Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

Feed Me, Seymour!

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Carnivorous Clock eats bugs, begins doomsday countdown

This prototype time-piece from UK-based designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau traps insects on flypaper stretched across its roller system before depositing them into a vat of bacteria. The ensuing chemical reaction, or “digestion,” is transformed into power that keeps the rollers rollin’ and the LCD clock ablaze.

So when the machines become sentient, they will already be carnivorous. All we can do now to compound the problem is to make sure they have a taste for human flesh.

Hey You, Stop Being … so … Unsafe!

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Over at incoherently scattered ponderings, there’s a post on safety at academic labs, which links to an article at Slate about an explosion at a lab which killed a worker, and discusses the difference in safety standards for students vs workers, and academia vs industry.

Why the difference between industry and academe? For one thing, the occupational safety and health laws that protect workers in hazardous jobs apply only to employees, not to undergraduates, graduate students, or research fellows who receive stipends from outside funders. (As a technician, Sheri Sangji was getting wages and a W-2. If she’d been paying tuition instead, Cal/OSHA could not even have investigated her death.)

I had not realized that students aren’t covered, but the disparity between the described situations is not surprising. I’ve spent time in academia (grad school) and worked in national labs (the NanoFabrication facility at Cornell, TRIUMF in Canada), and my current government job is a confluence of being industry/government and a quasi-national-lab (though not formally recognized as such). And I have to concur: lab safety in a university setting is not formally the priority is is in those other places. Academic safety leans far too much on the involvement of the PI, and leaves way too much to chance. A key difference of academia is that students are … students — they are still learning, and one cannot assume that they have the requisite experience to know much about the finer points of safety.

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Which One's Pink?

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Color and Reality. Another take on color vs. the brain’s interpretation of color, discussed (OK, linked to) previously in Color on the Brain

We were all taught about Sir Isaac Newton who discovered that a glass prism can split white light apart into its constituent colors.

While we consider this rather trivial today, at the time you’d be laughed out of the room if you suggested this somehow illustrated a fundamental property of light and color. The popular theory of the day was that color was a mixture of light and dark, and that prisms simply colored light. Color went from bright red (white light with the smallest amount of “dark” added) to dark blue (white light with the most amount of “dark” added before it turned black).

Candygram

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Great white sharks hunt just like Hannibal Lecter

Great white sharks have some things in common with human serial killers, a new study says: They don’t attack at random, but stalk specific victims, lurking out of sight.

The sharks hang back and observe from a not-too-close, not-too-far base, hunt strategically, and learn from previous attempts, according to a study being published online Monday in the Journal of Zoology. Researchers used a serial killer profiling method to figure out just how the fearsome ocean predator hunts, something that’s been hard to observe beneath the surface.

Just like the landshark

Tasty News

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Why taste is as regional as dialect

Prof Taylor said: “Taste is determined by our genetic make-up and influenced by our upbringing and experience with flavours.

“Just as with spoken dialects, where accent is placed on different syllables and vowel formations, people from different regions have developed enhanced sensitivities to certain taste sensations and seek foods that trigger these.”

The part I can’t quite wrap my head around is that this was a test done with British cuisine. One has to question if it is applicable to a broader population.

Wrong! Or Maybe Not.

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Fingerprints and Grip – Wrong vs Incomplete

I saw the headline to one version of the linked story (Fingerprint grip theory rejected) a few days back. I didn’t delve too deeply into it, and this thought had not occurred to me:

What struck me, and what the article did not mention, is that glass is a very artificial material. It is unlikely that our ancestors would have encountered such smooth material often in their day-to-day lives. Therefore there would not have been much selective pressure to develop a good grip on glass or similarly smooth material. Tree branches, rocks, fur, bones, and other materials that might find their way into the grasp of a hominid or ape are much rougher than glass.

Clearly follow up research is needed. How do fingerprints behave when applied to other materials, and how does wetness affect their utility?

What did pique my interest was a different version of the story (or headline, at least): Urban Myth Disproved: Fingerprints Do Not Improve Grip Friction. I had not considered that this was an “urban myth.” If it hadn’t been tested, then it was an hypothesis, and in need of testing. I don’t really hang with the “what good are fingerprints” crowd, so I don’t really have a grip —ridge-augmented or not — on how this viewpoint was being advertised. In any case, though, I agree that the process has been mischaracterized — the media has sensationalized the discovery by casting the results as some sort of paradigm shift rather than an incremental additional of knowledge.

What interested me most about this story is how the media channels science news stories into a few themes with which they feel comfortable. Debunking a commonly held myth is one of those themes. While this story hold a kernel of that theme – it is more accurate to say, in my opinion, not that the grip hypothesis is wrong but that the story is more complex.

That is a much more useful theme for science reporting – because the story is almost always more complex – more complex than the typical publish understanding, and even of our previous scientific understanding.

Likewise, it is more meaningful in many cases to portray our prior models and theories not as “wrong” but as incomplete. Sometimes they are wrong, but that needs to be distinguished from ideas that are oversimplified and therefore incomplete, but not wrong.

A Lesson in the Scientific Method

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This has it all. A scientist, working on his own, discovering something new (and useful) using proper scientific methodology … and he’s in high school. WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags

First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.

Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.

That wasn’t good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation.

Oh, and yes, he won the top prize at the science fair.