses bioluminescence as a sort of "burglar alarm" display -- the idea being that, if it is attacked, its display would attract an even larger predator to attack the attacker, enabling the jellyfish to swim away.

She tested it for the first time in 2004 in the Gulf of Mexico's brine pool, where methane bubbles up from the bottom providing food for the various mussels, clams and other organisms along that short. The camera was left on the edge of the shore overnight.

Not much happened the first four hours: just a lot of fish swimming by, blissfully unaware of the alien camera in their midst. Then the electronic jellyfish was activated. "Just 86 seconds after it went into its pinwheel display mode, I recorded a squid over six feet long -- a squid so new to science that it cannot be placed in any known scientific family," she said. Clearly, it was looking for prey. "I couldn't have asked for a better proof of concept."

Next she took the Eye In The Sea (EITS) system to the Bahamas. Even though she was only able to deploy the system three times during the nine-day cruise -- hers was not the only experiment being done -- nonetheless her team observed nine different species of deep-sea shark, and even recorded a giant six-gill shark rotting around in the ocean floor sediment looking for pill bugs -- a behavior scientists hadn't known about previously. She's now teaming up again with MBARI for Eye In The Sky on MARS (Monterey Accelerated Research System), which will install the camera system along MBARI's cabled network in Monterey Canyon off the coast to operate 24/7. "Instead of brief and infrequent glimpses, we are going to have a window into the deep sea that will be open around the clock, for months at a time," she said.

There's even an unexpected physics angle to bioluminescence (apart from the whole where-light-comes-from-atomically bit): there are two underwater neutrino telescopes being developed: NESTOR, in the Ionian Sea, and ANTARES, at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea. Widder was surprised to get a call from a distressed astrophysicist during a test run of the photomultiplier tubes designed to pick up the telltale flashes of light -- known as Cherenkov radiation -- that indicate the presence of neutrinos.

He asked her how prevalent bioluminescence in marine creatures was, and she informed him -- to his chagrin -- that it was "everywhere in the deep ocean, and you can't turn it off." Apparently they were expecting things to be a bit darker and less "photonically active," shall we say, and were surprised to find all that bioluminescence interfering with their ultra-sensitive instruments. The good news, says Widder, is that "There is no way it could be mistaken for Cherenkov radiation." Still, it was no doubt irritating; unexpected developments always are.

A few months later, Widder was surprised to read an article announcing the "surprising discovery" of bioluminescence in the deep ocean -- even though marine biologists have known about, and studied the phenomenon, for decades. See, this is why interdisciplinary collaborations and communication is so very important. Hopefully the two fields will have a jolly time swapping data and observations over the coming years, enabling us to learn more about deep sea creatures, bioluminescence, neutrinos, and perhaps an unsuspected discovery or two, along the way.

ch-ch-ch-changes

Something is stirring in the science blogosphere, a whiff in the air serving as a harbinger of pending change.... Okay, maybe not in the entire blogosphere, but big changes are coming to Cocktail Party Physics over the next few weeks. That mischievous faux-French revolutionary, Jen-Luc Piquant, has staged a coup, declaring it to be -- first and foremost -- her own personal cocktail party, and she's tired of only having one "guest": i.e., me. For my part, I'm getting a little bored with the sound of my own voice -- plus, book-writin' will shortly begin in earnest after a summer of copious note-taking doing my own unique form of "research" (Vegas, baby! and Disneyland!). Posts are already averaging four-to-five days apart, and I'm loathe to expand that gap any further. Besides, shaking things up now and then is good: it keeps you from getting into a rut.

So after nearly three wild years with just me and my avatar, Jen-Luc has taken the plunge and invited additional folks to the party. Shockingly, they have accepted. That's right, Cocktail Party Physics will become a group blog. Rest assured, Jen-Luc will continue to reign over the festivities with her trademark snark and her iron Cyberfist. This blog's irreverent tenor, sense of play, and focus on putting science back into the broader culture will remain unchanged. I'll still be on hand with my long-winded, quirky posts, but now there will be other voices, too, offering more diversity of writing styles, an even wider variety of topics and opinions, and perhaps even shorter posts (sacrilege!). Who knows, I might be inspired to experiment with a bit of brevity myself, despite being genetically hard-wired to ramble on. And on. And on.

So without further ado, here are the fabulous women signing onto Jen-Luc Piquant's "Guest List":

Calla Cofield: I met Calla when she was fresh from her studies (physics, with a dash of science writing), interning for the American Physical Society by contributing to Physical Review Focus and the Physics Central blog, Physics Buzz.  Then she moved to SLAC, writing for SLAC Today and Symmetry Magazine. She impressed me right way as one to watch: I loved her unique "voice," fun-loving approach, and creativity -- not mention skill at rudimentary pod-casting -- so I'm delighted she's joining us.

Lee Kottner: Regular readers are already familiar with Lee, who has guest-blogged on occasion, and also designs all the Jen-Luc avatars. She describes herself as "an unapologetic science, tech and Star Wars geek and Trekker; a former wannabe marine biologist; and dilettante whose professional dabblings include writer, editor, college instructor, blogging addict, and book artist." We met when I'd just moved to NYC fresh out of college, and we both worked crappy jobs for minimal pay as copy editors for a legal publisher. Eventually she found a job with the American Institute of Physics -- and also brought me to the American Physical Society. She didn't mean to turn me into a science writer. But it happened. And now I have corrupted her in turn, making her a science blogger. Bwa-ha-ha!

Diandra Leslie-Pelecky: You might recognize Diandra from this two-part Q&A interview at the cocktail party earlier this year, upon publication of her first popular science book, The Physics of NASCAR. She's also a physics professor at the University of Texas, Dallas, and has long been committed to education, outreach, and better communication of physics research. She's funny, outspoken, and tells terrific stories. She really enjoyed her anthropological expedition to the NASW meeting this past weekend, noting a few differences between a meeting of science writers and that of physicists: "Science writers swear a lot more. And there was actually a line for the ladies' room." We decided that would be a great title for her memoir as a woman in physics: There's Never a Line for the Ladies' Room.

M.G. Lord: One of the nicest surprises of moving to downtown LA was discovering that my neighbors included the author of a much-loved book, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. (Ten years later, it's still in print. It's that fun!) We met at Randy Olson's place this past summer -- part of a group dinner to welcome visiting author Carl Zimmer -- and quickly discovered we had much in common, including old movies and science history, plus, we both lived in NYC at the same time (me in the East Village, she in Greenwich Village). Her many hats include that of cartoonist, journalist and cultural historian. M.G.'s most recent book, Astroturf: The Private Life of Rocket Science, is part history of Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Lab, part memoir of her own troubled relationship with her father, a JPL aeronautics engineer. I told her an author really ought to have a bloggy outlet for writerly effluvia, and am thrilled that this argument worked and she agreed to join CPP.

And then there's me, Jennifer Ouellette, English major turned science writer, author of two books with a third in progress, who somehow still finds time to blog because I love it so much. I'm hoping to add one or two more women to the roster, too, as their schedules free up. (You know who you are!)

UPDATE: A little extra last-minute arm-twisting snagged another regular contributor for Jen-Luc's "guest list": Allyson Beatrice, occasional commenter at Cosmic Variance, even more occasional blogger at Depth of a Puddle, and my fellow Buffy fan, as evidenced by her book of essays, Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? I have no idea how frequently she'll blog -- Allyson is unpredictable that way; months go by sometimes between Depth of a Puddle posts -- but whenever she does, it will be sharp, snarky, just a wee bit scatalogical -- and hugely entertaining. She's a repeat offender when it comes to committing random acts of sarcasm. Check out her most recent post over there if you don't believe me.

Anyway, we're now in the process of collecting "official" bios, creating avatars, and tweaking the site design to reflect the switch. It will probably happen in stages over the next few weeks, as we all have deadlines and such to attend to. But new voices will begin appearing right away. Look for a post by Calla in the next few days, and possibly one from Lee, in addition to my usual post or two. And you can still find me blogging three times a week at Twisted Physics: today's post, "Little Green Men," is all about the Fermi Paradox, with some bonus video footage featuring John Hodgman. Jen-Luc says check it out!

paradigm shift

If it's Saturday, it must be -- um, Palo Alto? Seriously, October has been so crazed that I had to think a moment when I woke up this morning to remember which city/time zone I was in. That's why blogging has been light to virtually non-existent: it's tough to be coherent and entertaining when you're barely hanging on to your own physical bearings. But this is the last travel I'm doing for the rest of the year, and I have TONS of fantastic fodder waiting to be spun into bloggy gold (or at least a cheap alloy with a shiny finish).

