The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Star Trek medical scanner is GO!

Experts at Harborview Medical Center and the University of Washington are refining an ultrasound device that seals punctured lungs without invasive surgery, reports Science Daily. Just hold it over the affected area and push a button:

High-intensity focused ultrasound is now being investigated for a number of different treatments. It promises “bloodless surgery” with no scalpels or sutures in sight. Doctors would pass a sensor over the patient and use invisible rays to heal the wound. Researchers are exploring the use of high-intensity focused ultrasound – with beams tens of thousands of times more powerful than used in imaging – for applications ranging from numbing pain to destroying cancerous tissue.

In this case, lenses focus the high-intensity ultrasound beams at a particular spot inside the body on the patient’s lungs. Focusing the ultrasound beams, in a process similar to focusing sunlight with a magnifying glass, creates a tiny but extremely hot spot about the size and shape of a grain of rice. The rays heat the blood cells until they form a seal. Meanwhile the tissue between the device and the spot being treated does not get hot, as it would with a laser beam.

Entered on 31 August 2007 at 16:45 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

When ORCHIDS ruled the Earth!

New Scientist confirms the fever-dreams of many a fanatic gardener with the discovery that mammals didn’t take over right after the death of the dinosaurs – orchids did:

Santiago Ramirez of Harvard University and colleagues compared genetic information from the fossilised Meliorchis caribea with modern-day plants and reconstructed an evolutionary tree. It suggests that the first orchids bloomed about 84 million years ago.

They flourished after the massive extinction event, blooming over the graves of all those dead giants.

Entered on 30 August 2007 at 17:48 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Psychedelic Paintball

Wired‘s “Danger Room” reports on like, wow, man, that’s one *TRIPPY* gun:

Paintballs laced with mind-altering drugs and drug-spraying robots sound like something for The Joker rather than the Marine Corps. But these are two of the more promising new methods for administering nonlethal chemical weapons (sorry, calmatives) being developed by the Pentagon, according to the latest report from the Bradford Nonlethal Weapons Research Project .

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They drew their inspiration from drug skin patches, for example nicotine patches for nicotine withdrawal… They found that a drug/DMSO mixture could be delivered in this way and that the material would penetrate thin clothing….

I remember DMSO + LSD squirtguns being mentioned in Steal This Book, but always thought of it as an urban legend.

Entered on 28 August 2007 at 6:47 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

T. rex could have caught us.

New Scientist strikes fear into the hearts of time travelers everywhere with a report that T. rex could have caught humans. Easily.

Which is kind of a “No, duh,” observation, but they have video:

“Such calculations can accurately predict the top speed of a six-tonne chicken, but dinosaurs are not built like chickens, nor do they run like them,” he says.

Instead, Sellers and colleague Phillip Manning used an approach they dub “evolutionary robotics” to generate new estimates of the top speed of several two-legged dinosaurs. They built computer models featuring the leg bones, muscles, and skeletal structures of five groups of dinosaur: Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Allosaurus (which looks like a miniature Tyrannosaurus), the slightly smaller Dilophosaurus, and the chicken-sized Compsognathus.

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After hundreds of generations, this simulated evolution arrived at an efficient, workable gait for each dinosaur.

They used humans, emus and ostriches as controls, and yep, the simulation was accurate.

We would’ve been toast. No matter what they say at the Creation Museum.

Entered on 27 August 2007 at 18:27 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Compact Muon Solenoid of the Large Hadron Collider

This is how CERN is hoping to find the Higgs Boson.

At 40 feet long, it is the biggest superconducting solenoid ever made, costing $65 million, weighing about 485,000 pounds, and containing as much iron as the Eiffel Tower. From the outside it looks like a huge steel bullet protruding from the center of a steel cylinder some 50 feet tall, covered in cables and instruments and surrounded by scaffolding. “The magnetic field is immense; if they switched it on now and you had steel-capped shoes, you’d fly over there,” Barney says.

Photo ©CERN Geneva – with plenty more over here.

