Cocktail Party Physics

tissue issues

On the rare morning that I can't wrench myself out of bed, I call in with a sore throat, a bad reaction to sushi (I actually don't like sushi), or a mysterious "girly bits" problem that won't be questioned and will elicit both sympathy and no follow-up questions. It's better this way. Calling in "mentally ill" may not bring forth questions, but it will leave a sticky residue over my work relationships. I don't want pity, or whispers behind closed doors if I'm genuinely annoyed or upset by an annoying or upsetting event that would furrow anyone's brow. And once people know, it's difficult for them to avoid acting like they know, with all the misunderstandings and misplaced sympathies that follow.

I remember the onset of mental illness came somewhere in the fourth grade; paranoia, emptiness, an inability to feel anything but anger or sadness. By the time I was in the sixth grade, I had two suicide attempts under my belt. 

It wasn't until I was seventeen, in the hospital (again) hooked up to monitors, groggy from an overdose and subsequent chugging of charcoal to mitigate said overdose, that a doctor diagnosed me. 

We spoke for awhile, he writing things down on a yellow pad, me staring at a ceiling. I'd done this before, over and over, describing every symptom of craziness in annoyingly boring detail. 

He diagnosed me with Major Depressive Disorder and prescribed medication. He said I wasn't really crazy, that my brain was made of chemical soup, and one of the chemicals responsible for a stable mind was running low. The meds would prevent that from happening, or something. And that was that. 

That was almost twenty years ago, and probably a defining moment that set me on the path toward atheism, reason, skepticism. My brain was made of chemical soup. My emotions were made of chemicals. The horrible pain that made living unbearable could be fixed with a pill. At least mostly. Too much and I can't write or draw, too little and those unbearable mornings become too frequent. 

It's almost romantic thinking of the brain as primordial ooze where synapses fire electrical current through goopy gray matter, sparking reactions to stimuli, some ideas evolve into beliefs, and so on. 

It was a huge relief to get an explanation for what felt like a woo-based curse. My teen years were spent searching for some karmic reason for my inability to feel gratefulness toward my parents who tried so hard to rescue me, and love for my brother who was way too little to be dealing with the heavy hand of mental illness that made his life a much scarier place than it had to be. 

Recently, NIMH published a study on how thinning tissue on the right half of the brain could increase the development of depression. 

The findings come from research on types of depression that run in families. 

That part stopped me cold. Thinking through the generations of people in my family who self medicated on alcohol and drugs, trying to numb that mind-searing pain with no idea that a fairy-dust sprinkle of serotonin could have prevented a Pandora's boxcar full of abuse and neglect. 

My prescription for a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) allows me to feel grateful that I'm here, in this generation, where there's a perfectly logical, medical, rational reason for storm that brews in my brain. It leaves me with a sense of relief, but also tremendous wonder about how the disorder manifested in me, and in those who preceded me on the matriarchal line. 

I, my mother, my grandmother and great-mother can all draw and paint. I inherited a box of oils and brushes from my mom, who inherited them from my grandmother. I wonder if any part of our creativity comes from the rapid washing away of an emotion stabilizer in our heads. Do we experience the world a bit differently?If so, how so? I embrace new research in a struggle to understand, and once again, the embrace comes with the pleasure of gratitude, that feeling that was completely foreign to me for such a long time. I'm so grateful to live in a time where the word "neurotransmitter" exists. 

Those who came before me, whose DNA and brain soup produced the person writing this were not as fortunate as I, and I grieve for that.

I didn't get their blue eyes, blonde hair, or bombshell figures, but I did inherit their low blood pressure, and given the white hot temper flare ups, long bouts of feeling blue and angry, and hypersensitivity to the feelings of others, I think there's a good shot that we all probably have a strangely thinning tissue issue. 

I desperately wish I could go back in time, armed with "what we know now" and grant them the peace I mostly feel in my once violently ill brain. Even when I feel the shift in mood, I can carefully, reasonably discern whether it's caused by an outside stimulus or a metaphorical bit of scar tissue from growing up with an untreated mental illness. 

This precious feeling of gratitude was brought to me by scientific research. Thank you.

get the lead in

I recall reading an article asserting that women living in the same house or dorm would end up with synchronized menstrual cycles.  I'm thinking that women who blog together must have some universal rhythm too, since I started working on a "lead post" a week ago - well before Lee posted hers yesterday.  Luckily, lead is a dense enough topic that the only overlap between our posts is the Romans.

My inspiration wasn't a half-nekkid HughJackman (see Lee's post), although that is an inspirational vision.  I was trying to find out whether L'Oreal sponsored programming on PBS, as I'm looking for a funding source for a program I'd like to do on cosmetics.  What came up on Ask.com was a paper from Nanoletters by a group of researchers from L'Oreal R&D (in France) about nanoparticles of lead sulfide (PbS) used by the ancient Greeks and Romans for dying hair black.

Lead has been a cosmetics component for a very long time.  Lead white (lead carbonate or 2PbCO₃·Pb(OH)₂ + PbCO₃) was used for foundation by the Hellenes, which is pretty impressive because it takes a lot of chemical synthesis.  Pliny the Elder described how to prepare it from metallic lead and vinegar in a paper in a very early edition of JACS.  The Volos museum in Greece has power compacts from the end of the 4th Century B.C.  Lead white also used to be common in paints, but (as Lee points out), it poses a risk of lead poisoning.  The Romans just used talc and gypsum - as did I the one time my husband and I tried drywalling. 

The natural look is in now, thankfully, but it surprised me that the many of the Greco-Roman recipes are still being used.  Mix lead oxide (PbO) with slaked lime (Ca (OH)₂) and a small amount of water.  The resulting paste applied to gray or light-colored hair and, after 24-72 hours, turns the hair black.  Grecian formula is lead (II) acetate (Pb(CH₃COO)₂) and it works the same way as the ancient formula.  (Just for Men hair coloring does not use lead acetate - but it doesn't work as gradually as Grecian formula.  Or so I'm told.)

The protein alpha-keratin makes up most of your hair (as well as your fingernails).  (Beta keratin makes up harder things, like bird beaks, reptile claws and scales). Keratin is a long coiled molecule that acts like a spring, as shown in yellow in the picture at left.  Four keratin springs twist together to form a protofibril.  Eleven protofibrils twist together to form a microfibril, which is the largest structure shown in the diagram at left.  Keratins have lots of the sulfur-containing amino acid cysteine and that allows the formation of disulfide bridges that hold together keratin molecules.  Think of a disulfide bridge as two keratin molecules holding hands.  The bridge forms a much stronger structure than the two individual molecules.  Sulfur bridges do the same thing in vulcanized rubber.

Microfibrils pack together in long thin bundles called macrofibrils.  Macrofibrils pack together to form long thin cortical cells, and cortical cells pack together to form a hair. Human hair is about 14% cysteine and most of it is in the grey area in the figure that separates macrofibrils.  There is a fair amount of sulfur in hair, which is why burning hair is one of the absolute worst smells in the world - even when it is someone else's hair.  Permanent curling and straightening products break sulfur bridges, reshape the hair, and then reform the bridges so that the hair adapts the new shape.To give you an idea of size, the average hair is about 70,000 nanometers.  A macrofibril is roughly 7 nanometers in diameter. L'Oreal has a great animation showing the composition of the hair. The picture at right (from the L'Oreal animation) shows the macrofibrils (the smallest structures visible in that shot) and the cortical cells that make up a hair.

The little black things you see within each macrofibril is melanin, which is responsible for giving you your hair color.  Large star-shaped cells called melanocytes reside at the bottom of the hair follicle and manufacture the melanin, which is incorporated into the hair structure as the hair is formed. Only about 1% of the hair is melanin, so it doesn't take much to give it its color.

There are only two types of melanin.  Eumelanin is rice-shaped and comes in brown and black varieties. Phaeomelanin is irregularly shaped and imparts a pink to red hue. Japanese hair contains mostly eumelanin and red hair is rich is phaeomelanin.  Black eumelanin is in mostly non-Europeans, while brown eumelanin is in mostly young Europeans.  A small amount of brown eumelanin in the absence of other pigments makes hair blond.  A small amount of black eumelanin without other pigments causes grey hair. With no melanin, hair is white, although we don't know yet whether that is because your body stops producing melanin, or if it just isn't incorporated into the hair.

