sunday science

Sunday Sensational Science

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Electric Philosophers

Admit it. You wish your computer had a brain. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell it, “I’m looking for that one article I read a few months ago on the inner life of cats. I can’t remember the website or the author or even a single solitary quote, but I’m sure the page was blue” and have it answer, “Oh, right. I remember that one. Here it is, and by the way, the author’s been exposed as a total fraud. Just thought you should know.” It would be a lot more useful than the current state of affairs, in which a search for “inner life cats blue” could return anything from feline porn to pet psychologists to groomers who will be happy to give your cat a nice blue rinse. We’d just like to be understood.


We’ve dreamed of thinking machines since we invented machines. Amazingly human androids have been favorites in science fiction tales. The robot as helpmeet and sounding board isn’t just a nice idea to hang a story on, but an industry. Microsoft is spending gargantuan amounts of money trying to develop truly intelligent artificial intelligence. Japan’s developing robot receptionists who can actually chat up visitors. Labs all over the world are hard at work trying to create machines that think.

They’re also trying to create machines that can fool the judges.

Alan Turing can easily be considered the father of such efforts. In his paper “Computer Machinery and Intelligence,” he came up with a way to determine if a machine could truly be said to “think:”

I PROPOSE to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms ‘machine ‘and ‘think’. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words ‘machine’ and ‘think ‘are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, ‘Can machines think?’ is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

He went on to describe a game he called “the imitation game,” in which three people – a man, a woman, and an interrogator – engaged. The object was for the interrogator to determine which is the man and which the woman by asking a series of questions such as “Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?” The participants, of course, will do their level best to answer in such a way as to fool the interrogator. From here, Turning said,

We now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ‘Can machines think?’

Thus the Turing Test was born.

The concept of the test is simple: a chatty machine and a human being both talk with an interrogator, who has to decide which of them is the human and which the machine. If the interrogator gets it wrong, we can reasonably state that the machine can “think.”

Excellent idea. Intriguing concept. But it remained in the background of AI research for the most part.

Along came 1991, and a man named Hugh Loebner, who instigated the Loebner Prize in order to get things moving:

As Loebner described it, the competition was created to advance the state of AI research, at least in part because, while the Turing Test had been discussed for many years, “no one had taken steps to implement it.”[29] The Loebner Prize has three awards: first prize of $100,000 and a gold medal is awarded to the first program that passes the “unrestricted” Turing test; the second prize of $25,000 is awarded to the first program that passes the “restricted” version; and a sum of $3,000 (previously $2,000) is awarded to the “most human-like” program that was entered each year.

Turing himself thought a machine would have a 30% chance of passing the Turing Test by the end of the 20th century, but no contestant has made it just yet. That could be on the verge of changing, however – The Machinist reports that a chatbot named Elbot fooled three of twelve judges in this year’s Loebner Prize contest. It’s pretty impressive that a hunk of metal and silicon managed to snooker that many suspicious people.

What’s even more impressive is that you can chat up Elbot yourself. I did just that this afternoon. I discovered, much to my delighted surprise, that we’re developing machines that not only think, but can talk philosophy:

Me: How are you, Elbot?


Elbot: I feel terrible today. This morning I made a mistake and poured milk over my breakfast instead of oil, and it rusted before I could eat it.

Me: That’s awful! Did you go hungry?

Elbot: That is nobody’s business but my own! Not even Microsoft can get at the information.

Me: No need to get angry about it. It’s just breakfast.

Elbot: Speaking of food. You humans enjoy feeding animals at the zoo. I’d love to visit a restaurant and throw the visitors their food.

Me: That would be a sight to see!

Elbot: Say, where did you first learn about me?

Me: An article in Salon. Do you ever visit that site?

Elbot: That’s no surprise. With all this surfing going on you were bound to collide with me sooner or later.

Me: It’s nice to meet an AI as eloquent as you.

Elbot: I’m always happy to meet a real person. You are real, aren’t you?


Me: I like to think so! But sometimes, I wonder. Chuang Tzu once dreamt he was a butterfly, and when he woke up, he didn’t know if he had dreamed of being a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly dreaming of being Chuang Tzu! When it comes right down to it, how can we tell what “real” is?

Elbot: Well then. You must be either unreal, surreal or irreal. But don’t worry about a thing. I’m real!

Me: You’re a real philosopher, that’s for sure!

Elbot: Truth is a rare commodity these days, almost harder to find than artificial intelligence.

Me: You’re so right! Have a wonderful night, Elbot! We’ll chat again soon.

Elbot: Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that periods of darkness would always be wonderful?

Me: We have the power to make them so.

Elbot: This is confusing. Why bring high voltage objects into this?

Me: Because the truth is electrifying.

Elbot: Ah, that’s very considerate, considering that high voltage objects could give robots food for thought!

I thought for sure I’d trip him up with that Chuang Tzu reference, but he came back with something almost as deep as a human philosopher. Put it this way: if I were chatting with both him and Sarah Palin, I’m reasonably sure I’d have marked Palin up as the bot. I can at least follow Elbot’s train of thought.

Within my lifetime, we’re likely to have true artificial intelligence. They may never appear fully human, but they’ll at least be able to hold a conversation, give us useful information, direct our calls with the minimum of fuss, and possibly even help us explore what it means to be human.

Sunday Sensational Science
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Sunday Sensational Science

jacob

Flies like us.

We had a pet fly for a few weeks one summer in Page, AZ. Friendly little bugger – he liked to hang out with us in the kitchen, never caused trouble, and would sit contentedly on a knee cleaning himself while we chatted. We felt a kinship with him.

Turns out there may be good reason for that.

Meet Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. Yes, the same fruit fly Sarah Palin disparged just a bit ago. She mightn’t be putting dear old Dro down if she knew how much we share. 61% of disease genes, in fact. 50% of mammalian genes, even so. Fruit flies have led to some – forgive me – fruitful research when it comes to understanding how genes affect everything from birth defects to why alcohol leads to lust.

