science

Wow. I (finally) just finished reading Krakatoa — The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, by Simon Winchester. Crazy stuff. I liked it. It’s a smidge on the textbook-side, but he’s an entertaining enough writer — and the topic is so incredible — that you don’t ever get bored during its 380-ish pages. The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 was pretty much the first “world-wide” event. It was the first real “news item” that happened after the advent of global communications (the telegraph).

Winchester examines the legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island Krakatoa, which was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. The effects of the immense waves were felt as far away as France. Barometers in Bogotá and Washington, D.C. went haywire. Bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of the island’s destruction were heard in Australia and India and on islands thousands of miles away. Most significant of all — in view of today’s new political climate — the eruption helped to trigger in Java a wave of murderous anti-Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims, one of the first outbreaks of Islamic-inspired killings anywhere.

This weekend I finally finished Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. It was a terrific read, truly wonderful. Bryson managed to make even the most esoteric, incredibly — for lack of a better word — boring details about life on this planet inconceivably fascinating. I mean really, it takes a brilliant author to get you completely engrossed in plate tectonics, genome theories, and the Brownian motion of subatomic particles. I’m not a very good test subject, actually, because I tend to find these types of things amazing and fun even when presented in incredibly bland tomes on them, but I have to tell you that even if you aren’t even barely interested in glaciers or the lipids that comprise your cell walls, this book will enthrall you.

I also just recently finished “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” by Mary Roach. This book, too, was just so damn fun to read. A bit morbid, to be sure, but Roach approaches everything with a bent towards comedy and I enjoyed it.

And lastly I should mention that my girlfriend and I managed to catch March of the Penguins on Friday night. If it doesn’t win an Academy Award — or two or three or four — I will be astonished.

Am I the only one that is just completely amazed that the Voyagers are still going strong? “NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system’s final frontier, a vast, turbulent expanse where the Sun’s influence ends and the solar wind crashes into the thin gas between stars.” That’s really crazy. Voyager I is about 8.7 billion miles from the sun.

This part is insane:

“For their original missions to Jupiter and Saturn, the Voyagers were destined for regions of space far from the Sun, so each was equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators to produce electrical power for the spacecraft systems and instruments. Still operating in remote, cold and dark conditions 27 years later, the Voyagers could last until 2020.”

I can’t get a cell phone with a battery that lasts more than a year, and twenty-something years ago NASA was making batteries that don’t even need THE SUN to charge them?!

Here’s one for the “weird” file: GIANTmicrobes! I always wanted a stuffed rhinovirus!

We make stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes — only a million times actual size! Each 5-to-7 inch doll is accompanied by an image of the real microbe it represents, as well as information about the microbe.

link via 8 Ways to Sunday

“Three-dimensional tubes of living tissue have been printed using modified desktop printers filled with suspensions of cells instead of ink. The work is a first step towards printing complex tissues or even entire organs.”

Paleontologist Gregory M. Erickson of Florida State University answers the question, “What are the odds of a dead dinosaur becoming fossilized?” on this week’s Scientific American: Ask the Experts.

A dazzling solar eclipse will be on display across a broad swath of the western United States, Mexico, Canada and Asia on Monday, with as much as 99 percent of the sun obscured by the moon.

The eclipse will begin at 5:13 p.m. PDT, with best viewing time around 6:20.

[Update: Damn. I totally forgot to watch.]

“Does John Searle, in his book Minds, Brains, and Science, succeed in explaining how mental phenomena can be nothing over and above neural phenomena and yet be caused by neural activity?” - My Answer.

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I’m not sure if this has been blogged to death and I just haven’t noticed, but there is a superb article on the Discover site detailing The 11 Greatest Unanswered Questions of Physics.

1. What is dark matter?
2. What is dark energy?
3. How were the heavy elements from iron to uranium made?
4. Do neutrinos have mass?
5. Where do ultrahigh-energy particles come from?
6. Is a new theory of light and matter needed to explain what happens at very high energies and temperatures?
7. Are there new states of matter at ultrahigh temperatures and densities?
8. Are protons unstable?
9. What is gravity?
10. Are there additional dimensions?
11. How did the universe begin?

And it’s wonderfully cute to read at the bottom of the article that these are all © 2002 The Walt Disney Company.

A few weeks ago I finished reading The Best American Science Writing 2001. It’s a marvelous collection of all the “best” essays written on scientific topics from last year. One article, “Running Dry” by Jacques Leslie, really shocked me. It’s all about the depletion of the Earth’s freshwater and the (disastrous) effects damming has had on the planet’s ecosystem. There’s going to be a special on The Discovery Channel tonight about China’s Three Gorges Dam (8pm). The tag-line of the special is:

“The Chinese have a plan to tame the large, muddy and unpredictable Yangtze River with a huge dam that measures two and a half miles wide and 650 feet high. Creating a reservoir 400 miles long, the dam will be the world’s largest concrete structure.”

That sounds amazing, right? After reading the article by Leslie, though, to me it sounds downright scary.

The planet accommodates 40,000 large dams - dams more than four stories high - and some 800,000 small ones. They have shifted so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth’s rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field. Together they blot out a terrain bigger than California.

I’m of the opinion that anything mankind does to significantly alter our freaking course around the sun is probably not a good idea. Am I the only one concerned about this?

Good gravy! I’ve been suffering from a severe case of non-fiction addiction lately. I managed to grab three of the five Oscar movies over the weekend, but otherwise for the last month or so I’ve watched almost nothing that wasn’t on TLC, Discovery, or A&E. I’ve seen specials on mummies, temples, “the Iceman”, pyramids, tombs, the U.S. Mint … and Biographies on everyone from Ron Howard to Saddam Hussein. I just finished reading Cod, started that book on the coelacanth, and was enraptured this evening by an article in The Atlantic on the American Lobster. I need to get a job.

I finished reading Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel this afternoon. It is a wonderful book.
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“Switching to a mandatory system of organ donation — one where viable organs are harvested from the recently deceased without the family’s permission — would alleviate the nation’s donor-organ shortages and prevent people from needlessly dying while waiting for an organ, according to two US and UK researchers.”

Scientific American answers the question, “What is a headache?”

The most common type of headache is the tension or muscle contraction type, which is frequently caused by spasms in the neck muscles and the muscles of mastication (chewing). This type of headache is usually treated easily by over-the-counter medications. More intense headaches are caused by unknown mechanisms. Most theories of vascular headache involve the relationship between the nerves and the blood vessels, both of which can be sensitive.