The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Science Art: Pelton Wheel, p. 1593, Webster’s New International.

Behold the Pelton wheel. This is a kind of water turbine designed to turn babbling brooks into industrious electrical generators.

Beautiful imagery from the Wikipedia entry: “There exist multi-ton Pelton wheels mounted on vertical oil pad bearings in hydroelectric plants.”

Imagine how it must feel to be in the same room with that. Iron and water. A gently rolling mountain. The faint smell of oil, ozone and damp machinery. Power.

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

Entered on 31 May 2009 at 6:07 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Needed: Rosetta Stones, good condition, not yet used.

Just in case you thought we knew everything there was to know about the ancient world, New Scientist brings a little mystery back with their list of eight untranslated alphabets:

These fall into three broad categories: a known script writing an unknown language; an unknown script writing a known language; and an unknown script writing an unknown language. The first two categories are more likely to yield to decipherment; the third – which recalls Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous “unknown unknowns” – is a much tougher proposition, though this doesn’t keep people from trying.

Most of the undeciphered scripts featured here have been partially deciphered, and well-known researchers have claimed that they have deciphered some much more fully. Further progress is possible for most of them, especially if new inscriptions are discovered, which fortunately happens fairly often.

Can you read these?

1. Etruscan (Italian Greeks, known letters, unknown language),
2. Kushite (black pharaohs, known letters, unknown language)
3. Olmec, Zapotec & Isthmian (pre-Mayan Central Americans, three unknown scripts, two possibly known languages)
4. Linear A (ancient Minoan, partial script, unknown language)
5. Rongo-rongo (maybe not-so-ancient Easter Islandese, unknown script, known language)
6. Indus (ancient Pakistan, unknown script, language possibly like Tamil)
7. Proto-Elamite (really, really, really old, partially known script, mystery language)
8. The Phaistos Disc (It’s one thing. Could be just cool squiggles in rock. Probably something more.)

Entered on 29 May 2009 at 6:42 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Gibraltar may crumble…

…but this new memory technology Neatorama’s talking about will be here to stay:

Berkeley… researcher Alex Zettl and colleagues created a physical memory cell composed of an iron nanoparticle that can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. The position of the iron particle represents the state of the bit, which leads to very dense and highly stabile memory arrays, resulting in very long lifetime.

How stable is stable? Here’s a chart that shows typical storage lifetimes vs bit density for a variety of storage media. As you can see, his stuff beats rock!

Go to the page to see the chart. You can read more on that new superdisk here (where they have a picture with the glorious caption, “Egyptian hieroglyphs, a low-density, long-lifetime storage medium”).

Entered on 27 May 2009 at 6:12 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Global warming real estate.

You’d expect the rising ocean levels to decimate coastlines, but the New York Times points out that melting glaciers are, rather surprisingly, raising land levels in some coastal areas:

The geology is complex, but it boils down to this: Relieved of billions of tons of glacial weight, the land has risen much as a cushion regains its shape after someone gets up from a couch. The land is ascending so fast that the rising seas — a ubiquitous byproduct of global warming — cannot keep pace. As a result, the relative sea level is falling, at a rate “among the highest ever recorded,” according to a 2007 report by a panel of experts convened by Mayor Bruce Botelho of Juneau.

Greenland and a few other places have experienced similar effects from widespread glacial melting that began more than 200 years ago, geologists say. But, they say, the effects are more noticeable in and near Juneau, where most glaciers are retreating 30 feet a year or more.

Soon, some near-Arctic islands will be connected to the mainland by land bridges. Maybe those of us closer to Miami and Manhattan really will be able to move north with the receding icecaps.

(Not that all of this land will be particularly healthy, mind you.)

Entered on 25 May 2009 at 6:56 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: S125-E-007900 (Canary Islands Vortices), STS-125 Shuttle Mission Imagery

^{Click to embiggen vastly}

June marks the official beginning of hurricane season. Here’s where they start from, whirling spirals off the coast of North Africa. Soon, I imagine, a couple of these youngsters will gain enough strength to pop across the Atlantic and cause all kinds of trouble in the Caribbean, the American Southeast and Gulf states and throughout South America. But for now, they sure are cool-lookin’.