In the meantime, I'm at the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers, having been invited by science writer extraordinaire KC Cole (now a professor at the University of Southern California) to participate in a panel discussion: "What's Science Got to Do With It? Thinking Outside the Lab." I also attended a morning session as an audience member: "Geeks, Freaks and Deadlines: Writing About Technology and the Humans Who Love It," which featured Wired's Adam Rogers and Annalee Newitz, who heads the phenomenal io9 blog. Both the short presentations and followup discussions in both panels was substantive and thought-provoking, and honestly, I'm still processing everything I heard. So this post is going to be a bit of a brain dump of random but related thoughts, which will hopefully one day coalesce into sharp, penetrating insight.

First, the morning panel. Tom Abate, a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle who also writes a blog called "The Tech Chronicles," kicked things off with a frank assessment of what he calls the "media ecosystem," and what this means for science and tech writing. The traditional science writer is "an endangered species." The old model of a staff reporter assigned to the science beat who just had to worry about the writing is a thing of the past in today's multimedia empire. Now, he says, science writers must be more of a one-man band: learning Photo-Shop to create graphics and finesse photos to accompany those articles; researching online resources to hyperlink; finding supplementary audio/video material; writing a short blog post illuminating an aspect of the story that didn't make it into the final version; and so forth. The science writer of the future must be flexible, adaptable and multi-talented in many different media formats in order to stay competitive.

I particularly liked this statement: "We have to be the people who make sense of the world and put the new events into proper context." That's a big part of what's often missing in science stories in daily newspapers and wire services. There is neither time to develop that critical context, or space, in today's ultra-abbreviated formats, but it's difficult to genuinely appreciate the significance of scientific discoveries with no sense of what came before.

More importantly, with the rise of the Internet and the blogosphere in particular, anyone who wants one can have a voice. That's the beauty of democracy, but it does mean that there's an inevitable intermediate phase with lots of noise and various voices jockeying for position. This makes some people nervous, but eventually this dissonance subsides and the good stuff emerges from the muddle. I think Tom is correct that writers (or "voices," to be more generically multimedia) will be needed to help move this process along, by sifting through all the noise, picking out the nuggets, and shaping that raw material into a coherent, informative yet broadly appealing narrative.

It was fun not only meeting Annalee at long last -- I'm a huge io9 fan, and loved the anthology she edited, She's Such a Geek -- but also hearing about her personal journey as a microcosm of the evolution of technology writing. She started a Webzine just for fun, and one thing led to another until voila! She was a bona fide science writer and blogger. Most notably, she and Adam both pointed out that technology writing in, say, the early 1990s was a lot like traditional science writing: a focus on research, new applications, and the technical minutiae of bringing those high-tech products to market. Now, technology writing overlaps with lots of other different areas, so it can be a tough call for an editor to know where to place a story that has elements of business, technology, true crime, pop culture, or politics -- and sometimes all of those at once. Thank god for "Lifestyle" sections!

Annalee also, no doubt, set one questioner on the road to Cyber-crime when he asked how one might go about generating fake "unique" hits, rather than just hitting the page over and over again from the same IP address: "You want a 'bot farm," a.k.a., zombie computers, each with a different IP address that registers one click on a site per computer. Duly noted. Jen-Luc Piquant is on the case. Expect to see the cocktail party's traffic soar in coming months.

There are many reasons for the meteoric rise of the blogosphere, but a large part of its appeal stems from the fact that it's more of a two-way conversation, an interactive community, and provides a more efficient, easily disseminated feedback loop than ever before. And that in turn is changing how newspapers, magazines, TV and radio view their online content. Per Tom: "Interactive/online journalism is the future." It's challenging to figure out what resonates with readers -- unless you take the easy way out and resort to over-the-top rhetoric to provoke a response -- but the payoff can be enormous. Tom told of how he recently created an online interactive element tied to the recent $700 billion bailout bill passed by Congress, to put it in terms an everyday American could grasp: eg, how many homes in Florida could you buy with that? How many football fields? It was two guys spending an afternoon crunching some simple numbers, but the reader response was tremendous. (Annalee chimed in with a paean to the well-known traffic-generating phenomenon of Top Ten Lists -- an io9 staple, along with their regular "space porn" photos.)

Tom made the argument that in some ways, online journalism is actually more authoritative -- or at least more easily held accountable -- because you can link to original technical papers, reports and source material -- an online version of footnotes and references. The format is also useful for combating errors and inaccuracies in science stories. Once an error has been pointed out, it can be corrected immediately, and permanently. Tom particularly bemoaned some of his earlier print stories, in which errors were still showing up on archives 20 years later. Online, those corrections can be made in a few minutes. And while blogs tend to be highly opinionated, the way things are shaping up, the online media might just look a lot like a traditional newspaper in the end, with a mix of news and opinion, clearly labeled as such, with lively commentary ("letters to the editor").

He also threw out an intriguing scenario of flipping the current news model that focuses on the print version first, then replicating it online with extras. Instead, perhaps the news could be reported primarily online for the initial "vetting phase" by readers, and only after corrections had been made, would a filtered version finally appear in print. Personally, I think newspapers are still struggling with the whole online news concept, and are not yet taking full advantage of the hyperlinking capabilities in particular. Too often, the links are to prior articles within their own pages, when source material is what the savvy Internet reader craves. It's built-in accountability, if done right. And that should be a good thing.

As for the much-discussed business models for "new media," Adam said that obviously, the current ones are going to evolve into something else. Annalee concurred, but added that these might not be totally new models, just updated versions of the older ones. For example, io9 is affiliated with Gawker, and benefits from its parent site's deep pockets and huge advertising base. So it has paid staffers, and gets most of its revenue from advertising, much like the current TV system. (A Gawker model weakness, Tom pointed out, is its lack of classified ads. But I thought Craigs List and E-Bay pretty much have a lock on that sector these days.) Josh Marshall, who runs Talking Points Memo, has adopted a more non-profit, public radio approach: asking for donations from devoted readers. In fact, readers contributed his travel expenses to cover this year's Democrat and Republican National Conventions. I'll be interested to see how these models evolve in the next few years, particularly as paid staff bloggers become less of an exception, and more the norm.

RE: advice to aspiring science writers, Tom echoed my own sentiments perfectly when he pointed out that Annalee had essentially invented her current position by exposing the world to her work online while still in college through a Webzine called Bad Subjects, that started out on Gopher -- remember Gopher? -- and is still around today in a much more graphics and multimedia friendly format. (It only took 15 years to achieve her "overnight success.") Aspiring science writers: start a blog. Get your voice out there, start honing your craft, and if you're good, science editors will sit up and take notice. Or someone will.

You never know where these sorts of things will lead. It might seem counter-intuitive at first, but it's the 21st century equivalent of writing stories for free weekly newspapers for peanuts just to build up one's clips and resume. Heck, John Scalzi published his first science fiction novel online, and now he's got shiny prestigious awards and fantastic sales figures, as well as a hugely popular blog. I get this question a lot, and I always say the same thing: I've gotten more work because of the blog that I write for free, than by any other means. It's my writing lab, the place where I sift through the fodder to find the potential gems that may one day fit into an article or book. The fact that folks like to read it sometimes is a much-appreciated (and frankly humbling) bonus.

I think we're already moving past the denial phase of bloggy influence among the mainstream media, although there's still some resistance in certain quarters -- and a tendency to view bloggers as second-class citizens. This is another aspect of getting rid of pointless categorizations. "All blogging means is you're using blogging software," Annalee said, admonishing upcoming writers to "Get used to it -- you will be writing on the Web." Adam spoke on similar lines: "Don't be mislead by medium. Were talking about genres. It's about what we cover, not how we cover it. Your practices are what makes you a journalist, so don't be nervous (or apologetic!) about being 'just a blogger.'

"The hardening of the categories" is a common lament of KC Cole, who adopted it as her mantra for her very successful "Categorically Not!" lecture series/events, that bring together scientists, artists, writers, actors, dancers, and so forth together along a common theme. (The Spousal Unit participated in one with the theme "Mistakes," and talked about the different kinds of mistakes made in science.) That's why she wanted to have an NASW panel on the power of thinking outside the lab. Everyone on the panel -- Adam Frank, Paul Preuss, KC, and my good friend Diandra Leslie-Pelecky (The Physics of NASCAR) -- made excellent points, to which I cannot do justice because I was too busy participating to take copious notes. So I'll just focus on my own points to conclude, with the caveat that many of these were echoed, eloquently, by my fellow panelists.

