The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Science Art: Gathering the Ripe Pods of the Cacao, or Chocolate, Tree

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Scanned from The Encyclopedia of Food (The stories of foods by which we live, how and where they grow and are marketed, their comparative values and how best to use and enjoy them), by Artemas Ward, a man who knew a lot about food… and marketing.

I’d love to frame this and hang it on the wall. The book is full of marvelous color plates (and great information about what foods are and where they come from), but is sometimes hard to find.

Luckily, there are page images of an earlier edition here, if you’re not lucky enough to own a physical copy. Check out the dedication on page 8.

Entered on 30 November 2008 at 6:35 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower….

Technology Review covers the breakthrough of MIT chemist Daniel Nocera, who has figured out how to make like a leaf… and turn sunlight into fuel:

Carried out with the help of a catalyst he developed, the reaction is the first and most difficult step in splitting water to make hydrogen gas. And efficiently generating hydrogen from water, Nocera believes, will help surmount one of the main obstacles preventing solar power from becoming a dominant source of electricity: there’s no cost-effective way to store the energy collected by solar panels so that it can be used at night or during cloudy days.

Solar power has a unique potential to generate vast amounts of clean energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming. But without a cheap means to store this energy, solar power can’t replace fossil fuels on a large scale. In Nocera’s scenario, sunlight would split water to produce versatile, easy-to-store hydrogen fuel that could later be burned in an internal-combustion generator or recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell. Even more ambitious, the reaction could be used to split seawater; in that case, running the hydrogen through a fuel cell would yield fresh water as well as electricity.

Storing energy from the sun by mimicking photosynthesis is something scientists have been trying to do since the early 1970s.

Nocera’s catalyst also has the interesting side effect of, as far as he can tell, desalinating sea water. Which might have interesting implications for irrigation and water supplies around the world.

His work, by the way, is just the tip of the iceberg as far as MIT’s new discoveries with catalysts.

Entered on 28 November 2008 at 6:19 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Gift Guide: CHEMISTRY!

The glorious MAKE blog has the scientific gift guide of my dreams: chemistry sets and DIY books for garage explosives experts and drug manufacturers. No, wait. Scientists! I mean scientists.

I began breathing heavily when I got to the entry on Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, and my eyes became glassy when I saw the link to the book as a rapidshare pdf.

That’s some iconic science education there.

Entered on 27 November 2008 at 6:26 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Thanksgiving Theremin: Thomas Grillo.

Here, for your enjoyment, is a theremin concert by a master:

Thomas Grillo lives and teaches in Jackson, Mississippi, as well as educating the general public online.

Found [via].

Entered on 26 November 2008 at 6:38 in the Music file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Argonauta, Webster’s New International

From Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1911, G & C Miriam Co. Springfield, MA, [found here.]

Entered on 23 November 2008 at 6:51 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Build us a House (They Could See From Space)

SONG: “Build us a House (They Could See From Space).” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Ancient Peru pyramid spotted by satellite”, Discovery, via MSNBC.com, 6 Oct 2008, as used in the post “Satellite Discovers Pyramid at Nazca.”

ABSTRACT: What started out as a song about that whole Ozymandias thing – building a pyramid that big that’s now so gone we need satellites to find it – turned into a song about the housing crisis, which is hitting a little closer to home than I’d like. They found remains of human sacrifices around the Nazca pyramid. The people who built it probably thought it’d be there forever. So it goes.

I was pleased with the recording process here; a guitar, a bass, some double tracking, a little mellotron, and that’s it. I would’ve liked to mess with the words some more to add something more explicitly Peruvian, but it would’ve taken a lot of work, a lot of time, and not been significantly enough different, I don’t think. It’s all in there anyway – patterns in the sand, sacrifices and stones. That’s about all we know about the Nazca anyway, isn’t it?

Entered on 22 November 2008 at 7:27 in the Songs file | 1 Observation |  Print

The Grave of the Priestess

LiveScience is calling her a “shaman,” but since the 12,000-year-old grave is in Israel, not Siberia, that’s probably not exactly the right term. But whatever you want to call her, they’re pretty sure this ancient woman talked to the spirits:

The woman was about 45 years old when she died and based on measurements of the skull and long bone, she stood at about 4.9 feet (1.5 meters). Wearing of her teeth and other aging signs on the bones suggested the woman was relatively old for her time. And she likely had a limp or dragged her foot, the researchers speculate, due to the fusion of the coccyx and sacrum along with deformations of the pelvis and lower vertebrae.

