Science Made Cool

Weekly Parasite #5: The Eyes Have It

When I was in grad school, I was always a little disappointed that I didn’t need to travel much further than northern Florida. Other students in my graduate cohort were busy going off to do research in interesting and exotic places like Jamaica, New Guinea, Brazil, Peru, or Gabon, and I was driving down to Tallahassee and picking up roadkill.

But sometimes I’m reminded of exactly how much I missed. One of my friends, now a full-fledged professional systematist, came back from one of his field seasons in Africa with a passenger.

                                                   

Tangled Bank #63

Tangled Bank appears again, this time at OK So I'm Not Really A Cowboy. Enjoy!

Robot Uprising. Film at 11.

Daniel Wilson’s How To Survive a Robot Uprising looks superficially like one of those little humor books designed to entertain you while you’re waiting for something else: the bus, the checkout clerk, the bathroom. But lurking just under its irreverent surface is a pretty decent introduction to modern robotics research. As I read through Wilson’s warnings about robotic flies (frightening collective intelligence!) and tips on surviving robotic hand-to-hand combat, I recognized research from lots of biomechanics researchers I know, including Mimi Koehl, Kellar Autumn, Mike Dickinson, and Berkeley’s PolyPedal Lab, among others.

Imagine that. An educational book hiding out in the humor section. I have no complaints. After all, it's the strategy we use when we design our games.

Back to the Golden Age

A staple of Golden Age science fiction was the idea that space exploration would be conducted by private individuals -- backyard inventors, eccentric millionaires, and plucky teenagers.  Then the real Space Age arrived and we all learned that was nonsense.  Space exploration required massive bureaucratic organizations working with giant corporate contractors.  This model got humans to the Moon . . .

. . . and then stalled out.  For thirty years now the best that space agencies like NASA have been able to achieve is low-orbit manned spaceflight and unmanned probes to the rest of the Solar System.  Impressive achievements, to be sure, but somehow disappointing after the early triumphs.

Meanwhile, new players are entering the space race, and they look suspiciously familiar to any fan of classic science fiction.  We've got eccentric millionaires, backyard inventors, and now even a group of plucky college students at Cambridge, all developing their own space programs.

It may be that the "Space Age" we all know and love -- the exciting period between the end of World War II and the last Moon landing -- was an anomaly.  The pressures of Cold War geopolitics caused an early flowering which couldn't be sustained.  In this view, our space heroes weren't rocket-powered Columbuses pioneering a New Frontier in space, but rather a series of cosmic Lief Ericsons.  The Norse explorers reached the New World and even planted colonies, but couldn't sustain them.  The technology wasn't quite ready yet and the economics didn't work out.  European exploration of the Americas had to wait several centuries until it made technological and economic sense.

Now the technology is catching up, with cheap computing power, advanced materials, and smaller rocket motors.  People are finding ways to make money in space -- ways which don't rely on government funding.  If they succeed, there will be a permanent human presence in space, with all that implies.

In other words, the Space Age didn't end.  It's just beginning.

Friday Parasite #4: Up Close Parasite Encounters

Our Pandora sphinx caterpillar spent two days climbing around its jar and munching grape leaves. Then it stopped. It sat unmoving for another couple of days. It started looking a little baggy, like its skin was too big for it. I suspected I knew what was wrong.

On the morning of day 5, I walked into my office and discovered that my suspicions were all too correct. It wasn’t pretty, either.

                      

Unbeknownst to us, the caterpillar had been parasitized long before we found it, probably by a braconid wasp. The mother wasp had laid eggs under the caterpillar’s skin, and the parasitic larvae had been munching on its guts ever since. Now they were all grown up and ready to pupate. Some species of parasitic wasp pupate inside of their host and spare you the whole Alien-like experience. Unfortunately, this was one of the species that burst out of the caterpillar’s skin before they spin coccoons. I was willing to keep the larvae to see which species of wasp they’d become, but the child was rather upset and wouldn’t let me do it.

The Day The Fish Came Out

Just Monday I mentioned humans exploring a wreck beneath the sea.  Well, now the sea-dwellers can come up on land for a look around.  Techno-artist Seth Weiner has constructed the Terranaut -- a powered fishbowl which steers itself by reading which way its occupant swims. 