When the coloring formula interacts with the hair, the lead in the colorant combines with the sulfur in the hair and forms nanoparticles of lead sulfide (PbS) with diameters between 4 nanometers and 15 nanometers.  In contrast, natural melanin that produces black hair is about 300 nanometers in diameter.  The longer you leave the formula on the hair, the more nanocrystals you form and the blacker the hair looks.  This is why coloring products like Grecian formula slowly change the hair color and can get rid of grey gradually, unlike permanent color.  The PbS nanocrystals are very small and it doesn't take a lot of them to change the apparent color of the hair, so the mechanical properties of the hair aren't really affected.

Why do they form nanocrystals and not microcrystals?  One theory is that peptides - polymers that surround the organized keratin proteins - form nanoreactors that limit the size of the PbS nanoparticles.  The nanoparticles accumulate preferentially at the boundaries between the microfibrils, whereas melanin colorants are randomly distributed throughout the hair.

L'Oreal presents the L'Oreal-UNESCO awards each year to outstanding women scientists across the world:  one in African/Arab countries, one in Europe, one in North America, one in Asia, and one in Latin America.  The awards recognize the important role science plays in their industry and in the rest of the world.  They also offer a variety of awards and fellowships for women at other stages in their careers.. because we're worth it.

get the lead out

And that's what we're doing here at the cocktail party. Let's just say it's been a little crazy since March, not just for me but for the rest of my fellow CPP bloggers. But don't abandon us! We're planning a delicious and intoxicating non-stop party for the summer, with lots of posts, designed to make you not even miss Jennifer, our intrepid leader, while she's making the last sprint on finishing her calculus book.

So hey, did you see the new "X-Men Origins" film with Wolverine? And how about that horrifying scene where they dunk the gorgeously half-nekkid Hugh Jackman into what looks like an acid bath and inject his bones with adamantium and he comes up wearing eyeliner and a floppy haircut? Oh wait no. Wrong element. That would be AdamAntium. Never mind. Ba-dum-bum. SSSSSSS.

Oddly enough, when I wasn't thinking of fallen British pop stars or Hugh Jackman's half-nekkid body while watching this scene, I was thinking about . . . lead. And bad puns about Iron Man. No really. Cuz that's the kind of geek I am. See, during my stint with the environmental and hazardous materials engineers, I learned a lot of fun facts about pollutants, of which lead is a major one, especially in urban areas. Stick with me here, and I'll get to the Wolverine connection, I promise. But first, a little about lead.

Lead has been a hidden yet common ingredient in a number of familiar objects and substances for centuries. It was used as piping in the Romans' extensive aqueduct system (more on that later, too), and as an additive to ceramic glazes, where it functions to lower the melting point and enhance colors. It was and is added to crystal (as lead oxide) to give it brilliance and a crisp ringing tone (important if you're playing music on them). Lead was a key component of cosmetics (giving medieval and Renaissance faces that sought-after paleness), home remedies, and condiments, and used as a spermicide and preservative for wine. It was made into tankards, cooking pots, and dishes as well. The Romans also knew it could cause some strange symptoms, which they called "Saturnine gout" because lead was associated with the god Saturn, but that doesn't seem to have stopped them or anyone else from using it.

In the modern world, the two biggest sources of exposure are, or were, lead in gasoline and lead in paint. Lead was clearly recognized as a  health hazard in the U.S. and Europe as early as the 19th century but steps to limit its use, at least in gasoline, were not taken until the 1970s. The nasty truth is that it was actually known that adding tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) was a health hazard at least as early as the1920s, but this evidence was ignored in favor of profitability. Leaded gasoline was finally phased out entirely in 1996 with a few exceptions.

Lead was originally added to gasoline as an "anti-knock" agent, to prevent pockets of air and fuel mixtures from igniting at the wrong time and wrong place in your engine's piston stroke cycle, which it did by controlling the volatility or explosive characteristics of gasoline. The extraneous ignition shock wave causes the pinging or knock, and can be harmless or extremely destructive depending on when it happens in the cycle and how energetic it is. Lead was added to increase the octane of gasoline, or its resistance to detonation. The more resistance, the more efficient the fuel because it only ignites when it's supposed to, i.e., when lit by the spark plug. Although there are a number of anti-knock agents that have far less toxicity, TEL became the additive of choice for a number of complicated reasons, including plain ol' greed. As a result, something like 7 million tons of it were burned during the 20th century, and remain in the soil and water, making our current exposure levels 300-500 times greater than the normal background exposure. As Jamie Lincoln Kitman points out in his lengthy and horrifying article on lead in The Nation, "'Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that lead was dispersed so widely by man in the twentieth century that "it is doubtful whether any part of the earth's surface or any form of life remains uncontaminated by anthropogenic [man-made] lead.'"

Yikes!

The introduction of unleaded gasoline cut airborne emissions, but the stuff was still around not only in the soil (leaching into food) and air, but in the gallons and gallons of paint slowly peeling off interior and exterior walls, mixing with dust and becoming airborne or sinking into the soil. Lead is added to paint to increase its durability, color-fastness, and drying speed, and to make it moisture resistant. This latter quality means that lead is still used in paint for industrial purposes, especially ship paint, but it's been banned for use in residential settings. Lead poisoning from paint was (and still is) a huge problem in low-income neighborhoods where the buildings are often old and not well-maintained. When lead paint flakes, children often ingest it in chunks (pretty colors!) or it gets ground up into particulate matter and inhaled. I remember PSAs from my childhood showing a teething toddler gnawing on a flaking windowsill, as kids do, as part of a warning about how easily lead paint can be ingested by children. Lead paint removal has now become an environmental justice issue in many inner city communities, despite initiatives by city governments to mandate its removal in all residential buildings. The removal process is time-consuming and expensive because it must be done using hazmat precautions by trained technicians and involves basically scraping, sanding, ore peeling with heat or chemicals down to the bare surface in most cases. Not cheap or easy.

So what's the problem with lead, anyway? Lead is what's called a heavy metal (no, not that kind, although there may be some headbanging involved if you're poisoned by it). It's kind of a slippery term, but in general, non-scientific usage, it refers to the transition metals: among them, copper, zinc and lead, which are also pretty dense (hence the "heavy" part) and fairly toxic to humans. One of the factors that makes them toxic is their ability to bind to organic molecules and accumulate in tissue, as mercury accumulates in fish, for example.

And here's where the Wolverine connection comes in: Bones have a special affinity for lead, reacting to it by replacing calcium with it, so it stays in the body. In the x-ray at left, the white bands you see above and below the knee of this child are lead deposits, which look eerily like Wolverine's skeleton in the early stages of the adamantium injection. Ew. Lead also winds up in the blood and soft tissues too, like your liver,  heart muscle, and kidneys. The most damaging effect, though, has to do with its interactions with the central nervous system. Because it acts so much like calcium in the body, and calcium is one of the chemicals responsible for electrical activity in your brain, replacing it with lead is a real problem. Basically, it leads to a kind of short circuit, disrupting synaptic connections. In adults, it can produce cognitive deficits, abdominal cramping, constipation, tremors, and mood changes. Poisoning from the TEL put in gasoline is particularly ugly and manifests itself in several ways, including as "a mental disorder suggestive of schizophrenia."  It's also associated with violent behavior, which is not surprising, given the changes in the brain that it causes. What's interesting is that since the ban on leaded gasoline, studies have shown that violent crime has fallen in the countries most affected. The correlation is interesting, but not necessarily conclusive.

In children, whose brains are still developing, it can cause permanent mental retardation, seizure disorders, aggressive behavior, developmental regression, and cerebral edema (brain swelling) leading to seizures, coma, and death. What makes lead so insidious is that it takes a lower concentration of it to mess up your synapses than the concentration of calcium necessary to run them smoothly.

