SciencePunk

DEAR SCIENTISTS...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:57:41 +0000

Dear scientists,
Why do you study, the thing that you study? What is it, and why did you choose to study it over all the other possible things you could have studied?
Best
Frank

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Geek romance: How to make a Storm Glass pendant

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:23:30 +0000

Toward the end of last year, being in possession of two novelties - a girlfriend and a steady job - I decided to spend my free evenings crafting a very special piece of jewellery. I was inspired by a visit to Barometer World in the late summer, where I discovered the curious material known as storm glass (tragic backstory recounted here).

In short, a storm glass is a weather divination tool so old that nobody really knows where they came from. It's likely they were borne out of alchemy experiments performed during the medieval period. Inside a sealed glass tube, crystals bloom, wither and vanish spontaneously, apparently spurred on by weather fronts. It was a thing of wondrous beauty.

Nobody knows what exactly makes storm glasses act this way. I've read in many places since that it is pressure changes, as with a barometer. This clearly isn't true, as the fluid is sealed inside a solid glass chamber. Others cite temperature fluctuations - far more probable - or, more exotically, electrical discharge across the glass (again, unlikely, glass is a very fine electrical insulator). Even spooky quantum forces get a mention.

It was around then that an idea hatched in my head: if it was really heat that caused a storm glass to sigh and sway from one condition to another, then why couldn't it be turned into a pendant? One that would react to the body heat of the wearer? I would make a storm glass - not one that predicted the passing of nature's cold fronts, but one that signalled the tempests of the heart! A crystal that would melt in the heat of my girlfriend's passions, and grow hard in the cooling of her mood. It would be easy, right?

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Luke Jerram's glass sculptures of microbes

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:11:40 +0000

This weekend I visited the Trauma exhibition at London's GV Art gallery. The pieces all relate in some way to physical and psychological trauma inflicted on the body, by a range of artists working alone and in collaboration with medics.

Some of the items are underwhelming verging on irritating - placing histological slides on a plinth does a disservice both to art (because there is no emotional narrative contained within) and to science, because it implies that the inherent wonder and beauty of science is absent unless it is repackaged as a gallery exhibit. (Hello? Museums present objects of science all the time, and they are spaces filled with wonder and beauty).

There are, though, some wonderful pieces that make the trip to West London worthwhile: the annual self-portraits of a man suffering Alzheimer's that chart the destruction of his talent with terrifying effect; and (pictured above) the exquisite glass sculptures of microbes - both real and imagined - created by Luke Jerram.

Trauma is free and can be seen at the GV Art gallery at 49 Chiltern Street, London, until February 18.

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The Information Diet - five ways to improve your data consumption

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:35:56 +0000

Last week I had a visit from a friend of mine, who was on something of a farewell tour. After several years of planning, he'd packed in his dependable but much-begrudged corporate job, and was setting sail for Asia, to see more of the world. He's already seen much more of the world than most people. Not because he was well connected or rich, but because he made it his life's mission to tour the forgotten, the hidden and the forbidden places of the world. I mention this because if there ever was a man to take life advice from, it is this one, and he put into words something I've been pondering for a while now.

"It's called," he told me, over the noise of the pub, "an information diet." It seems like an odd concept, even a heretical one. I am by my own admission an information glutton. I suck up huge volumes of information like a baleen whale, sieve it, swallow it, gulp again. I have a cascade of feeds I never have time to read, and I'm getting serious indigestion. Seeing and sharing is easy in an always-online world, and addictive to boot. I'm not the first one to turn a critical eye on my sources of information - the phrase "information diet" was coined long ago; prior to the internet there was no shortage of voices railing against the popular medium as an unfit and corrupting influence, whether it be comics, video games, television, MTV, books, and, we must presume, scrolls and slates in some early day.

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Falling Walls: Modern chemistry turns lead into gold

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:18:24 +0000

Today I'll be writing a series of blogposts from the Falling Walls conference in Berlin. Each speaker is invited to discuss the ideas, inventions, and discoveries they believe will break down walls in their field.

Paul Chirik: How Modern Alchemy Can Lead to Inexpensive and Clean Technology

Professor of chemistry Paul Chirik is on a mission to turn lead into gold. Or, to be more precise, to make lead act like gold. Precious metals are instrumental to some of the most widespread and important chemical processes in our world, such as the osmium needed to synthesise fertiliser (so valuable that BASF bought up the entire world's stock at one point), and the platinum needed to make jeans bendable, shoes sturdy, and envelopes sticky. The problem is that precious metals tend to be, well, precious. Not only that, but turbulent markets and rampant speculation cause huge fluctuations in their price, impacting on the products that depend on their use as catalysts.

