Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

Everything Old is New Again

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Get the lead out: Have we already forgotten this lesson?

[R]egardless, the analysis has been done; lead remediation is still a screamingly good deal. Lead remains one of the most common and harmful pollutants in the country; it’s often present in old paint and settles into soil, particularly in urban areas. One comprehensive study concluded that “each dollar invested in lead paint hazard control results in a return of $17–$221.” And that study focused on current, laborious methods of lead remediation. As it happens, scientists have developed a new, cheaper method — mixing fish bones into soil (!) — to absorb lead and render it nontoxic. Pretty cool stuff. Imagine what more research and funding could do.

Instead, federal funding for lead-poisoning prevention programs has been brutally slashed

I’m hoping the anti-spending reflex can be excised from our politics and replaced by the recognition that investment is a good idea. When the return on the spending exceeds the spending, it is a wise thing to do.

The elimination of lead from gasoline is a paradigmatic triumph of American environmentalism. A danger to health was discovered by scientists. Public-health advocates and greens pushed and pushed for decades, often futilely, to get the government to take action. When EPA finally cranked up efforts to do something about it, the agency was viciously attacked. Industry shills said it was an agenda to control Americans’ lives, driven by scientists who wanted research money and a cabal of extreme environmentalists. They said there were no viable alternatives to lead and the regulations would raise gas prices and destroy the economy. They paid their own scientists to produce counter-evidence. They flooded politicians with money.

Gosh, sound familiar? The EPA prevailed, but these tactics no doubt delayed the result and increased the damage done.

Check Out That Pecker!

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I’ve had trouble getting decent shots of woodpeckers before — they’ve had a tendency to move around to the other side of the tree or move along if I got close. This time I maxed out the optical zoom on my camera (advertised as 20X) and used the “digital zoom” (trading resolution for additional closeup) for about an extra factor of two and steadied myself against a tree. The bird wasn’t always in the frame for the whole shot as a result, but there’s a bit of footage from which to choose; at 210 fps, this clip represents only about 4 seconds of elapsed time.

You Can't Get There From Here

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Taking the Plunge

Q. If I find myself in a free-falling elevator, is there any position that might increase my chance of survival? (Climbing on top of other people is not an acceptable answer.)

A. The best option would be to lie on your back on the floor as flat as possible, said Eliot H. Frank, a research engineer at the Center for Biomedical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Yes, that makes sense, but how does one get to the floor and lie flat, while in free-fall?

There Could Be a Marshmallow in Your Future

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Time and Marshmallows

Mischel followed up years later, looking into how the kids who participated in the study ultimately turned out. There was a remarkable amount of correlation with this simple test and success later in life — kids who were able to hold off at age 4 for the second marshmallow turned out years later to have higher SAT scores and generally seem more competent. The hypothetical explanation is that our personalities are strongly influenced by our attitude toward time — whether we are focused primarily on the past, the present, or the future.

I had run across the Zimbardo video before, and put it in a post, and in that context, it’s not surprising that future-oriented people would appreciate, and possibly have an extra affinity for, education. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

The Boy with the Electrical Dragon Tattoo

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Meet Winston Kemp, Lightning Strike Survivor and Lichtenberg Figure Owner

We’ve all heard stories about people getting struck by lightning — usually as some sort of cautionary tale, but how many of us have ever seen the effects of lightning on a human? Winston Kemp, a 24 year old electrician, has had first-hand experience, and now he also has a unique and possibly permanent bit of body art to go along with it.

I have a Lichtenberg figure, which did not require me getting personally zapped.

How they’re normally made

All Hail Our New Fish Robots Overlords

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What Makes a Robot Fish Attractive? (Hint: It’s in the Moves)

The researchers designed their bio-inspired robotic fish to mimic the tail propulsion of a swimming fish, and conducted experiments at varying tail beat frequencies and flow speeds. In nature, fish positioned at the front of a school beat their tails with greater frequency, creating a wake in which their followers gather. The followers display a notably slower frequency of tail movement, leading researchers to believe that the followers are enjoying a hydrodynamic advantage from the leaders’ efforts.

Sexier than Lab Rats

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Teller Reveals His Secrets

Some of them, anyway.

I remember an experiment I did at the age of 11. My test subjects were Cub Scouts. My hypothesis (that nobody would see me sneak a fishbowl under a shawl) proved false and the Scouts pelted me with hard candy. If I could have avoided those welts by visiting an MRI lab, I surely would have.