And toys, sadly, have in the past been another delivery system for lead. Many older toys were made from tin or lead and/or used lead paint as well. In the U.S., this is now illegal, but last year, there was a big stink in the media and retail circles about toys manufactured in China which made use of lead-based paint. Mattel, venerable maker of many an action figure (though not our Wolverine; wouldn't that have been ironic?), suffered extreme embarrassment at having to recall approximately 9 million toys it contracted to have manufactured in China, where production standards are not as closely monitored. Many of the recalled toys were in the Fisher Price brand, which is geared toward infants and toddlers, a stage at which kids put just about everything in their mouths, offering an easy conduit for loose chips of lead paint. In response, the Feds developed some stringent rules about product testing intended to protect children from ingesting lead paint.Unfortunately, this turned out to be a real burden on independent toy makers, but that's another story that's still being hashed out. Suffice to say that although there are relatively inexpensive kits to test for lead in your toys or other objects, laboratory-grade testing is beyond the means of most small, cottage-industry-level manufacturers.

Humans aren't the only creatures affected by lead poisoning. One of the more unusual ways to be poisoned by lead (or at least one would think so) is from being shot with lead bullets, but this is exactly what contributed to the death of one California Condor, recently, who was peppered with lead shotgun pellets. And it's not the only kind of run-in with bullets that's been dangerous for the condors. They're scavengers and often dine on shotgunned varmits and deer in their habitat. Once those lead pellets come into contact with the acids in the bird's stomachs, uptake into the system begins and lead poisoning results. So lead bullets have been banned in their habitat, which has apparently made some hunters really unhappy.

Ingesting lead in your food isn't just for condors, either. As I mentioned above, Lead is added to a number of ceramic glazes used on dishes in other countries (it's illegal here, and imported and local dishware that uses it must be marked "not safe for food"). Remember that acid reaction in the condor's stomach? Citric acid (from citrus fruits) has the same effect, as does the acetic acid in grapes, wine, and vinegar, and other acidic foods. Citric and acetic acid are chelating agents, which means they form bonds with metal molecules to produce soluble molecules (which is why they're great for dissolving hard water stains). Once in your body via the food, those molecules break down again and your bones and tissues absorb the lead as above.

But that chelating power can be used for good! Turns out that sprinkling citric acid crystals on fields with, say, radishes can help mitigate or abate the presence of heavy metals in the soil. The citric acid binds with the heavy metals and is drawn up through the roots, where the chemistry of the plants turns it into a less toxic form and sends it into the leafy shoots. This is a process known as phytoremediation and some plants don't even need the citric acid boost because they naturally accumulate heavy metals at a concentration that would poison most. Radishes aren't the usual choice for this job, but they do work pretty well. Sunflower, corn, wheat, and a number of weeds including ragweed also work well. Even better, the metals can usually be recovered from the plant matter. It's nature's recycling process. As remediation processes go, it's not quick, but it's definitely a lot cheaper than soil caps (PDF) or excavation and disposal.

Finally, you may have heard those rumors that lead was responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire because their lead water pipes (like the one at left, running through the bath at Bath) slowly poisoned them all. A geochemist at University of Michigan's School of Public Health, Jerome Nriagu, wrote an interesting article to this effect in the New England Journal of Medicine. It's hardly conclusive, and there are some strong objections to it, one being that flowing water, as long as it's not terribly acidic, is not going to leach much lead out of pipes. But the Romans had some other habits that certainly contributed to the prevalence of "Saturnine gout" among the rich, one of which was boiling down grape must in lead pots. Remember how the lead gets out of the glazes? Same principle here, with highly acidic grapes. There's still a fair amount of argument about the idea, but without forensic samples, we'll probably never know just how much lead Romans ingested in their daily diet.

And wouldn't it be interesting to run a few forensic tests on Wolverine, to see what's leaching into his blood from that new skeleton? Adamantium is a steel alloy whose "properties do not qualify it for any know space on the Periodic Table of Elements," according to its creators. So I wonder if that might not account for some of Wolverine's mood swings? Just sayin'.

an astronomical year

It is nearly the start of month number six in the International Year of Astronomy and I can't believe I haven't blogged about this yet! If you live for the love of astronomy, you're probably way ahead of me. If you once felt a fire for planets and galaxies and dark matter, why not light it once again? And if you flirt shamelessly with outer space, just playing around with no real commitment, well, now might be the year to take it to the next level. There's never been a better time, as NASA and a number of astronomy and physics groups are pouring resources into celebrating the occasion, and we the public reap the beautiful benefits. And at the end of the year, if things aren't working out, you can just call it a summer romance and go have a fling with chemistry.

Here's an easy way to start celebrating - instead of hitting up Youtube with your morning coffee, check out the astronomy image of the day, courtesy of NASA. The striking and inspiring images include a short paragraph of information written by a scientist. (This site was established more than ten years ago, but what better time to become a fan?). Or, watch Carl Sagan's revolutionary documentary series Cosmos for FREE on hulu.

A more active, outdoor, get-unglued-from-your-computer way to ring in this amazing year is with the Galileoscope. It's small, lightweight, and only 15 bucks, yet it can resolve mountains and craters on the moon, the four largest moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn: the very same sights that must have taken Galileo's breath away 400 years ago. This website demonstrates everything you can do with a telescope as powerful as Galileo's first. The site's founder built his or hers out of PVC piping.

Then pack a midnight lunch, prepare for low temperatures and take your Galileoscope to a local star party. Sky and Telescope has one of the best resources for finding an event in your area. Amateur astronomy has grown tremendously as a world wide pass time, attracting folks who love gazing at the heavens but never made a career out of it. More than once in our recent past, amateur astronomers have made big contributions to the field, such as with the annual Great World Wide Star Count, which calls upon backyard astronomers to assist in measuring the brightness of particular stars. The next one starts in October!

Back in the day, and I mean back around the 12th century BC, astronomy was a religious activity. There is a notion built into our psyche that those with more power look down from above, and those will less live below. It relates to a feeling of exposure and thus lack of control. Add to that the tremendous glory of astronomical objects and you've got an easy recipe for religious inspiration. This recent video from the Texas Star Party certainly fills a wee human with revere for all things larger than us. It captures, through a series of long-exposures, the progression of our very own Milky Way galaxy across the night sky. I do not know what conditions lead to this incredible resolution and color, whether it be the camera or the darkness of the location. 

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Credit must be given to those early religious astronomers who maintained tremendous diaries of the sky and recorded visible events like comets and supernova. As a result we have an extended time-line of the universe. But the moment Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky for the first time, science changed. The world changed. I can't imagine what it must have been like to see the universe open up before you. Very, very rarely do scientists get such quick or massive results.

Now I should note that Galileo didn't invent the telescope but he did make some valuable improvements to it. A guy named Hans Lippershy has the first patent for the telescope, although there were claims all over Europe by other people who say they invented it first. It could be collective unconscious, or maybe a sign that society progresses toward certain technologies naturally.

One of the first things that Galileo dedicated himself to was the study of Jupiter and its moons. The so-called Galilean moons - Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto - were all Galileo could see. Now we know of 63 moons orbiting Jupiter. It's a veritable satellite highway of activity up there (as shown in this image from Astro Bob). Watching those tiny specs of light has provided loads more information than you'd ever expect. 

Just after the telescope breakthrough, Ole Christian Roemer used Io to make one of the first measurments of the speed of light (I hand it off to Ms. Ouellette to explain).

Jupiter holds a great deal of significance for me, since it's really what got me fascinated with physics. From a young age, I loved looking at pretty pictures from Hubble and dreaming of visiting other planets. Could I do this all day, every day for the next fifty years? Oh heavens yes. So I took some astronomy courses and discovered physics on the side. Then one day, the two collided, and astrophysics bowled me over. What got me was a class exercise in which we observed the motion of the moons of Jupiter and subsequently measured the mass of the planet.

Just an optical telescope, a camera, some graph paper, some patience and five tiny specs of light are enough to determine the mass of a planet 588,600,000 kilometers away. I'm still awed by that. I guess I assumed it would take very powerful instruments or at the very least very complex mathematics, but it's actually rather simple. If you are feeling particularly ambitious and want to test your amateur astronomer capabilities, there is a version of the experiment that you can do at home. Use class websites like this and this to guide you.