Precious metals tend to operate in the realms of two electron transfers, while "base" metals only operate a single electron transfer. Two electrons good in this case; single-electron transfer is responsible for all the chemistry you hate, like the free radicals in your body and the rust in your car. To get around this problem, nature engineered complex electron transport chains carried out by enzymes to produce the molecules it needs without relying on the rarer elements. Chrik is following in these footsteps, developing ways to get cheap metals like iron work like platinum, replacing the more expensive of the two in common industrial reactions.

The technique offers huge advances for sustainable chemistry. A molecule Chirik developed, when added in 1% solution to herbicide, forced it to spread over leaves instead of forming droplets. This meant 90% less was needed to treat the same area! It's not always simple of course - a replacement envelope glue designed by Chirik was rejected because nobody wanted to lick a black gumming strip (a more appeasing colour was developed).

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Falling Walls: Making a Fine Mess of Things

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:26:49 +0000

Robert E. Horn: How Visual Language Supports Decision Making About Wicked Problems and Social Messes

Let's face it, having "messes" listed as a research specialism on your business card is pretty neat. But Stanford's Robert Horn is exactly that, a man who studies messes, or more accurately "inter-related sets of problems", particularly because business and government strategies are often hatched in the midst of messes. Starting out with the war on drugs, Horn shows how the issue is fed from a dizzying number of sources: everything from the rate of high-school dropout to war on the streets of Mexico. And this leads to Horn's mantra, writ large on the towering screen behind him: "Don't treat a social mess as a regular problem".

To make sense of messes such as these, Horn creates visual aids. But these are no ordinary powerpoint presentations. Commissioned to help develop Britain's 12,000 year plan for the disposal of nuclear waste, Horn and his team created a mural that spanned fifty years into the past and a million into the future, containing hundred of images and word boxes. A similar mural was created for the World Council on Sustainable Development, to illustrate a roadmap for achieving a more equal society by 2050. In "backcasting" (a technique Horn describes as imagining the ideal future and looking backwards, year by year, to visualise what would need to be in place to lead there), the final mural was 40 14 feet wide and contained 70 measures of success, 350 milestones and 250 visual elements.

Horn says this kind of mega-infographic can illustrate multiple points of view, patterns, and context that helps to facilitate the type of group processes needed to solve some of our most intractable - and intricate - problems.

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Falling Walls: Storing the Sun on Earth

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:41:58 +0000

Robert Schlögl: How Heterogeneous Catalysis Can Replace Fossil Fuels

Robert Schlögl is Director of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, discussing our reliance on fossil fuels. The problem isn't simply that they are a fast-diminishing resource, but that fossil fuels still represent the world's best energy storage system. We need to find new ways of generating energy, but just as importantly, we need to find ways of storing it. Currently the only way of efficiently storing energy is inside a chemical bond.

Nature has its own storage molecule - sugar. But it is a difficult molecule to work with. Schlögl wants to design new artificial solar fuels, that are stable and easy to build. Collecting the light that falls on just 0.17% of the Earth's suface - an area 2.5x the size of Germany, is enough to meet global energy demand. Chemicals forged in a solar plant could then be manufactured into useful fuels in a solar refinery. The difficulty lies in designing something better than what nature produced in 4 billion years.

Generating hydrogen from water is one idea, but the platinum plates needed as a catalyst are not only expensive, but destroyed in the process. Schlögl says we need to develop new catalytic technologies. Nano-engineered materials that physically cradle the water molecules can help reduce the massive amount of energy needed to split them apart, and even operate as a production line for fuels, built molecule by molecule. (it's at this stage his slides start to look like something from SpaceChem). The discovery and development of these materials will drive the creation of synthetic fuels.

Who determines the price of energy? asks Schlögl, and here I think he's hinting at the massive subsidies fossil fuels enjoy that makes developing alternatives so difficult. To close, he challenges the audience to support the implementation of new energy options. "The starting point is here," he says. "Now is the Big Bang in our energy systems."

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Falling Walls: New war and the need for a global emergency services

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:37:14 +0000

Mary Kaldor: How Human Security Makes People Safe in a Global Era
The day's first speaker was Professor of Global Governance at the London School of Economics Mary Kaldor, who proposed the creation of a "global emergency services". During an exercise with the army (discussing the optimal way to retake a block of flats in Southampton that were occupied by a fictitious insurgent group), Kaldor discovered that although most present supported the use of soft tactics of conflict resolution - political and economic measures - those present felt that their business was fighting wars.

The trouble, Kaldor opines, is that these tactics are poorly suited to so-called "new wars", where battle is the decisive encounter. More and more, conflict is perpetrated by actors with vague state ties and is perpetrated against civilian populations, and resembles violent crime and disorder on a national scale. The solution was to build a taskforce whose role was not to defeat enemies, but to protect civilians, from both internal and external threats.