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And for a special bonus link, check out the awesome MareNostrum Supercomputer of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, installed beautifully in the Chapel Torre Girona.

Entered on 26 August 2007 at 6:39 in the Science Art file | 1 Observation |  Print

You’ll put an eye out.

Behold the science of engineering. LEGO engineering.

Forbidden Lego is a book by master builders Ulrik Pilegaard and Mike Dooley.

As a teaser, here’s a pdf of plans for building a device that will launch a paper airplane at the speed of a car, they say.

The videos of their other creations are quite remarkable. Like so….

Entered on 25 August 2007 at 6:40 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Giant “living fossil” fish on the brink

National Geographic reports on another Chinese river-dweller struggling to survive – the giant sturgeon, also known as the “underwater panda”:

Adult sturgeons, which can measure up to 4 meters (13 feet) in length and weigh 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms), migrate from the East China Sea into the Yangtze River to spawn….

But the Yangtze’s deteriorating environment and increased shipping traffic have taken their toll on the mammoth fish.

Thirty years ago there were 2,000 spawning Chinese sturgeons in the Yangtze River every year. Now that number is down to several hundred.

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The sturgeon is also highly sensitive to increased noise on the river caused by growing traffic.

In addition, Wei speculates that worsening water contamination from industrial runoff and other sources may be causing sturgeons to change their sex.

“After 1995 the ratio of male to female has totally changed,” he said. “It used to be one to one, but now there may be up to ten females for every one male.”

It’s National Geographic – there are photos and maps at the link.

Entered on 24 August 2007 at 6:16 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Beautiful (Have Another Plum)

SONG: “Beautiful (Have Another Plum)” _{(To download: right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Baboon Birth Control” entry, from “Primates on the Pill”, New Scientist, 19 July 2007.

ABSTRACT: When I first read this article, I started hearing a baboon woman singing the word “beautiful.” Here’s a lady trying to keep a family together when times get hard – probably has a good-timing man – who has to make an effort to keep herself from being sexually attractive for the good of her family. It sounded, in other words, like a country song. I didn’t wind up writing a country song, exactly, although if I had my druthers, there’d be a pedal steel coming in for the “Cousin Dora” verse. The bridge was definitely written with the lyrical style of Bob Lind in mind. (Hi, Bob!) Recording this was a challenge – not only is it the first thing I’ve really written on a piano, but once I finally figured out where my fingers should go, my Powerbook died – so I had to hook up my old Compaq and use recording software that was somewhere below state of the art in 1998 (and sing in a living-room whisper once my own family had gone to sleep). I always like lo-fi anyway. I hope you enjoy it… and spare a thought for the baboons of Gashaka-Gumti when you give it a listen.

Entered on 23 August 2007 at 6:01 in the Music, Songs file | 1 Observation |  Print

Mira, The Tail Star

We’ve been watching this thing for four centuries, and we only now noticed it had a tail, as Nature reports. A really long tail:

Astronomers have found an unexpected treat on a star first described more than 400 years ago – the streak of a 13-light-year-long tail.
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Seibert says that Mira’s “shockingly huge” tail gives scientists valuable insight into the chemical evolution of galaxies. Stars such as Mira generate most of the midweight, but exactly how the elements are produced isn’t clear. Mira’s tail spreads out this process by putting the older material at the back of the tail and the newer material at the head, with the oldest part of the tail some 30,000 years old. “Now we’ll be able to tell at what rate these elements are being generated,” says Seibert. “It’s going to take years to decipher. But this discovery gets us started.”

Entered on 21 August 2007 at 6:28 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Baby powder soothes earthquakes

Nature eases chafing on a tectonic level:

Researchers drilling deep into the San Andreas fault in California report in today’s Nature the presence of talc inside a relatively sedate section of the famous fault. This seems to explain why this region of the fault typically creeps slowly to relieve stress, rather than experiencing the abrupt slips that cause large earthquakes.

“It looks like the talc prevents the fault from shooting off to cause big quakes,” says Christopher Wibberley, a geologist at the University of Nice in France.

Entered on 20 August 2007 at 19:28 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print