I started off by re-phrasing Adam Rogers' question: "Just what is a science story these days, anyway?" The answer is that it can be so much more than traditional science writing, which -- while still necessary -- tends to "preach to the converted." At a time when all media is struggling and newspapers have killed off their science sections, how do we get science to the folks who don't read Discover, New Scientist, or Scientific American? The best strategy is to work it into existing sections: where's the science angle in the hot business story of the day? What ratings-smashing new TV series can be tied into the latest scientific research? What sorts of cultural and lifestyle issues might have a scientific component? The idea is to move away from the standard reportage of the latest arXiv papers and press releases to find science in the nooks and crannies of the world around us: what I call "found physics."

Freelance science writers in particular are always needing to find not just an unusual story, but a fresh compelling angle, told with a strong narrative. Take vacuum technology: it's an essential component of most scientific research, but taken on its own, it's awfully dry and boring. (Diandra disagrees, but she's in the minority.) Some possible ways to deal with a potentially soul-destroying story assignment on vacuum technology include placing it within the context of a broader story on really cool research to make it a bit more interesting. Alternatively, you could take an historical approach, talking about early traveling demonstrations using animals trapped a glass container as the air is slowly pumped out. Or you could answer a niggling question, like, how long could you survive in the vacuum of space, and what would happen to you if exposed too long?

[UPDATE: There's one important point I forgot to include last night, and that's some helpful tips for finding those unusual angles. During the Q&A, Adam Frank and I both suggested fostering and/or rediscovering a childlike sense of wonder. "Take a walk in the woods," he suggested, and start looking for the science that will be all around you. You can do the same thing for any environment in which you happen to find yourself: Disneyland (amusement park physics is all the rage), a sporting event, a live taping for a TV show, etc. Science is everywhere; we've just gotten so used to its pervasiveness, that we tend to take it for granted. (To paraphrase my favorite exchange from Eric Roston's recent appearance on the Colbert Report plugging his new book, The Carbon Age: "It's ubiquitous." "No, it's EVERYWHERE!")

For instance, I shared an anecdote from early in my science writing career, the epiphany when I realized I was finally, officially, a science geek. I was riding a shuttle bus back to my hotel from a physics conference where I'd listened to a press conference on the physics of granular media. We passed a construction site where a huge machine was dumping sand into a gigantic pile. As I watched, the sand pile peaked and "avalanched," as the sand redistributed into a shorter pile with a broader base and started building up to a peak again. I pointed and exclaimed to my seatmate: "Look! Self-organized criticality!" And I had my real-world tie-in for a discussion of the dynamics of granular media.

Diandra supplemented those suggestions by emphasizing the need to listen to your target audience and hone in on what they really want to know -- in the case of NASCAR, it's "Why isn't my favorite driver winning?" Physics has the answer, and Diandra was happy to provide it on her blog and in her book. NASCAR fans are passionately devoted to their sport, and their drivers -- really it's almost a religion -- and that means they will slog throgh even science-y treatises on aspects of aerodynamics, fluid mechanics, materials science and the like to find an answer to that burning question. Hard-core sci-fi fans show the same devotion and enthusiasm.

Follow the passion, and you'll find a powerful medium for your message -- and that includes the stuff you're passionate about. One of the reasons The Physics of the Buffyverse turned out so well (at least I was happy with it) is because I am genuine fan of the show, and that passion and enthusiasm informed my writing. Diandra wasn't a big NASCAR fan when she started out, but she wanted to know the answer to a burning question -- why did one race car crash for no apparent reason? -- and forged into the brave new world of stock car racing to find out. She broadened her horizons, sought out new experiences, and learned as much about herself as she did about NASCAR in the process. Go forth, and do likewise. Living in a science bubble is not, in the long run, going to serve you well as a science writer in the new multimedia online world.]

It's late and I'm running out of steam, so I'll skip over the remaining salient specifics and cut to the chase. Putting physics (and science more broadly) back into the broader culture -- instead of fostering the prevailing notion that it is somehow scary and separate -- is the raison d'etre of this blog. I believe it's an important facet of effective scientific outreach, but more pragmatically, it can help make science writers more competitive in a constricting market -- by opening up new markets, hopefully in more mainstream media outlets. We need less hardening of the categories.

There has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth in recent years bemoaning the "death of science writing," but it's really just the demise of an old paradigm that no longer fits the world we live in. I'm as saddened by the killing of science sections in newspapers as any other science writer, but at some point the mourning's gotta end, and we have to move on. The world is changing, and our industry is changing with it. Change is inevitable; we can't control it. But we can control how we respond to it and adapt accordingly, and how we do this defines us. Yes, we are losing one thing, but we are gaining a new opportunity to reinvent science writing for the future. Right now, we're kinda struggling to find a foothold in the brave new multimedia world, but that won't last forever. So reports of the death of science writing are greatly exaggerated. I predict it will rise like a phoenix from the ashes, in a new and glorious incarnation. And I can't wait to see what happens.

REPOST: ghost in the machine

[NOTE: I'm currently in Boston attending the 2008 Industrial Physics Forum, and also writing blog posts about the various talks here. Nothing like hard work to keep one from wallowing in self-pity, right? But it means blogging will be nonexistent at the cocktail party until Thursday. So here's a handy repost from the archives as a placeholder until I get home.]

Last week, while chatting with my pal Lee -- personal stylist to Jen-Luc Piquant and an occasional guest blogger here at Cocktail Party Physics -- she complained about a noticeable increase in strange interference effects. For instance, she occasionally comes home to find the radio playing, courtesy of her neighbor's universal remote. And sometimes her cell phone "talks" to her computer speakers. In Lee's words, "What I want to know is, who the hell is using my cell phone to talk to the Mother Ship?"

I can commiserate, having gone through an irritating period where I temporarily lost my home WiFi signal every time I turned on the microwave. It's a fairly common problem, actually, and in my case there was an easy fix: changing the point access channels so the two radio frequency (rf) ranges didn't overlap. All this interference probably shouldn't be all that surprising, considering the growing number of wireless and remote devices scattered about the average American household: not just microwave ovens, but other WiFi access points, cordless phones, wireless video cameras, game controllers, Bluetooth devices, sometimes even bad electrical connections or fluorescent lights. No wonder rf interference is particularly problematic in population-dense areas like New York City (and specifically in Lee's densely packed neighborhood in the Bronx). The real miracle is that it doesn't happen more often.

And more devices are constantly appearing on the market: just last week, the digital design company IconNicholson announced its new three-panel Magic Mirror, an interactive technology that can be set up outside the dressing rooms of boutiques. Shoppers can see how an outfit will look on them without physically trying it on. If they're unsure about their fashion choices -- and what teenager isn't? -- they can send live video to their friends and receive near-real-time feedback. The company's press release describes it as "Facebook meets the mall."

Granted, the radio frequency segment of the electromagnetic spectrum covers a pretty wide range, and regulatory agencies are pretty stringent about assigning radio frequencies. Consider this list, courtesy of the most excellent site How Stuff Works:

• AM radio: 535 kHz to 1.7 MHz
• Short wave radio: 5.9 MHz to 26.1 MHz
• Citizens band radio:26.96 MHz to 27.41 MHz
• TV stations (channels 2 through 6): 54 to 88 MHz
• TV stations (channels 7 through 14): 174 to 220 MHz
• FM radio: 88 MHz to 108 MHz

You'd think that would be sufficient, but modern technology includes all kinds of small household devices, each of which also uses a specific band in the spectrum:

• Garage door openers/alarm systems: 40 MHz
• Cordless phones: 40 MHz to 50 MHz (Some newer versions are 900 MHz.)
• Baby monitors: 49 MHz
• Radio-controlled airplanes: 72 MHz
• Radio-controlled cars: 75 MHz
• Wildlife tracking collars: 215 MHz to 220 MHz
• MIR Space Station: 145 MHz to 437 MHz
• Cell phones: 824 MHz to 849 MHz
• Air traffic control radar: 960 MHz to 1,215 MHz
• Global Positioning System: 1,227 MHZ to 1,575 MHz
• Deep space radio communication: 2,290 MHz to 2300 MHz

Microwave ovens generally emit signals in the same 2.4 GHz frequency band that most WLANs employ, so occasional crossed signals are almost inevitable. That's also why the signal might sometimes be weak if too many people are using WiFi access points in the same frequency range, in the same general region, causing slower rates for Web browsing and file downloads.

(Random thought: Note that there is a 111 MHz gap between the high end of the cell phone frequency and the low end of air traffic control radar systems, yet only a 12 MHz gap between the high end of air traffic control radar and the low end of the Global Positioning System. So why do I have to turn my cell phone off during every single flight? Isn't the GPS a far greater interference risk, or am I missing some crucial point? Thoughts? Comments?)

