Science Made Cool

How I Started My Summer Vacation

I don’t teach during the UMass Amherst summer session, but that doesn’t mean I get to spend three months sunbathing in my backyard. As soon as I turn in my final grades, the frenzy of experiments begins – basically everything I don’t have time for during the school year (because I’m, y’know, teaching) gets crammed into the weeks between May and September. This year, I spent the end of May in Louisiana, where I met up with one of my collaborators to work on a 3D anatomical atlas of the alligator cloaca.

                    Getting ready for his closeup.

This is part of a larger project examining the evolution and function of archosaur reproductive systems: right now, we want to define how the cloacal muscles, blood vessels, and the phallus are oriented relative to one another. And because it's really challenging to define these relationships by dissection alone, we used a modern imaging technique to try to get a more precise picture of the cloaca in situ. In short, we ran 7-foot long American alligators through a CT scanner. 

Why so big? We needed mature animals, and alligators don't become sexually mature until they're more than 6 feet long. (These animals were actually on the small side for adult males, but we were also limited by the size of the table in the CT scanner!) So we were lucky to have the expert help of both the wildlife biologists at the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge and the vets and technicians at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine for this part of the project. I was amused to see how excited the students were to see what we were doing -- vets-in-training kept stopping by the imaging suite to watch us work.

Of course, collecting the data is just the first step: we’ll be analyzing the images and building 3D computer models for months to come. But it was a particularly thrilling first step.

 

Beautiful Anatomy on Display

Before there was computed tomography, before there was CLARITY, biologists used clearing and staining to study the three-dimensional anatomy of bones, cartilage, and nerves. The technique is actually straightforward, if time-consuming: soak a whole animal (dead, of course) in materials that make its skin and muscles transparent, while applying stains that meld to specific kinds of tissue.

The results are gorgeous.

A skeleton in shades of red and blue is revealed through the ghostly outline of the animal. Intricate details that normal dissection can destroy are visible: tiny bones around the eye, miniscule gill supports, the connections in living levers.

These preparations are usually stored in laboratories and the back rooms of museums – they are, after all, made for research - but two museums have brought them (or more precisely, their images) out to the public as art installations.

Skate: ©2013 Adam Summers

At the American Museum of Natural History, large-format photographs of cleared and stained fish are part of the Picturing Science exhibition, along with examples of infrared and fluorescence photography, at the museum’s Akeley Gallery until May 31, 2014. And until spring of 2014, the Seattle Aquarium is displaying enormous photographic prints of cleared and stained fish that Adam Summers used for his own research on the biomechanics of fish feeding, locomotion, and ventilation. (Adam's also made these images available on greeting cards and a 2014 calendar.)

If you find yourself on either coast before the end of winter, you should check one of these exhibits out. You'll be amazed.

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.)

Help Fund A Study on Sticky Tongues

Last year, Patty Brennan and I were part of the SciFund Challenge – an experiment in crowdfunding scientific research that raised over $75,000 for its projects in just 45 days. RocketHub, our hosting platform, clearly took note: it added  “Science” to its overall list of project categories, so appeals to support dance, music or photography will now sit alongside requests to fund projects in plant genetics or primatology. And I was delighted to learn that one of the first scientists to step up to the plate is doing some fantastic functional morphology.

Christopher Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Florida, where he studies how temperature affects how chameleons feed. He’d like to learn how different species of chameleon have adapted to living in hot and cold habitats, but since many of these animals are protected and can’t be brought into the United States, he’s raising money to bring his study to them.

He’s already raised enough cash to fund his experiments in South Africa, but further donations will let him take the study to other countries. His RocketHub link is <here>, and there's still a couple of weeks left to donate.

The Ghoul Strikes Again

Back in the pioneering days of space exploration, probes launched to Mars had a shockingly high failure rate. It wasn't until the landings of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that humans finally managed an overall 50 percent success rate. 

NASA engineers in the old days used to joke rather grimly about the "Great Galactic Ghoul" lurking in space, ready to gobble up vehicles heading for Mars.

Well, the Ghoul is still on the job. The Russian Phobos-Grunt probe (I didn't name it) suffered an engine failure in orbit. Instead of blasting off for Mars it will probably wind up dropping into an ocean somewhere.

The American Curiosity rover is set to launch in two weeks, and if it gets past the Ghoul it may be the last pesky Earth machine to bother Mars for a long time. The Administration is backing away from plans to send more missions in 2016 and 2018, and any thoughts of a manned voyage seem to be permanently on hold.

The Ghoul is winning.

Spying on the Moon

Wanna see some cool pictures? Look here. Those are photos of the surface of the Moon, taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Those squiggly lines? Those are the footprints of astronauts. The shiny blobs are Lunar descent modules and instrument packages left behind.

Next time some nitwit starts claiming that the Moon landings were faked, show her these pictures. The nitwit will of course declare them faked, but it gives you an excuse to look at photos from the Moon.

