Cocktail Party Physics

coming clean

My NASCAR life has been a little depressing lately because instead of talking about clever feats of engineering, we've been fixated on drug testing.  Over at stockcarscience.com, I've been figuring out the difference between left-handed and right-handed forms of methamphetamine. So I'm happy to talk about something a little more straightforward, because I can look at ephedrine and pseudoephedrine molecules for hours and still not be quite sure about exactly how they differ.
Ever since my post about lead sulfide particles being used to darken hair, I've been compulsively reading ingredients on my hair care products.  When an ingredient in my shampoo is the same as something I saw an invoice for in the lab, I feel like I ought to check it out.  In this case, the offender is SDS - sodium dodecyl sulfate, also known as sodium lauryl sulfate.  SDS is a surfactant, which is a contraction of surface active agent.  Surfactant molecules are usually long chain molecules with a hydrocarbon backbone and a head.  SDS, for example, has a tail of 12 carbon atoms with a sodium and a sulfate group at the head. 

Surfactants are the Jimmy Carters of the chemical world:  they try to make everything get along, even oil and water.  The head end of most surfactants is hydrophilic, meaning that it really likes water molecules.  The tail is hydrophobic, or water hating. 

The key to surfactants is that the two ends of the molecule have different proclivities.  One likes water and one likes oil.  The surfactant molecule acquires this split personality due to charge sharing.  One end of the molecule has more negative charge and the other has more positive charge.  (See Naveen's comment below and check out http://gold.cchem.berkeley.edu/research_twofaces.html for a really good discussion of the topic.)  The hydrophilic end of the molecule likes hydrogen bonding.  Hydrogen bonding is when an electronegative atom and a hydrogen that is bonded to a different electronegative atom feel an attractive force due to the interaction between the dipole moments.  So when you put SDS in water, it will orient itself (when in the right concentrations) so that the tails all stick out into the water, where they can engage in transient hydrogen bonding, and the heads all stick together, making a micelle.

Water and oil, of course, don't like each other.  If you mix the two, they refuse to have anything to do with each other.  Like a party I hosted recently, the oil-like guests go off in one corner of the family room and the water-like guests go off to the furthest corner they can find and refuse to mingle. Physicists call this phase separation.  Hostesses call this a disaster.  Enter the surfactant.

The hydrophobic ends of the surfactant molecules are happy to hang out with the oil-like guests, while the hydrophilic ends of the surfactant are happy to hang out with the water-like guests.  If enough surfactant molecules surround an oily group, they can move the oily group out into the middle of the floor.  Mind you, the oil and water components are still not in direct contact - they form an emulsion - small bits of one phase in another phase.  This is important in food as well as in cleaning.  Vinaigrette, for example, is an emulsion of oil and vinegar. The reason you have to whisk it so hard and drizzle in the oil is because the oil and the vinegar really don't care to mingle.  Mayonnaise is an oil-water emulsion, with the mediating role played by lecithin, which is provided by egg yolks.

Soaps and detergents are both surfactants.  The difference is that soaps are generally made using 'natural' ingredients and detergents are made from synthetic ingredients.  The original recipe for soap is to mix fat and ashes from a fireplace.  The alkali in the ashes combines with the oils to form soap and water.  A similar process is used to create detergents, but the starting materials generally come from bottles instead of directly from plants and animals.  Soaps are biodegradable; however, they combine with minerals in hard water (magnesium, calcium, etc.) and form a nasty scum that sticks in your bathtub and to your clothes.  Soap doesn't wash out as well and can build up on clothing.  Traditional soaps work best at high pH (alkaline) - while surfactants can be engineered to work over a range of pHs.  Most of those used for skin are designed to work best at the skin's natural pH of 5.5.

Regardless of whether you use soap or detergent, the surfactants play an important role.   Water really likes itself.  Given the chance, water will form droplets, which is the result of the molecules trying to form as compact a surface as possible.  You want this to happen on your car, but not in the washing machine.  Surfactants decrease the surface tension of water, allowing the water to soak into the clothing better. 

Although all surfactants have the same hydrophilic/phobic split personality, there are some differences between them.  Anionic surfactants are those in which there is a net negative charge, like SDS, Sodium Lauroyl Lactylate and Disodium laureth sulfosuccinate.  Anionic surfactants really good at removing dirt.  The surfactants surround oily dirt particles that the water would normally avoid and wash right over. Because the water hating end of the surfactant latches onto the direct, the water loving end sticks out.  When water rushes over it, the surfactant pulls the dirt particle away and takes it down the drain.

Cationic surfactants aren't as good at cleaning.  They have a net positive charge and are chemicals like olealkonium chloride, cetrimonium chloride and distearyldimonium chloride.  Although they don't clean as well, they are good at sticking to clean surfaces, so they are found in conditioners, moisturizers, etc. Non-ionics (surfactants with no net charge) do a lot of different things, from cleaning to making the shampoo thicker to making the foam longer lasting.  Amphoteric surfactants are the switch hitters.  They are often used to make a product foamier, but they can help clean and thicken the product.  These are ingredients like Cocoamidopropyl Betaine, Lauramine Oxide or Cocamidopropyl Hydroxysultaine.

You might not think foam is important, but it is for two reasons.  First, we've all been conditioned (sorry) to associate foam with cleaning.  When companies first put out liquid laundry detergents that didn't foam, people perceived that they didn't clean as well - even though objectively, they were very good at removing dirt.  Secondly, top-loading clothes washers work better when you have a lot of foam.  The bubbles trap the dirt and keep it from re-depositing on your clothing.  Front-loading washers don't want bubbles becuase they improve cleaning by hitting the clothing against the tub wall as it tosses it.  Bubbles cushion the impact and reduce the cleaning ability.  So the 'special detergent for front-loading washers' thing isn't just a way to get you spend more money.

Of course, it's not that simple, otherwise the ingredient list on the shampoo bottle wouldn't take up half the surface area.  Some of the ingredients are functional and others are quite literally just for looks.  We like shampoos to be clear (not cloudy) and thick and smell nice. The pH is also important.

Hair has overlapping scales. (The picture to the right is from http://www.vcbio.science.ru.nl/images/fesem_hair001.jpg) and shows a nice healthy piece of hair.)  If the shampoo and/or conditioner is slightly acidic (ph 5.5 to 6.5, where 7 is neutral), then the scales get smoothed over and the hair lies nicely.  If the pH isn't right, the scales are raised, making the hair look dull (diffuse reflection!) and feel rough.  The raised scales can catch on the scales of other hair, forming tangles and snarls.

We've come up with all kinds of things to remove dirt, but it would be easiest if we could just create materials that dirt won't stick to.  In addition, it would be really cool if we could make a material that also wouldn't get wet.  In otherwords, our ideal material would repel water and oil.  You may have seen materials that repel water, but that's the easy part of this trick.  Water has a very high surface tension, so it likes balling up.  Oils, on the other hand, have very low surface tension (often 4-5 times less than water), so they like to soak into surfaces like fabrics.  Leave it to Robert Cohen's group at MIT to create something that is omniphobic - it repels water and oil.

Their surface is an array of toadstood-like structures with stems are make from silicon and the 10-micron-wide, third-of-a-micro tall caps from silicon dioxide.  10 microns is the size of the line in the picture of the hair above.  The structures are called microhoodoos, as they resemble small hoodoos, a geological feature that results from erosion.  Oil and water both 'bead up' when confronted with this surface.  The structures balance the forces of gravity (which want droplets to lie flat) with surface tension, allowing oils and high-surface-tension waters like liquids to ball up.

As soon as they figure out how to make a kitchen apron from this stuff, I'll be the first one to buy it.

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.

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.

crown jewels

They say that diamonds are a girl's best friend, but actually, it depends upon the girl in question. Jen-Luc Piquant, for instance, prefers emeralds and sapphires as adornments to her fine pixelated self -- although she likes the occasional splash of diamond in her tiara, and she wouldn't say no to a rare blue or yellow diamond should a well-heeled virtual Cyber-suitor offer one to her. I, on the other hand, have quirkier tastes. True, I adore the wedding ring the Spousal Unit chose for me, but it's as much for the unique asymmetry of the piece -- designed to sit at an elegant angle on my finger -- as for the three very pretty diamonds arranged therein. And whenever I check out the window displays of high-end jewelry stores, the glittering wares -- many retailing for tens of thousands of dollars -- strike me as garish, and frankly leave me cold.

