Science Made Cool

Science Toys!

No Profound Musings today, just a couple of way-cool science toys.

First, from the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories comes the amazing toast printer -- a computer-controlled heat gun which can make images on bread.  Not only is it vastly cool, but I seriously expect to start seeing restaurants using it to decorate sandwiches.  Wouldn't you?

Second, if you want to control your toast printer with nothing but the power of your mind, now you can (as reported by Physorg.com).  Several small startup tech companies are developing brain wave reading devices to control video games.  Now most people might wonder why such a powerful technology, with all kinds of applications is being used for something as seemingly trivial as games.  The answer:  money.  You can make buckets of money selling people things to play with.  Or so we've heard.  Right now we've only managed to make a few cupfuls.

Strange New World

It's been all over the news for the past few days:  a new Terrestrial planet has been discovered orbiting a nearby star.  The coverage tends to describe the planet as the most Earthlike world yet found -- which is true, but misleading.  Most other known extrasolar planets are giant Jupiter-like bodies, so this one is Earthlike in the sense that it's a solid object composed of rock and iron instead of hydrogen.

So what's this "Earthlike" planet really like, anyway?  Well, let's look at some numbers.  The best estimate of its size is about 12,000 miles in diameter.  That's half again as big as Earth, which means this alien world would have a mass of about 3.5 Earths.  In other words, more mass than all the Terrestrial-type planets in our Solar system combined.  A body that massive would have a surface gravity of at least one and a half times Earth normal -- possibly more, since a big world like that could easily be more dense than Earth and thus pack more mass.

The primary star, Gliese 581, is a dim red dwarf about 20 light-years away.  Red dwarfs are the invisible majority of the stars in our Galaxy -- they make up 80 or 90 percent of all stars, but most are quite dim and cool.  This means they last a very long time before their fuel gets exhausted.  The new planet orbits Gliese 581 in a tight circle only six million miles in radius, or one-fourteenth the distance from Earth to the Sun.  If Gliese 581 was a big-league star like the Sun, this newly-found planet would be molten hot, but red dwarf stars have such wimpy energy output that even so close it's about the same temperature as Earth.

Oribiting that close means our planet is almost certainly tidally locked to its star, always keeping the same face turned to its primary, just as the Moon keeps the same face to the Earth. 

Okay, that's the basic parameters -- gravity, diameter, temperature.  But what's it like?  Putting on my propellor beanie science fiction writer hat, I will speculate.

It's a big, massive planet which means more internal heat and thus more volcanic and tectonic activity.  The surface will be rugged with lots of mountainous continents and volcanic island arcs.  Oceans are likely to be quite deep -- only the highest peaks will be above sea level. 

The atmosphere will also be massive -- three or four times as dense as Earth's, if not more.  If the planet is lifeless, that massive atmosphere will create a tremendous greenhouse effect, which means those vast oceans could well have boiled into vapor leaving the surface a super-hot inferno like Venus.

But if life got a toehold, green plants could have sucked all the carbon dioxide and methane out of the atmosphere, just as they did on Earth.  That would prevent a runaway greenhouse effect and leave the surface temperature comfortably in the liquid-water range.

So let's imagine ourselves there.  It's an endless expanse of ocean under a never-setting sun.  There are shallow basins rimmed by island chains, and deep abyssal plains with active thermal vents at the bottom.  The water is thick with plants in the shallows, and among the plants swim animals -- fish-shaped but completely unlike any fish on Earth.  In the deep ocean basins swim leviathans vaster than any whales.  On the dark side the islands are covered by glaciers and pack ice floats on the water.

Do any of the things living there have brains, language, and tools?  And do any of them look up at a faint yellow star and wonder if it has any planets with life? 

Bad Chocolate

At least, that’s what the Chocolate Manufacturer’s Association wants to foist on us. They (along with several other manufacturers and grocery associations) are petitioning the FDA to expand the definition of what they can call chocolate. Unfortunately, by being more “inclusive”, they will legally be able to call those nasty chocolate-flavored oil-based candies that no one likes to eat “chocolate.”

The problem from their standpoint is that chocolate contains cocoa butter, an oil derived from the cacao bean that gives chocolate its characteristic mouthfeel. And cocoa butter costs more than $2.00 a pound.  If the FDA apporoves their petition, the manufacturers will be able to replace cocoa butter with cheaper vegetable oil and still call their product chocolate. But then we’ll have to eat it. And our mouths, exquisitely sensitive chemical sensors that they are, will know the difference.

Cybelle May of Candyblog published an editorial in the LA Times last week that summarizes the whole issue. And you can tell the FDA what you think. They have an online service that allows consumers to give them feedback. The commenting period would have ended today, but it looks like it’s been extended to May 25, 2007.

