Everyday Scientist

the inhuman element

Is anyone else sick of Dow’s Human Element campaign? I know I’m not the first to note the irony. Dow bought Union Carbide and now refuses to take responsibility for the cleanup and liability of a terrible chemical accident in Bhopal many years earlier.I know that it is a complex issue—legally, politically, and ethically—but Dow is a little disingenuous to claim that they care so much about humankind. If Dow were human-conscious, the problem might become simple: Union Carbide shirked on its responsibility to clean up a disastrous chemical spill; Dow bought Union Carbide; along with the benefits of owning Union Carbide come the responsibility of correcting a financial and moral wrong. Instead, Dow only points out that it didn’t own the plant when the accident occurred. But that ignores that fact that today Dow is still benefiting from Union Carbide’s escaping responsibility.I say that Dow just pay for the cleanup (which other companies are willing to help with). Maybe even pay some liability settlements to the poor people harmed by the spill and contaminated lands. Then Dow can show ads like the following with a clear conscience.

[google -5925107796437659727 nolink]

To learn more, you can read a book by a PhD chemist from Union Carbide: The Black Box of Bhopal. I haven’t read it. I’m nowhere near an expert on this topic. Maybe I’m way off in my opinions: It’s just a gut reaction at this point. Other viewpoints?

It came from the rocks

From a CBS affiliate on the anatomy of a Twinkie:

…Dr. Phillips says there are 39 ingredients packed into the dessert, and all but one are processed.

The ingredients cellulose gum, calcium sulfate, and polysorbate 60 are also used in sheet rock, shampoo, laundry detergent, and even rocket fuel. Author Steve Ettlinger spent five years tracking down the source of every ingredient found in a Twinkie.

“I was surprised that so many not only came from petroleum, but at least five came from rocks,” Ettlinger says.

The vitamins, artificial flavors, and colorings all come from petroleum. Phosphates from limestone make Twinkies light and airy.

“Sorbic acid is made from natural gas. That really blew my mind,” Ettlinger says…

Steve is a real winner with this alarmism. CAME FROM ROCKS, oh my God!?!

buy gold now

The weight of the official kilogram is decreasing. That means that, if you wait even one day, you will get less absolute mass of gold for the same official weight.

This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity. It’s not every day that the drifting value of a definition can mean BIG BUCKS for you and your family. You need to hurry to take advantage of this situation before it is rectified by scientists. Already there is talk about changing the definition of the kilogram to an unvarying value.

The only better investment on the planet is those collectible plates that may go up in value.

This is your brain on … policy

Just saw a recent article in the LA times that should get some attention. Here is the Nature Neuroscience primary source:

That’s right folks … I always knew THEY were strange and different!

a little literature roundup

Because I’ve found several cool tidbits in the world of scientific literature, I’d summarize them here in a little roundup:

Baby Einstein makes you dumb:

I read this piece in Nature News: Disney is all flustered about a study (here’s the Journal of Pediatrics paper) coming out of University of Washington that casts doubt on the educational effectiveness of making infants watch some expensive garbage. The study found that babies who watched Baby Einstein videos were less verbally endowed than those who didn’t. This is probably correlation—not necessarily causation—but hilarious nonetheless.

How to unboil an egg:

Daniel Liu at Harvard has devised a way of unboiling eggs. Well, not exactly. But his lab did just come out with a JACS paper about modifying the surfaces of proteins so that they are far less likely to aggregate.

The modified GFP proteins in the figure above do aggregate and turn off when boiled. But when subsequently cooled, they return to their native state. The unmodified protein (left epi tubes) remain boiled.

Molecular thermometers:

In another JACS paper, some Canadian researchers (eh?) used the blinking rates of GFP molecules to measure temperature in a tiny reaction chamber. It’s been known for a while that the blinking rates of individual GFP fluorophores are temperature and pH dependent, so I’m not exactly sure what makes this a breakthrough. Nevertheless, I like the calibration and the attempt to make something practical out of a some complicated scientific data.

gearing up for acs boston

I’ve been scanning the Technical Program for ACS Boston, and I’m super excited! Should be some great talks in the single-molecule biophysics field: days and days of fun!

 In all my reading of the program, this session seems the most … well, erotic? (At least the talks after the intermission, depending on what you’re into.) These talks put the “sex” in Technical Section.

Powers of One

Hey folks, Sam dug up this awesome cartoon, entitled Powers of One, from the xkcd.com site:

Powers of Ten is a 1977 short documentary film written and directed by Charles Eames and his wife, Ray. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude). The idea for the film appears to have come from the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke.

Science Fair

Last weekend I had the pleasure of judging middle school science fair projects. It’s always refreshing to see the kids interested (or at least pretending to be interested) in science. There were a lot of great projects. It was also nice to have a coordinator that wanted us to find a winner, instead of the “everyone’s a winner” approach I’ve encountered judging at some other schools. In honour of their efforts, I’ve put together my own science fair project.

Problem
How do glasses relax? This is important because glasses are important for people with bad site to see good.

Hypothesis
I think glasses will relax. I think this because if glasses didn’t relax, then we wouldn’t be able to see through them. But I’ve seen through a glass before, so it must have relaxed.