Truth be told, I prefer the less flashy, more natural stones. Rubies? All but the most expensive varieties tend to be pinkish in tone. Give me the rich deep red of the mundane garnet any day. Like my good friend Peri, I am enthralled by opals, a.k.a., Nature's home-grown photonic crystals -- about which I have written extensively. Fine turquoise can be counted upon to catch my eye if it's in an unusual setting, and especially if it's the coveted Bixbee Blue variety native to the copper mines of Arizona:

Even better is the deeper, darker blue of lapis lazuli; jasper; malachite; jade; and quartz, which has the added value of being piezoelectric. But sterling silver and semi-precious stones are just a small part of Nature's jewelry-inspiring bounty. For instance, I occasionally wear a pretty dragonfly pendant -- real laminated dragonfly wings set into a silver "body" -- that never fails to elicit admiration from like-minded women. We are legion. As with our shoes, we like our jewelry to reflect our individuality, as well as accessorizing our outfits. If, like me, you love jewelry that reflects your love of science, rejoice! There are some truly unique offerings out there these days.

By far my favorite pieces in my own jewelry box are a matching sterling silver set based on ammonite fossils: pendant, cuff bracelet, and ring. Ammonites are extinct marine creatures especially prevalent in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods (they went extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago). They look a lot like the modern Nautilus, but are actually more closely related as a species to octopus, squid and cuttlefish. Sometimes they are even iridescent, if conditions have helped preserve their mother-of-pearl coatings; in rare instances, they can be polished to resemble gemstones. I bought my pieces years ago, and was pleased to find business is still thriving for a similar online store specializing in unique fossil jewelry. There's a lovely pendant with black onyx and Moroccan ammonite (pictured below), for instance, and a cephalopod fossil ring (PZ Myers could present it as gift to his infamous Trophy Wife). 

Ammonite appeals to me on so many levels: visually, on a tactile level, plus it has a long, rich mythological history. The creatures owe their name to Pliny the Elder (who died around 79 AD); he called them ammonis cornua ("horns of Ammon") because the Egyptian god Ammon was frequently shown wearing ram's horns and ammonites are tightly coiled like ram's horns. They are revered in the Hindu religion, and were known as "snakestones" in medieval Europe since they were believed to be petrified snakes -- the result of divine acts of intervention perpetrated by Saint Hilda or Saint Patrick. Personally, I covet this custom-made silver bracelet with semi-precious stones and ammonite fossils, even though it's already been snatched up by some lucky woman (hey, at least I saved $630).

 

If ammonite just isn't your thing, there's plenty of other styles from which to choose. The best known science-themed jewelry maker (and it's even affordable) in science blog circles is Molecular Muse, which made a splash a couple of years ago when it debuted its series of pendants and earrings based on popular molecules: caffeine, for instance, and serotonin, not to mention cocoa and resveratrol. The latter is a molecule commonly found in the skin of grapes, and thus, red wine -- which several studies have shown may reduce the risk of cancer when consumed in moderation. Plus it makes an awfully pretty necklace (note the garnet teardrop at the tip):

Jessica of Bioephemera (one of my favorite blogs) has an especially keen eye for this sort of thing. Check out her recent post spotlighting the wares of Nervous System, a jewelry company founded by two MIT grads. The pieces combine "nontraditional materials like silicone rubber and stainless steel with rapid prototyping methods," and find "inspiration in complex patters generated by computation and nature." Jessica picked this algae filament necklace to highlight: 

Ah, but she outdid herself this past week by digging up a truly unique find: bejewelled sterling silver "skeleton hands," half bracelet, half gauntlet, retailing at a paltry $24K courtesy of Delfina Delettrez. One word: WANT!!! Oh, Delfina, why do you tempt me so? Until the Spousal Unit and I win the lottery, I must admire longingly from afar. The only thing cooler would be my very own Witchblade.

But for all my love of semi-precious stones, ideally I'd like my jewelry to be at least somewhat sustainable. So I was thrilled when noted entomologist May Berenbaum (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) contacted me a few weeks ago about an organization called Conservation through Poverty Alleviation International (CPALI), dedicated to developing wild silks as sustainable renewable income sources in Madagascar. Madagascar, as you may know, is a "hotspot" of biodiversity, and 90% of its species dwell in its forests, which are at risk from the "slash and burn" agricultural practices; apparently less than 10% of the original forest remains. The production of yarns and silks could provide an alternative to impoverished local farmers for generating income in a way that does not, in the long run, destroy their livelihood (not to mention all manner of rare species).

Moth silk in particular shows promise as a raw material for unique textiles and jewelry and other decorative objects, although at the moment, production isn't high enough for this to be a realistic thriving business. Market demand needs to be developed. To that end, CPALI now has an online store, Rainforest Silk, which sells a few head scarves and shawls spun from moth silk. Some truly lovely patterns can be woven using silk harvested from three species of moth (Atherina suraka, Hypsoides singularis, and "ginger" Borocera):

May also sent me some photos of truly eye-catching (and sustainable!) jewelry incorporating moth silk and cocoons. Like this ethereal Tim-Burton-esque set of earrings (I don't wear earrings, but if this comes in pendant form, the Spousal Unit now knows my dearest birthday wish):

Here's a pendant made with black sapphire and gold, as well as moth silk:

And here's a ruby and silk pendant that looks a lot like gold filigree, except even finer:

With support from the National Geographic Society, CPALI has been hard at work demonstrating the feasibility of using the silk moths of Madagascar as a tool for conserving the region's rich biodiversity. Long-term, the goal is to establish small-scale local businesses that use the forest resources sustainably. To date, they've identified specific sites where the favored food plants of the three target moth species are abundant, and have set up a learning and training center in Morantsetra for farmers interested in rearing larvae/silk cocoons -- the same food plants can be grown in the family garden along with dietary staples like manioc, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and peppers. It's not big business yet, but the niche "eco-fashion" market is as good a place as any to start. I, for one, welcome the decorative possibilities offered by the Moths of Madagascar.

a spark in the dark

One wouldn't expect the 17th century English philosopher Francis Bacon to have much of a sweet tooth; he always struck me as a rather curmudgeonly sort, thoughts firmly fixed on Higher Matters, eschewing the paltry comforts of the flesh. But Jen-Luc Piquant suspects he might have had a secret fondness for hard candies, based on a passing remark Bacon made in his treatise, Novum Organum (published in 1620): "It is almost certain that all sugar, whether refined or raw, provided only it be somewhat hard, sparkles when broken or scraped with a knife in the dark."

Now, one could argue that Bacon was merely being an observant scientist following his natural curiosity, but stop and think for a moment under what conditions he might have discovered such an effect -- alone in a darkened room with a bag of hard candy and a knife to break up the pieces into smaller bits that were easier to consume. Sounds like a secret sweet tooth to me! This also establishes Bacon as the earliest to record the phenomenon, known as triboluminescence, a.k.a., "the Wint-O-Green Life Saver Effect."

I adored Wint-O-Green Life Savers as a child, mostly for the refreshing minty taste, but they also had loads of entertainment value. It's pretty well known that if you chew fresh, dry Wint-O-Green candies in a dark room -- or snap them in two using a pair of pliers -- you'll get a spark of greenish/bluish light. That's triboluminescence. In 1753, one Father Giambattista Beccaria wrote a treatise on "artificial electricity," in which he described how easy it was "to frighten simple people only by chewing lumps of sugar, and, in the meantime, keeping your mouth open, which will appear to them as if full of fire." One bets Beccaria was just a laugh-riot at parties. (Actually, considering the level of superstition at that time, he was fortunate not to be run out of town, or even burned at the stake.)

By the late 1790s, sugar production began to produce more refined crystals of pure sugar in the shape of a large solid cone. Once transported and sold, the cone would be broken into smaller chunks using a "sugar nip" -- I'm guessing similar to, say, nail clippers or a similar type of pinching device. And of course, when the sugar cone was nipped in a darkened setting, there would be tiny bursts of visible light, and Beccaria's little party trick became less effective -- because everyone knew about it by then. It's not just sugar that shows the effect, either, When a diamond facet is being ground, or the gem is being sawed during the cutting process, the diamond may fluoresce blue or green. Open certain postal envelopes in the dark, or tear a Band-Aid wrapper very quickly, and you might see a brief blue-green glow.

There's actually rather a lot going on here, from a science standpoint. The simplest explanation is that when molecules are crushed or torn asunder, electrons are forced from their atomic fields and start colliding with nitrogen molecules in the air. The collisions cause a transfer of energy from the electrons to the nitrogen molecules, which begin to vibrate (an "excited state"). The nitrogen molecules want to get rid of the excess energy -- I guess the vibrations make them uncomfortable -- so they emit light, usually in the ultraviolet range, but there's usually a small amount of visible light as well.