Things have learned to drive which ought to swim.

Of course, Seth's not the first to imagine this:  Phil and Kaja Foglio have a recurring minor character in their  Girl Genius comic who's a fish in a powered bowl.  (Read the whole thing!  Buy their books!)

Zygote Games welcomes our new undersea overlords!

Airship Under Water

The U.S.S. Macon was one of two giant rigid airships built by the U.S. Navy during the early 1930s.  Along with her sister ship the Akron, the Macon was designed as a flying aircraft carrier, with five Curtiss F9C "Sparrowhawk" biplanes launched and recovered by an ingenious "trapeze" mechanism.  The idea was to combine the incredible range of the airships with the speed of the planes to create a scouting force capable of locating enemy ships in the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean.  (Given that this was in the decade before World War II, it shouldn't be hard to guess just which enemy ships the Navy had in mind.)

It was a neat idea, but it failed.  The airships were very well-designed and well-built, using a lot of technology adapted by Goodyear from the Zeppelin corporation.  But the engineering of the 1930s simply wasn't good enough to build lighter-than-air vessels capable of withstanding powerful wind shear.  Both Akron and Macon broke up in storms.  When the wind at the front of the airship is blowing one way and the wind at the back end is blowing another way, something has to give, and unfortunately what gave was the frail aluminum skeleton of the airships.  After the loss of the Macon, the Navy abandoned rigid airships.

Airships did serve in World War II, doing valuable service as U-boat spotters escorting convoys, but they weren't giant rigids but blimps.  Blimps were smaller, cheaper, tougher -- and expendable.

Now a team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has located the wreck of the Macon on the seabottom and is conducting an underwater exploration of the site.  More than 70 years after the dirigible went down we may get another look at what remains.

To celebrate, how about some airship wine?

Insect Identification 101

My daughter found an enormous caterpillar today. Naturally, she wanted to know what it was. But I’d never seen anything like it before, and our insect identification books only have pictures of adults. What to do? To the Internet!

Fortunately, it’s a showy larva: rich chocolate-brown flesh with large white spots. And I knew that she’d found it on our grape vine. A bit of Googling brought me to What’s That Bug, which might be billed as an art project, but is filled with useful pictures that let me identify our captive – a larval Pandora sphinx moth (Eumorpha pandorus).

               

Knowing the animal’s common and species names opens up whole new avenues for search. The online BugGuide tells us that the button on the back of the caterpillar means it’s in its final instar, and it’ll pupate soon. Wikipedia says that it’ll burrow underground when it’s ready to pupate. So we've put it in a bigger jar with a couple of inches of dirt at the bottom, and lots of fresh grape leaves. We’ll see if we can ecclose a big gorgeous green moth in a few months.

Much better photo than any of my own attempts by Patrick Coin 

Friday Parasite #3: Back to School Special

It’s the first full week of school, and we’ve been graced with the annual memo about lice. As parasites go, head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis)are pretty low-key. They don’t have complicated multi-host life cycles, and they don’t seem to carry any diseases (they leave that to their close relative the body louse. Typhus… brrrr). All head lice really do is scurry over human heads, drink blood, and lay eggs. But they can spread through a class of little kids like wildfire.


Head lice are tiny insects that spend their entire lives on human heads. Females glue eggs to the base of hairs. After about a week, nymphs hatch out and start biting the scalp to get blood meals. They molt three times over a week or two, becoming sexually mature adults at the last molt. Adults can live about a month, and the females lay over 100 eggs during that time.

But lice can’t survive very long away from their human hosts. If a louse falls off a person, it generally dies within a day or two. Their bodies are adapted to hanging on to hairs – their legs even have specialized curved claws that fit around hair shafts. And they don’t have wings. So they can only get from person to person by crawling. For that they need direct head-to-head contact. And little kids are all about big hugs, leaning close, and sharing things with their buddies. Sometimes they bring more home than good feelings.


SEM image of adult louse from the Sussex Center for Advanced Microscopy; other images from the CDC.

Apple of Chaos

Its discovery prompted a knock-down, drag-out battle among astronomers, so now it's got the perfect name:  Eris.  The dwarf planet's discovery caused the controvery which led to Pluto getting downgraded, so it's especially appropriate to name it after the goddess of Discord.