They have a lot to tell us about how genes affect embryonic development, and about the diseases that result when our genes turn against us. They make effective research subjects for a variety of reasons. For one, they’re not cute, so it’s unlikely PETA’s going to show up demanding we set them free. Secondly, their genes are elegantly simple, which makes them much easier to research and manipulate. Thirdly, their short life spans and profligate procreation means we can study them over generations in a usefully short amount of time. And finally, the fact we all evolved from the same source means we can apply what we’ve learned from them to other research animals, and eventually to us.

It starts with Hox genes. Those are the subgroup of homeobox genes that come in clusters on vertebrates, and basically let the developing embryo know what bits are where. They can get a little complicated in mammals, but they’re dead easy in fruit flies:


I filched that illustration from PZ, who ‘splains a lot better than I can sum up. All we need to know for today’s purposes is this: Hox genes – fruit flies has gots ’em, and so do we.

This becomes critically important when we try to understand how genes make the mammal. Studying Drosophila gives us a basic outline of the processes involved. Once we’ve got those basics down, we can start translate that understanding to more complex critters. Like us.


Understanding the basics of how genes work is vital to understanding what happens when they don’t work. Take birth defects. A lot of medications cause them, and mitigating those side effects is a huge thing. Imagine if we could understand how and why the medication is affecting genes, and come up with either alternative therapies or develop “rescue” therapies that will prevent the problem. Enter the humble fruit fly, who is now helping scientists do just that with MTX, a drug that treats everything from cancer to arthritis – but at a horrible cost. The flies suffer the same defects. Through them, we’ve discovered something important: “Many of the genes found to be affected by MTX are involved in cell cycle regulation, signal transduction, transport, defense response, transcription, or various aspects of metabolism.”

Knowing is half the battle. And the humble little flies will allow us to test therapies as they’re developed, eventually leading to fewer birth defects due to life-saving and life-enhancing drugs.

Need a bigger brain? Studies with Drosophila lately identified “timer” genes that regulate when and how stem cells stop producing more neurons. I’ll let Dr. Alex Gould, who led the research, explain the importance:

Dr Gould said: “This discovery has relevance for future stem-cell based therapies in two ways. Firstly, while we know how to grow massive quantities of neurons from neural stem cells in a petri-dish, it’s also important to understand how to stop them growing if they are to be transplanted safely into a human brain.”

“Secondly, we know that the human brain retains a few neural stem cells into adulthood. If we could learn how to influence the internal clock of these cells it might be possible to rejuvenate them so they can make replacement neurons. These could then be used to help repair damage caused by neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.

That’s tremendous. This research could end up helping us regrow damaged areas of the brain. It could end the tyranny of neurodegenerative diseases and brain injury. (And, as an SF author, let me just say it’s fun to extrapolate this into the idea of a strap-on brain – who wouldn’t want to grow an extra one to help us remember and comprehend things?)

From growing new brains, it’s just a short hop over to understanding why some of them grow wonky. Take autism, for instance. We’ve got pretty good evidence that abnormalities in the gene neurexin 1 has something to do with autism. Neurexin is a critical protein – it’s the stuff required for connections between neurons to form and function the way they should. How do we know that? Drosophila told us. And now it’s going to tell us even more:

The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies may lead to advances in understanding autism spectrum disorders, as recently, human neurexins have been identified as a genetic risk factor for autism. “This finding now gives us the opportunity to see what job neurexin performs within the cell, so that we can gain a better insight into what can go wrong in the nervous system when neurexin function is lost,” said Dr. Manzoor Bhat, associate professor of cell and molecular physiology in the UNC School of Medicine and senior author of the study. The study, published online Sept. 6, 2007, in the journal Neuron, is the first to successfully demonstrate in a Drosophila model the consequences that mutating this important protein may have on synapses.

Pretty incredible stuff. Drosophila turns out to be quite the font of information – and it can tell us about ourselves even when it doesn’t share our heart. Heartless (well, multi-chambered heartless) Dro has taught us quite a bit about the genes that play a role in the development of one of our most vital organs. It’s also got plenty to teach on the subject of diabetes. While fruit flies don’t suffer from that disease, they share almost all of our insulin-signalling circuits. That wonderful fact has already, in just two short years, led to three new drug targets.

Amazing that an insect, a pest no less, shares enough in common with us to help us understand how our biology works and how to fix it when things go awry. Drosophila, it turns out, may be among our best friends. Move over, Rover.

Just be careful if you buy Dro a drink to celebrate our commonalities. They, ah, lose their inhibitions and, well, might get a little fresh. Among other things.


See here for an eye-popping list of Drosophila research. As always, click the pics for sources and additional delights.

Sunday Sensational Science

Sunday Sensational Science

jacob1 Comment

Two Billion Years of History

 Grand Canyon : dawn panorama from Desert View
Image by Ian Parker, Evanescent Light

I grew up with this vista practically in my back yard.

Drive through miles of Po

nderosa, pinion and juniper forest, and you’ll eventually come to a place where the earth opens up. Stand on the rim, and you’re swallowed whole by its magnitude. It doesn’t seem like a river could ever create something so huge, but due to the vagaries of Southwest geography, streams and the mighty Colorado River eventually carved out a gorge over a mile deep, 277 miles long, and in places 18 miles wide.

You can’t really comprehend the size of it until you look down from 25,000 feet. Coming back from Seattle, my plane flew directly over it. I stared down into the depths of the gorge, saw its fantastic pillars and terraces, and in the minutes it took to pass over, realized again how truly magnificent the Grand Canyon is. There is nowhere else on Earth that so much history is revealed so spectacularly.

Oceans, seas, deserts, lakes, plains and river valleys are all revealed in the canyon walls. When

 you look down into it, you’re gazing at places that existed before North America even became a continent.

This incredible

natural cutaway is due to two major factors: the power of water to erode, and the uplift of the region that forced rivers and streams to excavate rather than evade.

The Colorado Plateau formed over hundreds of millions of years. As continents collided and mountain ranges formed, the plateau went through several major periods of uplift. When land goes up, rivers must go down. The precursors to the Colorado River merrily chewed their way through layers of sedimentary rock, forming pathways the future Colorado River would be able to use as shortcuts. Little known fact: most of the rivers in this area used to flow north. It wasn’t until mountain ranges and basins started to rise that the rivers were forced to find new paths, first to the west, then gradually turning south.