Or, as Wikipedia succinctly puts it: "electrical fields are created, separating positive and negative charges than then create sparks while trying to reunite." It's rather like a lightning strike, in fact. The effect is usually observed with asymmetrical crystals; when those materials are scratched, crushed or rubbed, the chemical bonds are broken and a small flash of light is emitted. Hence the name triboluminescence from the Greek tribein ("to rub") and the Latin lumen ("light").

The effect is even more pronounced with Wint-O-Green Life Savers because of the flavoring used: wintergreen oil is technically known as methyl salicylate, a fluorescent chemical, which means it absorbs light of a shorter wavelength and then emits it as light of a longer wavelength. So when you crush a Wint-O-Green Life Saver between your teeth, negatively charged electrons break free; the atoms that once were their homes become positively charged, and the free electrons start dashing about in search of a new home. Meanwhile the sugar crystals disintegrate, causing nitrogen molecules from the surrounding air to attach themselves to the surface. The free electrons strike the nitrogen molecules, causing them to emit invisible ultraviolet radiation and a faintly visible glow. The molecules of methyl salicylate (wintergreen oil used for flavoring the candy) absorb the ultraviolet light (shorter wavelength), and then re-emit visible blue-green light (longer wavelength). And you have sparkage.

Most of us would be satisfied with that level of detail in an explanation, but scientists adhere to higher standards. They want to know precisely what is happening atom by individual atom, and preferably even at the smallest subatomic level. That way they can better control physical phenomena, and the more you can control them, the easier it is to exploit such effects in practical applications. That's why researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began conducting experiments that exploited the effect to shed light -- literally -- on how materials fracture. They published their findings last year in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

"When you break a pencil, you actually have to have broken chemical bonds," Illinois professor Kenneth Suslick told the New York Times last year. "Yet our understanding of the process is surprisingly poor. I fact, when you look at the quantum mechanics of that, it isn't exactly clear how the breakage occurs." What is clear is that when one breaks a material, invariably this drives chemical reactions. And a reaction like triboluminescence "gives us a spectroscopic probe to see what's going on right at the fracture point," said Suslick.

But triboluminescence, as it naturally occurs, is a very small effect. The Illinois researchers had to figure out some way to amplify the effect in order to glean useful information from the fracture point (a spectral fingerprint, if you will). Suslick and his collaborators filled a test tube with a slurry of small sugar crystals and liquid paraffin, then immersed a vibrating titanium rod into it. This generated ultrasound waves, creating lots of tiny bubbles constantly growing and collapsing in the paraffin (acoustic cavitation). The shock waves caused the sugar crystals to collide, nitrogen and oxygen bubbled through the slurry, and the result was bursts of light 100 to 1000 times brighter than the usual triboluminescence. So far they've found the presence of carbon monoxide, CO2 ions, and other products of combustion, and are now working on determining the chemical reactions taking place during triboluminescence.

Research in this area continues to yield surprising results. Last month, physicists at UCLA announced that unspooling a simple roll of Scotch tape produces sufficient X-rays to make clear images of their fingers. Seth Putterman and several students constructed a device to unspool the 3M brand Scotch adhesive tape at a steady rte of about 1.3 inches per second, and placed it in a vacuum. They measured emitted light and X-rays.

Surprisingly, the tape did not emit X-rays continuously, but in short bursts -- enough energy to produce an X-ray image of a finger in a second. (A dental X-ray takes about one-third of a second.) The next step is to build a device that brings two pieces of tape together, and then rapidly separates them -- at a rate of around 1000 times per second -- using a piezoelectric device. The idea is control the effect, and hopefully miniaturize it for potential applications.

Something similar happens with cloth tape, which displays a glowing line where the end of the tape is being pulled away from the rest of the roll. Putterman's team has found most brands of clear adhesive tape also give off x-rays, albeit with a different spectrum of energies. Duct tape does not, and they haven't gotten around yet to testing masking tape. Apparently you also get triboluminescence when you tear off the piece of tape at the end of a roll of photographic film.

Given Putterman's prior work on things like sonoluminescence, it's not surprising that when asked about potential applications, his thoughts naturally turn to nuclear fusion. The idea is that energy from the breaking adhesive could somehow -- aye, there's the sticking point! -- be directed away from the electrons to heavy hydrogen ions that would be cunningly implanted into the tape. Those ions would accelerate and (hopefully) collide with sufficient force that they could fuse, emitting energy in the process. But fear not, OSHA! Ripping off a piece of Scotch tape is not exposing us to dangerous radiation on a daily basis in the workplace -- unless you happen to work in a vacuum. Air molecules otherwise intercept the X-rays, rendering them harmless pretty quickly.

A more realistic possibility is finding some way to exploit the phenomenon in simple medical devices to destroy tumors with bursts of x-rays. And like the Illinois researchers, Putterman's UCLA group is eying a potential application to detect x-ray emissions from composite materials as they start to fatigue (i.e., become more prone to cracking); current methods, which work very well with metals, don't always reveal weak areas composites in time to prevent a crisis. Since composite materials are increasingly used to build airplanes. I, for one (in a burst of self-interest), would support any new technology capable of telling ground crews whether or not the plane I'm boarding is likely to break into pieces mid-flight, 37,000 feet in the air. Just sayin'...

So, wintergreen-flavored candies and Scotch tape could be potential energy sources in the future -- bet the manufacturers never saw that coming. Science is weird. And in this case, truly stranger than fiction.

the skull beneath the skin

"Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures underground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin."
-- T.S. Eliot, "Whispers of Immortality"

Eliot's classic poem alludes to the great Jacobean tragedian, John Webster (of Duchess of Malfi fame), who did indeed have a predilection for the macabre, but the Indiana Jones film series arguably has an element of that as well. The Spousal Unit and I finally went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Sunday night (he was decidedly underwhelmed, I was moderately entertained). All the usual tropes were present: the mystical objects (loosely based on historical artifacts and legend), the drawn-out chase scenes, inventive stunt work, sly witticisms (this installment is less witty than others), attacks by creepy-crawlies, the double-crossing "ally", the power-mad villain(ess), and the almost laughably absurd supernatural climax -- in this case, bringing in shades of The X-Files. (The Spousal Unit bemoaned the silliness of the ending; it was silly, but not any sillier than any of the previous three installments.) Of course, there's also loads of mucking about underground in ancient archaeological sites, strewn with dusty cobwebs, booby traps, and lots and lots of decaying corpses grossing out delighted filmgoers with their "lipless grins."

Admittedly, the film suffers from a formula that's getting a wee bit tired, and what appears to be laziness on the part of the filmmakers in terms of character development, dialogue, and pacing. Everyone's in such a hurry to get to the next stunt or special effect, hurtling towards the climax, that they forget to let the audience savor those little throw-away moments that made the first and most successful Indy film so much fun. The cheesy props don't help matters -- could the crystal skull of the title look any sillier? paging CGI! -- but really, when has Indiana Jones ever been about anything except far-out fun? Cue my usual mantra about how it's unrealistic to expect film and television to be very true to life when it comes to facts about science, history, blah, blah, blah. (NOTE: There may be a few unintentional spoilers below for those who haven't yet seen the film.)

Except in this case, I'm starting to think the thin line between fiction and reality really might be getting a bit too blurred. Last month the Archaeological Institute of America -- the oldest and largest nonprofit organization in the US devoted to archaeology -- elected actor Harrison Ford to its Board of Directors in recognition of his role in "stimulating the public's interest in archaeological exploration," according to AIA president Brian Rose. I'm happy for Ford, who does seem to have an genuine interest in the field; any celebrities who care to lend their name in support of science get mega-points with me. But, well, Dr. Jones is a pretty glamorized version of your typical archaeologist. The National Science Foundation was sufficiently concerned to issue a special report highlighting the differences and similarities between the worlds of science and Indiana Jones. Per the press release accompanying its release:

NSF-supported archaeologists do discover "lost cities." They try to figure out what happened to "vanished civilizations" and whether what caused their collapse may have relevance to contemporary problems. They seek rare and precious artifacts that tell important stories about the past, even if those artifacts are minute snails and the scrapings of ancient teeth and not golden idols. They "deal with Native peoples," though with respect, as partners in the process of learning about the past, rather than with weapons. And certainly, as jokingly noted in the latest Indiana Jones adventure, teaching is an important part of what they do.

Being tall is also an important part of what archaeologists do, not to mention breaking into song when locating ancient Sumerian artifacts from the 3rd dynasty -- at least according to Monty Python (h/t: Afarensis). Harrison Ford's got the tall part down, at least, even if the NSF report failed to mention it.

