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Olive branch solves a Bronze Age mystery

2010-05-21T02:50:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON - Compared to the well-studied world of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the civilizations that flourished in the eastern Mediterranean just before Homer’s time are still cloaked in mystery.
Even the basic chronology of the region during this time has been heatedly debated. Now, a resolution has finally emerged -- initiated, quite literally, by an olive branch.
Scientists have discovered the remains of a single olive tree, buried alive during a massive volcanic eruption during the Late Bronze Age. A study that dates this tree, plus another study that dates a series of objects from before, during and after the eruption, now offer a new timeline for one of the earliest chapters of European civilization

Scientists get frog to shake his booty

2010-05-21T02:47:00.000-07:00

Panamanian species gets jiggy with it to intimidate rivals.

One species of male frog shakes its booty big-time in aggressive showdowns, with the victor pulsating its rear for a longer time and with more gusto.
The shaking, which starts with the hind end and becomes a whole-body affair, sends vibrations along the red-eyed treefrog's plant perch until the shaking reaches the frog's opponent sitting on the branch — this process is called tremulation.
"In the case of red-eyed treefrogs, tremulation displays in which the frogs shake their entire bodies convey information about the status and aggressive intent of the signaler," said researcher Michael Caldwell of Boston University. "They also appear to carry information about the size of the signaler."

Astronauts gear up for 3rd and final spacewalk

2010-05-21T02:43:00.000-07:00

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The Atlantis astronauts have one more big job before leaving the International Space Station.
On Friday morning, two of the crew will venture out on the third and final spacewalk of their mission.
Astronauts Garrett Reisman and Michael Good will finish installing new space station batteries. They will replace two old batteries. Four new batteries went in during Wednesday's spacewalk.
Atlantis delivered the batteries along with a new Russian compartment. The chamber was opened Thursday, but had to be sealed again when metal filings were found floating inside. Flight controllers are devising a clean-up plan.
Atlantis will undock from the space station Sunday for the last time. NASA has just two shuttle missions left.

Asteroid Caught Marching Across Tadpole Nebula

2010-05-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the Tadpole nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to catch an asteroid in our solar system passing by. The asteroid, called 1719 Jens, left tracks across the image, seen as a line of yellow-green dots in the boxes near center. A second asteroid, called 1992 UZ5, was also observed cruising by, as highlighted in the boxes near the upper left (the larger boxes are blown-up versions of the smaller ones).

But that's not all that WISE caught in this busy image -- two satellites orbiting above WISE (highlighted in the ovals) streak through the image, appearing as faint green trails. The apparent motion of asteroids is slower than satellites because asteroids are much more distant, and thus appear as dots that move from one WISE frame to the next, rather than streaks in a single frame.
This Tadpole region is chock full of stars as young as only a million years old -- infants in stellar terms -- and masses over 10 times that of our sun. It is called the Tadpole nebula because the masses of hot, young stars are blasting out ultraviolet radiation that has etched the gas into two tadpole-shaped pillars, called Sim 129 and Sim 130. These "tadpoles" appear as the yellow squiggles near the center of the frame. The knotted regions at their heads are likely to contain new young stars. WISE's infrared vision is helping to ferret out hidden stars such as these.
The 1719 Jens asteroid, discovered in 1950, orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The space rock, which has a diameter of 19 kilometers (12 miles), rotates every 5.9 hours and orbits the sun every 4.3 years.
Twenty-five frames of the region, taken at all four of the wavelengths detected by WISE, were combined into this one image. The space telescope caught 1719 Jens in 11 successive frames. Infrared light of 3.4 microns is color-coded blue: 4.6-micron light is cyan; 12-micron-light is green; and 22-micron light is red.
WISE is an all-sky survey, snapping pictures of the whole sky, including everything from asteroids to stars to powerful, distant galaxies.
JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Physicists Create Millimeter-Sized 'Bohr Atom'

2010-05-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

Nearly a century after Danish physicist Niels Bohr offered his planet-like model of the hydrogen atom, a Rice University-led team of physicists has created giant, millimeter-sized atoms that resemble it more closely than any other experimental realization yet achieved.