…

Scattered around the body and beneath it were tortoise shells. Before arranging the shells inside the grave during the burial ritual, humans cracked open the tortoise shells along the reptiles’ bellies (so as not to crack the back part of the shell) and sucked out the meat, possibly for food.

…

The woman was part of the Natufian culture, a group of hunter-gatherers who lived from 15,000 to about 11,500 years ago in the area that now includes Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

There’s a kind of beautiful diagram of the body with the offerings (which also may have included a severed human foot) at the link.

Entered on 21 November 2008 at 21:15 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Hollywood, Meet Science.

New Scientist thrills me with a new push to get the entertainment industry to understand science:

The new effort, called the Science and Entertainment Exchange, is a project of the US National Academy of Sciences, and will be run by science writer Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Physics of the Buffyverse.

…

The project is “vitally important”, said Seth MacFarlane, creator of the television show Family Guy, at a press conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Other entertainment industry figures were also at the event, including Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

…

Married film producers Janet and Jerry Zucker, who were among the driving forces in setting up the Exchange, started paying more attention to science when their daughter was diagnosed with diabetes after becoming ill.

…

Aside from serving as a point of contact for members of the entertainment industry seeking advice on scientific accuracy, people involved in the Exchange hope that it will help create new partnerships between scientists and entertainers to promote scientific literacy and inspire the next generation of scientists.

Big names. Good ideas. I wonder if I can help somehow.

Entered on 21 November 2008 at 6:41 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Neither Chinese Chickens Nor Uighur Eggs.

China is a complicated country, and the closer people look, the more complicated it gets. Take, for example, the latest findings on the mummies of Xinjiang. These well-preserved bodies date back nearly 4,000 years, and are the pride of this “autonomous region,” where Turkic Uighurs and Han Chinese often wrestle over who really has rights to the land. Although priceless historical relics, the mummies have left neither the Uighur minority nor the Han majority pleased, because they indicate that the first people in this part of China weren’t Han or Uighur – they were European:

The New York Times:
The Tarim mummies seem to indicate that the very first people to settle the area came from the west — down from the steppes of Central Asia and even farther afield — and not from the fertile plains and river valleys of the Chinese interior. The oldest, like the Loulan Beauty, date back 3,800 years.

Some Uighurs have latched on to the fact that the oldest mummies are most likely from the west as evidence that Xinjiang has belonged to the Uighurs throughout history.

…

Scholars generally agree that Uighurs did not migrate to what is now Xinjiang from Central Asia until the 10th century. But, uncomfortably for the Chinese authorities, evidence from the mummies also offers a far more nuanced history of settlement than the official Chinese version.

By that official account, Zhang Qian, a general of the Han dynasty, led a military expedition to Xinjiang in the second century B.C. His presence is often cited by the ethnic Han Chinese when making historical claims to the region.

The mummies show, though, that humans entered the region thousands of years earlier, and almost certainly from the west.

That’s a lot of pressure for a handful of preserved bodies. Even if they are wearing kilts.

Entered on 20 November 2008 at 6:15 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The Egg. The Egg Came First.

Canadian paleontologists have answered the old conundrum by closely studying a fossilized dinosaur nest:

LiveScience.com, via Yahoo! News:

…[I]nterpreted literally, the answer to the riddle is clear. Dinosaurs were forming bird-like nests and laying bird-like eggs long before birds (including chickens) evolved from dinosaurs.

“The egg came before the chicken,” Zelenitsky said. “Chickens evolved well after the meat-eating dinosaurs that laid these eggs.”

…

The fossil nest was collected in the 1990s and kept at Canada Fossils Limited in Calgary, Alberta. That’s where Zelenitsky first spotted the remains, which were labeled at first as belonging to a duck-billed dinosaur, an herbivore….

Zelenitsky realized that the nest and eggs actually belonged to a small theropod, a meat-eating dinosaur. In particular, the egg-layer was likely a maniraptoran, the group of theropods that paleontologists think birds derived from some 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.

If you’re curious, this is what a maniraptoran (or “hand-snatcher”) looked like. Specimens found in China had long plumage, and the group includes the Bambiraptor, which is a funny name until you realize it (kind of) means “baby snatcher.”

Entered on 19 November 2008 at 6:26 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print