Most of the press related to the new film, however, has focused on the legends and myths surrounding the crystal skulls. Yes, Virginia, there really are crystal skulls -- 13 of them, to be exact -- and the film even identifies the most famous one by name: the infamous Mitchell-Hedges skull, a.k.a., "the skull of doom." It was supposedly discovered by 17-year-old Anna Mitchell Hedges and her father in either 1924 or 1927 (they never did get their stories straight on the year) under the altar of a Mayan temple in a ruined city in Belize, although there is documentary evidence that in fact, Anna's father bought the skull at a Sotheby's sale in 1943. (Anna herself later came up with an "explanation" for that bill of sale.") Her father, a British "adventurer" named F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, claimed the clear quartz crystal skull was "at least 3600 years old, and according to legend was used by the High Priest of the Maya when performing esoteric rites. It is said that when he willed death with the help of the skull, death inevitably followed. It has been described as the embodiment of all evil."

The other skulls include "Max," the "Texas crystal skull," supposedly from Guatemala; "ET", supposedly discovered in 1900 (notable for its pronounced overbite); "Ami," an amethyst crystal skull, supposed to be Mayan; "Sha-na-ra," a clear crystal skull that moonlights as a member of an a capella doo-wop group whose owner claims to have found it in Mexico; the British Museum crystal skull (also mentioned in the film), made of cloudy quartz; the Paris Skull, thought to be Aztec, currently housed in the Musee de l'Homme in Paris; and an Aztec crystal skull anonymously sent to the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History in 1992, which also had a smaller crystal skull in its possession for many years.

The real crystal skulls look nothing like the hulking prop used in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. For starters, they're a lot smaller; some of them measure as little as an inch across, most likely having been carved out of authentic pre-Colombian beads in the 19th century, when museums first began collecting crystal skulls. There are exceptions: the one in the British Museum is life-sized, and  the crystal skull mysteriously mailed to the Smithsonian in 1992 weighs a whopping 30 pounds; the anonymous sender claimed it was of Aztec origin.

Not so, sez Jane MacLaren Walsh, a Smithsonian anthropologist who has studied several of the skulls extensively, including the most recent acquisition. In a recent cover story in Archaeology magazine, she insists, "These exotic carvings are usually attributed to pre-Colombian Mesoamerican cultures, but not a single crystal skull in a museum comes from a documented excavation, and they have little stylistic or technical relationship with any genuine pre-Colombian depictions of skulls, which are an important motif in Mesoamerican iconography." (You can find a preliminary report on her study of both the Smithsonian and British Museum crystal skulls here.)

Walsh is featured in an upcoming documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Legend of the Crystal Skulls, airing July 10th. (You can see clips/video footage, and find quite a bit of background information about the skulls, here. And if you want to own your very own crystal skull, you can buy one here, although many of the most popular models are currently sold out -- no doubt boosted by the current Indiana Jones craze. They also offer clear stone phalluses, which if nothing else would make for an interesting conversation piece at dinner parties.)

There are some wacky sorts out there who attribute the crystal skulls with special psychic powers, and even some murmurings of possible alien provenance (rumors that started with F.A. Mitchell-Hedges). An art restorer named Frank Dorland claimed to hear ringing bells and the sound of a choir singing and could see images when he gazed into the Mitchell-Hedges skull -- which he studied for about six years, becoming one of its staunchest devotees. Anna claims her skull has been used for healing -- disputing her own father's characterization of the artifact as "the embodiment of evil." The owner of "ET", a smoky crystal skull, believed it healed her brain tumor. These claims have been handily debunked, of course, but certainly the notion that the skulls have special powers captures the imagination: an episode of Stargate SG-1 memorably featured a crystal skull that enabled characters to travel between worlds.

The most popular legend has it that when all 13 of the crystal skulls are brought together in a certain configuration -- and no doubt at a specific place and time, just to make it as unlikely as possible -- they will "divulge their secret and prevent a terrible calamity." LucasFilms Ltd. picked up that premise and ran with it in their latest blockbuster, although they got a bit confused at the end about what calamity, exactly, the skulls were supposed to prevent. (The destruction of an entire Mayan city might strike some as a calamity.)

So where did the skulls come from? The consensus seems to be that they emerged in the late 19th century, part of a wave of pre-Colombian fakes that found their way into various museums around the world. While visiting Mexico City in 1884, the Smithsonian archaeologist W.H. Holmes warned about the burgeoning number of "relic shops" on every street corned filled with fakes, prompting him to write an article for Science on "The Trade in Spurious Mexican Antiquities." One wonders, then, how the Institute was taken in a mere two years later, when, in 1996, the Smithsonian purchased a small crystal skull from a man who had been Emperor Maximilian's secretary in Mexico at the time. In part, museums began collecting rock-crystal skulls at this time because existing knowledge about real artifacts was pretty scarce, making it easy to pass off fakes as the real deal.

Walsh tracked down several of the skulls to one Eugene Boban, a French art dealer in the late 19th century. At least three of the 13 famed crystal skulls can be traced directly back to Boban, who served as the official "archaeologist" in the Mexican court of Maximilian, as well as being a member of the French Scientific Commission in Mexico. After Maximilian's execution by the army of Benito Juarez, Boban found himself back in Paris, where he opened an antiquities shop. Even at the time (1885), one of his second-generation crystal skulls was denounced as a fake when he tried to sell it to Mexico's national museum as a bona fide Aztec artifact. Eventually he found himself in New York City, where he managed to sell the skull at auction to Tiffany's for $950. (This skull is the one that was later sold to the British Museum.)

As scientific knowledge advanced in the 20th century, the crystal skulls lost quite a bit of their mystic luster, and almost all of their credibility as bona fide antiquities. Based on her research, Walsh concludes that "all of the smaller crystal skulls that constitute the first generation of fakes were made in Mexico around the time they were sold, between 1856 and 1880. This 24-year period may represent the output of a single artisan, or perhaps a single workshop."

In the 1950s, a Smithsonian mineralogist named William Foshag realized that the crystal skull it had acquired in the 1800s had been carved with a modern lapidary wheel. From then until it mysteriously disappeared in 1973, the skull was displayed in an exhibit of archaeological fakes.

Using high-end instruments like Scanning Electron Microscopy, Walsh concluded that the Mitchell-Hedges skull, for instance, shows evidence of tool marks, casting serious doubt on claims the skulls are pre-Colombian in origin, since the Maya, Aztecs or other pre-Colombian peoples just didn't have the tools to make those kinds of marks. (Aliens, though, would most certainly have had advanced tools, claim the True Believers.) Heck, even Frank Dorland said that the Mitchell-Hedges skull showed signs of "mechanical grinding on the faces of the teeth," although he was a proponent of the alien origin theory, the better to bolster his delusions about the skull's power. The Paris Skull -- which Walsh believes to be a "transitional piece," larger but similar in style to the first generation of crystal skulls -- will be undergoing extensive scientific testing with such advanced elemental testing techniques as particle induced X-ray emission and Raman spectroscopy, to determine its exact age/composition once and for all.

As for attributing special mystical powers to the crystal skulls -- or any kind of crystal, for that matter -- no doubt True Believers would say that scientists are close-minded and refuse to consider the possibility. Um, nice try, but actually, scientists know a great deal about the properties of crystals. There's an entire field of material physics (crystallography) devoted to studying those properties, and crystals -- unlike, say, soft condensed matter (amorphous solids and the like) -- are among the best understood materials today. Crystals get their properties from their atomic structure; the definition of a crystal is a solid in which the atoms, molecules and/or ions are arranged in regularly ordered, repeating patterns in all three spatial directions. It's a naturally occurring structure, wondrous in and of itself, but that's not enough for crystal aficionados, who feel the need to attribute mystical properties to these materials as well.

According to crystal skull sycophant Frank Dorland, "The crystal stimulates an unknown part of the brain, opening a psychic door to the absolute." It's a common type of argument. For instance, True Believers have been known to cite the natural piezoelectric properties of quartz crystals as evidence of their power. Now, piezoelectricity is pretty nifty: in 1880, Pierre and Jacques Curie discovered that squeezing a quartz crystal produced an electrical charge, which is why quartz is used in watches, those old car lighters, all kinds of sensors, and so forth. Granted, this is energy of a sort, but it's certainly not psychic energy, just plain old electricity. Crystals are very pretty, though, which might explain why there's so much wishful thinking surrounding the issue of whether they have healing or psychic powers.

So there you have it: the lowdown on the real-life crystal skulls, which are nothing like that depicted in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- but nonetheless, I think they're still pretty darn cool. And science could offer some useful fodder for future installments in the Indiana Jones saga, should Hollywood decide to build a similar series around Indy's son, Henry Jones III (Shia LeBoeuf). Over at Twisted Physics, I mentioned the use of cosmic ray detectors by archaeologists, using muons to map out archaeological sites and detect hidden tombs or chambers. I think it would make an excellent premise for the first Son of Indy flick. After all, Crystal Skulls takes place in 1957. Luis Alvarez first used cosmic ray detectors to study Egyptian pyramids around 1967, when Indy 2.0 would be around 30 (give or take a couple of years), hopefully having completed some semblance of an education at long last.