The gravitational pull of one object on another is determined by the mass of the two objects (ie, you weigh more on Jupiter than you do on Earth) as well as their distance from each other. If you combine Kepler's laws of planetary motion with Newton's laws of gravity, you find the connection between mass and motion. It isn't random or unique for each moon or planet. You can tell something about the bodies involved by how they move (like flirting). I'm sparing you some mathematics here, but we can relate the mass of a planet to the motion of its orbiting bodies via this equation:

M=(R³/P²)

Here M will be the mass of Jupiter, R is the orbital radius of a moon (the furthest it gets from Jupiter during its orbit), and P the orbital period (how long it takes to go around once). Looking through your telescope you should see something like this:

Watch Jupiter's moons each night and record their position relative to Jupiter as well as the time. The Galileoscope is powerful enough to see the moons, but just barely so your measurements will have some significant error bars. You need a way to measure how far the moons travel away from Jupiter during their orbit. For that you need a camera, or at the very least a cross hairs and a way to stabilize the telescope. Use Jupiter's own diameter (1.43 x 10^5 km) to figure out the distance R. There should be two maxima, one on each side of the planet. Then record how long it takes each moon to do one full revolution (return to the same maximum). One of the moons takes less than two days to orbit the planet, so you'll have to make multiple observations throughout one night, and one takes more than two weeks so you'll have to be patient. 

Note that this equation does not allow us to measure the mass of Jupiter from scratch. To use this equation you must already know the mass of the sun and the distance from the sun to the Earth. The units must be M in solar masses (ie the mas of our sun), P in Earth years, and R in astronomical units or the distance from the sun to the Earth. Otherwise it doesn't work. Astronomers did the grunt work to figure out that the orbital radius and period of Earth are related to the mass of the sun. But we know that the same laws that govern the Earth and sun, also govern Jupiter and its moons. Thus, a little pre-packaged set of variables makes the work much simpler. None the less, you are still personally determining the mass of a whole freaking planet.

So Jupiter's mass turns out to be 1.899 x 10^27 kg, 318 times the mass of Earth, or 2.5 times larger than all the planets (including Pluto) combined. Jupiter is 10 times the diameter of Earth, and not very dense. It's packing about 1.3 grams per cubit meter versus Earth's 5.52. You could add a lot more mass to Jupiter, and it could stay the same size, but if you tried to make it any bigger it would contract under its own weight. You could say it's like the solar system's massive balloon, but a balloon full of vicious storms and poisonous gasses.

If you chose to embrace this year and explore the solar system a bit more, I implore you to not forget that moons are often as vibrant and enticing as planets. When do we ever ask 'what's your favorite moon' instead of 'what's your favorite planet'? Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are full of activity and mystery. Astronomers think Europa holds twice as much water as Earth, making it a possible setting for life. Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system and bigger than Mercury, generates its own magnetic field, just like Earth. Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Even if they don't have the oh-so-coveted title of planet, they still contain entire worlds awaiting exploration.

Decades before the creation of calculus and centuries before the dawn of modern physics, Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler were all standing on the edge of a great precipice of understanding. Galileo and Copernicus may have sensed the greatness that lay beyond, but could never quite see it. Newton jumped off, into the calculus ridden depths of gravity. We now see that those physicists also brushed against the divider between the quantum and classical worlds. Gravity causes Jupiter to collect moons, and causes planets to orbit the sun, yet we as humans don't have enough mass to affect small objects in the same way. This implies that size does matter. Now physicists explore in more depth where gravity's pull seems to end and forces like the weak force begin (see the wonderful world of the Planck scale). What wonderful mysteries new physics may be brushing against we can only imagine.

**** 

The International Year of Astronomy is aiming to get kids excited about science and spread the word that astronomy is good for a whole lot more than pretty pictures. It has contributed to an incredible number of technologies that we use every day. Besides that, the exploration of space and an increased understanding of our universe enrich our culture and the intellectual landscape of our society.

Some great websites to check out in this wonderful year:

International Year of Astronomy homepage.

thenineplanets.org

Discover's blog Bad Astronomy, any of these ten blogs, or just take a troll through the blogs listed on the CPP sidebar.

Astronomy Magazine news section, atom & cosmos section of science news, sky and telescope magazine website.

An interesting article on how astronomy programs can help third world countries.

Librarything's list of most commonly sought astronomy books.

There are so many! I leave it up to readers to share more!

the shoe bomber theory of purchasing regulations

A couple years back when I switched jobs from the mighty JPL to a small (but still mighty!) private lab, they handed me a couple of corporate cards and quickbooks for purchasing equipment, services, and other odds and ends for the scientists. The approval process went something like this:  "HEY DAVE, DO THEY REALLY NEED THIS CRAP?" If Dave agreed and lectured me on how this wasn't in fact crap but a VERY IMPORTANT WIDGET, I'd then ask Debra, "HEY DEBRA, DAVE SAYS WE NEED THIS STUFF THAT IS MOST DEFINITELY NOT CRAP, WHICH ACCOUNT DOES IT GO ON?" And then Debra would check the contract, make some calculations, sigh, and tell me which account to use for the purchase. 

The entire process took about ten minutes or so. Then I'd call a vendor, place the order, enter all the needed info for inventory and accounting and whatever it was that they needed would arrive the next day, sometimes longer if it was coming from someplace not on the West Coast. Auditors would come in every now and again and make sure we weren't ordering booze and pole dancers.

Purchasing is easy in a small lab because when you have fewer than a couple dozen humans involved, it's easy to provide the necessary checks and balances in a very short period of time. The bureaucracy is me, checking things off on a list, and because I have to face the scientist at lunch in a half hour, I want to be able to say the thing they need is on its way and not make excuses. Because the scientist needs to face the CEO at the same lunch table, s/he wants to be able to look him in the eye and say that the things they purchased will bring us that much closer to the deliverable/bottom line. Monkey business is rare. 

Now that I'm back at the mighty JPL, I'm faced with the longish delays that come with a Rube Goldberg-like  maze of an approval process for purchases. Large government labs use the Shoe Bomber Theory of Government Spending.

In 2001, a jackhole named Richard Reid got on a plane and attempted to make it go 'splody by lighting a bomb in his shoes.  Now we all have to suffer the indignity of standing barefoot in line at the airport while the security goons X-ray my Hello Kitty flip flops. An appropriate punishment for Mr. Reid would be to chain him to the metal detector at various airports and then we could all smack him in the chops with our shoes before boarding the plane. 

Likewise, somewhere out there, some jackass probably used his government p-card to buy a hooker, forty-eight pounds of veal, a case of absinthe, and a weed whacker for a groovy night of debauchery at a conference in Madrid. 

Then some bored reporter showed up to blow the lid off this travesty as if s/he had discovered a Woodward and Bernsteinesque plot, it all ended up on the evening news, and suddenly I need to get sixty-eight approvals from the head of NASA all the way to my mom (hi mom!) to order a box of Kim Wipes. I hate waiting for stuff. 

Don't get me wrong, I sincerely believe that controls need to be in place to ensure that purchases on the government dime are transparent for public edification and a just use of funds to make science happen. I bear no ill will toward the approvers who have been tasked with signing off on Kim Wipes, step stools, Matlab software, or lasers. Everything has to be carefully inventoried, everything has to be purchased with attention to price and quality. 

Still, I've been waiting a week and a half for my full version of Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop and I AM GOING MAD. I COULD HAVE CRAWLED TO THE MAC STORE ON MY HANDS AND KNEES BY NOW. Sorry. Sorry. I know. There's a contract and it's in place to ensure we get it at the best price. I know. It's my tax dollars at work. I appreciate it. Hear that sound? No, it's not a sonic boom...it's my deadline, breaking the sound barrier as it whizzes past my desk and dear god I just need to modify this PDF...

Until there's a better way to purchase what we need, I would like to suggest something that would not speed up the process, but at least allow me the opportunity to channel my rage in the appropriate direction. 