The point is, it's clear from this ever-growing list that the technology boom is taking a bigger and bigger bite out of the radio frequency spectrum every year -- or rather, new wireless devices are multiplying like rabbits, forcing us to carve out ever-smaller niches in the spectrum to make room for everything.  Lee informs me that HDTV employs micro-frequencies, although I haven't been able to independently verify that -- too much techie jargon to wade through on every legitimate site I perused, plus a downright dizzying array of acronyms. (Learn to speak plain English, people! Or, as Jen-Luc would say, "Il faut parler en anglais!") Clearly, we're going have to ditch some of the old technology and start all over again from scratch at some point --a huge inconvenience, but a far less daunting challenge than figuring out what to do about all that space junk (old satellites, rocket parts, etc.) floating about in space. (I try not to think too much about it; otherwise I lie awake all night worrying about satellite traffic jams in space. NASA scientists, one hopes, are on it.)

Some might argue that the problem of interference pales in comparison with unknown long-term adverse health effects that might be related to prolonged exposure to all these electromagnetic fields. "Cell phones cause cancer!" scream the fear-mongering headlines -- echoes of the power line controversy in the 1980s and 1990s. There's an undeniable element of hysteria in some of this, like the case of a Welsh teacher -- reported in December -- who claimed to become ill whenever he taught in front of a WiFi transmitter. Most news reports failed to mention the follow-up controlled experiment, when the teacher didn't know the WiFi access point was turned off, and still reported feeling ill.

In February 2000, the Swedish National Institute for Working Life reported on a survey of 5000 cell phone users in Norway and another 12,000 in Sweden. Fully one-quarter complained they felt "warmth on or behind the ear" when using their phones, and 20% reported recurring fatigue and frequent headaches after long conversations on their cell phone. *Cue gratutious eye-rolling* Oh please. My ears get warm after prolonged lying down on a pillow, thanks to the transfer of body heat, and I have yet to hear reports that pillows might have adverse health effects. I get headaches, too, but I don't blame it on my cell phone. After all, I occasionally got headaches in the pre-cell phone era, and no one ever thought to attribute it to my AM radio. Even a rep for the Swedish National Institute admitted that they didn't specifically measure rf emissions from the cell phones, and many of the symptoms could also be traced to other factors, like plain old garden-variety stress.

It would help alleviate public hysteria if folks had a clearer understanding of the underlying science. Alas, many Websites hawking "preventive" products deliberately whip up that hysteria to get people to buy their wares. Those Websites include the New Age-y Tools for Healing, Safety Shield, those opposed to the very notion of EMFs (which makes about as much sense as opposing gravity), and -- my personal favorite -- the folks who market Zone-030 Protective Foil. I couldn't find a picture of their product on the Internets; in my head, I'm envisioning snazzy tinfoil hats. Then there's this new product marketed by Clarins: a spray-on mist to protect one's skin from those nasty electromagnetic waves by "coating it with an imperceptible and invigorating film" supposedly derived from "ingredients found 2000 meters deep in the ocean." According to the marketing brochure, the company's scientists exposed treated cell cultures to 900 MHz frequencies -- i.e., those new cordless phones -- "and found that their structures hardly changed!" (Everyone knows that using exclamation points proves you're right!!! It's SCIENTIFIC!!!)

Jen-Luc Piquant cynically points out that there is no mention of a control group experiment; chances are, exposing an untreated cell culture to the same frequency wouldn't have caused any observable changes either. Her cynicism is shared by Michael Bluck, an engineer at Imperial College, London, who rightly points out that humanity has been bathed in electromagnetic waves since the dawn of time, and that these waves are used by electronic devices precisely because they don't interact significantly with our bodies. He advised concerned readers of The Guardian (which reported on the new product) to forego buying snake-oil products like Clarin's E3p mist. If they're worried, they can "live as far away from the producers of EM waves as possible, and live with the consequences of having no friends and no life."

On the flip side, one doesn't like to blithely dismiss such concerns out of hand, especially if one has ever perused the gruesome historical archive photos of early X-ray pioneers. People used to think X-rays were harmless, too, so much so that they got "bone scans" for a lark, and even used X-ray machines in shoe stores for awhile to determine sizing. Many scientists and physicians who worked routinely with X-rays lost their hair, developed cancerous tumors, and had to have various extremities amputated before people finally realized, hey! Maybe zapping human beings with enormous amounts of X-rays isn't such a great idea! In 1904, Thomas Edison's assistant, Clarence Dally, died from prlolonged X-ray exposure. Ever the scientist, he carefully documented the burns, serial amputations and diseased lymph nodes leading up to his death. Once scientists understood the effects, they were able to develop precautionary measures, so we could reap the benefits of X-ray technology while still protecting our health.

However, the dangers of X-rays were pretty clearcut and easily observed; ditto with the high-energy gamma rays associated with nuclear bombs or power plants. Both are examples of ionizing radiation, which causes cells to mutate and sometimes die. Radio frequency energy is far, far lower, insufficient to cause mutation of biological cells. That's not to say it doesn't have biological effects: get enough rf energy focused in one place, and it can heat tissue; such an increase in body temperature can certainly cause some damage, particularly to the eyes and testes. But we're talking huge amounts of rf energy, not the incidental signals emitted by cell phones, microwaves, and other wireless devices.

And yet... and yet... with so many more rf devices popping up in population-dense regions, and people spending longer amounts of time using such devices, could there be any long-term ill effects from prolonged exposure even to the tiny rf signals being constantly emitted around us? The middle ground is to call for more research, specifically tightly controlled studies, in hopes of settling the matter once and for all. An article on the NIH Website cites several major studies showing no link between cell phones and cancer, but stops short of declaring this to be a definitive answer, because those were short-term studies.

There have been more long-term studies in the last six years indicating biological effects in animals triggered when they were bombarded with rf radiation of frequencies used by typical cell phones. A 2002 study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis exposed lab rats to huge amounts of rf radiation, for hours on end, yet found no significant evidence that the exposure caused increased incidents of cancer. But there could be other adverse effects. In 2003, Leif Salford of Lund University Hospital in Sweden scattered pulses of low-level microwave radiation across the brains of rats, and found that even a single two-hour exposure can kill some brain cells. Those results await confirmation by additional studies, and even Salford cautions that his results might not apply to real-world cell phone use.

Still, the FDA and the Federal Communications Commission have taken preventive steps... just in case. For instance, there are limitations in place regarding how much rf energy cell phones are allowed to give off, and these amounts are much lower than the levels shown to cause damage in the aforementioned lab rats. Cell phone manufacturers are required to report the rf exposure of all their phone models to the FCC.

For my part, I'll stick to being annoyed by WiFi interference problems, and ignoring the strange voices being emitted from my computer speakers. Among other things, they're telling me to buy The Open Laboratory, the first-ever anthology of the best posts from science blogs in 2006. The voices think you should buy a copy, too, especially since one of my own posts is among the entries. You can order them from Lulu.com, a print-on-demand service. (It's a format that is very a propos for the blogosphere, I think.) Kudos to Coturnix of A Blog Around the Clock, for pulling the project together in record time. The voices hope this marks the beginning of an annual tradition!

the long goodbye

[UPDATE: At 3:45 PM PST, Clio breathed her last. It was quick -- mere seconds -- and we were with her to the end. Thanks to everyone who sent well wishes.]

We returned from our London trip on Sunday to find our beloved Resident Feline, Clio, in a sorry state. She had stopped eating mid-week, according to her caretaker, and while the vet was initially optimistic that it was little more than a "blockage" (i.e., constipation), poor Clio has not rebounded. If anything, her condition has worsened. So today could very well be the day we bid her a fond farewell and send her to the Great Kitty Hunting Ground in the sky. It's not definite yet: the vet is trying one last life-saving IV in hopes it will reverse (or at least halt) the damage to her liver and kidneys. But my gut feeling is that this will probably only buy Clio a couple of months, at best. I always swore I wouldn't needlessly prolong her suffering when the time came, and the Spousal Unit concurs. Understandably, I do not much feel like blogging while waiting to learn if this is, indeed, vaya con dios for our feline friend. Instead, I offer Clio's own bloggy "greatest hits," from her short-lived blog called I Am the Kitty. She's always had a penchant for cat-related science tidbits in her infrequent posts -- with a generous helping of snark. Perhaps she will yet live to blog again....

[February 18, 2008]
This Axiom is All Too True

Found this cartoon in the Interwebs and I think it captures a fundamental truth about how humans view the noble feline: they infantalize us. I'm very fond of my Humans, and they converse with each other at a very high level, but the minute their attention turns to me, it's all cooing over how cute I am and asking, "Awww... who's the kitty?"

