Category Archives: Science

The Shape Of The Universe Explained

I’ve posted other things about the shape of the universe, but nothing that is quite as clear as this video.  The gist of the video is that we are three dimensional beings in a higher dimensional universe and you can have a universe that looks flat and finite but still travel in one direction only to end up back where you started.  This is similar to walking around a sphere only supesized!  I am in awe of people that can take such a difficult concept to wrap your mind around and make it easy to understand and clever at the same time.  This is part one of a promised three and covers the idea of a flat universe, which you may recall is one of three recognized models for the shape of the universe.  The others being spherical and hyperbolic.  Those will be covered in the next videos to come.  Watch:

[youtube http://youtu.be/_k3_B9Eq7eM]

 

It’s Alive! It’s Alive!

Lake Vostok, the Antarctic lake buried under two miles of ice has been discovered to be teeming with life.  Scientists were able to verify 3,500 distinct organisms from DNA samples.  Many of the organisms appear to be similar to ones normally found near underwater thermal vents.

This is actually slightly surprising.  It was thought that Lake Vostok has been sealed away from the world for millions of years.  Scientists thought to find a completely sterile environment or a relatively alien environment.  And while organisms that hang around thermal vents are certainly alien to our everyday life, they’re certainly not alien to biologists.

That isn’t to say that they won’t find alien life in Lake Vostok.  They’ve only reported on what they’ve already been able to verify and not what they haven’t yet.  It does likely mean that Lake Vostok is not as cut off from the outside world as was once thought.  Either way, you can expect some pretty cool science to be coming from the Lake Vostok finds for years to come.

Oh, and what’s with Russia’s science station at Lake Vostok?  It looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic nightmare.  A band of survivors hunting for scraps and making shelter of whatever is available to them.  Given the location, either Russia didn’t have a lot of money to build the station or they have a wicked sense of humor.  Given the amount of vodka they consume, it could go either way.

Michael Douglas Is A Cunning Linguist

It’s not often that important news comes from celebrity, but this certainly qualifies.  In a recent interview, Michael Douglas talked about his recent fight with throat cancer.  He reveals that the likely cause of his throat cancer was HPV caused by cunnilingus.

Now, people will snicker, but this is actually really important as far as education goes.  Studies show that 80% of women will contract HPV by the time they are 50.  HPV can cause many, many health problems for women.  As we see from Michael Douglas, it can also cause problems for men.

All of these problems should be immaterial within a generation or two because we have a vaccine for HPV.  The CDC recommends girls get vaccinated around their teenage years, but I’d like it to be taken a step further.  Making this vaccine mandatory for both boys and girls would prevent countless pointless health problems and save many lives.

Unfortunately, America still thinks sex is icky and if people don’t want to get HPV they simply shouldn’t have sex.  They also think that giving kids the vaccine will make teenagers sex crazed lunatics who will hump anything that moves.  Newsflash, they already are.  The only thing the vaccine will do is prevent them from spreading disease.

Men only think of health problems when it affects them.  Maybe Michael Douglas’ bout with cancer will make politicians stop giving women a tongue lashing (ha!) and get on board with vaccinating this easily preventable disease.

Prince Rupert’s Drop

What happens when you drip molten glass into water and then shatter the resulting glass drop?  Your awesome science video of the day happens, that’s what:

Dude.  That’s some serious science.  I’m going to have to watch the other ones as well.

An Entertainment Complex In The Middle Of A Sewage System

Oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson, why must you be so awesome?

When giving a speech on Intelligent Design, he had a segment about how stupidly designed the entire universe is.  He went on to describe how stupidly designed humans are.  He called the human reproductive system “an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system.”  He also railed about the idiocy of using the same mouth to both breath, talk, and eat guaranteeing that a certain portion of the population will choke to death every year.  No engineer worth a damn would ever have created the human.

The larger point of the speech is that every well known scientist in history has proclaimed Intelligent Design in their careers to describe what they can’t describe despite the fact that someone came along later to fill in the gaps.  It’s even true today to a lesser extent.  85% of the top scientific minds in the world do not believe in god but what about the other 15%?  If the scientific community can’t even convert that 15%, what can they possibly expect to establish inroads with the general population who have no idea how science actually works.  The answer is you can’t.

You should watch the speech in its entirety.  It’s well worth it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASmQmYX-71Q&feature=youtube_gdata_player]

In Praise Of Our Atmosphere

NASA does a lot of work with a little money.  They send rovers to Mars, they launch satellites into space, they observer distant stars and galaxies and they look at the moon.  We often forget about them moon perhaps because of its ubiquitousness in the sky.  That is until NASA informs us that they have recorded the largest explosion ever recorded on the moon.  If you happened to be looking at the moon at the time of impact, you would have been able to see it with the naked eye.  No telescope required.  40 kilograms at 90,000 kilometers per hour.  KER-SPLAT!

Even a casual observer will notice that the moon gets hit a lot.  It’s surface is more cratered than a teenager’s face with acne.  With no atmosphere, the moon takes the full force of any impact from rogue meteoroids.  Any colonization that we do on the moon would almost certainly be required to be underground as a result.

Earth, on the other hand, has a nice atmosphere of various gases that not only allows us to breath and live, but also protects us from the potentially deadly flying rocks that are strewn across our  solar floating in mathematically precise orbits around the Sun just like Earth.  Any of those rocks that try hitting the Earth are met by billions of molecules joyously bouncing off of each other but mostly spread impossibly far apart.  The plunging rock changes this dynamic.  It pushes those molecules closer and closer together where they start bouncing off of each other more and more frequently.  All of this bouncing around causes pressure and temperature to rise quickly.  The higher pressure and temperature start picking away at the death spiraling rock until it breaks apart into fine dust and tiny pebbles that fall harmlessly to Earth.  Well, most of the time.