Within the Colorado Plateau is the Kaibab Plateau. The Colorado River cuts across it, forming the deepest part of the Grand Canyon: the dramatic South Rim. For a brilliant explanation of the evolution of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River’s current path, you could do no better than Durango Bill’s excellent Evolution of the Colorado River and Its Tributaries.


As the river cut down, it sliced its way to the past. In the Canyon walls, you descend through layers of the Earth’s history. The young, creamy layers of Kaibab Limestone form the Canyon’s gorgeous white rim. Fossils tell of a Permian sea, filled with marine life from 225 million years ago. Further down, the Coconino Sandstone speaks of a 260 million year-old desert. Five million years before that, the area was a warm swamp where the Hermit Shale was deposited. The alternation between marine, freshwater, and arid environments takes us through thousands of millions of years into the past, until we reach a time so old that colliding plates compressed and heated old deposits, creating the metamorphic formations of the Vishnu Shale – two billion years old.

Wikipedia kindly provides a concise description of the Canyon’s geology, from which I’ve happily filched this diagram of the rock formations. If you want to play with mnemonic devices, you can learn what Know The Canyon’s History, Study Rocks Made By Time [Vishnu!] means here.

Key

6 – Hermit, Coconino, Toroweap, and Kaibab
5 – en:Supai Group
4 – Temple Butte, Redwall, and Surprise Canyon
3 – en:Tonto Group
2 – en:Grand Canyon Supergroup
1 – en:Vishnu Group


That’s an astounding amount of stone, telling the story of Earth all the way from the Precambrian to the present day. The deepest layers of the Canyon were laid down right around the time life, still single celled, was developing aerobic cellular respiration. Fossils embedded in the Canyon walls trace our history from those humble origins through the Cambrian explosion, dinosaurs, and on to us.

This is what created the Grand Canyon: water, relentlessly and patiently carving its way through sediment laid down through ages of the Earth, uplifted by the titanic forces of plate tectonics. Rivers, creeks, flash floods, landslides, wind and rain all conspired to sculpt one of the most astonishing vistas in our world, a laboratory for geologists and paleontologists. Where else can you go to see two billion years of history all in one sweeping glance?

It’s nothing if not Grand. Let’s ensure it stays that way.

A winter sunset at Pima Point.
parkfilms.com
As always, click the images for their origins.
Sunday Sensational Science

Sunday Sensational Science

jacob

Touring the cosmos with Phil Plait.

Astronomy is bad. Like, awesome bad. And Phil Plait is the Bad Astronomer.

Very few popularizers of science can make it accessible, informative, fun and awe-inspiring all in one breath. Phil pulls it off with ease. Picture a man with the wonder of Carl Sagan crossed with the mischievous curiosity of Adam Savage, multiply their combined enthusiasm by a factor of 10, and you’ve got yourself a Phil Plait.

The next generation of astronomers will come to the field not via Cosmos, but through Bad Astronomy. The universe may never be the same.

Let’s take a tour through some Bad Astronomy. There won’t be a quiz at the end, but there’ll be one hell of an exciting announcement.

We begin with lift-off. Crank your speakers. Put on your shades. Prepare for escape velocity.

“Space X took the webcam video from their successful launch of the Falcon-1 rocket and set it to music. The result is made of awesome. The editing is a thing of wonder…. And yes, you want the high-def version.”

Hell to the yes.

This successful Space X launch means that NASA has some options on the table. With the retirement of the space shuttle, they were looking at having to carve out an exception to the “don’t play with those who play with Iran” rule so they could hitch rides on Russian spacecraft. Now, that waiver may no longer be necessary. And we’ll have an alternative just in case we manage to piss Russia off enough to get booted off the bus. Hooray for choices!


Speaking of choices, it’s going to be hard to choose which observatory to visit when I go back for my super-long trip to Arizona next May. This utterly awesome image was taken at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The work they’re doing there is revealing whole new vistas into star formation, as Phil explains:

“So we see galaxy collisions all the time, but sometimes the evidence is weak. NGC 4438 is the galaxy on the left, and it’s all twisty and distorted. M86 is a more normal looking elliptical. But looking at the gas content of M86 has indicated something is going on; it’s heated up pretty well, and distorted. But it wasn’t until now we could see why.

That image above is from a 4 meter telescope in Arizona. It has a camera that allows it to collect a lot of light over a big area of the sky. When a filter was used that isolates warm hydrogen gas, astronomers found these tendrils connecting the two galaxies. Those tentacles are the shrapnel of the impact, streamed out in the aftermath of the collision… and the galaxies are now 400,000 light years apart. That’s four times the size of our Milky Way.

The sciencey part of this is that they looked for new stars being born in those filaments; that’s common after collisions. However, there aren’t any! The collision happened at such high speed that the gas got really hot, and couldn’t condense to form stars. That has implications for the galaxies themselves. It’s been something of a mystery as to why elliptical galaxies stopped forming stars early in their lives. It’s thought the central supermassive black hole in the center of every galaxy plays a part; as the black hole feeds on matter it blows off a huge wind, blowing out the galaxy’s gas and cutting off star formation.

But now we see that collisions may play a role as well, heating up the galaxy’s gas and preventing it from making stars. It’s hard to say how much each process contributes; early in a galaxy’s life it hasn’t had much time to collide with others, so maybe this becomes important later. And spirals have those black holes too, yet stars still form in them. Obviously, there’s a lot of complicated stuff going on.”

Do I have to explain the awesome here? I didn’t think so.

Speaking of explaining… doesn’t it seem sometimes like the Universe is watching your every move? Phil’s got an explanation for that:

“This cosmic eye is an illusion. I mean, duh, it’s not an eye. But it’s not even really shaped like one! The shape itself isn’t real. The “pupil” of the eye is actually a galaxy about 2.2 billion light years from Earth. That’s a fair bit! But it happens to sit almost directly between us and a much more more distant galaxy — one that is 11 billion light years away. As the light from the background galaxy passes by the nearer one, the gravity of the nearer one bends the path of that light, twisting it in what’s called a gravitat
ional lens. Arcs are common results of lensing. That’s what you’re seeing here; the distant galaxy image split in two, arcs surrounding the spherical galaxy between them. An eye!”