Whenever a new control is put in place that causes me to wait additional time for an approval, I believe that the new approval process should be named after the jerk who caused the problem to begin with. 

For example, say I requisition a golf cart, a length of fiberglass tubing, and a twenty pound sack of Yukon Gold spuds using DARPA funds so I can careen around the lab with a potato gun shooting people who are wearing socks with sandals. 

Now, a new tuber control point will have to be put in place with an approval from the Department of Agriculture if I need to get some potato salad and sandwiches for an all day review of a project in which fifteen scientists will be locked in a room yelling at each other about the wording on Powerpoint slide number seventy-two. The side-order approval process should be called the "Allyson Beatrice Is An Ass" Control Point and available in the drop-down menu of my request form. 

This way, everyone will know who to hate on. Instead of being irritated with Joe Blow from the Goverment Aggie for taking two hours to get to my side-order request, we can commiserate on the unfairness of his additional job duty, having to interrogate secretaries about whether or not there will be paprika and mustard in the potato salad. It'd be like Team Building!

As an addendum to this rule, if I have to wait more than three days for software, the software contract should be named after the person who struck the deal, so I can send all of my work to that person to do until I get what I need to do my job. I think this would speed things up a lot. 

GUEST POST: Opening Skinner's Box

Jen-Luc Piquant and I are in Santa Fe all this week at the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, held annually for the past 14 years by New York Times writers George Johnson and Sandra Blakeslee. There will be forthcoming blog posts, oh yes, once this is over, but there's so much cool stuff going on here, actual writing will have to wait. In the meantime, we offer a couple of brief announcements and a guest post by my good friend, Erica Friedman, on Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box. But first:

The belles of the cocktail party proudly offered their musical selections to Non-Pretentious.com last week for their regular "Mix Tape" feature. (Jen-Luc Piquant was miffed to not be asked to contribute, but let's face it, she's awfully pretentious.) I was pleased with our eclectic selections, even though it was sad that two of my choices were not actually available on iTunes anymore. Quel Dommage! Check out our list, and leave your own fave geeky grooves in the comments.

Second, the National Academy of Science's Science and Entertainment Exchange now has its very own blog called (duh) The X-Change Files. The NAS staffers came up with an uber-cool design, and an accompanying clear and concise mission statement:

The X-Change Files explores the intersections of science and entertainment, regularly taking a look at the ways in which science is portrayed in film and television.  Given that science is often the basis for provocative and compelling storylines, we’ll also highlight the latest scientific discoveries.  Perhaps most importantly, we’ll examine the ways in which public opinion is shaped and behavior is changed by what people see on their television sets and in the movie theaters. Just as The Exchange bridges the gap between the screen and the lab, each of the posts to The X-Change Files will explore the synergy between scientists and filmmakers with an eye towards their unique ability to inspire one another.

And now, for your reading pleasure, I present Ms. Erica Friedman, tai-chi practicing blogger, editor, writer and publisher at Okazu.blogspot.com and Yuricon.org. (Fair warning: content on those last two links might be NSFW.)

* * * * * *

It was sixth grade. Mrs. Ziegler - an imposing and to some, terrifying, teacher - told us she was going to teach us how to write a proper research paper. We, she promised ominously, would have to do this when we got to high school, so we'd better learn how to write a good one now.

Writing a "good" research paper, we soon learned, meant writing almost exclusively in a passive voice with no inclusion of first person. "In conclusion, it can be seen from the previous research that...." Never "I conclude." We were told in no uncertain terms, that "we" had no place in research.

In Opening Skinner's Box, Lauren Slater commits a cardinal sin by putting the personal firmly, awkwardly, back into the middle of scientific research, as she touches on ten "Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century."

At first, Slater's habit of elaborating scenes with the slick feel and salty taste of sweat, the smell of bird scat, the feel of a cooling breeze upon the face of an experimental subject, is annoying beyond comprehension. Why should there still be the smell of *anything* in Skinner's Box, decades after anything has lived in it? Why should the smell of chlorine stick to the inside of our noses when reading about Rosenhan's diagnosis of the state of psychology in the early 70s? Why are we reading about the flowers blooming in Slater's garden or being told about her daughter when we are here to learn about Alexander's Rat Park?

By the end of the book, I would have gladly shaken Slater's hand, and thanked her daughter, as well, for adding in those scents and sounds, those emotions and physical reactions.

Without moments of intensely personal revelation, I'm not sure I would have been able to keep reading about Stanley Milgram and his study on obedience, in which 65% of subjects felt it possible to administer shocks of increasing strength all the way to apparently causing death to a complete stranger. Without moments of gentle humanity, I'm not sure if I could have kept reading about Harry Harlow, whose experiments on monkeys gave us key understanding about child-rearing but drove him to drink, despite his public disdain for the animals.

For me, personally, the most meaningful chapters touched upon Leon Festinger's study of cognitive dissonance and Elizabeth Loftus' experiments with planted memories. I am not, as you may have guessed, a scientist or a science writer. I live in a world of fantasy and imagination that is intensely important to the people that spend time with those imaginings. I am a writer, editor and publisher in a world of animation and comics. This is a world that is characterized by a great deal of cognitive dissonance - what I refer to in my own writings as Fan Delusion. So it was beyond fascinating to me to learn not only the how and why of these impulses to rewrite continuity to fit our own worldview but to, incidentally, gain some insight into my own delusions and use of cognitive dissonance in my relationships. (In short, I provide so little positive feedback to people that they convince themselves they like me, in order to justify the fact that they don't kill me. Or so I interpret the facts. My friends might have a different delusion.)

There is no doubt that Slater's book is provocative. It has garnered criticism from several key members of the psychological community, including Elizabeth Loftus, the subject of one of the chapters. The American Psychological Society Observer notes that researchers question the accuracy of at least one other of the chapters. And a quick search of book reviews for Skinner's Box shows a surprising lack of coverage in scientific or mainstream press. The New England Journal of Medicine appears to be the only major medical publication not afraid to face this book head on.

I can't even begin to conjecture what that says about either the book, or the reviewers. It's not unheard of for scientific books by women to be treated as popular potboilers - but this is a popular potboiler that asks some serious questions about science. For my part, the popular tech blog site Boing Boing said it well when it said that this is "one of those popular science books that leaves you feeling a lot smarter after you finish it. Specifically, it makes you feel smart enough to feel kind of dumb and humble."  (http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/22/opening-skinners-box.html)

In conclusion, as the previous paragraphs indicate, "Opening Skinner's Box" is, if not an accurate representation of Experimental Psychology, then certainly an entertaining, thought- and emotion-provoking experience.

And by the way, thank you Mrs. Ziegler - you were an awesome teacher. And I still write a mean research paper.

a new wrinkle

"What - did you grow up in a barn?", the Rocket Scientist sighed, rolling his eyes in-between picking up my soda bottle from his table and inserting a coaster underneath it.

You learn a lot about people from their offices.  My office is a barely controlled state of chaos, which pretty much mirrors the rest of my life.  The Rocket Scientist is the only faculty member I've ever known who keeps coasters in his office (and requires their use).  I'll let you figure out what a coaster fetish tells you about RS - I have my own theories, but (ignoring for the moment the fact that we work for a public university and all our furniture is laminate) there actually are really good reasons for one to use coasters.

The cool liquid in glass condenses water from the air onto the glass.  The water rolls down the glass onto the wood table and produces a white ring that doesn't wipe off.  Removing that ghastly mark of shame requires esoteric cleaning approaches, like a warm iron applied to a towel over the damaged area or rubbing with toothpaste. 

But these fixes usually work only when the damage is confined to the top layer of the finish. Most real wood furniture is stained - pigment is absorbed into the wood fibers and the solvent (the stuff in which the pigment is suspended) evaporates. The furniture is then coated with something to protect the finish.  Back in the day, they used penetrating oil, which is absorbed into the very top layers of the wood, and/or coated the whole thing with a paste wax (sort of like like the plastic that covers certain types of cheeses).  The final layer is a barrier between the wood and the elements, but the finish can also affect the appearance of the furniture.