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Will Halley's Comet lose its sparkle?

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 07:52:18 +0000

Google is celebrating Edmund Halley's birthday today, so it seemed like a good time to mention something that's been on my mind. It's about life, wonder, and celestial bodies.

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Raise a glass to Laika

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:21:02 +0000

Fifty-four years ago today, a plucky little mongrel became the world's first space pilot, taking a one-way trip aboard Sputnik 2. Here's to you, Laika.

Image: Detail of "Laika", by Phineras X Jones. Prints available from the artist.

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Semiconductor's 20 Hz: listen to a geo-magnetic storm rage

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:36:55 +0000

I've covered the work of Semiconductor before on these pages: Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt are responsible for a series of visual and acoustic sculptures that intersect art and science. Previously they brought magnetic fields to life for Channel 4, and recaptured minerals squeezed into existence deep inside the Earth's crust..

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Home-made UAV with thermal cam used to hunt feral pigs

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:47:34 +0000

A Louisiana farmer was fed up with feral pigs trashing his rice crop. Usually farmers hire hunters to deal with the problem. But this isn't easy:

Hunting big angry pigs in rice that is as tall as your belly button is HARD. Seeing them at anything other than 10 feet away is nearly impossible, you have to walk, listen, stalk, and kill. Then chase the survivors for hours. Sometimes you could waste all night looking in the wrong places or maybe the pigs decided to not come out at all.

This year I decided to work smarter instead of harder. With our own little UAV up there I could spend a lot less time chasing pigs that might not even be around.

Thus the Dehogaflier is born.

The Dehogaflier is a custom-built RC airplane outfitted with a $4,500 thermal camera. With this device, the pilot can spot a pig at 1,000ft looking straight down. Also, it's worth bearing in mind the pilot has to fly this for long periods in pitch darkness. What a king!

Also, apparently in Louisiana you hunt pigs with assault rifles? Americans are so crazy!

Via Metafilter.

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A quick anecdote about quasicrystals

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:12:17 +0000

Today the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Daniel Shechtman for the discovery of quasicrystals - a material whose components are arranged in a seemingly ordered pattern, but one that never repeats itself.

Earlier this year I interviewed mathematician Edmund Harriss for an unrelated feature about design and science, and he told me a wonderful anecdote about these curious materials:

I work on aperiodic tiling, sets of shapes that fit together but never becomes periodic - there's never one single unit that repeats again and again. The initial example by Robert Berger had 10,000 different shapes, very much an abstract theoretical object, but that was brought down, to Penrose tiling, which has just two different shapes. Even today we don't understand a lot about how this process works.

Most people regarded it as recreational mathematics, just an interesting problem. Then in the 1980s, Dan Shechtman managed to get a crystal structure in an x-ray diffraction pattern that had a five-fold symmetry. In three dimensional space, you can't have a periodic structure with five-fold rotational symmetry. This showed that the structure of this crystal couldn't be periodic. This ran against the central beliefs that chemists had about how crystals form. The discovery of these non-periodic crystals disappeared without a trace, and one of the arguments was that it was mathematically impossible. The mathematicians then refined what was mathematically possible, so when quasicrystals were observed again you had models for what was happening.

Alongside the transcript I'd jotted the note: "So we ignored the existence of quasicrystals until someone figured out their underlying design?".

Sometimes, even in science, things need to be believed in to be seen.

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A note on hanging chain clocks

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:57:02 +0000

So BoingBoing has an item on hanging chain clocks, on sale from Ticktock Showroom at a bargain $100. I wrote about a similar art piece by Andreas Dober a year ago on these very pages, but that had a price tag of $2,338, so I'm glad to see bicycle chains have come down in price.

Here's the thing though: to my eyes, both this clock and the original by Dober are backwards. The clock is designed so that the chain takes the place of the hands as the moveable part, and thus someone decided that it should go clockwise. As a result, the numbers are printed in the opposite order to a usual clock. This is all wrong! The "hands" of ths clock are FIXED at the top of the clock, and the dial is turning instead. Ergo, these numbers should move ANTI-CLOCKWISE, as they do normally relative to the movement of the hands.

Or am I just being weird?

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Spectral Power Distribution of Crayons

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:38:10 +0000

Self confessed geek and photographer Mark Meyer makes images that "narrate, persuade, inspire and inform". He wanted to know the exact colours present in his pack of crayons. What to do then, but put them through a spectrophotometer?

Mark says:

These questions have been nagging me since kindergarten and this weekend I finally got to the bottom of it. I am now able to answer that age-old question: what really is the difference between green-yellow and yellow-green?

Many more nerdy charts and breakdowns at Mark's website.

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