Can't you just see Alvarez teaming up with a rebel archaeologist to foil some nefarious plot or another? Ancient Egypt certainly has enough myth, legend, and mystical artifacts to fuel another wacky plotline, and Alvarez really is the sort of physicist who should be better known among the general populace. I think he'd get a kick out it, frankly. So, George Lucas, feel free to use the above suggestion as you see fit -- in exchange for just a teensy percentage of the profits from the inevitable Son of Indy franchise. Then I should be able to keep the Spousal Unit and Resident Feline in the manner to which they would like to become accustomed.

nobody puts science in a corner

We might be missing the World Science Festival in New York City this weekend, but not to be outdone, Los Angeles is hosting the annual Book Expo America convention through Sunday, so there's still some excitement to be had locally. Actually, rather a lot excitement for hard-core bibliophiles like myself. Let me loose in a vast convention center filled with booths displaying all the forthcoming titles this fall from every single major publishing house (and countless independent publishers), augmented with complimentary novelty items, author signings, and tons of free giveaway Advance Review Copies (ARCs) -- honestly, it's like giving a junkie the keys to the crack factory. I wore myself out on Friday wandering through the booths, in what can only be described as "looting." (Back when I was a struggling young writer, snagging a pass to the book convention provided me with reading material for most of the year that I could otherwise ill afford.)

My scavenging efforts yielded quite the haul. I snagged 50+ free books, more than half of them Young Adult (YA) titles for my vast brood of nieces and nephews -- just in time for the summer break, when they might actually have time to read. The Spousal Unit received an autographed copy of Benjamin Wallace's The Billionaire's Vinegar (about the world's most expensive bottle of wine), plus an ARC of Mark Barrowcliffe's The Elfish Gene, a cheeky memoir about his teen years playing Dungeons and Dragons. We'll end up keeping a few titles for our own summer reading, giving most away as gifts, and donating the rest to the "library" in the tenant lounge of our building -- because it's all about spreading the book-love.

I was so caught up in the fever of the moment, that it didn't occur to me until yesterday afternoon that I hadn't seen a single popular science book among the promotional posters and giveaways. Not one. Nada. Zilch. "That can't be," I thought to myself, so I made a careful sweep of every single aisle, just to make sure. There was a single poster for Danica MacKellar's Math Doesn't Suck, and its sequel due out in the fall, but MacKellar herself -- a bona fide celebrity, with a book that did very well, sales-wise -- was nowhere to be found, not even among the 26 autographing tables where authors rotated in every hour (and sometimes on the half-hour). An author named Mark Kastleman was on hand signing his book Drug of the New Millennium, but even though the blurb mentioned "cutting-edge brain science," the actual book was listed in the Family & Relationships category, being more concerned with social issues than the underlying science.

Otherwise, I saw nothing. Science fiction and fantasy books were everywhere, of course, and there were course guides for math and science classes, and for acing standardized tests, plus a few plucky independent publishers pushing educational science products for younger ages. But none of the major publishing houses -- most of which have science titles in their catalogs -- were bothering to push those titles, or their authors, not even with posters and flyers. And in case you're wondering, yes, that includes the major academic/university presses.  I did ask about the popular science books at one such booth, but the person just handed me the usual thick printed catalog and waved me off: "There's a list of all our titles in there."

Stop and think a moment about what this means. Book Expo America is the single largest conference in the US for the publishing industry, bringing together publishers, marketers, distributors, bookstore owners, educators, librarians, authors, and hardcore bibliophiles who just want a sneak peek at all the goodies in store for them a few months down the line. It's where publishers make their big marketing push, reaching out to all those prospective book buyers and distributors (all of them devoted readers in the bargain), thereby creating "buzz" for forthcoming titles and ensuring that their books will be carried by as many stores and libraries and other outlets as possible. It's a very big part of what determines the "hot" books the mass market book readers will be devouring this fall.

Every conceivable genre was prominently represented -- sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance, foreign language, business, self-help, New Age/spiritualism, general fiction, the classics, nonfiction, children's/YA, comic books/graphic novels, manga, you name it -- except for popular science. I could pick up autographed copies of Michelle Whitedove's She Talks to Angels (said angels have apparently told Ms. Whitedove all the secrets of the Afterlife), and something called Inner Paths to Outer Space, "an investigation into experiences of other realms of existence and contact with otherwordly beings." (Apparently psychedelic drugs and "other spiritual technologies" were involved in the author's "experiences.")  But the work of popular science authors like Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Janna Levin, Alan Lightman, Dava Sobel, Mary Roach (actually, come to think of it, I did see a poster for her new book, Bonk), Chris Mooney, Carl Zimmer, Natalie Angier, etc., etc., was nowhere to be found. Talk about being marginalized! The biggest book event of the year, and science wasn't even invited to the party. Maybe the invitation got lost in the mail.

Now, I don't know squat about how these massive conventions are planned; it's possible this year's science-book-famine was an unintentional oversight. But as both a science writer and avid reader, I find it profoundly upsetting. There are plenty of readers like myself out there who don't divide our reading material neatly into "science" and "not science" -- we savor all genres, provided the book is well-written and holds our interest -- and there are almost as many science-themed TV shows on the air right now as there are cheesy reality shows. Is it too much to ask that this be reflected in the biggest book industry event of the year? The booths need not be awash in science books, but would it kill the major publishing houses to feature one or two of their most promising titles and/or authors, like they do for every other genre they publish?

Better yet, perhaps they could cooperate and put together a special popular science pavilion, like those this year that featured African-American literature, independent publishers, and so forth. Perhaps then, the New York Times would see fit to include at least one popular science title in its annual list of Notable Books; last year was, notoriously, a shut-out for science. I refuse to believe this marginalization occurs because science writers are producing suck-y books that nobody wants to read. Far from it!

It's all the more ironic since science and technology are literally re-inventing the publishing industry -- albeit against its collective will. (Hmmm, Jen-Luc Piquant catches a whiff of conspiracy.) There were several panel discussions during this year's BEA about "new markets" and "digital formats," including a panel on blogging and online communities and what this could mean for traditional publishing, featuring (among others) Cory Doctorow and Whatever's John Scalzi. (Jen-Luc was bemused to see Scalzi described in promotional materials as "sci-fi's fastest rising star." She bets it hasn't seemed all that fast to Scalzi himself, who's been slaving away in the trenches for over a decade, churning out first-rate work all the while. Jen-Luc is still trying to figure out when he sleeps, and suspects he's really a robot.)

Amazon had an entire booth devoted to its Kindle eBook reader, so I got to check out the device in person. I'd been mulling the possibility of buying one, just to see what eBooks are like, and was torn between the Kindle and Sony's E-Reader. Certainly the enabling electronic ink technology is fascinating. The specifics of each particular technology might vary, but essentially, all involve two sheets of thin plastic holding millions of two-color beads surrounded by oil to ensure the beads can rotate easily. When an electric voltage is applied, the beads rotate from black to white, or vice versa, as need be, to produce patterns on a page, very much like the pixels in a computer monitor. In this way, the text of a book can be electronically represented on the "page."

Storage capacities being what they are for electronic devices these days, you can pack quite a few entire "books" on one of those little devices. Considering how much of my carry-on luggage on longer trips consists of reading material, that's a very attractive option. Alas, I wasn't overly impressed with the Kindle. It looked... well... kinda cheap, even though the screen was perfectly readable. (One can only dream about the sort of e-Book reader Apple's kick-ass industrial designers would come up with, complete with the choice of lots of pretty colors. At least the Sony E-Reader comes in both silver and blue.)

So I guess I'll have to wait for the e-Book technology to develop a little further before it becomes a serious option. In the meantime, what can we do about the wholesale exclusion of popular science books from this year's BEA?  Maybe we can sneak some science themes into the next crop of YA novels -- I am most impressed with the imaginative approaches taken by YA authors in this year's offerings, and young adults represent a huge fraction of the reading market, plus, it's always a good idea to get them hooked on science when they're young. Maybe popular science authors and their publishers can band together and set up their own booth at next year's BEA. Other ideas are welcome. We need a metaphorical Patrick Swayze, in Dirty Dancing, gallantly standing up for science and announcing, "Nobody puts science in a corner!" Science is part of our broader culture, too, after all -- surely that warrants at least a brief turn in the spotlight once in awhile.

mind the gap

Madrid is home to many marvels of human ingenuity, but among the most striking is a kinetic sculpture by Eusebio Sempere, built entirely of hollow steel cylinders arranged in a periodic square array. In 1995, a handful of researchers at the Materials Science Institute of Madrid decided to study the acoustic properties of the sculpture: specifically, they hypothesized that the periodic organization of the cylinders should give rise to a sonic "band gap": in other words, the sculpture would block certain frequencies of sound and let other preferred frequencies through. Sure enough, they found that the sculpture caused sound waves traveling perpendicular to the cylinders' axes were strongly attenuated at a frequency of 1670 Hertz. It basically behaves like a sonic mirror.

