Science Made Cool

Munch, Munch, Munch

My personal fitness plan revolves around trees. We have a wood stove which contributes a not-inconsiderable fraction of our home heating during the winter, and that means I have to spend spring and summer refilling the woodpile. 

Mostly I cut up deadfalls, but occasionally I do cut down trees which look as though they're going to fall down anyway, or which are in places I don't want them to be. (I've tried asking them politely to move, but they ignore me.)

Earlier this summer I took down a medium-sized pine tree, about 40 feet tall, in order to bring more light to part of the yard. I cut off the branches, then sliced the trunk into 16-inch sections so that I could split them and burn them later.

Now, pine wood isn't as dense as, say, maple or oak, so it doesn't burn as hot. It's also full of resins and whatnot, so the result is that burning pine gunks up your flue with soot. My plan was to split the pine wood, but keep it separate from the rest of the woodpile for use as kindling wood or emergency backup fuel. So I stacked the cut segments and turned my attention to a fallen birch on the other side of the lot, because birch burns like plutonium. (And it gives the woodpile a pleasant root-beer scent.)

A couple of weeks later I happened to pass the stack of pine logs, and I noticed something. Two things, really. 

The first was the sawdust. I cut the tree where it lay on the ground, then moved the pieces to the pile. So why was the pile of pine logs covered with sawdust? Not just a little sawdust, great drifts of sawdust. Hmm.

I bent closer and noticed the second thing. The wood was making noise. I could distinctly hear a crunching sound. Like something chewing wood...

My resident scientist did some Googling, and we guess it was some sort of beetle larvae, from one of the many species of beetles which attack pine logs. We could have split one of the logs to examine the larvae in situ, but I was more interested in getting the infested stack as far away from our house (built mostly of pine) as possible. The noise-making logs went into the gully beyond the driveway, where the beetles can reduce them to sawdust.

So the lesson for today is: listen to your wood. It might tell you something worth knowing.

As Seen On TV!

HBO has just announced that they're doing a TV movie about the rivalry between fossil-hunters Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. You'll never guess what it's called.

Actually, you will: BONE WARS!

Wired has the story here. It's to be a comedy, featuring James Gandolfini (as, I'm guessing, Marsh) and Steve Carell (presumably as Cope).

I wonder if anybody at HBO is a fan of a certain card game? 

A Meeting With Medusoid

It's not quite artificial life, but it's certainly a step in that direction. As a "proof of concept" for work on artificial hearts and muscle systems, a group of researchers at Caltech (and Harvard) have created what they call a "Medusoid" -- a kind of synthetic jellyfish made of silicone rubber and cultured muscle cells. PhysOrg has the story, including video of the Medusoid swimming around.

Reactions, predictably, are heavy on the "It's ALIVE!" Frankenstein mad doctor electrical zapping hoo-ha. But the real story is that this thing works. It's not very far removed from something that could be implanted in your chest if your heart stops doing its job.

Though if the medical applications don't pan out, this would still be a hell of a fun thing to keep in your aquarium.

Space Prospectors

Crusty old space prospectors mining the asteroid belt for valuable minerals have been a staple of science fiction since the 1930s. In fiction they tended to fit the stereotype of the Klondike Gold Rush veteran: grizzled, fiercely independent, surviving in a patched-up old spaceship while searching for the one big strike that never comes.

Well, the space prospectors are here, and they're considerably more well-groomed. Planetary Resources, Incorporated is hosting a press conference today at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where they're going to announce a new company which aims to begin mining near-Earth asteroids for valuable minerals within a decade. Among the backers are Microsoft tycoon and space tourist Charles Simonyi, X-Prize founder and serial space entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, space tycoon Eric Anderson, Google moguls Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, Titanic director James Cameron, and a number of other tech bigwigs.

These are serious people with serious money and serious expertise. If they think there's at least a sporting chance of making money on this venture, I'm inclined to belive them.

So does this mean the old science fictional stereotype will come true? Crusty old prospectors cruising the asteroids? Yes: but they'll be crusty old robots, not humans. If they do become ornery and independent-minded, things can get very interesting indeed . . .

Tacocopter!

Is America ready for flying robot taco delivery?

To ask the question is to answer it, really. Of course we are!

Sadly, this article about just such a project turns out to be a hoax. Or at least vaporware.

Forget about flying cars. Where's my flying taco robot? I want my flying taco robot now!

Team Einstein Close Enough For A Field Goal

In the ongoing faster-than-light neutrino struggle between the OPERA experiment at CERN and General Relativity, there's been a major development. A new press release from the OPERA team has identified possible equipment issues as the source of the timing error which suggested that neutrinos were moving faster than light.

If you were hoping to see Einstein overthrown, it's bad news. Loose cables don't equal major paradigm shifts.

This, by the way, is exactly how science is supposed to work.

Life Imitates Art

A team of Russian scientists are boring through miles of ice into a twenty million year old lake in Antarctica. They haven't been heard from for a week now.

It's pretty obvious that the Shoggoths have gotten them.

(Note: Lovecraftian humor aside, I hope that nothing actually has happened to these brave researchers, and that they succeed in getting uncontaminated samples from Lake Vostok.)

Update: As of February 13, they're reporting success, and no Shoggoths. (Of course, that's just what they would say if the Thing has replaced them all.)

The Information Age Finally Arrives

Back in the 1980s, when personal computers first appeared on the market and people began plugging them into modems to communicate with other computers, there was a lot of excited talk about what this new "Information Age" would bring to us.

Some of the ideas were stupid even at the time: I recall that a selling point for early home computers was that they could be used to organize recipes and compose shopping lists. Organize recipes? I was not aware that disorganized recipes was a problem worth $1000 in 1980s money to solve. Shopping lists had to wait for pocket devices like the iPod or Blackberry, but recipes remain unorganized to this day.

Another big idea for the Information Age was that we would have access to school and college courses, making brick and mortar academies obsolete. That took a while to manage. "Distance Learning" began early on, but those pesky schools and professors did insist on being paid for their work, so most were subscription-based, or part of college tuition. Online encyclopedias and archives also demanded money -- which is why the error-riddled Wikipedia has become the resource of choice for everyone. It may be wrong, but it's free.

Well, now the Information Age has finally realized its potential. You can now take courses at MIT online, for free. So stop reading this, go follow the link, and get educated. Build your own damned flying car.