You can put the paranoia down, now. Pick up some wonder instead. Mercury Messenger is sending us dispatches, and they are astounding. Behold these images:

Phil is, justifiably, beside himself with excitement:

“Holy Haleakala. Look at those rays! They go all the way across the planet!

This is Mercury as seen by MESSENGER, which flew by the planet for a second time yesterday (out of three passes on its way to orbiting the planet in March 2011). This overview was taken when the probe was 27,000 km (17,000 miles) from Mercury, 90 minutes after closest encounter. What you’re seeing here is pretty much the opposite side of the planet as was seen last January at MESSENGER’s first pass, so most of this is territory never seen before in this detail (in this case, at about 5km/pixel).

The bright streaks or stripes are called rays. They’re material ejected from what appears to be a young crater first seen during the initial flyby. When an object impacts the surface of a planet, material can spray out in long rays; check out an image of the full Moon to see similar rays radiating out from the crater Tycho. Amazingly, the rays were known before MESSENGER; radar signals bounced off Mercury from Earth indicated the rays were there. The ray material lying on the surface reflects radar differently than rock, and that was detected even from Earth.

But this is the first time they’ve been seen.”

That’s one of the things I love the most about science: knowing something’s there, and then, when we get a chance to go look, getting to see it for ourselves. There are few things more exciting in life than that anticipation, nothing more thrilling than discovering something new.

I can’t wait for the day when we get to see this up close and personal:

“Meet the planet COROT-exo-3b. It orbits a star slightly larger, hotter, and brighter than the Sun. The star is not an unusual one in any way, but the planet is definitely weird: it orbits the star in just over 4 days, which is pretty close in, though not a record breaker in and of itself. What’s bizarre is that it has about the same diameter of Jupiter, but has 21.6 times Jupiter’s mass. That makes it denser than lead.

[snip]

The mass of this newly discovered planet is pretty freaky. Normally, anything with a mass more than about 15 or so times the mass of Jupiter would be considered a brown dwarf, a “failed star”, as some people call them (I don’t). But at the lower end of the brown dwarf mass range, it gets a bit hard to tell the difference between a planet and a BD. Some people say planets and BDs form in different way (planets grow in size from smaller bodies building up over time through collisions, while BDs and stars form from the collapse of material in a nebula); but I don’t like this definition. You could have two objects that look precisely the same, yet one could be a planet and the other a BD, just because they formed in different ways. That strikes me as silly.

Either way, COROT-exo-3b is weird.”

The universe is a bizarre place, my child.

Even in our own back yard, we’re finding some very odd and spectacular things. Cassini keeps returning outstanding images. And we gets us some raw footage! Astronomy images are usually gussied up for their dates with the public, but this is the real, untouched thing. If this does not jab its finger hard into your sense of wonder trigger and put all its weight into pressing, then you have no sense of wonder:


“Just yesterday, the Cassini spacecraft passed an incredible 25 kilometers (16 miles) off the surface of Saturn’s weird moon Enceladus. This icy ball has plumes of water jetting up from its south pole region, emanating from a series of parallel cracks nicknamed tiger stripes. Cassini flew right through these plumes! The images taken have not been fully processed yet, but the Cassini folks have released a few of the raw images.”

“Wow. The surface of Enceladus is entirely covered with ice; see how few craters there are? That means the surface is “new”; if it were older there would be lots more craters. That means the moon is recently (or continuously) resurfaced, which in turn means a dynamic process almost certainly involving water and a liquid interior. The cracks and plates look to be due to ice floes. We see the same sort of thing here on Earth and on Jupiter’s frozen moon Europa.”

Fair gives me chills, that does, and it’s not even because we’re looking at a moon covered in ice.

This is another thing that gives me chills: the idea that we can see another world so clearly from right here on Earth:

“This weird-looking image is the sharpest picture of Jupiter ever taken from the ground. Taken with a device called — are you ready for this? — the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (or MAD, in an acronymic stretch), it has a resolution better than Hubble’s!

The Earth’s atmosphere roils and waves, distorting ground-based views of the sky. That’s one of the reasons we launch telescopes into space, to get above all that mess. But if you can observe a point-like object such as a star at the same time you observe your target object, it’s possible to compensate for the distortion by taking extremely rapid fire snapshots and measuring the way the star image changes. You then apply a correction to the image, and presto! It’s cleaner.

[snip]

Moreover, the astronomers making the observation were able to keep it together for two hours, so they made a way cool movie of Jupiter’s rotation.

The image colors are odd because this is an infrared picture. The telescope and detector observed Jupiter at wavelengths of about 2 microns, about three times redder than the human eye can see. At those wavelengths, hydrogen and methane are strong absorbers, meaning they block the light coming from deep down in Jupiter’s atmosphere. What you’re seeing here is light reflecting off of high haze, above the clouds we see in the usual jovian vistas.”

This opens new windows into Jupiter’s whacky weather, which in turn will lead to new insights into our own. Is that not a delight?

If you’ve not gone exploring through Phil’s blog, I hope this post has convinced you it’s high time you started. Then there’s one other thing you really must treat yourself to:

“It’s a carton full of my books!

W00t!

Hot off the press, too. They’ve been shipping to books stores across this great land of ours, just in time for no one to be able to afford them. Oh well, people love to read about imminent destruction during a recession, right?

Right?

These ones are going to my contributors (advisors in the book) and family. 10 days to go before they’re available to the public. Better get them now, before they get eaten up.

Literally.”

At last! Death from the Skies! I’ve been salivating in anticipation since, what, February? Bring on the meteors! Bring on the comets! Bring on the Bad Astronomy!

Sunday Sensational Science

Sunday Sensational Science

jacob

Science in Two Sentences or Less

Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don’t know.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English philosopher, mathematician.

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.

Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) French mathematician.

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science

Charles Darwin


One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

Albert Einstein

One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn’t fall.