That study proved to be the first experimental evidence for the existence of what are now known as phononic band gaps, or phononic crystals. Note the spelling; that first "n" is important. Scientists have known for quite some time now that certain materials in which the atoms are arrayed in a precise periodic lattice structure gives rise to photonic band gaps: blocking certain frequencies of light while letting other frequencies through. This is what gives rise to examples of iridescence in nature, those flashes of bright colors one sees in butterfly wings, kingfishers, peacock feathers or opals. (Prior blog posts on photonic crystals can be found here and here.) But who knew the same would hold true for sound?

True, both light and sound travel in waves, and thus exhibit things like frequencies and wavelengths; and just as light is made of individual photons, there's a quantum equivalent for sound: phonons (basically a quantized mode of vibration). Yes, there is wave-particle duality even for sound. Who knew? But sound is mechanical, a pressure wave, and thus requires some medium through which to travel, unlike light, which can travel even in a vacuum. Even if there is a phononic bandgap that corresponds to the photonic version, would it still be useful? That is, could scientists exploit this feature to exert greater control over sound?

Scientists have exploited refraction to guide light -- the basic of fiber optic communication -- ever since experiments in Paris in the 1840s, when the Swiss physicist Daniel Colladon and his French colleague, Jacques Babinet, first demonstrated it was possible to bend light.  (Colladon and his friend Charles Sturm were honored with an award from the Academie des Science when they measured the speed of sound in water in Lake Geneva in 1826.)

Ten years later, an Irish inventor named John Tyndall publicly displayed a similar effect using water fountains. He made many studies of air and the earth's atmosphere, and was particularly interested in the scattering of light by dust and other large molecules in the air; in fact, this is known as the Tyndall Effect in his honor. That's what led him to develop a means for refracting light through a flexible tube of water, a device he called a "light-pipe." It was the precursor to modern fiber optic cables.

Just like photonic band gaps, sonic band gaps are the result of interference: certain frequencies of wave are blocked and others are allowed through, just like one of those annoying hip clubs with velvet ropes manned by bouncers, who scan the crowd and make sure nobody "unhip" gets through the social filter. (We should note, for the sake of thoroughness, that certain semiconductor materials also produce band gaps for electrons with energies at certain frequencies.)

In the case of sound, you needn't have an actual crystal (although you can). You create a phononic bandgap by adding periodic "air holes" in an otherwise solid material, like the array created by Sempere's steel cylinders. Those air holes produce variations in the density and/or speed of sound; like light, sound travels at different speeds through different mediums. (Isaac Newton, back in the 17th century, hypothesized that sound waves might travel through air in the same way an elastic wave would travel along a lattice of point masses connected by springs -- essentially a crystal structure.)

The size of the periodic air holes determines which frequencies are preferred. For instance, Sempere's sculpture is large enough to create a sonic bandgap within the range of human hearing (20 Hz to 20 kHz); for architects, it's a whole new way to approach their designs. But this also means that phononic band gaps are unlikely to prove useful for things like headphones or microphones; those devices are too small to block frequencies within human hearing range. Once you get down to fractions of millimeters, the sound wavelengths are so short (in the ultrasonic regime) that -- when combined with other nifty advances like adapting optic superlenses for sound-- they might find some interesting applications.

In the case of light (optics), the laws of physics pretty much limit the resolution capabilities of conventional lenses: they can't produce an image that contains details finer than the wavelength of the light being focused through the lens. Recently, there's been significant progress in the develop of new materials with a so-called negative index of refraction -- imagine dropping a pebble in a still pond and instead of rippling outwards, the wavelets ripple inward. That's how bizarre these materials are. But this unusual property makes them very useful when shaped into a flat thin slab-like lens: they can overcome the conventional diffraction limit for better resolution.

Now physicists think it might be possible to build sonic lenses with a similar negative index of refraction. They're looking into building hypersonic phononic crystals for the optoelectronics industry; among other uses, they could be used in thermoelectric devices to improve the conversion efficiency of heat into electricity, or to make "phonon lasers." Scientists aren't there yet: it's tough to make these sorts of structures, since you have to create the 3D periodic patterns at the nanoscale. But if they can solve the problem --perhaps by developing better holographic techniques for phononic structures -- the next step would be to combine photonic and phononic crystals to create "blind" and "deaf" materials: a material that has bandgaps for both sound and light at similar wavelengths.

Apparently, MIT researchers have made such a prototype crystal, featuring square or triangular arrays of air holes in silicon that create both sonic and photonic bandgaps, and can also trap light and sound at areas where there are defects. (In 2005, Physics World published a nice feature article detailing some of this cutting-edge research.) If nothing else, further development of phononic crystals will let scientists build devices that give them the same level of control over sound as they currently have over light using mirrors and lenses and such.

So, what about sound in Cyberspace? Does it have a "speed", too? Can we control how it propagates? Some researchers think so. Chris Chafe studies so-called "internet acoustics" at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, and maintains that sound waves traveling across the Internet can bounce off edges, boundaries and obstacles in this virtual realm, just like they do in the "real world." Last November, Chafe gave a talk at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in New Orleans about how to use these virtual "reflections" to create "a configurable sound world of rooms with enclosing walls and other kinds of objects which can vibrate." So anyone with a really fast Internet connection can enter into this type of "Internet music hall" -- similar in concept to a chat room -- and make music together even though the "musicians" are separated by several hundred miles. "One can actually 'play the network' as a guitar or flute stretching between San Francisco and Los Angeles," per Chafe.

Chafe's Stanford group has developed special software to create SoundWIRE (Sound waves on the Internet from real-time echoes), networked virtual auditoriums with the same acoustic echo properties as an actual concert hall. Even if they're separated by an entire continent, musicians can "rehearse" together in Cyberspace -- due in large part to recent advances in high-speed streaming. This isn't your daddy's teleconferencing. That is so, like, 1999.

"Just as someone might clap to get a sense of the size of a darkened room or knock on an object to know its rigidity, network users can tap on their Internet connections and listen to the vibrations that result," Chafe explains. He and his colleagues have created a "network guitar" using physical modeling synthesis; the pitch of the "string" is determined by how long it takes the sound to travel round trip between the two nodes of the network. The longer it takes the sound to return, the lower the pitch.

One practical application of Chafe's work might be to "ping" a network connection to detect any problems in real time -- the speed of virtual sound isn't uniform, so Chafe's synthetic instruments tend to exhibit a wavering kind of vibrato. But who  are we kidding? The best possible application would be  live concerts played  in places like Second Life, musicians from all around the world jamming together in a single  acoustical chat room, even if they remain physically separated in actual space.

c is for carbon: part deux

Blogmeister's Note: Today, we bring you Part Deux of Jen-Luc Piquant's hard-hitting interview with author Eric Roston, about his new book, The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threats. Pre-order your copy today! And check out Eric's blog, Carbon Nation. You can read Part 1 of the conversation here.

Jen-Luc: What was the most surprising thing that you discovered about carbon while researching and writing the book?

Eric: Carbon is so ubiquitous in life and civilization, it's easy to forget it's actually sort of rare on Earth. It doesn't even make the top 10 elements. It's commonly known that diamonds are carbon crystals. Less well known is that they are potentially the oldest surviving minerals on Earth -- more than 3 billion years old, possibly made from carbon in once-living organisms, and they also occur naturally in space, around the cooling envelope of large carbon stars.

Jen-Luc: Were there any especially colorful personalities or amusing encounters along the way?

Eric: My goodness, yes. Forced to choose one, out of the 10 or so that come immediately to mind, I volunteer Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor (of the environment, energy, food, population, economics, natural cycles, technological history...) at the University of Manitoba. He was a "Prague Spring"-era dissident from then-Czechoslovakia, and came here to earn his PhD. He is an iconoclast, hilarious, rhetorically fearless, and a breath of fresh air in a world of people less willing than he to share their actual interior monologues (though I might have passed on the details of prostate surgery). I've never met him in person, but enjoyed our several phone calls, and was always inspired by his breadth of knowledge and willingness to deploy it, crushing many in his path.