It's true, I am the kitty. But I did write my dissertation on feline influences and symbolism in the art and literature of Western culture. (I wanted to include a section on ancient Egypt and Babylonian symbolism, but my advisor insisted I narrow the focus.) Just once, it would be nice to have my intellect, as well as my cuddly cuteness, recognized. I'm just sayin'....

[February 19, 2008]
When Cats Calculate

Those silly humans seemed surprised a few months ago when Tatiana, a 350-pound Siberian tiger in the San Francisco Zoo, escaped from her enclosure by leaping over a 12.5 foot fence some 33 feet away. They didn't think this should be possible. That's because, unlike cats, humans are very bad at math. Perhaps they should spend more time scanning arXiv. They might have stumbled upon a useful paper by one Raza Syed: "Tiger Tales: A Critical Examination of the Tiger's Enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo."

Syed used a simple 2D projectile motion model to find the minimum velocity a 350-pound tiger would need to clear such an obstacle. It's simple ballistics, really -- simple for a cat, anyway. Tatiana would need to reach a velocity of 26.7 MPH at an angle of 55 degrees. And she was highly motivated. (Rumor has it taunting may have been involved. But personally, who wouldn't want to escape such a boring existence?)

 

Syed claims to be a physicist at Northwestern University, but we suspect he had some feline help with this particular paper. One day, perhaps, kitty contributions to science will be fully recognized.

I Purr, Therefore I Am

Why do cats purr? Because we can. It makes us feel good, and it pleases our Humans -- they find our purring comforting. Superstitious sorts even believe that our purr has special healing powers. And now physics has found a possible explanation for why the sound of the purr is so pleasant, along with evidence that there might be something to that old wives' tale.

Basically, scientists decided to measure a cat's purr acoustically and analyze how the vibration spreads through the body. They did this by attaching the world's smallest accelerometers -- about the size of a matchstick -- directly to the skin of the cats, attaching them with washable glue and medical tape, and recording the sounds.

 

The result: we fabulous felines purr between 20 Hz and 200 Hz frequency range -- a known "therapeutic" range. Most effective is between 25-50 Hz, followed by between 100-200 Hz. They speculate that cats evolved their purring ability to promote healing after a long day's hunting.

 

Our secret is out.

[February 26, 2008]
It's in the Genes

Some of you probably missed the news last year that scientists have succeeded in a first-pass sequencing of the cat genome, accounting for some 20,285 genes plucked from a four-year-old Abyssinian named Cinnamon. Humph. Abyssinians can't hold a candle to tabby cats. But try telling that to biologists.

Anyway, those scientists published their genome sequence in Science magazine last November. The analysis still needs work, but it's about 95% complete. The most surprising finding is that the cat genome has more in common with humans than other "nonprimate species" -- including dogs. This comes as no surprise to me, of course. In fact, I predict scientists will find that humans may very well have evolved from La Famille Felidae. We're that extraordinary.

[March 21, 2008]
I Shake my Paw at You

Sometimes I wonder whether scientists don't overthink things a little. My Primary Human recently abandoned me to attend some physics conference in New Orleans. I checked out the online epitome -- because I like to keep track of what my human is up to -- and found that there were a couple of papers involving computer simulations of "the feline reflexive habit of shaking its paw to remove an irritant."

Um, yes, we kitties do tend to shake our paws to remove irritants -- or, in my case, to disentangle my claw from the delicate multi-thread count designer sheets Secondary Human recently purchased for the new bedroom furniture. I never really gave it much thought; a cat's gotta do what a cat's gotta do. Who cares about the specific frequency of the shake movement, or the underlying mechanism?

 

Scientists at Georgia tech and Georgia State University, that's who! They've developed a new software package called AnimatLab to simulate the paw shake motion. Apparently they think the typical paw shake frequency (about 10 Hz) is insufficient to account for "the high periodic accelerations if only the distal muscles were used." Their 2D simulated model "revealed evidence of a whip-like motion." They think proximal hip muscles could contribute to the high paw accelerations.

 

Whatevs. So long as those irritants get removed, and I don't get stuck onto the bedsheets, I'm happy.

[March 29, 2008]
Finding our Roots

I admit it: I'm a mongrel. Even the vet simply has me listed as a "domestic short hair." I was born on da mean streets of New York City and have no recollection of my specific parentage. This is not a tragedy for cats. By and large, we aren't concerned with geneologies and such. It's humans who are completely obsessed with tracing bloodlines and producing "purebreds" to humiliate them in various national competitions.

Earlier this year, Genomics published the results of a new study by scientists at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine revealing that domesticated cats -- all of us, from all over the globe, regardless of how different we seem superficially -- actually came from the Middle East. This is based on analysis of DNA samples taken from 11,000 cats, specifically, the genetic microsatellites, or "junk DNA," that nonetheless can serve as useful genetic markers.

My favorite findings:

1. Persian cats turn out not to be Persian at all. They're just really pretentious Westernized cats. Tell that to the obnoxious Persian next door.

2. We are domesticated from Near Eastern wildcats. That explains my feral bloodlust. The birds have learned to fear me since once of their own got trapped in the loft. I am still The Mighty Huntress, however old and tame my humans think I've become.

3. Continued cat breeding is likely to lead to less genetic diversity among felines, and a greater likelihood of genetic disorders, such as polycystic kidney disease in Persians and blindness in other purebreds.

Take-home message: Mongrels like me are the hope of the future.

[August 7, 2008]
Glowing with Pride

Forget Dolly the sheep: the big scientific breakthrough in cloning occurred when scientists succeeded in cloning cats at Texas A&M University in 2002. They called the creature Copycat. Since then, all kinds of animals have been cloned: cows, dogs (why? just, why?), pigs, bulls and goats, not to mention glowing fish (tasty!). I think they should clone more mice. And birds. Specifically for cat-hunting purposes.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before those same researchers started tweaking our genes. That's the sort of experiment that can easily go horribly wrong. But the effort paid off last December, when Korean scientists at Gyeongsang National University in Jinju cloned a Turkish Angola kitten, modifying the three resulting copies genetically with a fluorescent protein to change their skin color. When viewed under ultraviolet light, the cloned kitten gives off a red fluorescent glow, while the original kitty appears to be green. (Sadly, one of the three cloned kitties didn't make it.)

It's not just for giggles, either. Cloning can help certain endangered species boost their low reproduction rates, and the genetic tweaking could help scientists better understand certain genetic diseases.

Alas, those same Korean scientists just cloned five little puppies -- as if we need more canines on this planet! -- all of whose names appropriately begin with "booger." Apparently the original dog was called Booger. I think if my humans had named me Booger, I would have spent the rest of my life shredding their furniture and peeing on their shoes in spite, before legally changing it to something more dignified. Like Clio.

REPOST: caveat voter

[NOTE: We're currently traveling and Internet access is sporadic, and pretty darned slow when we do manage to get online. So blogging hasn't really been possible. I'll be back in the coming week with fresh posts. In the meantime, here's a report from last August about voter fraud, both human and mechanical -- this being election season and all.]

Among the many things I was anticipating about my relocation to Los Angeles was the thrill of once again having a voting representative in Congress. Washington, DC, is neither fish nor fowl when it comes to the US Constitution: it's not a city within a state, nor is it a standalone state. It's just The Nation's Capitol. You'd think that would count for something, but not when it comes to Congress. Sure, there's a non-voting representative (Eleanor Holmes Norton), but residents of DC proper technically have no voice on Capitol Hill. Taxation without representation, anyone?

But now I am a resident of the fine state of California, disenfranchised no more. Or so I thought. Perhaps you noticed the news, late last Friday, announcing the release of a report testing the electronic voting machines certified for use in California elections. (h/t: Angela Gunn at TechSpace) Secretary of State Debra Bowen gave a group of University of California computer scientists the task of testing the machines of four major companies over five weeks to see if it were possible to hack into the systems or otherwise sabotage the machines. The results are depressing as hell: every single machine proved vulnerable to hacking, in some cases in ways that could alter the recording, reporting and tallying of votes. All of them. In the end, the UC scientists identified 15 different security flaws.

Well, actually, only three technically failed the test: those provided by Diebold, Hart Interactive and Sequoia. Election Systems and Software (ES&S) didn't send its InkaVote Plus systems in time for the testing -- despite the fact that its failure to do so violated the conditions of its state certification. Guess which company's machines are used by Los Angeles County? ES&S. Eventually they grudgingly sent over a few pieces of equipment, but no certified version of the source code or much of anything else needed to perform an adequate security test. Back in June, Bowen's office not only sent a tersely worded letter upbraiding the company for its lack of compliance, it issued a public press release letting everyone else know, too. Somehow we missed it. Needless to say, Bowen was pissed: "I'm not going to stand by and watch ES&S ignore the State of California, and in particular, the voters of Los Angeles County, by refusing to abide by the certification conditions," she says in the press release, accusing the company of "clearly trying to undermine the review." You go, girl!