Light behaves really nicely when it hits a smooth, flat surface, which is called specular reflection.  (Remember "the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection"?) Specular reflection gives you a nice clean reflection. The smoother the surface, the more specular the reflection, which is why you want a blemish-free top layer.  The smoother the finish, the more mirror-like the reflection.  For example, the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror has a surface smooth to within about half a millionth of an inch.  The mirror you carry in your purse is nowhere near that precise, but it still has to be pretty smooth to ensure that you don't feel like you're at a circus fun house.

A rough coating produces distortion and diffuse reflection. The light hits the rough surface and goes every which way, mucking up the reflection. ('Mucking' being a scientific term.) If you put the same paint on a smooth wall and a textured wall, it can look like two totally different colors because the surfaces reflect differently. Gloss paint tends to produce more specular reflection and matte paint more diffuse reflection. Diffuse reflections are less focused.  The old camera trick of filming through a piece of gauze works because the gauze diffuses the light and softens the image.

Polyurethane is not nearly as fancy as penetrating oil or paste wax, but you can put one or two coats on a piece of furniture and be done with it (compared to the ten or twelve you might need for something like tung oil).  Polyurethane is clear, so you don't have to worry about what your protectant is going to do to the stain color you so carefully chose.  When you look at the furniture, the polyurethane has little impact on what you see.  Light travels into your perfectly smooth furniture coating, refracts a little at the interface between the polyurethane and the air (as shown at right), hits the actual wood, and then comes out again , refracting back an equal amount at the second poly-air interface. Theta-i equals theta-r and everything is clear.

A scratch or other imperfection in the top coating makes the reflection more diffuse.  Instead of passing through the polyurethane as if it weren't there, light can reflect from the surfaces created by the imperfections in the top layer. When water is absorbed into the surface layer that protects the wood, it creates imperfections in what ought to be a transparent layer.  Those imperfections are responsible for the white ring.

When you put a warm iron onto a cloth over the wood, you transfer heat to the piece of furniture.  That does two things.  First, if there's any moisture left, the heat will help evaporate it.  Second, you soften the topcoat  enough that it smooths itself out.  When polyurethane is heated, it flows and evens out any roughness or irregularities.  If you've ever soldered something, you know that when you heat the solder, it liquefies and forms a nice smooth surface. If you don't want to take an iron to your grandmother's heirloom dining room table, buffing with an abrasive (like white toothpaste) also helps to even out the surface and decrease all those disorganized reflections.  I've also seen suggestions to rub with alcohol, which I think is a mild solvent for a lot of surface finishes, but if you use too much or rub too hard, you'll remove too much of the finish and that area will become a different color (especially if the finish is old and it's become darker).  If you've actually damaged the wood, none of these will work and you're going to have to remove the finish, fix the wood and then re-finish it.  The same goes for scratches - as long as the scratches are confined to the surface layer.

So what do the artisans and craftspeople who make fine furniture have in common with pitchman Billy Mays and his latest product that fixes scratches on cars?  He keys a car, then takes a little tube that applies a clear liquid, runs it over the scratch and voila! - the scratch is gone.  It works for any color car because cars are finished very similarly to furniture.  The base color is applied and then a number of clearcoats are put over the top.  As long as you don't scratch deeply enough to hit the color layer, the scratches you see are just because the clearcoat isn't smooth anymore.  The tool he uses applies a combination of a resin that is compatible with the clearcoat and a solvent.  The solvent melts a little of the clearcoat and the resin fills in the material that was removed by the scratching process.  The little foam applicator helps smooth out the surface.  That's why you don't need different product for different colors - you're only fixing the coating. 

And while we're talking about finishes and reflection, I'm still musing over the amazing things a professional can do with makeup - which I got to learn about from my experience with The Science of Speed video series.  A wrinkle in your skin is (from the point of view of a physicist, at least) really not very different than a scratch in a car's finish.  Over the couple sets of filming sessions, I had so much attention to my face that I became acutely aware of wrinkles I didn't know I had. The warm iron idea clearly is not going to work here and if we apply alcohol anywhere to fix that problem, I'm pretty sure internally is the only way to go.  This introduced me to the miracles of foundation.

Foundation has two purposes: hiding variations in color (like blemishes and age spots) and hiding the canonical "fine lines and wrinkles".  Some foundation is opaque cream or liquid that contains pigment particles - usually platelets - that cover your skin.  The platelets are opaque, so what you see is not your skin, it's the pigment from the foundation.  This type of foundation makes the skin very uniform in color because you're essentially covering up the skin with paint. 

Making the foundation more translucent requires decreasing the amount of pigment, but less pigment means less color correction. To make it worse, the pigments - which are often metal oxides of nano or micro scale dimensions - can actually collect in those 'fine lines', so some makeup actually makes lines look more pronounced if you don't touch it up every five minutes.

In contrast to covering up the skin entirely, some foundation is designed to make you more 'luminous'.  This makeup uses spherical microspheres (or nanospheres) made of silicas, polyethylene, or polymethylmethacrylate ("PMMA") that are very good at scattering light.  The idea is that the overall appearance of the skin is somewhat blurred by the makeup.  It's called the 'soft-focus effect'.  The problem is that these little particles work because they are transparent enough that light passes through them before reflecting.  That means you're seeing the actual skin, although you're seeing it through a blurry optical filter.  So if you have a pimple, someone looking at you sees a slightly blurry pimple because the particles aren't opaque enough to cover it.

You can guess what the next generation of foundation contains: opaque pigments combined with light-diffusing particles.  That can be done by using the traditional metal oxide opaque pigments like aluminum oxide and iron oxides and adding some less-opaque particles to produce the soft-focus effect. To the right, I've shown on top a flat pigment particle coated with tiny light-diffusing spheres. 

Flat pigments have the advantage of lying flat on the surface of the face;  however, spherical particles tend to be sensed as smoother and more desirable by consumers.  Some formulations either put the diffusing particles on the outside of a larger pigment particle (lower left), or use core-shell particles (lower right on the picture) with the opaque pigment on the inside and the diffusive part on the outside.  You can even make multiple layers for your opaque pigment and design it so that it reflects more green or blue or red, depending on the type of skin you're trying to correct, or mix different types of beads.  If you've ever wondered why cosmetics ads always use the phrase "reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles", that's because those products don't actually do anything to fix your wrinkles - they just make them less noticeable.

The moral?  For furniture and cars, beauty may be only skin deep, but when it comes to people, beauty sometimes isn't even skin deep.

nananananananananana batgrrl!

My life had been awfully unreasonable for awhile, but things seem to be going much better. After a scary job scare, I'm back at JPL next week. It's a good thing, I'll have more time to write and more scientists to entertain. I've been toying with the idea of putting together an essay collection on my experiences in science, you know, from a laygrrl's perspective, and I'll be soaking in the Petri dish.

For now, I'm still focused on bats. 

I set out to write a children's book that took place solely under the night sky, and anthropomorphize an animal that isn't usually thought of as loveable. Outside of the classic Stellaluna, bats are seldom portrayed as the adorable little squeakers that they actually are.  They used to give me hella creeps. For good reason.  I shall explain...

One night about 15 years ago, I was driving home from work, when a bat was apparently knocked out of the sky by a predator. Odds being against me as usual, the bat somehow managed to get sucked into the window of my car, whacked me in the face, and died on my passenger seat.

I panicked, got out of the car (yes, I stopped the car first, PEDANTS), and waited for a very long time until a nice policeman stopped to help me remove the bat.

A few years ago, a hawk of some kind (I'll go with a red-tail, though I've grown rusty in the bird-nerd department) knocked a seagull out of the air while I was speeding down the 5 freeway. The gull's body sliced my car antennae in half, and I was grateful it wasn't my windshield. 

If this trend continues, a rhino will chase an ostrich out of the brush along the 210, slam onto my hood, and that is how I will die. 

However, given my need for a nocturnal hero who would travel the world in search of a colony and experience a sort of Goldilocks conundrum Flying Foxes are TOO BIG, Vampire bats are TOO WEIRD), I had to get over my issues and learn to love bats. 