BioBlitz 2007: Yard Edition

I started our first BioBlitz by watching our bird feeder during breakfast, followed by a 40 minute long walk around our 6 acres. Eighty years ago, our property was part of a farm. Most of it was pasture, judging from the lines of barbed wire that still criss-cross the woods. It was abandoned sometime in the 1930s, and grew wild until the house was built in the late 1980s. Most of it is still growing wild, and now contains a mishmash of weedy fast-growing trees, feral European escapees from gardens, and a few young climax species. Because spring just arrived in Western Massachusetts, there aren’t as many plants in evidence as in high summer, but the woody things are still easy to find. 

My species list is below the fold:

Take a Book to Lunch

Today marks the 207th anniversary of the establishment of the U.S. Library of Congress.  On April 24, 1800, President John Adams approved legislation providing $5000 to purchase books for the use of Members of Congress, as part of the infant U.S. government's move to its permanent seat in Washington D.C.

The first collection was burned by the raiding British during the War of 1812, but Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement -- and more than doubling the size of the library in the process.

Jefferson's spirit still provides the Library's guiding philosophy:  nothing is outside the purview of the Library of Congress.  It collects books about everything.  Nowadays it adds about 10,000 items per day to the collection. 

Friday Parasite #25: Instant Video Replay

Last Friday, I wrote about the life history of Anisakis simplex. This week, I found out that Harvard’s Digital Atlas of Video Education (AKA the DAVE project) has a short film that captures one of them in the flesh, so to speak. It doesn't even require a strong stomach to watch. Have a look...

Friday Parasite #24: Accidental Passengers

This is Anisakis simplex. It’s a parasitic nematode that normally lives in the gut of marine mammals like seals, whales, and dolphins. It has a complex life cycle – an Anisakis egg that leaves the gut of the marine mammal hatches into a free-living larva. The larva swims around until it gets eaten by a small crustacean, then settles in and waits for its host to get nabbed by a squid or a small fish. Inside its new host, it bores through its gut wall into muscle. Then it waits to get eaten again. The worm can work its way through a chain of several larger fish this way, all the time waiting until its current host becomes dinner for the seal or dolphin that’s the worm’s final host.

But sometimes Anisakis gets sidetracked. That’s because people like fish too. 

Animated Contribution

A couple of weeks ago, Pharyngula pointed to an interesting appeal from a Scottish animator. Iain Gardner wants to put together a short film that shows how many people accept the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection relative to the people who believe in the creation of life by an intelligent designer. He wants you to send him a photo of yourself – holding an apple if you’re in the evolution camp, or a light bulb if you’re an ID-er. When he strings the images together into an animated video, you’ll be able to see the relative proportion of people in each group.

If you want to join in the project, just take a digital photo and send it on. But there are some composition issues to keep in mind. Iain explains in this video stashed below the fold:

Science Festivities Ahead!

The MIT museum is sponsoring the first annual Cambridge Science Festival. It starts with a science carnival at the Cambridge City Hall on April 21 from 12 – 5 pm, followed by nine full days of exhibitions, lectures, performances, and science-themed experiences at sites all around Cambridge, MA.

The science carnival alone looks like a blast – activities will include building an origami skyscraper with the Science Club for Girls, programs about the ecology of Boston Harbor (sponsored by TERC) and the Harbor Islands (sponsored by Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology), and demonstrations of water bottle rockets and solar cooking (which I hope has advanced since I tried to cook hot dogs with a homemade solar reflector in my yard back in the early 80s. My hot dogs were still raw half an hour after I started them. Eew.) And there are lots of interesting events scheduled for the rest of the week. One thing that caught my eye is what looks like an environmentally-themed live-action role-playing game.

The organizers have set up some special deals for Cambridge residents, but it looks like anyone’s welcome to join in. Most events are free. More information can be had from the festival website.

I hope I can make it into town for the Science Oratorio…




Cambridge Science Festival
April 21-29
locations around Cambridge, MA

Revisionist Climatology

Remember the Snowball Earth?  800 million years ago, algae started doing photosynthesis and sucked all the carbon dioxide out of the Earth's atmosphere, leaving the planet without a warming greenhouse effect.  The temperature fell below freezing all over the planet and Earth spent a quarter of a billion years covered in ice.

Well, maybe not.  New evidence based on rock weathering suggests that maybe the "snowball" model is incorrect.  Rocks from that era in Oman show chemical weathering consistent with alternating periods of cold and warm temperatures.  So time travelers visiting that era can take both swimsuits and snowshoes.

Evidently there was some feedback mechanism at work, so that as temperatures fell the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased.  Maybe lots of algae died and rotted in the cold; maybe volcanic activity replentished the supply of greenhouse gases; or maybe the Sun was hotter than previous estimates.  Anyway, the Earth did get really cold, but the oceans never froze over completely.  "Snowball Earth" was more of a "Slushball." 

Until new discoveries refute these findings, of course.  Maybe something else caused the weathering found in Oman, and the Snowball model is correct.  Reconstructing events a billion years in the past is difficult, and new facts can change everything.  That's the fun thing about science:  it doesn't sit still.  There's no unchallengeable doctrine, only theories supported by facts.  New facts can change the theories.  Which is why scientists love new facts.