The ES&S machines will, apparently, be "evaluated at a later date." Hopefully before local elections next February. As if that prospect weren't depressing enough, Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars alerted me yesterday to an item in The New Yorker about a new stealth move by some Republican lawyer in Sacramento who filed a ballot initiative to end the practice of granting all 55 of California's electoral votes to the statewide winner -- you know, like they do in every other sizable US state. Under the new initiative, only two electoral votes would go to the statewide winner; the rest would be determined, individually, by whoever won each district. Would that be enough to "steal" an election in a predominantly Democratic state? Tough to say. But The New Yorker piece points out that in 2004 George Bush carried 22 of the 55 districts. In a close presidential election, it could make a very big difference. Just ask Al Gore. I'm beginning to get that sinking feeling of disenfranchisement again. Enough with this outdated electoral college already!

The companies, of course, are crying foul and claiming the study was flawed and isn't a fair assessment. (Angela Gunn ain't having none of it: "Call the waaahmbulance!") Sequoia issued its own press release, in fact, insisting that "none of the threats outlined represent a realistic threat if the normal procedural mitigations are in effect." It is true that the report did not assess how difficult or plausible each hacking scenario might be. It's also true that most of the attacks could probably be prevented by improving physical security around the machines, among other actions. Nor was the study everything the UC scientists would have wanted it to be: they would have liked more time to conduct the tests, and better access to all the codes and other information. ES&S was only the most egregious in this respect.

There's been a risk of cheating and fraud in the historical election cycle ever since mankind invented voting. (Crooks and Liars also pointed me to an online video, "Hacking Democracy," that some readers might find of interest.) The machines have evolved along with the process, although their use varies from state to state, and sometimes even among districts. In the beginning there weren't really machines. Colonial Americans cast their votes by placing balls, coins, bullets or beans (hey, you work with what you have) into a container, and the "votes" were then tallied. Sometimes they relied on voice votes, in which the voter simply stated the name of his candidate; smaller communities relied on this method all the way through the Civil War. if nothing else, it made it more difficult to cheat, but voter anonymity (and the associated protection from pressure or reprisals) was pretty much nonexistent.

Around 1800, someone hit on the notion of a paper ballot, later supplemented with the familiar ballot box. Such a system was first used in the Australian state of Victoria in 1856; New York became the first US state to adopt the paper ballot in state-wide elections, beginning in 1889.  (Today, there are also punch-card systems that can either be counted manually or fed into a vote-tallying device.) Thomas Edison, fresh from a stint as a telegraph operator and intent on becoming a famous inventor, created the first electric voting machine in 1869, but it was never used, to his great disappointment. He was a little ahead of his time: nobody perceived a need for it, when paper ballots worked just fine. By 1892, that had changed: Jacob H. Myer's mechanical voting device -- quite similar in design to Edison's -- was adopted by the city of Lockport, New York, and became the first such machine to be used in a US election. By 1930, the machines were everywhere.

Typically, each lever in an array in a standard mechanical voting machine is connected to a specific candidate, and you just pull down the lever of choice to cast your vote. The levers are connected to counter wheels to keep track of the number of votes cast for each candidate. Then there's the optical scanning systems, familiar to anyone who's taken a standardized test: you fill in little ovals with a #2 pencil to indicate your choice, and these are fed into a computer-tabulating machine that selects the darkest mark to count as a vote. And finally we have the direct recording electronic (DRE) systems manufactured by Diebold, Hart, Sequoia and ES&S, among other companies. It's the same concept as the mechanical lever system, replacing the mechanics with a computer touch-screen (votes are stored electronically until they're ready to be tabulated), much like an ATM machine -- except not all of them issue a paper receipt. Aye, there's the rub.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who's been following the saga -- computer security experts have been issuing warnings about the vulnerabilities for years, and a Stanford professor named David Dill got so frustrated, he created a petition calling for voter verified audit trails for voting systems. It wasn't even a surprise to me, mostly due to a chance meeting a few years ago, at one of the annual Industrial Physics Forums. I headed back to the hotel early, and found myself alone on the bus, save for one other person: Barbara Simons, formerly a scientist with IBM Research and at the time, chair of the Association for Computing Machinery's Committee on Voting. She'd given a talk earlier that day on the technological problems with electronic voting machines and the potential for hacking and, by inference, voter fraud.

For the next 20 minutes, Simons told me all about the problems with the machines. And I talked her into writing a Back Page Op-Ed for APS News, called "Why Jonny Can't Vote." It didn't garner anywhere near the indignant outrage or even passionate debate for which I'd hoped. But I never forgot what I'd learned from chatting with her, and have been distrustful of electronic voting machines ever since. (The last time I voted, they gave me the option of a using a paper ballot. I took that option, hanging chads be damned.) The problem is that the voting machine software is proprietary -- understandable, these are commercial companies, after all, but  ultimately the rights of the voters should hold sway -- plus the certification process is secret (and often inadequate), and the test results are secret. All this secrecy might be great for the manufacturer, but it spells trouble for US voters. Says Simons, "Because there is no way to conduct a meaningful recount for paperless voting machines, it is impossible to verify that the reported results are correct. This is not a healthy situation for a democracy."

One of the many excellent points Simons made in her Op-Ed for APS News was about Diebold, which she dubbed the "poster child of all that is wrong with DREs." You might recall the ruckus in August 2003, when Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell -- a staunch Republican -- vowed to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to President Bush in the 2004 election. It sounded a bit ominous, coming from someone whose company manufactures the actual machines that tally votes. But Simons insisted that Diebold's biggest problems were technological, not political. There was a bizarre security breach in February 2003, when the company's voting machine software was found floating around on an open FTP Website. A group of computer scientists analyzed those programs and even published the so-called "Hopkins Paper" detailing its security problems, the most critical of which was a sloppy, almost cavalier approach to the all-important DES key.

Diebold had already been warned once about that vulnerability in 1997, by the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Equipment. The Hopkins Paper warned them again. So it's a bit chilling to read that this latest UC study found that the Diebold AccuVote-TSX system used, by default, a "well-known static security key." Any district that used the default setting -- and c'mon, you know there's bound to be loads that would do so -- would have machines extremely vulnerable to hacking. Knowing that key gives the user access to the machine's source code, after all. Alas, while the problems with the machines are well known, and well documented, in the computer science community, for some reason that awareness has yet to trickle down to policy makers and the public at large. It's not that I want people to automatically fear new technologies -- I love new technology, for the most part, being the geek I am -- but would a bit of reality-based concern be amiss, when our democratic rights are at stake? Simons concludes:

"Election officials were told that DREs in the long run wold be cheaper than alternative voting machines. They were told that DREs had been extensively tested and that the certification process guaranteed that the machines were reliable and secure. No mention was made of the significant costs of testing and of secure storage of DREs. No mention was made of the inadequacy of the testing and certification processes, to say nothing of the difficulty of creating bug-free software. Technologists are attempting to educate election officials, policy makers, and the public about the risks of paperless DREs. It is critical for the continued existence of democracy throughout the world that we succeed."

I'd encourage people to check out Simons' entire article, even though it's from 2005, and related links in the footnotes. It's still relevant. The upshot is, we got trouble, right here in Los Angeles County -- and probably in the rest of the country, too, unless Capitol Hill does the responsible thing and bans the use of electronic voting machines that don't leave paper trails. There will be hearings -- you can count on it. In fact, there's apparently some piece of legislation floating around the House of Representatives to that effect, co-sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif), aimed at scrapping paperless machines by 2012, although it's unlikely to be passed before Congress leaves for vacation.

The bad news is, the UC scientists were also able to manipulate paper receipts produced by both Diebold and Hart machines, so a paper trail might not entirely solve the problem, either. Still, we use banking ATMs all the time and those things are pretty darned secure (although I always keep my receipt until I verify it against my bank statement, just in case). We should be treating electronic voting machines with the same scrupulous attention to detail heaped upon the vast ATM system. Anyone who doubts what's at stake need only look at the last seven years.