I began my research the old fashioned way: I typed "California bats" into the Google hole in the browser. This fantastic bit of laziness brought me the Mexican free-tail, a charmingly wee critter that lives in massive colonies throughout the Southwest, including the fantastic Congress St. Bridge Colony  in Austin, Texas, and of course the Carlsbad Cavern colony. 

I named my bat Sam, after my co-author on the project. It seemed like a good name for a bat. 

To further my research, I planned a trip to Texas A&M so I could visit the bat lab and also take a trip to see a Free-tail colony emerge from under a bridge, but a nasty hurricane canceled my flight and I haven't had the opportunity to reschedule. I wrote to some researchers, and had an email back-and-forth with the rescue folks at the Isle of Wight Bat Hospital in the UK, to find out what my Sam would experience if he was brought to them with a broken wing. Lovely folks who indulged me with good cheer.

The random bat facts my research brought to me:

Mexican-freetail bats can live to be about fifteen years, and have one pup per year.

Baby freetail bats sing their own special little song so that their mothers can find them in the cave. 

Mexican long-nosed bats pollinate the agave plant, similar to the way a hummingbird drinks nectar. Raise your shot of tequila and give thanks. 

Bat poo (guano) is extremely high in nitrogen, making it an excellent fertilizer and bomb ingredient. 

A large Mexican free-tail colony, like the 20-million strong Bracken colony can eat about 250 tons of pesky crop-destroying insects a night. I didn't double-check this fact. Two hundred and fifty tons is very heavy. That's one hundred and twenty-five rhinos chasing ostriches onto the 210 into the path of my speeding car. 

Vampire bats actually RUN. 

An occupied bat house will keep the skeeters out of your backyard.

Ricky Gervais  knows a lot of shit about bats.

People? Still jerks

So I wrote, my co-author wrote, and our bat traveled the globe doing all sorts of fantastic things. We carefully researched how fast he could fly (our little guy's species has been clocked at 60MPH), how high (the highest flying bat at altitudes over 10,000 ft), and what a moth might taste like to a bat (I went with a stale powdered jelly doughnut, for texture reasons).

Legendary comic book artist Dave Dorman was generous enough to supply some artwork for my book proposal, here's a peek at the ink:

>I've no idea if the book will sell, it's my first attempt at fiction, and it may sucketh mightily. Or not. The research part was fun, though I really wished I could have figured out a way to get to hold a baby bat and examine one up close. You know, one that hadn't decked me in the forehead before meeting its doom in my crappy Mercury Bobcat in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts. I forgive you, little bat. It totally wasn't your fault. 

The seagull is still suspect.

history in hand

The science blogosphere was buzzing early last week as news of President Obama's address to the National Academy of Sciences hit the airwaves. And what a long-overdue affirmation of science that address turned out to be. (You can find the complete transcript, with photos, video and audio, here.) After eight long years of scientists being ignored, ridiculed, and sometimes outright harassed or pressured into changing their conclusions for political expediency, we finally have someone in office who understands and respects how critically important the scientific enterprise is to our nation's continued well-being.

And he has the oratorical gifts and personal charisma to passionately make the case for science to the public at large. A friend of mine has joked about Obama's uncanny ability to, in effect, sprinkle fairy dust all over everyone to bring them around to his way of thinking. There's a bit of truth to that cynical remark, which to my mind, serves to underscore the importance of having a strong, articulate communicator in the Oval Office who can advocate for science. (We want skilled orators working for us, not against us.)

Obama hit all the right notes for those of us who have watched with dismay as science has been pushed further and further into the shadows. He bemoaned the steady decline in federal funding in the physical sciences as a portion of US gross domestic product -- over the last 25 years, it's fallen by almost 50%, and the crucial research and experimentation tax credit, which encourages business to take risks and innovate, keeps lapsing at the whims of policymakers. He pointed out the adverse impact this has had on American global competitiveness, and on education, as US students routinely are overshadowed in math and science by their counterparts in other countries (notably Singapore, Japan, England, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Korea).

Showing once again his strong grasp of history, Obama deftly tied the foundation of the NAS by Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War to our current need to invest in our nation's future despite facing enormous fiscal challenges. Perhaps the comment that elicited the most cheers was this: "We have watched as scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas." Speak it, Mr. President!

Obama has a plan for science. Part of it involves making the aforementioned research and experimentation tax credit permanent, in hopes of encouraging businesses to strive for game-changing innovation, rather than maintaining the status quo. (Compare Apple Inc, which is doing pretty well despite the economc downturn, thanks very much, with, say, Chrysler, which is filing for bankruptcy.) Part of it involves increased funding for math and science education. Most encouraging of all, is that Obama is calling for the federal government to devote more than three percent of our GDP to research and development. We currently spend 1% or less of GDP on R&D.

Whether or not this administration can accomplish such a feat in these difficult economic times remains to be seen. The federal budget is already groaning under the countless other burdens heaped upon it by one of the longest and steepest recessions in recent history, and the national debt is so high I can't even count all the zeros. So converting pretty words into concrete action in the face of all that is no small feat, and will be the true test of the Obama administration. I appreciate the sentiment, though, and agree that investing in scientific research is a wise use of our increasingly limited financial resources -- technological innovation tends to create new markets, and has fueled much of US economic growth over the last 30 years. Renewed investment could very well lead us back to a strong economy. In time.

I was actually in DC for the annual meeting, although the NAS auditorium was far too packed to allow me to see the President in person. However, thanks to the glories of the Interwebs, I and millions of others around the world had the chance to watch the President's address online. That should have driven home his points about the game-changing impact of S&T more than his impressive oratorical skills. After all, it was advances in science -- both incremental and revolutionary breakthroughs, over hundreds of years -- that made this kind of mass communication possible, and it never ceases to amaze me how much we take these wonders for granted. The comedian Louis CK riffed on this phenomenon of spoiled entitlement in this bit from his appearance on Conan O'Brien last year:

Okay, I admit I've been one of those people grousing about unpleasant airplane flights, completely forgetting to pause a moment and marvel, "Holy crap, I'm actually flying!" But I'm still capable of being awed by the capabilities of my iPhone, for example, because like Louis CK, I too can remember those horrible rotary dial phones -- not to mention the huge cell phone prototypes that first emerged in the 1980s (they show up in films from that period, and now seem laughably dated). Of all the things that have been lost by the nation's dwindling support of science, perhaps that shared sense of wonder is the greatest. I'm stunned by folks who spew anti-science rhetoric while mindlessly reaping the benefits of centuries of research and development, all without batting an eye -- especially if they're doing it over radio or television, or on the Internet (all the result of countless scientists toiling away in their laboratories, adhering to the scientific method).

Perhaps, as Louis CK says, these people should be forced to give up their cars, cell phones, computers, TVs, radios, MP3 players, stereos, digital cameras, video camcorders, microwaves, vacuum cleaners, washer/dryers, garage door openers, refrigerators (the Carnot cycle in action!), and so forth, and go back to living in the Stone Age until they get over their sense of entitlement. We benefit from science every single day, in countless ways, and never realize it. Without science, there would be no plastics, no carbonated beverages, no Teflon coated pans, no Segways or dirt bikes, and -- for my fellow gastronomes -- no nifty molecular gastronomy techniques for creating foods with weird textures using liquid nitrogen. (Imagine: a world without Alinea and the anti-griddle! The horror!)

There would be no antibiotics, either, to help clear up infections. No aspirin/analgesics, no thermometers, no X-rays, or MRIs, or ultrasound imaging, or cutting-edge cancer treatments, or life support systems to keep your heart pumping on the off-chance you come out of that coma. Oh, and no handy over-the-counter pregnancy tests or insulin kits for diabetics to monitor their blood sugar levels, either. There's a reason average human life expectancy is longer than it's every been: science has been working tirelessly on our behalf. (Some may argue that this longer life-expectancy is a contributing factor to our dwindling resources. That may be true, but I don't see those same people offering to shuffle off this mortal coil early to benefit the greater good. I personally intend to go out kicking and screaming and begging for one last ride on the great roller coaster of life.)