Bohr offered the first successful theoretical model of the atom in 1913, suggesting that electrons traveled in orbits around the atom's nucleus like planets orbiting a star. Bohr's model led to a deeper understanding of both the chemical and optical properties of atoms and won him a Nobel Prize in 1922. But his notion of electrons traveling in discrete orbits was eventually displaced by quantum mechanics, which revealed that electrons don't have precise positions but are instead distributed in wave-like patterns.
"In a sufficiently large system, the quantum effects at the atomic scale can transition into the classical mechanics found in Bohr's model," said lead researcher Barry Dunning, Rice's Sam and Helen Worden Professor of Physics and Astronomy. "Using highly excited Rydberg atoms and a series of pulsed electric fields, we were able to manipulate the electron motion and create circular, planet-like states."
The team included members from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vienna University of Technology. Using lasers, the researchers excited potassium atoms to extremely high levels. Using a carefully tailored series of short electric pulses, the team was then able to coax the atoms into a precise configuration with one point-like, "localized" electron orbiting far from the nucleus. In fact, the atoms are true atomic giants, with diameters approaching one millimeter.
"Our measurements show that the electrons remain localized for several orbits and behave much as classical particles," Dunning said.
He said the work has potential applications in next-generation computers and in the study of classical and quantum chaos.
The research is available online in Physical Review Letters. Co-authors include Rice graduate students Jeffery Mestayer and Brendan Wyker, Rice postdoctoral researcher Jim Lancaster, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Carlos Reinhold and the Vienna University of Technology's Shuhei Yoshida and Joachim Burgdörfer. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Robert A. Welch Foundation, the Department of Energy and the Austrian Science Fund.

Bees That Nest in Petals

2010-05-20T23:21:00.000-07:00

Scientists Describe the Nest of an Uncommon Solitary Bee:

In a rare coincidence, researchers working in both Turkey and Iran discovered on the same day how a rare species of bee builds its underground nests. The females from the solitary species Osima (Ozbekosima) avoseta line the nest's brood chambers with petals of pink, yellow, blue, and purple flowers. The chambers provide nutrients for the larvae to grow and mature and protect the next generation as they wait out the winter.

Scientists Listen to Faint Sounds Inside Insects Using Atomic Force Microscopy

2010-05-20T23:17:00.000-07:00

AFM is one of major scientific tools responsible for the emergence of modern nanotechnology.
The unprecedented sensitivity of AFM allowed the Clarkson team to record sub-nano oscillations of very faint amplitude (less than the size of one atom) at high frequencies (up to 1,000 hertz or cycles per second). Previous work in the study of insects was only done at up to 5 hertz. The sounds are recorded by touching the surface of the bugs with an AFM probe.
The study of these sounds may allow researchers to discover unknown features and physiology of insects. Sokolov hopes these discoveries may help in finding solutions to the problems caused by insect pests.
"Insects are of general interest not only as the most numerous and diverse group of animals on the planet, but also as highly efficient bio-machines varying greatly in size," says Sokolov. "Some are major agricultural pests and competitors of humans for crops. Mosquitoes and other insects are important vectors of plant, animal, and human diseases. Also, vast lands of the earth are still underdeveloped because they are occupied by blood-sucking insects."
You can listen to audio files of the internal sounds of mosquitoes, flies, and ladybugs at: http://ftp.aip.org/epaps/appl_phys_lett/E-APPLAB-96-038950 .
The team consisted of Sokolov, who has appointments in Physics, and Chemistry and Biomolecular Science; Maxim Dokukin, a physics postdoctoral fellow; and Nataliia Guz, a physics graduate student; and Sergey Vasilyev, instrumental scientist. The other members of Sokolov's group, physics graduate students Dmytro Volkov, Ravi Gaikwad, and Shyuzhene Li, work on biosensors, self-assembly of particles, and the study of skin aging.