REMINDER: We are now accepting nominations and submissions for the next Philosophia Naturalis blog carnival on August 16, which will be hosted here at Cocktail Party Physics. Read any good posts about physics lately? Written one of your own? Simply send the link to Jen-Luc Piquant at JenLuc@gmail.com.

ig nobel dreams

Humor is truly a balm to the soul. Last night I joined the Spousal Unit for the dinner-and-entertainment portion of the Caltech Skeptic's Society Origins Conference, featuring the entire cast of the online Web-sitcom, Mr. Deity. Brian Keith Dalton, who plays the title role despite what he describes as his complete inability to act, is as charming and likable as his fictional counterpart. He showed several clips from Seasons 1 and 2, a blooper reel, and gave a few hints about what's to come in Season 3 (they begin shooting in November). The cast even acted out a couple of skits live, and despite his protestations of his lack of thespian gifts, Dalton only forgot his lines once -- with hilarious results. Sometimes bloopers are even funnier than the finished product.

Last week also brought the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony at Harvard University, sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research. Among my favorites from this year's roster of "winners" was the prize in cognitive science, awarded to a group of Japanese researchers for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles. Now, I distinctly recall being unfavorably compared to slime mold in grade school by the bratty kid down the street (who had issues with me, for some reason). Other than that, Wikipedia -- that veritable font of fascinating trivia -- tells me that there is a graphic novel (Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind) in which a mutated slime mold devours entire cities, a la The Blob, and that there a comic called General Protection Fault in which "one character's poor hygiene leads to the development of a sentient species of slime mold in his apartment that split the rent with him." Does it also help him with the crossword puzzle?

Scientifically, slime mold refers to tiny organisms that resemble amoeba and eat the micro-organisms found in decaying plants and such: they grow in the soil, on lawns (ever find a jelly-like substance on the grass? that's a slime mold), in the forest on fallen logs -- even in mulch or the fallen leaves that clog up gutters. The mold itself is made up of lots of these organisms; I wasn't sure whether the Japanese research pertains to the collective behavior of the slime mold, or the component organisms, but Google yielded a couple of news articles that contained a few more details (the original research seems to date back to a paper in Nature in 2000).

Anyway, the Japanese researchers somehow managed to to get pieces of slime mold to move through a five-square-inch maze -- laid out on a plate of agar -- by placing food at both ends (exits) of the maze puzzle. Somehow, the slime mold found its way to the food (ground oat flakes); its "body" (whatever that means to slime mold) after eight hours filled only the parts of the maze that were the shortest route from one piece of food to the other. (Per this BBC News article, this is unusual because, "Normally the slime spreads out its network of tube-like 'legs,' called pseudopodia, to fill all the available space.") The researchers concluded that some kind of cellular computation appears to be happening. There's more information about this specific experiment in the linked articles, but the primitive intelligence of amoeba and other such organisms remains a healthy area of research; I blogged about similar research a couple of years ago.

Then there is this year's Ig Nobel Prize for Chemistry, awarding one-half of the prize to one team of scientists for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and the other half of the prize to a second team for proving that it is not. (Snopes.com dismisses the "Coca-Cola kills sperm" case as an urban legend, noting, "Somehow I doubt this is what Coca-Cola meant by 'the pause that refreshes.'") Lots of common substances have been used as spermicides throughout human history, including honey, baking soda, and lemon juice solutions. The latter "has been shown to immobilize sperm in the laboratory," according to Wikipedia, but the entry also notes that there haven't really been any published studies on whether lemon juice solutions are therefore effective contraceptives -- an important distinction.

I learned through my Google researches that the idea dates back to the 1950s, when the notion first emerged that the carbonic acid in the soft drink killed the sperm and the sugar destroyed the cells. Birth control options were pretty limited back then, which might explain why people actually resorted to this relatively cheap homegrown method -- after all, the bottle itself was a handy "shake and shoot" applicator. See the Snopes article for the details; or Google "douche".

It wasn't really an effective method of birth control, for a variety of reasons, but the legend persisted, and in 1985 an article appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine reporting on experiments with various Coke formulations in the lab. The researchers concluded that Classic Coke was five times more effective in killing sperm than the reformulated "new" Coke -- one more reason to hate that abomination -- while my own soda of choice, Diet Coke, also proved quite effective. That said, they did not recommend actually using soft drinks as contraceptives. As the sarcasm-prone folks at Snopes put it, "Saying Diet Coke kills sperm is like saying a rubber glove makes a decent balloon." You can't just extrapolate that basic finding into an effective method of practical birth control.

Furthermore, Taiwanese researchers in subsequent years performed their own experiments and arrived at the opposite conclusion: "cola has little if any spermicidal effect." As recently as 1992, there was a Nigerian study that came to the same conclusion, although they found that something called Krest Bitter Lemon Drink actually fared quite well as a spermicide... so maybe lemon juice solutions will one day find their way into the Family Planning aisle at your local drugstore. Or not.

We've also all heard the rumor that Coca-Cola eats away your tooth enamel -- and in fact, if you leave a tooth immersed in Coke long enough, it will disintegrate. It's the acidity, proponents of this theory argue, so Coke can be used to clean toilets, remove corrosion from car batteries and rust spots from car bumpers, even loosen a rusty bolt and eat away nails. Now, while I won't argue that drinking soda is actually good for your teeth (or one's overall health), it seems the corrosive properties of Coke have been greatly exaggerated -- although baking a ham basted with Coca-Cola supposedly produces a delicious gravy. (I should try that sometime, should I ever find time again to cook.)

Sure, acidity is useful for cleaning purposes/stain removal: that's why vinegar is used sometimes as a household cleaner, but it's also commonly used in marinades and salad dressings. In fact, lots of foods (many of them healthy foods) contain acids, including fruit juices and buttermilk. Because these substances don't remain in the mouth for prolonged periods of time, it's not really the same thing as immersing a tooth or nail in Coke for a week or more, so while it's not great for your teeth, it's not going to utterly destroy them overnight, either. I'd still follow your dentist's advice on that score; better safe than toothless.

Finally, there is this year's Ig Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded to Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith for proving that heaps of string or hair will inevitably tangle if you put them in a box and shake it around a lot. Well, duh: probably even a slime mold could tell you that. But what the heck, the physicists decided to do the experiment anyway and publish a paper on the results, because they wanted to better understand "the factors governing the 'spontaneous' formation of various knots." Apparently, the more pliable the string, the more likely it is to knot spontaneously, and the longer the string, the more likely it is to form a knot.

I was surprised to learn that scientists have been studying knots for over 100 years. In 1867, no less a luminary than Lord Kelvin "proposed that atoms might be described s knots of swirling vortices," according to Raymer and Smith's paper. Kelvin's theory didn't really pan out, but it spawned other work in this area: knots are currently studies in polymer physics, statistical mechanics, quantum field theory, and DNA biochemistry: "Knotting and unknotting of DNA molecules occurs in living cells and viruses and has been extensively studied by molecular biologists," they write. You learn something new every day!

There was a similar experiment on which kind of hair -- straight or curly -- tended to snarl more easily that made the news last year, conducted by biophysicist Jean-Baptiste Masson of the Ecole Polytechnique in France. (h/t: Feministe) Masson had hairdressers count tangles every afternoon (so the hair had time to snarl) for an entire week in the hair of 212 subjects: 123 with striaght hair and 89 with curls. The result: straight hair tangled twice as much as curly hair.

Masson's work probably isn't going to save anyone's hair from getting tangled, but it does have a practical application: it could improve Velcro, which is all about hairy fibers getting tightly tangled up, perhaps by increasing the tension of Velcro fibers to make them a little bit straighter.

So those were my favorites from this year's crop of Ig Nobelists, although this is not to slight the others in the least. Here's the rest of the recipients:

Archaeology: Astolfo Gomes de Mello Araujo and Jose Carlos Marcelino, for showing that armadillos can mix up the contents of an archaeological site.

Biology: Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc, for discovering that fleas that live on dogs jump higher than fleas that live on cats. (Our Resident Feline is very interested in this finding.)

Economics: Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tyber, and Brent Jordan, for discovering that exotic dancers earn more when at peak fertility. (The field work for that study must have been a blast -- and the itemized expenses must have looked mighty suspicious on the annual budget report.)

Literature: David Sims, for his study, "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations."

Medicine: Dan Ariely for demonstrating that expensive counterfeit drugs are more effective than inexpensive counterfeit drugs.

Nutrition: Massamiliano Zampini and Charles Spence, for demonstrating that food tastes better when it sounds more appealing. (Probably true, especially when described in a foreign language: compare people's reactions to "foie gras" and "the liver of a duck or goose that has been specially fattened by force-feeding the animal to bursting point" -- a procedure known as "gavage." And yes, I occasionally indulge anyway.)

