Science Made Cool

Holiday Sale

It's "Black Friday", and retailers all over the country are trying to tempt you with holiday sales. Why should we be any different? For a limited time, buy a copy of Bone Wars with a copy of Parasites Unleashed for $20. It's like getting Parasites Unleashed for free, or Bone Wars at half price, or both games at a substantial discount... anyway, it's a good deal. Just click either of the game images in the left-hand sidebar to navigate over to our homepage and find our webstore. Happy Holidays!

Music of the Spheres

I wasn't doing any blogging these past few days because I was a guest a Philcon in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Most of my time at the con was spent doing panels -- I was at a total of eight events over the course of two nights and two days.

On Sunday I did manage to attend a panel as part of the audience -- I went to Dr. Patricia Boyd's presentation on the upcoming Kepler mission, and it sounds very exciting. The Kepler telescope will use very sensitive optics and massive computer processing to examine the light curves of some 150,000 stars in the sky near the Summer Triangle of Deneb, Altair, and Vega. What Kepler's looking for are regular, periodic dips in the light output of those stars. The slight variations in luminosity will indicate the presence of planets orbiting those stars. Kepler should be sensitive enough to detect worlds the size of Earth or even smaller. The goal is to see how common Earthlike planets are, and possibly identify some candidates for life.

Dr. Boyd's talk was interesting enough in itself for a space buff like me, but she enlivened the proceedings with some musical numbers. She is a member of the a capella singing group The Chromatics. As one might expect from a singing group founded by NASA employees, many of the Chromatics' original numbers have science and space exploration themes. They performed a couple of songs during the talk, bringing the audience musically up to speed on concepts like the Doppler Effect or the Life Zone of a star system.

Patricia Boyd and the Chromatics aren't the only connection between Kepler and music. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (who is of course the person after whom the mission is named) had his own theories about the harmonies of planetary motion. He even wrote out in musical notation what the "music of the spheres" might sound like if each planet had its own characteristic note. You can listen to it here.

I don't know if Dr. Boyd and the Chromatics have ever tried performing Kepler's music of the spheres themselves, but it would certainly be appropriate.

Off to Philcon!

I'm off to scenic Cherry Hill, New Jersey today, where I will be one of the program participants at this year's Philcon science fiction convention. They've got me pretty heavily scheduled, so I don't know if I'll have time to see anything but the inside of the con hotel while I'm there.  Any readers in the area are welcome to stop by and meet a Zygote in the flesh. Since Philcon is a science fiction convention, I'll be wearing my writer hat most of the time while I'm there -- but if my schedule permits, I'm going to run some demo games of Bone Wars and Parasites Unleashed! in the gaming area.

Insect Art

Science and art are far more closely related than you might expect -- if only because the natural phenomena that science tries to explain have underlying regular patterns that are very beautiful. So it's not surprising that scientific photography contests are thick on the ground. Olympus is a relatively new addition to the list, with their BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. They've just announced the winners of their sixth competition: first place going to Spike Walker's stunning photomicrograph of a tiny parasitic wasp.


Photo: Spike Walker

More Weirdness From Saturn

The weirdest planet in the Solar System keeps getting weirder. The latest finding from the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn is that the ringed planet has a mysterious bright aurora which physicists on Earth are still trying to puzzle out. The aurora covers the whole polar area of the planet and is very bright and energetic -- even though the Sun is going through an unusually quiet period right now.

Is there any connection between the anomalous aurora and Saturn's equally mysterious polar hexagon? Nobody knows. And those are two words dear to every scientist's heart.

Congratulations, Chandrayaan!

There's a new player on the Moon. Today the Indian Space Research Organization landed its first probe on the surface of the Moon. The Chandrayaan-1 probe touched down at 11:21 Universal Time (when we here at Zygote Games World HQ were just waking up). This isn't just a flag on the ground, either -- Chandrayaan is a serious science payload, with experiment packages aboard from four countries. In addition to the lander it has a lunar orbiter which will study the Moon for several years to come. As an added bonus, the landing happened to fall on the birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru, the founding father of modern India.

Addictive Puzzles

I've always been a sucker for puzzle games -- the kind of person who feels compelled to play Myst or 3 in Three for 48 hours straight because I can't bear leaving the game before it's solved. So I've spent far, far too much time this evening working through Fantastic Contraption. The premise is simple: build a device to carry an object across the screen. In a lot of cases, it's much trickier than it sounds.

Birds on Ice

Doug Hardy usually studies paleoclimatology, coring ice to look for evidence of climate change. But he kept finding something odd during his field seasons on the Quelccaya ice cap in the eastern Peruvian Andes – collections of grass and twigs on the edge of the glacier that looked suspiciously like bird nests. Because no bird was known to voluntarily nest on glaciers (and indeed, only the Emperor Penguin was known to nest on ice at all), he decided to take a closer look, and started photographing the pieces of nest that he found.

 The job of identifying potential candiates for the nest-builders went to Hardy’s son Spencer. This in and of itself isn’t terribly unusual – there are plenty of parent/child teams in the sciences, like the notable Luis and Walter Alvarez. What’s unusual here is that Spencer was still in elementary school at the time. Spencer took charge of the literature research and narrowed down the possible nest-building candidates to two species: the White-fronted ground tyrant and the White-winged Diuca finch. When Doug returned to the glacier the next year, he kept an eye out for more intact nests, and collected feathers from their lining. He asked feather expert Carla Dove to identify them. She found that the feathers came from several different bird species, but only one of them -- White-winged Diuca finch --was small enough to have fit in the nest. And during the next field season, Hardy found nests containing abandoned eggs that match the White-winged Diuca finch’s eggs, confirming that this species is the first bird known to nest on glaciers.

Reference:
Hardy, D. and S. Hardy 2008. White-winged Diuca Finch (Diuca speculifera) nesting on Quelccaya ice cap, Peru. Wilson Journal of Ornithology 120: 613-617.
Photo by Tom Owen Edmunds

Still No Flying Car

Doctor John Parmentola is a satisfied man. Why? Dr. Parmentola is the Army's director of research, and this past Monday, while people were getting all excited about trivialities, Dr. Parmentola announced a raft of new discoveries and techniques developed by Army-sponsored researchers which will profoundly change the world.

Let's see -- there's immortality, in the form of "nanoscaffolding" to regenerate tissues and organs. There's quantum imaging, using entangled photons to see the invisible. There's Star Trek-style handheld chemical analyzers. There's telepathy, in the form of direct brain interface controls and (rather creepily) memory editing. There's even what sounds like a first pass at a Turing Test-passing artificial intelligence.

And that's just the stuff he can talk about. Read his press briefing transcript here.

Bye Bye Gertie

Tomorrow marks the 68th anniversary of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The bridge is famous (or possibly infamous) because of the amazing oscillations of its main span which led to the collapse. You can watch the bridge's final moments here. It's a little queasy-making to watch a huge structure of steel and concrete bouncing and flexing like a Slinky.

What caused the bridge to shimmy like that? Wind. Not some incredible super-hurricane, but just a strong breeze blowing down the Narrows. The wind made the bridge shake, just a little bit at first. But the design of the bridge and the force of the wind created what's called forced oscillation -- the same phenomenon that lets a kid on a swing soar higher and higher by pumping his legs with each swing. The force of the legs isn't very great, but if the kid times it property, the pushes build up. The same thing happened to the bridge, on a much more catastrophic scale.

A more comprehensive analysis of the bridge collapse can be found at the somewhat demoralizingly-named Failure magazine web site.

The only casualty of the disaster was a cocker spaniel.