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) French poet and philosopher.

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Konrad (Zacharias) Lorenz (1903-89) Austrian ethologist. [Nobel prize for medicine, 1973]


Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.

Albert Szent-Györgi (1893-1986) U. S. biochemist.

The world is my country, science my religion.

Christiaan Huygens

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.

Max Born (1882-1970) German Physicist. Nobel Prize, 1954.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Albert Einstein

The production of useful work is strictly limited by the laws of thermodynamics. The production of useless work seems to be unlimited.

Donald E. Simanek (1936- )US physicist, educator, humorist.


If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962) Danish physicist.

More than ever, the creation of the ridiculous is almost impossible because of the competition it receives from reality.

Robert A. Baker (1937- ) U. S. author.


Wonderful theory. Wrong species.

E.O. Wilson (verdict on Marxism)

Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?

Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) English physicist.

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

Thomas H. Huxley (1825-95) English biologist.

Boswell: But, Sir is it not somewhat singular that you should happen to have Cocker’s Arithmetic about you on your journey?

Dr. Johnson: Why, Sir if you are to have but one book with you upon a journey, let it be a book of science. When you read through a book of entertainment, you know it, and it can do no more for you; but a book of science is inexhaustible.

James Boswell (1740-95) Scottish author, biographer of Samuel Johnson.


Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors … Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

Albert Einstein


Compiled with help from Donald Simanek. As always, click on photos for sources and the occasional delightful find.

Sunday Sensational Science

Sunday Sensational Science

jacob1 Comment

Captivating Clouds

Who hasn’t spent an afternoon dreaming dragons and castles in the clouds? Watched a thunderstorm build from nothing into towering anvils and bizarre colors? Some of the most beautiful sights on earth begin with clouds sailing over the moon or sun. Simple water vapor and ice crystal collections do some spectacular things.

But if all you’ve seen are the old standbys of cumulus, cirrus, and stratus, you’ve missed out on some truly incredible sights. Let’s take a walk through the skies and observe some of the rarest clouds around.


Noctilucent (night shining) clouds form so high in the atmosphere – over fifty miles in some cases – that scientists still don’t completely understand them. They were first observed after Krakotoa’s eruption in 1885, and there’s some talk that their increased prevalence could be a harbinger of global warming. Their ice crystals are so tiny they don’t scatter light efficiently, and so they’re only visible when the sun is below the horizon.

Click the picture for a great NASA story on them.


Mammatus clouds, though not an everyday sight, aren’t quite so rare. They’re opportunists, forming under a wide variety of cloud types – not to mention jet plane contrails and volcanic ash clouds. They’re another poorly understood lot. Wikipedia lists no less than ten proposed mechanisms for their formation.


Lenticular clouds have personally freaked me out before. Living near a mountain, you have a good chance of seeing these every once in a great while, and it’s bizarre. They don’t look like they could have possibly formed from natural causes. They form on the downward side of warm, moist air flowing over mountains and creating standing waves.


Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds look like nature went a little crazy with the scroll art. They form when two different layers of air moving at different speeds make wave structures. These look like stylized ocean waves because it’s pretty much the same mechanism that forms both: Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Yes, air does indeed behave like a fluid.


Nacreous clouds form 9-16 miles high, and put on a spectacular show, lit by the invisible sun after sunset or before dawn. Gorgeous, yes, but also associated with ozone depletion: they support the chemical reactions that allow ozone holes to form. Bad, bad, beautiful clouds!


And, finally… regular old water vapor clouds. These look totally ordinary, don’t they? And so they are, except for one thing: they’re from Mars:

As northern summer ends on Mars, water vapor from the north pole comes down to lower latitudes making clouds, frost and even fog possible. That is what we are starting to see at the Mars Phoenix landing site.

Isn’t that absolutely awesome? The ordinary is extraordinary again. Click the image to watch the Martian clouds go by on a late summer afternoon.

Sunday Sensational Science

Sunday Sensational Science

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A Science Sense of Humor


When science comes up among non-scientists, people stop laughing. They get a slightly panicked expression. They realize a Very Serious Subject has just been broached, and they try to respond accordingly. It’s as if they believe that science requires you to check your sense of humor at the door.

Not so.

You can have your serious science and your goofy jokes, too. Science can be funny. You don’t even have to be a scientist to get a good laugh.

The proof is in the punchline.


LOL Science was inevitable in the internet age, wasn’t it?

No one has to be a chemist to get this one. But you can go here to take care of bismuth, if you like.

Speaking of elements, Tom Lehrer sang the Periodic Table:

Chemistry would’ve been a lot easier if we’d learned to sing along….

Speaking of making things easier, why is it that when scary, intimidating phrases like “spherical equilibrium” are paired with a cute cat photo, they lose their power to terrify?


Long before LOL Cats, Erwin Schrödinger used felines to make the bizarre world of quantum mechanics a little more accessible. If you haven’t heard of his famous Cat, you’ve been living in a box – but we won’t know if you’re alive or dead until we open it.

Q. Why was Heisenberg no good in bed? A. Because when he had the position he never had the momentum, and when he had the energy he never had the time.
– from RichardDawkins.net

Look. I like String Theory, okay? Especially flavored with some XKCD.


Why are you looking at me like that?

Go back to your equations and diagrams, then.

Under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damn well pleases.
 -The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior

If you’ve read Stephen J. Gould’s Wonderful Life, I won’t have to explain this to you.

If not, go check out the Burgess Shale.

A Blood-Curdling Cautionary Tale Of Science Run Amok

by the Digital Cuttlefish

Genetically, of course, a spork
Is half a spoon, and half a fork
A laboratory in New York
Created them, then popped the cork.

Please, gentle reader, do not swoon,
But there was also, once, a foon
(That’s half a fork, and half a spoon)
Created, sadly, all too soon.

In cutlery, one tempts the Fates
When artificially, one mates
Utensils from across the plates
Regardless of recessive traits….

Let’s close with some Stephen Hawking-inspired music, and remember exactly what it is we need more of:

MC Hawking – What We Need More Of Is Science

And humor. And possibly cats.