But magic’s not easy to pick apart with machines, because it’s not really about the mechanics of your senses. Magic’s about understanding—and then manipulating—how viewers digest the sensory information.

Boom Boom

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The disposal of drums of sodium into Lake Lenore, an alkaline lake in the Grand Coulee area of eastern Washington State, in 1947 by the War Assets Administration.

Wanna dispose of some sodium? Na.

[A]fter WWII, the US government found they had some extra sodium no one wanted, so they disposed of it.
In a lake. Full of water. And by the way, it was ten tons of pure sodium.

Safety and environmental impact disclaimer

Oh, and all that surplus WWII sodium? While that would destroy the ecology of a lake, in this case it was already a heavily alkaline lake with no fish in it. While I wouldn’t say this was a great thing to do, at least they thought to minimize the impact. But cripes: don’t try this at home.

Intellectualism and Scientific Literacy

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Mastering complexity

[W]e live in a world where it’s de rigueur to know your Shakespeare, Molière or Goethe, but quite all right to be proudly ignorant of Faraday, Pasteur or Einstein. It hasn’t always been that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way. But right now, there’s a trend in society towards scientific apathy, and even antagonism. This is dangerous for us all and it’s incumbent on the scientific community to address the issue.

I think it’s de rigueur to know your Shakespeare, Molière or Goethe if you want to claim to be an intellectual (which, as I have said, I do not). But I think one must note that literacy is a term we associate with a minimum level of capability. One who is literate can read, but that does not mean that said person will be able to appreciate the works of Shakespeare (or Molière or Goethe). That next level is where we find interactional expertise, and we need to be clear whether we expect this, or simply literacy. But anyone claiming to be an intellectual cannot legitimately exclude math and science from their arsenal.

Somewhat related to this topic, I have to say that Howard Johnson Jennifer is right! in Meet Me Halfway

It’s frustrating. That frustration is often expressed in a renewed cracking of the whip, insisting that scientists just need to do better in communicating via public outreach. While I agree that the scientific community should (and is) working to improve in that area — heck, I do this for a living and still am constantly striving to improve! — what Hasson’s research clearly shows is that genuine communication is a two-way street. Scientists — a.k.a., the speakers — are only half of the equation, and thus they are only half of the problem.

The other half of the equation are the listeners; any type of communication will fail if it doesn’t have a receptive audience. And I’d go one step further. We tend to think of listening as a passive act, but it actually requires some effort in order to achieve that elusive connection. Particularly when it comes to bridging a gap, as with scientists and the general public, the listeners need to be more actively engaged, more invested in having a true conversation.

This is a view I’ve held for a long time. There are concepts that do require years of college to get a handle on, and reading a pop-sci book is not a substitute. You have to go out and expend some effort to have your interactional expertise if you want to be part of the conversation.

All of which ties in to a session I attended on scientific literacy (Is encouraging scientific literacy more than telling people what they need to know) at ScienceOnline 2012. We agreed that it’s important, because science appears in many places and people need to be able to make informed decisions, but in light of Jennifer’s post, I think one must add that people need to be motivated to want to make informed decisions, and take steps toward that end.

There was an interesting exercise in which the (Canadian) moderators gave a short dialogue about a curling result, and used the collective sports (il)literacy as an analogy for science (though it’s not the first time one might have thought of this). Since I lived in Canada for 2.5 years and am familiar with curling, though, I didn’t get the full benefit of the exercise.

The FTL neutrino experiment came up as well, and I wish I had better notes because I don’t recall exactly what the objection was — something about conflicting information being presented, but this is because most physicists are not neutrino experts and there’s a difference between literacy and expertise. I pointed out that in some ways, the issue actually raised scientific literacy, because it was a demonstration of the scientific process.

There was a very interesting example given by one of the moderators (Catherine Anderson, with whom I talked at length about this after the session) about some science-camp exercises that were modeled to be like a CSI investigation. Clues were given and the students had to gather evidence and make their case, but one of the driving lessons of the exercise was that there was no right answer, just as in any part of “real” science — you do your experiment and then have to interpret the results. There’s no “right answer” to compare it to, which is one of the tougher concepts I’ve had to try to convey in introductory physics labs back when I was doing that sort of thing. The students get the idea that experimental error was the difference between what they got and what the textbook said they should get. I occasionally try and think of ways one could do a lab where the “right” answer isn’t available, so the students would have to the chance to do something that compared to real science investigation, and understanding the process of science and how uncertainty/error fits in is a big part of scientific literacy