Edwin Saltpeter first postulated how carbon forms in stars. We spoke several times at length. He is a delightful gentleman-scientist and his life story is equally inspiring. As a young teenager his family fled Nazi Austria. To name just one more, the interview that really first put me on the right track, in May 2004, was with the late Richard Smalley, in Houston, Texas, a co-discovered of the soccer-ball-shaped all-carbon molecule C60 ("buckyballs"). At the end of the bibliography of The Carbon Age, I have a long list of all the other people who helped shape the book, one way or another.

Jen-Luc: You've written that "Today's Carbon Age is the Carboniferous Period in reverse." Care to expound on that statement for the benefit of our readers? How did you arrive at that particular insight?

Eric: This is a pivotal question. What do we call the coal, oil and gas industries? They collectively belong to what the business press calls the "extractive industries." Companies extract these unique (carbon-heavy) fuels from the ground. Then there is the take that geologists, over several generations, from around the world, have assembled based on accumulated physical evidence, logic, and computer modeling.

The geological time span that dates from 359 to 299 million years ago is called the Carboniferous Period. They call it that because the Earth saw a catastrophic drop in the partial pressure atmospheric carbon (dioxide) -- a 90% drop. Here's part of the story, and as global carbon cycle scientists tell it, not even the most important part. In this period, woody plants populated bogs around the Earth's then-supercontinent. They lived their leafy lives, collapsed, perhaps one into another, face-planted in the muck, and over a couple of hundred million years became coal.

So, by extracting coal and burning it into atmospheric gas, we are reversing the photosynthesis that first captured solar energy (and atmospheric carbon) in living tissue 350 million years ago, in the Carboniferous. Except, we are doing it several orders of magnitude faster than it took to bury all that carbon to begin with. Big problem, by the way, if you are used to the stable climates in places humans have built settlements and cities for the past 10,000 years. (Oil and gas are more "recent" geological phenomena. Most of the oil came "only" in the last 70 million years or so.) On the face of it, it's not illogical that atmospheric composition should change dramatically and acutely if you decided to pack it with 100 million years' worth of gasified sediment.

Jen-Luc: Carbon is found in all kinds of everyday materials: Kevlar vests, soft drinks (carbonation), our computers -- the list is endless. What's the secret to its breathtaking versatility? Isn't it bizarre that the same element can be found in the furthest reaches of the galaxy as well as in a common soda can?

Eric: Yes, it's absolutely bizarre. All things being equal, you would be reasonable to expect that all 92 naturally occurring elements mix and match in equal proportions to make us and everything around us. But that's not the case, at all.

Here's the secret: Carbon is atomic Velcro. It's very good at holding things together but is also perfectly happy to let go under the right circumstances, and re-attach. That's the key. It holds atoms together into molecules, but it also "knows" when to let go. Cholesterol is built on a network of four rings of carbon, and it turns up in rock samples 3 million years old. That's a great example of how well carbon holds together. TNT blows up because highly energetic carbon bonds to nitrogen-oxygen groups are unstable. That's because making and breaking carbon bonds allows the 700 gazillion chemical transformation that occur in every body every second.

Jen-Luc: Speaking of the body, carbon is also related to carbohydrates, which have a serious image problem these days in the public eye. Is there really such a thing as "good" vs. "bad" carbs? Aren't we just really talking about burning fuel for energy?

Eric: Food is fuel. There's about as much chemical energy stored in a 64-oz bottle of soda as in two spoons of gasoline. On a basic level, what's going on in cells is identical to what's going on in an internal combustion engine. Oxygen attacks bonds of carbon and hydrogen, releasing energy and producing CO2 and H2O. French chemists realized that respiration and combustion are the same thing in 1780.

There are good and bad carbs, or at least carbs you should eat more of, and carbs you should eat less of. Most of the "carbs" we eat should be the complex variety, found in grains, beans, etc. -- fibers and starches. Simple carbs are basically sugar. Don't want too many of those, but we pack them away by the tablespoon anyway. Fats are mostly "carbs" -- carbon, anyway -- hydrocarbon chains tied together in a way the body can break them down.

As far as what we would eat, it will be tough for anyone to top Michael Pollan's lead in a New York Times Magazine article last year: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." But there's also body-builder Jack Lalane's advice for longevity: "If it's manmade, don't eat it, and if it tastes good, spit it out."

Jen-Luc: Since we're on the subject of fuel, gas prices are topping a record $4 per gallon these days. How do we break the stranglehold that oil and gas have on our society?

Eric: Rising gas prices were one impetus for writing The Carbon Age. Mostly, I wanted to add to the conversation context I felt was missing. The papers, magazines, and other books do a great job of talking about the oil crisis, the climate crisis, the this-and-that crisis. My goal is to complement these familiar stories by broadening the conversation, showing how seemingly far-flung parts of our experience are part of a singular tale -- carbon's story.

One question I'm asked sometimes is, "Do you propose solutions [to climate, energy crises] in the book?" The answer is unequivocally yes, but not in the way that the question is usually meant. Understanding what science is, and what it currently tells us, is an often overlooked part of solutions, or at least an enabler of carbon-reducing solutions.

A couple of years ago, I noted a "teaser" at the beginning of the arts section of a magazine. ("Teaser" is news jargon for the front-page snippets that make you want to read inside.) It read something like, "What's the hottest crop of science books? Here's a hint: it's not geology." The story was about the boom in economics books, such as Freakonomics. There's nothing wrong with that teaser. It does a good job. What's messed up is that we live in a culture where that works as a teaser.

The fact is, economics is, or has become, the study of how carbon minerals can drive material wealth, without taking into account the cost of waste. I wouldn't be surprised if 50 years from now -- or 20, or next week -- people look back and say, "What the hell were they thinking, treating economics as if it weren't a wholly owned subsidiary of geology? How is it possible that generation after generation of students graduated into a carbon-mineral economy without ever being required to take an Earth science class?"

Jen-Luc: Carbon is on everyone's mind these days because of climate change/global warming. There are still a few staunch hold-out denialists, bolstered by the latest news predicting a brief cooling trend in the coming years. How would you counter-argue that point? What, ultimately, is the significance (if any) of this predicted cooling trend?

Eric: In my wildest dreams I never imagined the book would come out the same month that the US Senate undertakes debate of a rigorous and comprehensive carbon-mitigation bill. It has been very heartening to watch how quickly the climate conversation has moved in the last two years. But, you're right, the disinformation machine is still working overtime.

In April, the journal Nature ran a research article by German scientists who fine-tuned computer models to tentatively predict a cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere in the next decade. Forget any caveats about this study for the moment -- that they were just beta-testing their model, that it's even possible to initialize sea-surface temperatures, etc -- science-y stuff. Say hypothetically that they are 100% right. This reveals a very important point about the complexity of the atmosphere and climate change.

Manmade global warming is occurring and will continue to occur, possibly for thousands of years to come. While this process is occurring, short- and even long-term natural variation of the climate is also occurring. A powerful natural variation toward regional cooling can mask the long-term warming signal. It did in the third quarter of the last century. Think of it like this: Say you're boiling water to make pasta, but you ritually forget how much water to put in. So you've got that burner on setting #7, and it keeps adding heat to the water. But you've got to add more water to accommodate the pasta. So you add the water. This lowers the temperature in the pot -- but it's a temporary cooling and that heat just keeps on coming. It'll boil. It just may take longer.

Jen-Luc: We are both former New Yorkers. I couldn't help noticing in your bio that you were an eyewitness to the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. In fact, you were part of a reporting team that won a national magazine award for your coverage. What impact did that have on you, both personally and professionally?

Eric: 9/11 caused so much devastation, trauma and dislocation, that something feels not quite right about my calling it a personal tragedy, too. But it was, both because of what I saw and heard, and because of how much I love New York. I was reporting several blocks from Ground Zero when the towers fell.

I've always been a student of war. I majored in the history of the World Wars in college. And I always knew that the bright-line distinction between our generation and my father's, and probably every one before his, is that our generation had no compulsory military service during wartime. On 9/11, with the southern tip of Manhattan about to go into Martial Law, I remember wandering around Tribeca, my sweatshirt wrapped around my nose and mouth, after residents and workers had fled north and across the rivers. I remember staring into a dust cloud, and at a trail of debris left in the exodus, thinking that war has come.

[Illustration by Dan McCarthy. Prints can be ordered here!]

c is for carbon: part one

Back when I was living in Washington, DC, and writing the first two books, I had the privilege of receiving invaluable input from a group of local writers. We called ourselves Roomful of Writers, and for awhile there we met each week, critiquing each other's submitted works. They're the reason Black Bodies and Quantum Cats ended up being such a quirky, pop-culture-laden collection of physics essays -- and also why it ended up being so readable, since most of our members had an almost pathological aversion to scientific jargon of any kind.  Seriously? The folks at ROW made me a much better writer, and for that, they will always have my gratitude and loyalty. Just as I was finishing The Physics of the Buffyverse, a new member joined our ragtag team: Eric Roston, a former reporter for TIME, who was writing a book about carbon. As in, the element. It was nice to have another science writer to even out the ranks a bit. (Check out this fun piece he wrote for TIME last year about carbonation in soft drinks and how it relates to climate change.)