So, thank you atmosphere!  Your praises cannot be sung enough.  Ballads should be written and stories told of all of your invisible, silent, never ending works.

One Monsanto To Rule Them All

The Supreme Court recently unanimously ruled in favor of Monsanto in a lawsuit that has far reaching implications for genetic modification and individual control of the food chain.  At issue was whether a farmer could buy soybeans from a grain elevator and plant them even though those soybeans were grown with Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready soybean stock.  The court ruled that the farmer violated Monsanto’s patent doing so.

There are a couple of interesting points to this.  First, the farmer does have a contract with Monsanto to buy its Roundup Ready soybeans and he did so for the traditional first planting season.  He then decided to attempt a risky second planting with the much cheaper soybeans he was able to purchase from a local grain elevator.  Second, 90% of soybeans grown in the United States are Roundup Ready.  Talk about a monopoly!  Third, the Supreme Court made it clear that all the thorny issues involved with this decision are only relevant to this decision and no inferences should be made as to the general legality of patented gene modification technology.

I call balderdash on that third point.  I am far from an expert, but I’ve never heard someone cite a case and the citation be rejected because the Supreme Court called no backsies when they made the decision.  Of course this decision is going to be used as precedent in the many cases to come!  The “this is not meant to be a sweeping decision” language is just political cover for an incredibly contentious issue.

Think about the implication here.  The Supreme Court has ruled that a company can create a self-replicating organic product and then decide how the offspring of that product is used ad infinitum.  I buy and plant Roundup Ready seed from Monsanto.  I plant those seeds and sell the resulting crop to person B.  Person B is restricted from planting the seeds I sold him.  Person B sells the seed to person C.  Person C is restricted from planting the seeds that person B sold him.  Monsanto can dictate exactly how those soybeans are used throughout the soybean’s life cycle no matter how many generations that soybean exists.  In theory, this means that Monsanto could dictate exactly what products are made with those soybeans.  Not that I think they would ever do something so stupid.

The farmer in this case almost certainly deserved to lose.  He signed a contract with Monsanto and he tried to skirt that contract in an inventive way.  The problem is HOW he lost.  The Supreme Court is saying that he violated patent law, not contract law.  Monsanto can and does go after farmers who plant non-Roundup Ready crops that happen to get cross pollinated with a neighbor’s Roundup Ready plants.  This Supreme Court decision declares that Monsanto has every right to do so.

This is one of those issues where the law definitely needs to be updated but there is so much money involved that there is almost unanimous political agreement that nothing will be done.  Self-replicating technologies should not be patentable.  If companies like Monsanto want to mess with genes to produce a superior plant they should mess with a few more genes and make those plants infertile.

GUITARS. IN. SPACE!

Commander Chris Hadfield recorded a pretty awesome version of “Space Oddity” while on the International Space Station.  Check it out:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo&feature=youtube_gdata_player]

There is a guitar in space!  That got me to thinking.  Your average acoustic guitar weighs about 7 lbs (3 kg).  The cost per kilogram to get an object to orbit is around $10,000.  That means that the guitar cost $30,000 to get to the ISS!

This isn’t meant as a knock on wasteful government spending.  It’s more putting into perspective how expensive space travel is.  A guitar is certainly worth the investment for the astronauts of the ISS.  It provides needed entertainment during their downtime hours.  It’s not like these guys can go out for a walk in their free time.  Not to mention that a guitar in space has brought us this stunning music video!  Well played, NASA.  Well played.

It also got me to thinking about how much modern technology has likely saved us.  You have to assume that a fairly common personal item brought by the astronauts is a book.  Books are made of paper and paper is pretty heavy.  Now, thought, they can just keep a Kindle or two up there to share and have hundreds of books at the cost of only $2,500 (250 g) per Kindle.  And they can just beam new books to the ISS for free!

That’s the beautiful thing about space travel.  Even the most mundane thing as a guitar becomes infinitely fascinating.

Tree Splooge

All the trees here in Chicago are budding and it’s slightly rainy and a bit windy.  That means tree splooge is everywhere.  Those of us who are unlucky enough to have parked outside need a tree splooge towel to wipe off our cars.  Budding trees will have distinctive bud/pollen rings around them come morning.  It’s a little disgusting but it’s all part of the normal cycle.

Spring is kind of amazing.  The world takes on this sickly sweet smell wherever you go.  With all of the trees coming out of hibernation, the carbon dioxide in the air actually precipitously drops.  The earth has a breath rhythm and that breath rhythm is increasing:

co2_data_mlo

Source

Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to increased temperatures.  Increased temperatures leads to more erratic weather.  More erratic weather leads to more disasters.

Increased carbon dioxide is only good for plants up to a point just like increased oxygen is only good for humans up to a point.  If oxygen were increasing the way carbon dioxide is we’d be terrified.  Too much oxygen in the air and someone lights a cigarette and the entire world explodes.  Carbon dioxide isn’t as dramatic.  It’s a creeper.  There are so many places to store the excess heat that carbon dioxide creates that people don’t realize there’s something wrong.  But there is something wrong and special interests have hijacked rational debate.

97% of climate scientists say there is something wrong but the 3% that say there isn’t anything wrong get equal (or even more) time in the media.  This creates a dynamic where people believe there is a vigorous scientific debate going on where there really isn’t.

The ice caps are melting dramatically.  Air temperatures are slowly rising.  The ocean is incomprehensibly vast and has the ability to absorb a lot of the generated heat.  At some point, that will end and the air temperature will rise precipitously.  It may already be too late to stop this.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act.