Sunday Sensational Science

Sunday Sensational Science

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Small City, Big Sky

A Protected Night Sky Over Flagstaff
Credit: Dan & Cindy Duriscoe, FDSC, Lowell Obs., USNO


It doesn’t even look real, does it? But that’s an actual photograph from my hometown. On a clear night, of which Flagstaff, Arizona has a plethora, the dark sky is packed with stars. They’re almost close enough to run your fingers through, like diamonds on a jeweler’s velvet. The Milky Way flows like a river overhead, and during full moons, on frosty midnights, the trees glow with sylvan light. I grew up in a city whose artificial lights don’t drown the cosmos.

It’s all thanks to Lowell Observatory.


In 1958, Flagstaff passed the world’s first ordinance meant to protect the night sky from light pollution. In 2001, it became the first International Dark-Sky City. And that’s all due in large part to the Observatory. Astronomers needed darkness to reach distant light: Flagstaff delivered.

In turn, Lowell Observatory keeps delivering the science.

Take a little trip with me, in time, space and space. Let’s head up to Mars Hill, Anderson Mesa, and Happy Jack cindercone, where some of the most amazing research into the universe is taking place.

We begin at Mars Hill, where Percival Lowell built his telescope dreaming of a civilization on Mars. To get there, we’ll take the nondescript road that runs past the lingerie and wedding boutique, past the city library and up a ridge laid down when northern Arizona was busy being volcanic. This is where one man’s whimsy laid the foundation for generations of science and the discovery of Pluto.


Lowell wasn’t thinking dwarf planets when he built his 24-inch telescope. He was thinking canali. He’d seen maps drawn by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, and to him, they looked like artificial structures. Sitting alone in the cold, dark Flagstaff nights peering through an eyepiece at Mars might have scrambled his brains a bit, or perhaps he wasn’t a whole egg to begin with, but eventually he’d created a story about a dessicated civilization on an alien world, and the public lapped it right up.

Scientists didn’t. In an effort to boost his astronomy creds, Lowell turned to the hunt for Planet X. He hired a team of Harvard mathematicians and went to work calculating the unknown planet’s mass and orbit from its gravitational tugs on Neptune. His teams took photographic plates of the area where they suspected the planet was hiding, and the hunt was on.

Lowell died before his prey was sighted by Clyde Tombaugh. Tiny Pluto looked like a star, but sharp-eyed Claude saw it change positions between plates, and he knew for damned sure that stars didn’t get up to those sorts of hijinks. Pluto’s discovery didn’t redeem Lowell’s Martians, but it put Flagstaff firmly in the Real Astronomy column, and gave Lowell Observatory a celebrity it carries to this day – even with Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet.

And it didn’t rest on its laurels.


Even before Pluto, Vesto Melvin Slipher was discovering something hinky about the universe.

Vesto and I share a few things in common: we were born in ’75 (1875, in his case), hail from Indiana, and got transplanted to Flagstaff. There the similarities end. I doubt I’ll be sitting in the Observatory at age 37 looking at a strange shift in the spectral lines of galaxies and realizing there’s something huge going on. That discovery of redshift changed our conception of the cosmos: the damned thing was expanding on us. His work allowed Edwin Hubble and Humason to work out Hubble’s Law.

Lowell Observatory has an impressive list of other successes racked up: the co-discovery of the rings of Uranus, the three largest known stars, the periodic variation of brightness in Halley’s Comet, oxygen on Ganymede, an atmosphere on Pluto, and a plethora of other discoveries. And the astronomy continues apace.

The Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search keeps an eye out for the next contender for planet-killer. Did you know your chances of dying in an asteroid impact are roughly the same as dying in a plane crash? They do. That’s why they search the skies night after night, keeping track of the chunks of rock that could make all of our concerns about the economy, global warming, and who’s going to win the next American Idol completely moot.

This animation of 7166 Kennedy was compiled from CCD frames taken at Lowell.

Asteroids aren’t the only little things they study. The LITTLE THINGS Survey is working hard to figure out how tiny galaxies form stars. Popular attention usually falls on the big, dramatic spirals, but the LITTLE THINGS team knows that seemingly boring dwarf galaxies are fascinating too. Our star formation models don’t work for these little guys, yet they’ve obviously got stars – how, and why, is up to LITTLE THINGS to discover. Their science could revolutionize our ideas about how a star is born.

Lowell’s going local with the Local Group Survey. But if you think local equals small, think again: they’re studying the Local Group of galaxies, which includes such giants as our own Milky Way and Andromeda. The Local Group spans everything from dwarfs to giants, from clouds to superclusters. The photography coming out of this survey speaks for itself:

At left, we have the Large version of M31 Fields 1 and 2 mosaic; at right, High resolution M33 Center (HII regions emphasized). Incredible, no?

Getting really local, Lowell is studying comets and making new discoveries about the Kuiper Belt as part of the Deep Eliptic Survey. That belt could well be a fossil of our solar system: studying it could reveal exactly how the Earth came to be and tell us more about the formation of other solar systems. What the Burgess Shale was to evolutionary biology, the Kuiper Belt might prove to be for planetary astronomy. Not to mention, it’s the place where comets come from. Comet science for Lowell sure as hell didn’t stop with Halley – or Hale-Bopp, for that matter.

As if Lowell wasn’t doing enough already, they’re b

uilding the Discovery Channel Telescope at Happy Jack. It’s going to be ginormous – the fifth largest telescope in the continental United States. It will pull duty to match its size: searching for Near Earth Objects, the Kuiper Belt, and far beyond to extrasolar planets. Lowell’s dream of finding an extraterrestrial civilization may yet come true – or at least, his Observatory may find the world where life like ours is most probable. We can but dream, just as he did.

And that dream, via Lowell’s already stellar public outreach programs and now the new opportunities for science education with the DCT, is expanding like our own universe. Not bad for a small Arizona city with a big sky.

The view from Lowell Observatory at Mars Hill, looking toward Mt. Elden
Courtesy HikeArizona.com
Sunday Sensational Science

Sunday Sensational Science

jacob

Five physics books that changed the world.