I mentioned my appreciation for the iPhone. It's not just because it's a sleek, chic gadget that can keep me connected to friends, family, and the World Wide Web wherever I can get a signal (i.e., pretty much everywhere). And it's not just because it can hold 150 of my favorite tunes. It also holds at least 150 years' worth of physics history, right there in the palm of my hand. As I pointed out in a 2007 post honoring the awarding of the Nobel Prize for giant magnetoresistance (GMR):

"Of course, if you really want to be all fundamental about it, this year's Nobel Prize in Physics has roots stretching all the way back to 900 BC, when a Greek shepherd named Magnes supposedly walked across a field of black stones, which pulled the iron nails out his sandals. He dubbed the region Magnesia. That's the legend, anyway, and who are we to argue about it?"

I went on to talk about the seminal work of Hans Christian Oersted and Michael Faraday, not to mention James Clerk Maxwell, who formalized Faraday's ideas into an actual set of equations that are now a staple of college physics courses. In fact, I'd argue that you could probably build an entire course around the "Science of the iPhone," and cover a lot of that same material in a concrete, real-world context. Maybe then those students would appreciate the scientists who gave them their iPhones and other gadgets a little more. For instance, they could learn about Benjamin Franklin and countless others who experimented with electricity in the 1700s -- at least one of whom was killed by ball lightning. R.I.P., Wilhelm Reichmann. And they would come out of college knowing the name of William Gilbert, an English physicist in 1600 who noticed that friction (rubbing one object against another) could create "electricity." (The effect had been known since around 600 BC, but was limited to amber rubbed against, say, fur. Gilbert noticed this phenomenon also extended to other objects and was not a specific magical property of amber.)

What else is covered by the science of the iPhone? Let's not forget the invention of the first telephone itself, wherein numerous inventors (Thomas Edison, Elisha Gray, and Alexander Graham Bell among them) raced to be the first to construct a device that could convert the mechanical energy of sound waves into an electrical transmission, send that signal over a wire, and reconvert it back into sound on the other end. By then, there had been sufficient technological developments -- notably the battery and electromagnet -- that such a device was feasible.

Bell won the patent race, beating out Gray by submitting his application just a few hours earlier on the same day: February 14, 1876. (The diagram below is Bell's original sketch of his concept. He may have been a brilliant inventor, but a skilled draftsman he was not.) And Bell won over the history books; he's listed in countless sources as the inventor of the telephone. It's not quite true, however; technically, he achieved the "first documented transmission of human speech" over a telephone wire, and received the first patent. There's evidence, however, that he had a little help on that score.

See, an Italian immigrant named Antonio Meucci invented a telephonic device way back in 1849; he was just too poor to be able to afford the $250 patent application fee. All he managed was filing a notice of intent in December 1871, along with a prototype model of his device. When he heard about Bell's patent application, Meucci hired a lawyer to fight back, only to find that his prior documentary had been mysteriously lost. The suspicion is that there were illegal relationships between employees in the US Patent Office and at Bell's company working behind the scenes to ensure Bell's patent claim was upheld.

Life is perennially unfair in that respect. Bell was wealthier and a far more prominent personage, so he won the court case that ensued. Meucci died as destitute as he had lived. Congress officially credited him with inventing the telephone on June 15, 2002. Better late than never, I guess. That said, Bell had studied sound and vibration for much of his life -- his grandfather was an elocutionist, his mother was deaf, and his father invented the first international phonetic alphabet for the deaf -- so it's likely that he arrived at his invention independently, even if he obtained his patent in a less than ethical manner.

Lots of folks were working on similar devices based on the same underlying principles. There was quite a lot of low-hanging technological fruit in the late 19th century, and competition to be the first to file a patent and make money off one's inventions was fierce. Consider the nasty attacks Edison leveled at Nikola Tesla over DC (direct current) versus AC (alternating current) electricity. Tesla also became embroiled in a battle for supremacy in wireless radio with Guglielmo Marconi -- another critical development in the long road to achieving the iPhone. Marconi claimed to have invented a "black box" -- basically a spark transmitter with an antenna -- in Italy in December 1894, but he didn't give a public demonstration of his device until he arrived in London in 1896. Meanwhile, Tesla had already demonstrated radio communication in St. Louis, Missouri, the year before.

Tesla patented a wireless device in 1897, but Marconi is the one who turned the fledgling technology into a major industry, sharing the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics and becoming known as the "father of wireless communications." Tesla's contributions were ignored. Marconi died a wealthy man, while Tesla died penniless (and a bit crazy). Further complicating history is the fact that Bell apparently transmitted the first wireless telephone message using his prototype "photophone" a good 13 years before Tesla gave his first public demonstration of wireless technology using radio waves -- yet Bell's work is almost never mentioned in most historical accounts of the birth of wireless. (Payback for cheating Meucci out of the patent for a telephone? Sometimes Karma is a bitch.) Bell's photophone transmitted sound on a beam of light, making it the progenitor of modern fiber-optic telecommunications. Bell may have been a crass opportunist, but he was also a genuine visionary.

We can take pictures with our iPhones, play music, and watch videos, so toss in the history of photography, the phonograph, and the television, not to mention the digitization and miniaturization of all those media outlets. Microelectronics meant that receivers, microphones, digital cameras, wireless antennae, etc., could shrink to fit into a handheld device, beginning with the invention of the integrated circuit at Bell Labs. That's not counting the development of cutting-edge lithographic techniques capable of etching ever-smaller features on silicon chips, and advances in semiconductor materials research, not to mention GMR, which has made it possible to cram tons more data into ever tinier gadgets.

And let's not forget the inventor of the first cell phone: Martin Cooper. As a project manager at Motorola, he was the fist one to make a call and speak on his mobile phone back in 1973, and admits he was inspired by the handheld communication devices employed by Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew members on Star Trek. However, Bell Labs and AT&T jointly came up with the underlying technology for making cell phones feasible back in 1947: hexagonal cells for mobile phone base stations. Before then, certain privileged folks relied on radiophones, thus being forced to haul around a large backpack device to transmit the phone's signal to nearby stations. Cooper longed for a truly mobile phone, so he invented one, although it took another 25 years or so for cell phones to resemble the communicators on Star Trek.

What made the iPhone an instant sensation with consumers long accustomed to portable cell phones and PDAs was its revolutionary multi-touch-screen technology. (I personally find my Blackberry awkward and ungainly to use, and to those who can't live without their "Crackberries," I would just point out that even Blackberry has come out with a new model employing the touch screen technology. So there.) It's so simple, and that's the genius of the concept.  Touch screens on most PDAs work because there's a layer of capacitive material to hold an electrical charge; touch the screen, and you change the amount of charge at a specific point of contact. In some models, it's the pressure from your finger that causes conductive and resistive layers of circuitry to touch each other, changing the circuits' resistance.

The problem with the conventional touch screens is that they only locate a single touch; the system just couldn't deal with touching the screen in more than spot. The iPhone's touch screen is able to respond to both touch points and their movements simultaneously. It has the same layer of capacitive material, except with the iPhone, said capacitors are arranged as part of a coordinate system, or grid, and the circuitry can detect changes at each point along that grid. Every point generates its own signal when touched and relays that signal to the iPhone's processor, and that's that's why you can enlarge or shrink a photo by a small outward sweeping motion of one's fingers, or by pinching thumb and forefinger together.

The Next Big Thing could be Microsoft's Tabletop PC, similar to the fictional wall computer featured in the film Minority Report whereby images and data could be manipulated by touch. The actual Tabletop PC itself made a cameo in last December's The Day the Earth Stood Still. It's the iPhone's touch screen technology writ large.

Should you become bored downloading all those killer apps for your iPhone, I learned recently via io9 that it's now possible to turn your iPhone into something resembling the Star Trek medical tricorder. No, really. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have a technology that requires a simple USB plug-in to turn the average SmartPhone into a handheld imaging scanner to perform ultrasound poces, image the kidneys and bladder, even perform prostate and uterine screenings. Actually, come to think of it, the plug-in only works with Windows, so it won't be hitting the Apps Store anytime soon. That's just as well, because when random people in bars can start comparing their prostates and kidneys, we've officially entered the realm of Too Much Information. Stay classy, people.