A followup to the blog entry of 9/10/09.

Every day I want to learn something new. Today, what I learned was not only new, but also involved very cool science. I was catching up on listening to some podcasts and I heard a story about a guy named Michael Musnick. Mr. Musnick was described in the story as a “citizen scientist” who lives in Duchess County, New York. With no formal training, he wrote a grant to study wood turtles in the Great Swamp in Duchess County. He wanted to study the turtles because he had the time to do so and, in his own words, he thought the turtles were cute.

His study involved attaching radio transmitters to the shells of wood turtles. During his studies, he observed and counted dead wood turtles on a set of railroad tracks. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has a train rail running right through the area he was studying. What he discovered was that the dead wood turtles were not being killed by passing trains, but were getting stuck between the rails and were dying from the summer heat. On his own, he came up with a solution….turtle bridges. What the heck is that? Click here and take a look at the video.

So, today I learned what a turtle bridge looks like and what purpose it serves. But the thing I find really cool about this story is that a private citizen had an idea to study something in the world around him, discovered something new, and came up with a simple solution to a problem. It makes me want to run out and look more closely at the world around me. Is there something that I’ve seen before but never thought deeply enough about to allow me to see how I can lend a hand? How about you, reader? If you look more closely at the world today, will you spot something new? Let me know!

This morning, I was speaking to a friend who works for the Minnesota Department of Public Health.  His job there involves HIV/AIDS testing, awareness, and education programming for the Minneapolis area.  He told me an interesting fact.  In Minneapolis, over the past year there has been a 100% increase in the number of HIV infections among people tested in his clinic.  When I asked him if the number of people being tested had increased during the same testing period, I expected him to say, “Yes.”  One could argue, therefore, that the increase in HIV(+) people being tested was not truly a 100% increase.  I was surprised and dismayed when he responded that the number of people being tested was actually smaller than the previous reporting period.  If the number of cases doubled over the previous year but the number of people being tested was actually lower, what does that mean?  My friend, Charlie, and I simultaneously said over the phone, “What the heck is going on in Minneapolis?” (Read more…)

At Northwestern University, Owen Priest interviews Professor Rick Van Duyne about his work using Raman spectroscopy to analyze works of art.

This week my new computer showed up. I was excited to get it set up and start using it right away. There was only one problem. Before I could put my new computer on my desk, I had to pull apart all of the wires and cables, sort them out, and decide which ones were needed for the new computer. There was a power cable for the computer, a power cable for the monitor, a cable for the camera attached to the computer, power cables for the computer’s speakers, cables going to and from the USB hub, a cable connecting the computer to the printer and another cable to power the printer, and various cables for plugging in iPods, cameras, etc. There was even a loose cable tangled in with the others that seemed to have no purpose.

They were all in such a twisted mess that I was reminded why I kept them all stuffed down behind my desk and kept out of sight. Untangling all of the cables and then figuring out how to connect them all to my new computer was the most time consuming part of installing the computer. If only someone would invent a way to power a computer and all of the peripheral devices without the need for all of the cables. What if there were such a thing as wireless transmission of electricity? (Read more…)

Hanging on the wall in my office I still have my very first periodic table. It was given to me in the late seventies by my high school chemistry teacher, Mrs. Clarke. It’s woefully out of date but it has great sentimental value.

There are 103 named elements on my old periodic table. Elements 93-103, the transuranic elements (a.k.a. elements higher than uranium, #92) had all been discovered and were named on the periodic table. Elements 104-106 had been discovered before I took high school chemistry, although they would not be named until 1997. I remember my high school chemistry teacher telling us that scientists would discover heavier and heavier elements until, one day, element #112 would be synthesized. She told us that the synthesis of element #112 would complete what is known as a d-shell of electrons and, with the fully completed shell, the new atom might have interesting properties and be more stable than other transuranic elements.

Element #112 WAS discovered in February of 1996 by a team of German researchers at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research. The German team created Element #112 by firing accelerated zinc-70 nuclei (atomic mass = 30) at a target made of lead-208 nuclei (atomic mass = 82) in a heavy ion accelerator. 82 + 30 = 112 and hence element #112 was born.

So why have I thought of element #112 recently? Because it was just named this past month! The name? Copernicium. The element was named after Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543), the first astronomer to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric theory of the universe. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) will officially endorse the element’s name in about six months. So, thirteen years after it was discovered, element #112 has had its existence independently verified and been given a name.

Why did it take thirteen years? (Read more…)

I’ve never been a big fan of bottled water. Initially, my distaste for bottled water was due to my feelings that drinkers of bottled water were trying to either appear more refined than me or healthier than me. Either way, I didn’t like it.

Eventually, my distaste for bottled water focused on how the whole concept of bottling and selling water in an industrialized nation, like the U.S., is incredibly unfriendly towards the environment. When I think of how much fossil fuel goes into the manufacture of all of those little plastic bottles which are then filled with water and then flown to America from places like France and Fiji at the expense of burning more fossil fuels so that Americans can drive around in their fossil fuel burning monster-sized SUVs while drinking the stuff and then the empty bottles are carted away by fossil fuel burning trucks and are deposited in land fills where they then take about 450 years to decompose…..well, I think you get my point.

Now I have a new reason to not like bottled water. Could bottled water be dangerous to human health? (Read more…)

Sometimes I get frustrated when I see public officials demonstrating their lack of scientific literacy.  Sometimes I get downright annoyed.  In recent memory, a truly annoying demonstration of scientific illiteracy can be found in comments made by Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.  Perhaps you’ve seen her in the news making statements about carbon dioxide not being a harmful gas but, rather, being a harmless gas?  Perhaps you saw her on C-SPAN speaking from the floor of the House of Representatives making the same statements as part of an effort to convince Americans that the “threat of manmade global warming doesn’t make any sense”?  If you missed it, or just want to be reminded of the sheer absurdity of her statements, I’ve included a copy of the video.

YouTube Direct Link
I used to live in Minnesota, not very far from the State Capitol building.  There was a time when I could have (and would have) tried to meet with Congresswoman Bachmann to talk with her about her ideas and help her learn some real science.   Since I no longer live in Minnesota, I decided to write her the following letter: (Read more…)

In 1987, my alma mater hosted a chemist from the University of Sussex named Sir Harold Kroto.  I was fortunate enough to sit in on his lecture which detailed a collaboration between Dr. Kroto and two chemists from Rice University, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. During the lecture, Dr. Kroto showed a box with a soccer ball inside of it.  He closed the lid and waved his hand; when he opened the box the soccer ball had vanished and been replaced by a plastic model of a molecule with 60 points joining pentagons and hexagons, similar in shape to a soccer ball.  The plastic model was of C60, a new form of carbon discovered by Kroto, Smalley, and Curl, for which they would eventually share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

This new molecule also resembled the geodesic dome, a structure popularized by an American architect from Chicago name Richard Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was not the original inventor of the geodesic dome, but he developed and popularized the idea in the 1940s, eventually receiving a U.S. patent for it.  Fuller was interested in the geodesicdome because it was extremely strong for its weight and because a sphere has the largest volume with the least surface area.  He envisioned using the geodesic dome in all types of structures: houses, cars, museums, etc.  C60 was given the common name buckminsterfullerene (buckyball for short) in honor of Buckminster Fuller’s work. (Read more…)