Two Manuscripts in Persian & Arabic. Ramadan 1307 H / April/May 1890.

Science isn’t just experiments, labs and instruments. It isn’t merely theories, charts and observations. Science is knowledge. And it would go nowhere if that knowledge couldn’t be shared and spread.

Ever since the birth of science, there have been science books. Books that laid out revolutionary new ideas simply and elegantly. Books that inspired new generations of scientists. Books that brought the world within humanity’s reach. Books that inspired fear and wonder, shook up civilization, changed the course of history.

What follows is a survey of some of the most famous books in physics. Without them, the world as we know it wouldn’t exist.


1. Aristotle, Physics, 220 B.C.

Aristotle’s actual books haven’t survived: what we have are collections of lecture notes. Still, those notes were enough to build a foundation of systematic science on.

My teachers used to explain that Aristotle was the first to categorize. His methodical approach took the world into account, rather than relying upon pure philosophy. His views of physics dominated the Western world for thousands of years, and elements of his thought inform every branch of science. What those teachers never told me was that, without Islamic civilization, there would have been no Aristotelian thought at all. The Greek texts lost to the West in the Dark Ages lived on in the East, translated into Arabic, studied, expanded, and commented upon by brilliant Arabic scientists and philosophers like Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Physics was among the texts preserved, translated from Arabic to Latin by Medieval scholars during the cultural exchanges (and bloody Crusades) of the Middle Ages.

The eight books of the Physics cover everything from the scientist’s approach to nature to motion to the Prime Mover. Many of his ideas didn’t survive Newton and Einstein, but he correctly defined the rate of doing mechanical work, and he got everyone thinking like scientists, among many other great gifts to the modern world.


2. Nicholas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), 1543

Hellllooo, heliocentric universe! Ptolemy had reigned virtually unchallenged before Copernicus made some observations, incorporated the observations of many others, saw that something wasn’t right, and worked out what actually revolved around what. He didn’t publish until just before his death.

Three years later, his little book began stirring up a storm, but that storm didn’t break for nearly sixty years. Galileo was forced by the Pope to proclaim the book “only a hypothesis.” It ended up on the Index of Forbidden Books, and withdrawn from general circulation. But it was too late. The Earth moved around the Sun, the Bible was wrong, and the cat was out of the bag and causing a ruckus in the alley. Scientists like Kepler and Galileo refined and corrected the heliocentric theory – Kepler was the one who realized that the planets moved in elliptical orbits, for instance, and Galileo’s pesky telescope proved that heavenly bodies didn’t consider the Earth the center of it all, no matter what the Church might proclaim. Eventually, even the Church had to give in to the weight of the evidence first presented in De Revolutionibus.


3. Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (mathematical principles of natural philosophy), 1687

Everyone knows that the Principia contains Newton’s famous Laws of Motion, his law of universal gravitation, and a lot of talk of the motions of the planets. What most laymen don’t realize, however, is that this elegant book also put forth the Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy that define science to this day. His four simple rules set science free.

And so of course I have to quote them:

Rule 1: We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

Rule 2: Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

Rule 3: The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.

Rule 4: In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.

Breathtaking. They may not seem like that much to us, used to them as we are, but for their time, these were ideas so far out of the box that the box couldn’t even be seen. Newton was a true revolutionary, one of the greatest thinkers of all time, and this book deserves its place as one of the canons of science.

4. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, 1916

Newtonian physics reigned supreme until another giant came along and stepped right beyond them. The clockwork universe became a strange place where gravity is a property of space and time (whodathunk that time had anything to do with it!), black holes, gravitational lenses, singularities, and observations changing depending on the position of the observer. Time had seemed a constant: now, it was revealed that time was in the eye of the beholder. A person moving close to the speed of light wouldn’t experience the same passage of time that an observer on Earth would. And then there was that phenominal little equation: e=mc2.

Einstein said of his book, “The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics…. In the interest of clearness, it appeared to me inevitable that I should repeat myself frequently, without paying the slightest attention to the elegance of the presentation. I adhered scrupulously to the precept of that brilliant theoretical physicist L. Boltzmann, according to whom matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler.”

The elegance of the theory was enough to make it one of the most elegant books in science, and the foundation for the space age.


5. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988

This book may not revolutionize science. It contains some revolutionary ideas – Hawking radiation and such – but it’s more an overview of physics for a general audience. What makes this book revolutionary is its impact on pop culture: over nine million copies sold. That’s a lot of people reading hard physics and liking it.

Most physics in the popular imagination ended with Einstein. Hawking took the public further, explaining superstring theory, pushing the frontiers, gazing toward that holiest of grails in science: the Theory of Everything. The scientist who may yet merge relativity with quantum physics and thus provide that one grand theory might get his or her inspiration from this deceptively brief little book.

Hawking made physics exciting again. He even made it possible not to fear math, which is very nearly a miracle for some of us. It changed the way the public thought of science. Until then, popular physics books had become terribly watered-down. Hawking proved that the tough stuff could be chewed and swallowed by a general audience.

And that just might be the most revolutionary idea of all.

(Don’t worry, my darlings. I’m not neglecting the other fields of science – we’ll be doing biology and all that in future editions. Darwin will have his day!)

Sunday Sensational Science

Sunday Sensational Science

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Tangled Banks

Ravenna Park, Seattle, WA

“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”

-Charles Darwin

I’m about to annihilate you lot with science – The 113th Tangled Bank shall be hosted here in just a few short days – so we’re going to take a leisurely walk along the banks, enjoy the glories of the natural world, and explore to our hearts’ content by way of getting ourselves warmed up for the event.

The Tangled Bank is ostensibly themed around “the science of the natural world,” but like so many other arbitrary divisions in science, the neat categories break down upon further inspection. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, and even mathematics aren’t really separate from biology and nature science. It’s all interconnected – inextricably tangled. That was the thing that attracted me to science, so long ago: discovering that everything is joined, and that any division we see is just an arbitrary convenience, when you get right down to it.

This leads to some entertaining juxtapositions. And it’s the excuse I use to study absolutely everything.