Quantum Physics

2010-05-20T08:02:00.000-07:00

What on earth has Quantum Physics got to do with miracles?
One way of looking at Quantum Mechanics is that there is a little slop in the gears of life. When ball A hits ball B it veers off at a precise angle, all mathematically calculable, but not quite. Quantum freedom allows the ball to veer off at any angle it feels like, so long as it is sufficiently close to the precise angle. What I am talking about is something deeper than the slop you would expect because the ball isn’t quite round, the table not quite flat etc. At a fundamental level, atomic particles have choice, within limits, to do what they damn well please. It is called Heisenberg uncertainty. Please excuse the simplistic anthropomorphising; I am trying to reach a non-technical audience too.
The Many Worlds Hypothesis is the mathematically simplest way of resolving Bell’s Theorem. Bell’s Theorem is a mathematical proof derived from physics demonstrating that whenever two particles interact, they are thereafter connected in a mysterious faster-than-light way that doesn’t diminish with time or distance and can’t be shielded. Also known as the "mechanism of non-locality ". There are other explanations besides the Many-Worlds Hypothesis, but, historically, the mathematically simplest explanations tend to win out in the long run.
The Many Worlds Hypothesis states that the universe continuously branches into multiple parallel worlds — creating all possibilities allowed by quantum randomness / uncertainty / indefiniteness (which is a far cry from all possibilities conceivable!). You might imagine the tree of life with incredibly luxuriant lush branching. Because all possibilities, even the "almost impossible" ones, manifest, the many worlds hypothesis explains why we live in such an improbable universe. We humans just don’t exist in most of the probable universes — just in the improbable ones we inhabit.
The most recent work in Quantum Mechanics says that, in some way, various unlikely possibilities cancel each other out, so that in practice, in general, we manifest an orderly predicable universe.
In some sense, everything possible, past and future is pre-existing

love the education

2010-05-19T10:20:00.001-07:00

I consider myself an Education Reformer. Through the years I have tried to reform education from the inside out. It has not worked. What makes me so smart, nothing really? I think every teacher wants to assist students with learning to the best of their ability. At least that is my deepest desire, to assist kids that struggled to overcome their challenges. Which in turn, produces more well-rounded, self-sufficient, educated people as citizens for our county. Does this seem far-fetched?

This is my general premise as per my paper, The Multi-Sensory Classroom (Aug. 2004):
“Each child develops sensory/motor preskills at a very young age (e.g., auditory processing, fine and gross motor skills, visual perception, reflexes, tactile processing, sensory modulation). These bottom levels of sensory/motor development are often taken for granted because they are basic and develop automatically in the typically developing child. When we teach a student at school, the child uses these sensory/motor preskills as a foundation for learning. Children in whom these preskills have not fully developed find learning difficult if not impossible; they become our struggling or special-needs children. Without the appropriate developmental foundation, they cannot build the abstract thinking skills we try to teach them in school. “
Therefore, students may struggle in an educational setting and it may not be obviously apparent why the struggle exists.

So here’s my beef. Many students receive the necessary tools to overcome struggles in public education by the support of parents, teachers and interventions. There are a great number of students who do not receive additional support for whatever reason. This fact needs to change very rapidly.

Case in point, let’s examines the test scores for the high school exit exam for California. According to the California Department of Education website’s data for July of 2008, 13, 237 students took the Math portion of the California Exit Exam and 13, 373 students took the English portion of the exam. 29% of the students passed the Math and 30% passed the English portions of the test for the state. That means that 9,423 students failed the Math and 9,420 failed the English! Holy Smoke!

I cannot be the only one screaming in the wildness. Where are you? Please don’t give me the spill about more qualified teachers and incentives. In today’s, New York Times, Week in Review section on page 5 there is an advertisement from the President of America Federation of Teachers. The name of the article which is really an advertisement is called, “ What Matters Most: Words into Action”. In the ad-like article the president, Randi Weingarten explains this problem in education, “ For too long and too often, teacher evaluation –in both design and implementation – has failed to achieve what must be our goal: continuously improving and informing teaching so as to better education all students”. She goes on to give an example from Colorado of the school board and teacher union working together. Then at the end she says that school board members, teachers, union leaders all feel the same way, they want what’s best for the kids. I felt the article was about working relationships in these difficult financial times. Maybe that needs to be the focus for the advertisement that educational higher ups and teacher unions do not need to eat each other alive so they can eventually help kids. Although our students are failing right now and I don’t want any kid to miss several years of learning because people who make a lot of money can’t get along. We are talking about kid’s futures here. Give me a break!

I’m tired of the Infomercial Education. The kind that keeps promising that magic ellixir yet, the product is just so-so. The real conversation needs to be around the individual differences of students or their learning styles and needs. Administrators, school boards, teachers and all school staff members need to be trained in how to recognize a struggling student’s needs: emotionally, developmentally and physically. They also need to know how to build or recognize curriculum for these needs and drive the curriculum based on assessment data, not a hunch or a feeling. I’m not saying that public education can fix it all and is a one-stop shop. But let’s be honest students come to school with all of these issues and as a whole we cannot ignore the numbers. Our students in this state are not making the cut. Our interventions are not making the cut. Identifying student’s needs are not based on each student’s individual differences or assessments yet blanket interventions are thrown on major problems.

So, we need an Educational Revolution…