Maybe someday someone will go back. Someday . . .

Museum Report: Owls Head Transportation Museum

Owls Head, Maine, is a tiny town. The population is only 1600, and there's exactly one store in the place. Yet it also boasts a world-class auto and airplane museum: the Owls Head Transportation Museum. How'd it wind up in such a tiny place? The list of founders holds a clue: it includes such worthies as Thomas J. Watson, Jr. (of IBM fame) and James S. Rockefeller, Jr.

So what's inside? There's a small but fascinating collection of steam engines, including a giant Corliss engine from the 1890s. The automobile collection is weighted heavily toward pioneering designs, with an 1885 Benz, a Stanley steamer, and a Sears motor-buggy from 1908. If you're a fan of MG sports cars, there's a whole gallery of vintage MGs.

Weirdest vehicle? Without a doubt the 1913 Scripps-Booth Bi-Autogo. This landmark of motorized insanity is a hybrid of automobile and motorcycle, with a body like a narrow car (bench seats and everything) slung between two big motorbike wheels fore and aft. At low speeds a pair of little outrigger wheels are supposed to flip down and keep the whole thing from toppling over. Just to make it completely crazy, there's a V-8 motor to blast it along at 75 mph. It's a gorgeous piece of machinery, like an old Frank R. Paul painting come to life.

As to airplanes, the collection again leans heavily toward early designes, with a good assortment of pioneers and World War I aircraft. Most of them are actually "representations," which is to say modern replicas, but they're faithful replicas. The museum grounds adjoin the Owls Head regional airport, and several of the aircraft are kept in flying condition (you can tell which ones by the drip pans under them to catch the oil leaking out of their engines). From time to time during our visit to Owls Head our Crack Team saw vintage biplanes overhead.

Younger visitors (and their parents) are likely to be enchanted by the whimsical fish-bike and dragonflycycle in the musuem's outdoor display area.

Overall rating: A+ if you're a car buff, B+ if you're disappointed by replica airplanes. If you happen to be near the central Maine coast, stop by Owls Head and check it out.

BIG Space News

If you follow space-industry news, you already know about this. SpaceX, the private space-launch outfit founded by Internet billionaire Elon Musk, has unveiled their newest rocket, and it's a doozy. The Falcon Heavy can put fifty tons into orbit, for about a thousand dollars a pound. That's a lot of payload: the mighty Saturn V Moon rocket had a low-orbit payload of about 100 tons, so you could put together a pretty good manned space mission with a couple of Falcons. Or launch a small space station.

The size isn't the really big deal. The Saturn was hoisting bigger loads forty years ago and the Russian Energia can still out-lift the Falcon today. What is impressive is the cost. A thousand bucks a pound was the (entirely mythical) cost aim of the Space Shuttle program back in the 1980s. That was the threshold for "cheap access to space." At that level private groups like the Mars Society could quit lobbying Congress for NASA funding and just launch their own goddamned Mars missions.

Well, it looks like we've may have reached that point at last. The Space Age may finally be leaving its "pioneer era" and entering something more like the "airmail era" of the 1920s. Virgin Galactic just flew a spaceship to its new terminal in San Francisco and plans to operate suborbital flights from there beginning next year. For space enthusiasts, things are definitely looking up.

Crowdsourcing Science, Facebook Edition

This is neat. A group of ichthyologists faced a serious problem after they completed a survey of fish diversity in Guyana: paperwork. They'd collected over 5000 specimens over the course of their expedition, but they needed to identify them before they could get export permits to bring them back to their labs in the United States. They had a week. The local libraries were inadequate for the job. But they had internet access. 

So they loaded photographs of their fish onto Facebook, and let their friends and colleagues help them. Fortunately, the friends and colleagues of a bunch of ichthyologists include a high proportion of other ichthyologists. The whole story is on the National Museum of Natural History's blog.

 

H/T to John Sullivan for pointing out the story!

Google's Robot Army to Invade Moon

I only recently heard about the Google Lunar X-Prize, another attempt to encourage private initiatives in space through prize competitions. In this case it's 20 million dollars to whoever can land a robot on the Moon and move it 500 meters, all the while returning data to Earth. Now 20 million is nothing to sneeze at if you're an individual, but in the world of government space programs -- and even big business -- it's nothing. As a reference point, a 30-second TV ad during the Super Bowl costs about 2.5 million dollars, so the Google prize is equal to the cost of maybe two commercial breaks during the game.

If you browse the pages describing the teams which have formally entered the competition, you'll see there is tremendous variety. Some of the designs are pretty recognizable "space probes" while others look like snakes, or sea urchins, or giant spiders.

So is this the future of space exploration? Groovy garage-band robots noodling around on other worlds? It's an appealing notion -- virtual space tourism for everyone!

But wouldn't it be nice if humans were making some new footprints up there?