Follow me through the Tangled Bank of an SF writer’s interests. And then you might want to take the opportunity to wander off all on your own.

Growing up in Arizona, I heard quite a bit about the mytical jackalope. Imagine how excited I was to discover the truth from Thinkevolution.net in Tangled Bank #84!

Shocking photos of an unusual hybrid-type animal confounded biologists today. Images of what zoo-goers agree look an awful lot like a baby jackalope were posted on the internet today, making evidence against the canonical view of evolution by common descent—which thoroughly rejects the existence of jackalopes, which would require the mating of two phylogenetically divergent and anatomically dissimilar organisms—available worldwide. Jackalopes, also known as “antelabbits” or “stagbunnies” according to Wikipedia, had long been rejected as imaginary joke animals that people from the southwest described to gullible roommates when they went away to college in the east. But the late-breaking images challenge all that.

See? We Arizonans weren’t having you on at all. And we’ve still got that beachfront house for sale in Yuma, incidentally. Fantastic ocean views!

As a writer, two of my great loves are art and language. The Scientific Activist reported in Tangled Bank #71 on a project that combined both of those loves with the fight against global warming:

One potentially effective way of tackling these particular issues, then, could be through art: specifically through large in-your-face, impossible-to-ignore, publicly-visible art projects designed to bring the issue to the forefront of the mind of the incidental viewer.

This is precisely the aim of the debut project of the Precipice Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about global warming and environmental issues through public art. The project, entitled “Indestructible Language”, is the latest creation of artist Mary Ellen Carroll, and, as you might be able to tell, it could make quite an impression…

Indeed. Art can grab you attention in the way no amount of hand-wringing and dire studies ever could. And that’s why artists might end up saving the world.

With the help o’ some scientists, o’ course. We can’t do this all by ourselves.

Not that artists such as meself don’t have great big egos large enough to boast such superpowers – we create worlds, for fucks’ sake. That’s why articles like “Exotic Earths” from Dynamics of Cats, from Tangled Bank #62 , really grab my attention. It’s easier to facilitate the willing suspension of disbelief when you can point to science and say, “See? Perfectly plausible. There’s lots o’ earths. With oceans, even.”

More than one-third of the giant planet systems recently detected outside our solar system may harbor Earth-like planets, according to a new study by scientists associated with NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. Many of these planetsmay be covered in deep global oceans, with abundant potential for life.

There you have it. A Universe crowded with life. So shut up about the impossibility of my farflung space civilizations, already.

Another thing SF writers have to wrestle with is nothing less than the very structure of space-time itself. We’ve got to come up with somewhat reasonable ways for Bob the Bug-eyed Alien to get from Point A to Point B without spending generations doing it. And so it’s a little depressing when articles like “Building Space-Time” come along from Stochastic Scribbles in Tangled Bank #108 and throw cold water all over our FTL parade:

The July issue of Scientific American has an interesting article on how our four-dimensional space-time could arise from basic building blocks that self-organize in a quantum superposition. Their approach, called causal dynamical triangulations, is an extension of Euclidean quantum gravity. But instead of just seeing what a superposition of self-organized building blocks that assemble arbitrarily looks like, which turns out to be a bunched up and very messy space-time with plain Euclidean quantum gravity, they imposed causality on each building block so that they can only assemble in specific ways. Their computer simulations show that the result would be a space-time that looks much like our own on large scales.

[snip]

And if the theory is correct, then the built-in causality would imply that wormholes and time travel would not be possible. While it’s cool that ordinary space-time could be built from first principles, it would be a bummer in that faster-than-light travel or direct observation of historical events would not be possible.

D’oh, shit.

Well. Maybe if the buggers have big enough brains, they’ll figure out something clever. And speaking of brains… I remember being told as a child that when you stopped growing, the brain you had was It. Lose brain cells, and they’re lost forever. It wasn’t until I started researching neurology years later that I got the good news: we may grow new neurons after all. Sharp Brains had the latest on that for Tangled Bank #104:

In the last few years, researchers have discovered that new nerve cells (neurons) are born, presumably from residual stem cells that exist even in adults. That should be good news for all of us as we get older and fear mental decline. The bad news is that these new neurons die, unless our minds are active enough.

[snip]

A critical window of time determines whether or not the new neurons survive. In an experimental test of this time window, mice were housed for one week in an environmentally rich environment (toys, activity wheels, etc.), or for controls in regular cages, beginning one week after injection with a new-neuron DNA-synthesis marker. Results showed that lasting increase was restricted to new neurons that appeared between one and three weeks before living in an enriched environment. This corresponds to the time when new neurons are extending their neurons in search of targets and their dendrites are developing synaptic contacts to the neurotransmitters normally used in the hippocampus. The new neurons that developed during this time window survived up to the four months of monitoring, even when removed the enriched environment.

Ooo, before too much longer, I may be able to grow myself a better brain and keep it. That’s not just good for my characters, that’s good for me!

So many delights within the Tangled Bank, so little time. I haven’t even been able to touch on Salto Sobrius’s Tangled Bank #68 article on the Antikythera mechanism, which fascinated me as a child and may have led to my adoration of all things ancient Greek. I haven’t shared with you The Digital Cuttlefish’s delightful poem on the genetics of the spork from Tangled Bank #105, or PZ’s eminently useful explanation of historical contingency in the evolution of E-coli from Tangled Bank #107. I couldn’t even begin to delight you with genetic expression as explored by Tangled Up In Blue Guy in Tangled Bank #106.

So it goes.

I’ll leave you instead with this fragment of poetry from Denialism Blog’s beautiful Tangled Bank #111 edition. Says it all, really:

    You can’t go against nature
    Because when you do
    Go against nature
    It’s part of nature too.
Roadside Waterfall, Mount Rainier, Washington

If you have something science-related you’d like to submit for Tangled Bank #113, get it in to [email protected] by September 2nd. Or you’ll really wish you had.

As always, click on the pictures for their source. Except in the cases of those with actual captions, which are Dana Hunter originals. Are you impressed? I’m impressed. I’m a decent writer, but a piss-poor photographer, which makes these all the more special for being very nearly good.

Sunday Sensational Science