Peace: The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland, for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity. (Slime molds will soon be demanding similar civil rights.)

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
It's that time of year again, when Donors Choose holds its Bloggers Challenge: over 3000 K-12 teachers have signed up asking for funds to help them in the classroom; education funding being so woefully inadequate, sometimes just a few hundred dollars can make a big difference.  Many of the SciBlings over at Science Blogs are participating, including my buddy Chad at Uncertain Principles. But this year I have divided loyalties, as the Spousal Unit and his merry band of co-bloggers at Cosmic Variance are also participating. As the Spousal Unit goes, so goes my nation: Cocktail Party Physics and Twisted Physics thus are joining forces with Cosmic Variance. It's all for a good cause, and there's far too many worthy projects than can possibly be funded. Head on over to either CV or Chad's place if you feel moved to donate.

daring to be extraordinary

Imagine that you are on the board of directors for a major corporation, or nonprofit organization, or physics department, or other such entity, and you are interviewing  candidates for one of your top positions: second in command to the Big Cheese. And let's say your organization hasn't been doing so well lately and is pretty much at the tipping point for failure. So you need someone who can bring their "A" game from the outset, especially since the Big Cheese is getting on in years, has been making increasingly erratic bad decisions, and will most likely be asked to step down (if he doesn't keel over first) in a few years.

Given the dire state of your company, you're willing to consider some nontraditional choices who are a bit outside the conventional "box"; it's not like business as usual has been working all that well for you, and you're tired of nothing but the same "insider" old white guys running the show. So you're eager to embrace youth and freshness, someone with new ideas -- provided said job applicant can demonstrate that he grasps the fundamental issues facing your organization (which includes familiarity with its august history), and can propose solid solutions that include a few specific suggestions for implementing those proposed solutions. Oh, and he's going to have to be able to get the squabbling underlings -- who have divided into two very hostile warring factions -- to put aside their differences and start working in tandem again. So, people skills -- kind of a "must."

The stakes are high, so you set up an intensive, multi-stage interviewing process. Enter candidate Bob Smith, a white 40-something, middle class Regular Guy with a spotty academic record and minimal job experience running his own business in Small Town, USA. The inexperience is a concern, but you've got one another applicant who's also a bit young and inexperienced (albeit with stellar academic credentials), and that applicant did great in the interviewing process, clearly showing that he grasped the issues and had some concrete ideas to help your organization. Bob Smith could do so, too, plus he's energetic, enthusiastic, charming, and handsome -- he's certainly got the people skills, and he's a big hit initially with at least half the board members.

Then comes the first interview, and you realize you've got a serious problem. First, he refuses to show up unless he is shown proper "deference and respect." While he is engaging and likable, he can't seem to speak in anything other than pre-rehearsed canned sound bites -- and, if forced to go "off script," not even in complete sentences. He garbles facts and figures, gives nonsensical answers, can't offer a single concrete specific example (of anything -- not even his favorite newspapers and magazines) and seems genuinely put out when you gently ask a few follow-up questions in a vain attempt to get something coherent out of him.

Afterward, he tries to rationalize his poor performance by claiming the interviewer (you) "annoyed" him by asking him all these pesky "gotcha" questions about topics he didn't want to talk about -- or, more accurately, could not answer because he didn't know the answers. (Sometimes it seemed like he didn't even understand the question.) In fact, his list of unacceptable "gotcha" questions consists of pretty much anything relevant to whether or not he could actually do the job for which he is applying.

Given the opportunity to rectify that, he still doesn't answer questions about his own qualifications; instead, he spends the entire time trashing all the other applicants to make himself look better in comparison.  For the final interview, he announces that he will talk about whatever he damn well pleases, regardless of the question asked, and will not allow any follow-up questions, because heck, he hasn't been at this that long, and nobody really cares if he can rattle off facts or figures, or demonstrate any real depth of understanding. Wink, wink.

Would you seriously consider, even for a moment, hiring Bob Smith? Of course you wouldn't. Bob Smith would be laughed out of the conference room, and rightly so. So the fact that anyone, regardless of political orientation, still considers Sarah Palin to be a viable candidate for vice president just boggles the mind. Don't get me wrong: she's not as stupid as the Couric interviews would lead one to believe (although someone with a degree in journalism and TV experience as a sportscaster shouldn't have been so inept). Heck, she might be great in a different position, say, Secretary of the Interior, or Ambassador to Greenland, where she can keep coasting on her looks and charm. But she's not even remotely qualified to be vice president in 21st century America -- unless your only criteria is that the candidate be a carbon-based life form of a minimum age. And anyone daring to point out this painfully obvious fact -- hey, the Empress has no clothes! -- is automatically labeled sexist, elitist, a traitor (to gender or party), or one of them gosh-darned unpatriotic socialist-lovin' liberals, by those who so desperately want to believe in her. Kill the messenger, indeed.

Despite the Palin-centric focus, this is not meant to be a political post; rather, her candidacy epitomizes one of our most fundamental failings as a nation. I'm talking about the triumph of mediocrity, of settling for "good enough," in America. No wonder our country is in a shambles, teetering on the edge of economic ruin and losing our historical edge in technological innovation. No wonder we're lagging so far behind other developed countries in educational testing scores, when we demand so little of even the highest offices of our land.

With her folksy appeal, Palin reinforces the mantra that anyone can grow up to be president -- at least on the surface.  But actually, that notion has become twisted from its original intent. Anyone has the potential to grow up to be president (or an astronaut, fireman, or brain surgeon) -- and everyone should have the equal opportunity to pursue that goal -- but you still have to put in the work to becoming qualified for the office. You've got to have the requisite knowledge and skills to be able to compete in the major leagues, because nobody is going to change the rules or set the bar lower for you just because you happen to a pretty woman, and such a gosh-darned likable person.

Except, in Palin's case, we have, because for all her twangy, gun-totin' bravado (Sarah Barracuda? I don't think so!), she can't hold her own against the big boys in the major leagues. Come on -- John McCain literally had to babysit her during one interview and protect her from Big Bad Katie Couric. How humiliating is that? Any woman who has struggled to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field has got to be cringing in embarrassment right about now. Can you imagine a female physics graduate student going into her PhD thesis defense demanding to be treated with deference, refusing to answer the questions posed to her, insisting that facts and figures are irrelevant, and being unwilling (or unable) to demonstrate even a rudimentary grasp of the basic subject matter -- relying instead on flirting with the examination board? Would it then be "sexist" to deny her a PhD? I find it ironic that the same folks who have loudly criticized affirmative action in the past, now seem to be fawning all over the ultimate Token Woman.

When I started at a private high school, I won a small scholarship to help pay for the tuition. After the first couple of months, the board that had awarded the scholarships called in the various recipients for a follow-up interview. The chairman asked how my classes were going. I was painfully shy as a teenager, and modestly responded, "Oh, you know, about average." He was outraged: "AVERAGE?!? What do you mean, average?!?" I hastily assured him I meant mostly A's, maybe with one or two B's. This only mollified him a little; he fixed me with a baleful eye and sternly pronounced, "That is simply not acceptable from someone with your potential. This board expects better from you, young lady. We expect to see all A's." Surprise, surprise: I got straight A's after that --  because that man cared enough, and was committed enough to his educational principles, to gave me a much-needed kick in the pants. He refused to let me "coast" and settle for mediocrity. "Good enough" simply wasn't an option. Imagine what he would say to the spectacle of Sarah Palin.

I encountered a similar challenge in my 10 years of jujitsu. While the guys took it easy on me as a beginner, the further I advanced in the ranks, the tougher they became about holding me to the highest standard, and the less they pulled their punches. I passed the same brutal, 2-1/2 hour test as every other male black belt, despite a size and strength disadvantage; my techniques just had to be that much better. Nobody lowered the bar or cut me any slack; if anything, they were tougher on me, knowing that any attacker would show no mercy, either, and I'd better be prepared for that kind of brutality. And I am a better, stronger person for it. Why should we pull our punches with Sarah Palin, when there's so much more at stake? We're not doing her any favors in the long run.

So I was inordinately depressed after Thursday night's empty mockery of a vice presidential "debate," and the predictable inanities that followed. ["She spoke in English! She didn't completely suck! Yay, victory!"] Fortunately, Friday morning I had the pleasure of chatting with Cosmic Variance's Julianne Dalcanton on Blogging Heads TV. Julianne is the perfect Post-Palin Pick-Me-Up. She's pretty. She's smart. She's articulate, engaging, and eminently likable. She's a working mom. She studies galaxy formations and discovered a comet (that now bears her name). She is anything but average and ordinary, and doesn't pretend to be -- instead, she dares to be extraordinary.