Materials
1) Paper
2) Pencil
3) Regeneratively amplified femtosecond Ti:Sapphire oscillator
4) Stopwatch
5) Notebook
6) Something to make things cold

Procedure
1) I ask 5 friends, David, Melissa, Lindsay, Billy, and Rainbow if they thought glasses relax.
2) I wrote down what they said, and averaged the results.
3) Make a liquid supercold.
4) Shine a lazer through it, and see what comes out.
5) Analyze your results.

My independent variable was the number of people I asked. My dependent variable was if the glass relaxed.

Results
These were my results.

As your can see, David, Melissa, and Rainbow all said that glasses relax, while Billy and Lindsay said glasses cannot relax. This confirms my hypothesis that glasses can relax, because more people think glasses can relax than glasses cannot relax.

Conclusions
My hypothesis was correct. If I could do this experiment again, I would see if playing different types of music would make the glasses relax faster. This experiment was important because it shows science works.

Bibliography
100 Great Science Fair Thesis Projects

Magnetically Charged Goodness

I was at my local Fairways Supermarket the other day looking for some shampoo when I came across this gem of an item:

Magnetically charged hair care for naturally beautiful hair.

and the list of ingredients is:

Aqueous (Water) Extracts of *Rosemary (Rosmarinus Officinalis) Oil, *Coltsfoot Leaf (Tussilago Farfara), *Sage Leaf (Salvia Officinalis), *Clary (Salvia Sclarea), *Thyme (Thymus Vulgaris) Oil, *Soybean Protein (Glycine Soja), C12-14 Olefin Sulfonate (coconut derived), Cocomidopropyl Betaine, ** Magnetite (Fe3O4), Citric Acid (corn), Lactoferrin (Metalloprotein), Mica, Sodium Hydroxymethylglycinate, Sodium Chloride (sea salt), Grapefruit Seed.

I guess a little magnetite will go a long way. Do the good people at the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists know about this miraculous breakthrough in “naturally beautiful hair” technology?

Laboratory Safety

Not even the president bothers with it. Waft, don’t sniff, Mr. President.

the internets make you live longer

Proven: Using the internet makes you live longer. And, as a nice side effect, the internet reduces child mortality. Don’t believe me? See for yourself (click on the chart below):

(To manipulate the chart or see a map or make your own chart, click here.) Cool Google stuff.

news update: photonics, publishing, and elephants

Just a few (sciency) news updates today…

Publishing

This month, NPG launches its new (sub)journal Nature Photonics. It might have some cool articles in the future. Also PLoS One launched at the end of 2006 and will be an open-access journal that publishes any submissions that pass very limited scientific criteria (i.e. not including the impact or “coolness” of the paper). Who know? It might even work. If there were a good way of filtering the papers after they’re published, this open-access fad might be the new paradigm.

Invisible Cloak (not)

OK, everyone’s calling it an invisible cloak, but the “metamaterials” technology isn’t really even close. But it just got closer, with Opt. Lett. 2006, 32, 53–55. The authors report a metamaterial with a negative refractive index for visible (780-nm) light. And it’s really cool because … hey wait … where’d you go??

Stupid Elephant Picture

Many newspapers etc. have been publishing a picture of an elephant fetus in the womb (allegedly).

Cool eh? But it’s bogus! (Yeah, I was fooled, too. I saw it in Nature, where they claimed it was “enhanced with computer graphics.” Riiiiight. That should have tipped me off.) Actually, it is a silicon model of this ultrasound image:

I guess that’s cool.

offset your entropy footprint

You’ve probably heard of websites like CarbonCounter.com, where you can offset your personal carbon footprint to help prevent global warming. Well, I’ve created a site that will let you calculate and offset your entropy footprint in order to help prevent a more dangerous inevitability: the heat death of the universe!

Please help before it’s too late.

running on oobleck

No, it’s not a new alternative energy, it’s fun video of people literally running atop a non-Newtonian fluid. Of course, I’ve already posted an article about more profound Oobleck revelations, but this video is in a different language!

why don’t people understand dollars and cents?

There’s a strange problem being reported by multiple people on the internets: Verizon cannot (or refuses to) grasp the difference between 0.002 dollars per kilobyte and 0.002 cents per kilobyte—obviously a 100-fold difference. Their confusion is clear: they seem to believe that a fraction of a dollar is called a “cent.” When asked Do you recognize the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents?, the customer service rep replied, No, they’re the same thing.

For those of us who have ever converted megapancakes per second to picoyummies (conversion factor: 10¹⁸ y*s/p), this seems pretty idiotic (and soooo frustrating). (And it seems that the Verizon customer service people need to be trained to be a little more respectful and helpful, and to listen to their customers.) Plus, this may be a societal problem of the reluctance to think in abstracts (e.g. units). But I also have to be sorta the bad guy and point out that—while not their job to teach the Verizon idiots how to do very simple math and finance—these people who spoke to several customer service reps and managers need to take a little responsibility for failing to communicate effectively.

Of course I understood what the wronged customers were saying, but I’m well educated in math (just as they seem to be). I would have used the same tactics, analogies, and examples that they did. And I would have failed to convey the problem, too. Especially without the help of a blackboard, time, or patience (on either end), clarifying the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents might be an impossible task. But I’m still disappointed that the well educated customers failed—and failed again and again using nearly identical tactics.

So maybe the bad Verizon math scandal is a wake-up call for both sides—the educators and the desperately-needing-to-be-educated-even-just-a-little—that, if at first you don’t succeed, try again a different way.