Unfortunately, Eric joined just as the group was unraveling, with members going their separate ways: to Africa, to New York City, to motherhood, and in my case, to marriage and sunny Los Angeles. Still, Eric is a professional: he muddled through on his own without our help, wrote his book, and we kept in touch as he did so. Last fall, I had the privilege of reading the entire manuscript. And now? The book is being published next month! It's called The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat, it's available for pre-order (go on, you know you want a copy!), and the preliminary reviews have been terrific. Jen-Luc Piquant smells best-seller.  Go Eric! Not only that, Eric has gone to the dark side and become a blogger at Carbon Nation.

Anyway, as a special treat, we're featuring a two-part Q&A -- more like a conversation, really -- in which Eric chats with hardcore bibliophile Jen-Luc Piquant about his new book, the writing process, climate change, rising gas prices, and what carbon could possibly have in common with MySpace doyen turned reality TV star Tila Tequila. It's lengthy, but substantive, and well worth the read. Bon appetit!

Jen-Luc: What possessed you to write a book about carbon?

Eric: The short answer is that I wanted to read a book about carbon, but nobody else had written one.

Jen-Luc: Okay, so what's the long answer?

Eric: Alfred Hitchcock movies all have what he referred to as a "MacGuffin": the thing the characters in the movie are after, whether it be microfilm, uranium in wine bottles, or papers. It never matters to the audience. It only matters to the characters. The news media treat carbon like it's a MacGuffin. It's the reason we have to reduce our industrial emissions, or the gee-whiz supermaterial that convinces us to drop another $200 for a carbon-fiber tennis racket, or the "carbs" we avoid (or embrace) in food.

But carbon isn't a MacGuffin. It's the central structural element of all life and civilization, and as such, the quickest path to learn the most about virtually everything larger than an atom and smaller than a planet.

Jen-Luc: What makes the topic particularly timely? Not just why this book, but why now?

Eric: At the end of 2003, carbon-dioxide induced global warming was bleeding into the private sector. The Atkins "low-carb" diet was careening towards its spectacular blowout. Oil (read hydrocarbons) prices began their steady ascent, after the Iraq invasion. And Lance Armstrong rode to victory in Paris in the Tour de France year after year on a $6500 carbon-fiber Trek bike. Everywhere I looked, people were talking about carbon, but in stovepipes, completely removed from each other. I wanted to start a project that would tease out the connective tissue between all these stories. We think of these as far-flung topics, but you can build a singular narrative, "carbon-based," that unifies and explains vast swaths of our experience. Looking at what carbon is, how it does that crazy thing it does, and how it gets around, allows you to talk about energy, climate, personal health, materials, and much else all in one conversation.

Jen-Luc: Okay, so I see the attraction, and the relevance, but it must have been daunting. I mean, isn't that like writing a book about air, or hydrogen?

Eric: Richard Feynman said, "No matter what you look at, if you look at closely enough, you are involved in the entire Universe." In the last 20 years or so, there have been a lot of nonfiction books -- microhistories -- that illuminate vast swaths of life, the universe and everything by peering through nontraditional lenses: salt, gold, walking, the computer chip, oxygen, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Jen-Luc: Anyone who invokes both Hitchcock and Feynman in the first 10 minutes wins mega-points with us, plus you subtly plugged our second book. But how did you narrow the scope of the book sufficiently to produce a compelling narrative?

Eric: The simple answer? An enormous amount of work and an enormous amount of time. I ended up with a balanced, structured narrative across 12 chapters -- a wink at carbon's atomic mass (12), which is the official standard by which all others are measured. Filling those chapters was a little like filling an ice cube tray with water. You have to swish it around quite a bit to get all the cubes to the same level. the first half of the book ("The Natural") is basically about evolution and its effect on the global carbon cycle. The second half ("The Unnatural") looks at what technology is within evolution, and technology's effect on the global carbon cycle (i.e., meteoric).

Before I stumbled upon this structure, thinking about the narrative was like trying to cut soup with a knife. Check this out: as of May 19, 12:45 AM, there were 35,421,960 known substances. This number grows by about 3000-4000 every day. But only about 100,000 of them are inorganic, science-speak for "not containing carbon." That means, essentially, I had a practically infinite pool of things to write about, needed to pick a dozen, build stories around them, and make sure that the stories flow out of carbon's singular narrative. I don't know what's crazier, how much work this book took, or the fact that I loved almost every second of it.

Jen-Luc: Here's more evidence of your very high tolerance for pain: Most of your research is comprised of peer-reviewed articles from scientific journals. Isn't that a bit masochistic of you?

Eric: I got into it. First of all, journal articles are primary documents. I wanted to avoid secondary literature, media, to the extent possible. (I supplemented the diet of journal articles with many books by writer-scientists and science writers.) Also, I wanted to emphasize how important peer review is. Never mind for a moment the debates going on in the blogosphere and elsewhere about the future of peer-reviewed journals. Scientists appeal to each others' professional judgment as a way to drive forward, into the unknown. It's kind of like the US justice system, where the highest, most noble authority is the jury of our peers. So by concentrating on peer-reviewed literature (despite all the imperfections), I also wanted to defend professional judgment, which is under attack in this country, be i in science, journalism, and other areas.

Jen-Luc: You have firsthand experience with the mainstream media. How do you feel about the current level of public discourse on scientific issues in general, and the topic of climate change in particular? As a faux-French, intellectually elitist avatar, I get discouraged when these sorts of issues fail to get covered as frequently as the Starlet du Jour's latest randy exploits. Can the blogosphere help fill in the gap left by the dearth of substantive media analysis?

Eric: By design, The Carbon Age is a book that I hope (a) people will enjoy, and (b) is filled with all the stuff I wish could be taken for granted by mainstream media, policymakers, and captains of industry. You have to take your hat off for a number of people and institutions who in the last decade have emphasized the importance of putting more science into public discourse and fixing US education. They include but are not limited to: the February 2001 Hart-Rudman Commission report on 21st century threats to the US; Tom Friedman's The World is Flat; the October 2005 NAS report Rising Above the Gathering Storm; and work in the blogosphere by the "Sciblings" (SEED's stable of science blogs) and other science bloggers.

Because I worked for several years in the corporate media, I think about these questions from a different angle. For example, why does science rarely get covered? I would argue that looking at the bigger economic picture might help answer this question. The business model for news media in the US is broken. Newspapers and magazines are still profitable, but not as much as they have been historically, and many have had to take draconian measures to cut costs in order to stay profitable. So science coverage gets cut. But so do legal affairs, government (versus politics), local coverage, investigations, education, art, international events, etc. We're not getting as much of virtually everything -- except the randy exploits.

To me, this speaks of a problem much deeper and more complicated than how science and scientists are portrayed in the media. It speaks to how we teach students science, and how they take it (or don't) into the labor force and culture. The media are losing their shirts everywhere, so I think they are just one star in the galaxy of problems with education standards. Nations need to invest in their citizens. Ours hasn't so much lately, relative to the competition. That's the ultimate reason many people think the corporate media don't cover science well.

A friend of mind is a pollster and quite cynical. He said recently that the problem with Washington isn't politicians, it's voters. Americans get the political leaders they deserve. The same might be said of media. If editors sense that people don't want to read about science as much as celebrities, there will be less science and more celebrities. On a positive note, I would emphasize strongly that there is more good journalism going on today than possibly ever. It just has smaller, fragmented audiences.

Jen-Luc: That said, we're not above mentioning the occasional Shameless Starlet to boost our blog traffic a bit. Your book was linked on shop.MTV's Website to the DVD release of Season 1 the reality show, Tila Tequila's Shot at Love. Why isn't she in your book? After all, Tila (see photo above) is a carbon-based life form, albeit with a more synthetic enhancements than most. And Carl Sagan once said that we are all made of star stuff.

Eric: I was happy and amused that shop.MTV noticed that if you like soft-core porn, you'll love The Carbon Age. There actually is sex of a sort in the book. And certainly it's true that every atom larger than hydrogen in a starlet's body was forged in a sun. From what I gather, though, at least in the Hollywood sense, Tila Tequila is not "star" material.

NEXT UP: Things get serious! "C is for Carbon: Part Deux," in which Eric tells Jen-Luc Piquant all about good and bad carbs, global warming, and what it was like to interview Vaclav Smil, former Czechoslovakian dissident turned distinguished professor.