The crew of Space Shuttle Atlantis snapped this image during STS 125, the last mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope.

Photo by NASA.

Entered on 24 May 2009 at 6:25 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: “If I Believe It”

SONG: “If I Believe It” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “The science of voodoo: When mind attacks body “, New Scientist, 13 May 2009, as used in the post “Imaginary Poisons.” (Although recent coverage of the H1N1 flu virus also played a large role.) (Also, anthropological note: New Scientist’s article title is somewhat misleading – “Voodoo,” or Vodoun, is an African syncretic religion that has a lot less to do with cursing and sympathetic magic than the public imagination would have it.)

ABSTRACT:
For a long time, I’ve thought the placebo effect is the future of medicine. It’s so often dismissed – oh, that’s just a placebo, one says, skeptically. But IT IS A THING THAT WORKS! Even though IT’S NOT THERE! By using YOUR MIND! Which never ceases to amaze me. Of course, that it can work the opposite way is both terrifying and unsurprising. I don’t… I don’t feel so well.

I consciously modeled this new, as-yet-unlabeled genre that seems to be emerging – a kind of creepy, urban-sounding version of indie pop that’s more uncanny than melancholy. It’s not quite the spy soundtracks of Interpol, and not the dreampop of, well, The Postmarks or Au Revoir Simone. Although I’ve seen it described as goth psychedelia, it’s neither goth nor psychedelic. It’s music for night clubs in unfamiliar cities, black turtlenecks, disturbing puppet shows, and making a place for oneself far from home. Examples would include Ipso Facto and Sunset Rubdown, although there are roots of the sound in the first couple Death Cab for Cutie or Long Winters albums. So, I wanted to try to do that. A song about imaginary poisons seemed just about right for that sound – retro, unsettling, possibly all in my head. Once I had that aesthetic in mind, recording it was easy.

Entered on 23 May 2009 at 7:06 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Komodo dragons: venomous after all. And how.

I’ve always reveled in the way Komodo dragons killed their prey – by having dirty mouths, chomping on quicker-moving prey and letting septicemia slowly finish them off. Well, New Scientist pokes a hole in that horrifying story by revealing that they actually have gigantic venom glands in their bottom jaws:

“They slash and pull back, but it’s the venom that nails it. It lowers blood pressure, and stops blood clotting. Prey goes into shock and can’t even struggle,” says [Bryan] Fry [of the University of Melbourne]. The venom could lead to the development of novel pharmaceuticals, he adds… [comparing] grevious ignorance of the Komodo dragon’s venomous capabilities as akin to “missing the teeth on great white sharks and saying they are plankton eaters”.

Oops. Based on this, too, Fry thinks he’s isolated a 16-foot monster that was once the world’s largest venomous animal.

Entered on 22 May 2009 at 6:55 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Clouds of germs (and germs of clouds).

PhysOrg.com has a new piece of the climate change puzzle, a discovery some call the “holy grail” of climate science:

The effects of tiny airborne particles called aerosols on cloud formation have been some of the most difficult aspects of weather and climate for scientists to understand. In the climate change science field, which derives many of its projections from computer simulations of climate phenomena, the actions of aerosols on clouds represent what scientists consider the greatest uncertainty in modeling predictions for the future.

“By sampling clouds in real time from an aircraft, these investigators were able to get information about ice particles in clouds at an unprecedented level of detail,” said Anne-Marine Schmoltner of the NSF’s Division of Atmospheric Sciences. “By determining the chemical composition of the very cores of individual ice particles, they discovered that both mineral dust, and, surprisingly, biological particles play a major role in the formation of clouds.”

…

The findings suggest that the biological particles that get swept up in dust storms help to induce the formation of cloud ice and that their region of origin makes a difference. Prather said initial evidence is increasingly suggesting that dust transported from Asia could be influencing precipitation in North America, for example.

I don’t know if they’ll be making any Harrison Ford blockbusters (or Tom Hanks blockbusters, for that matter) about frozen bacteria, but you never know. Their holy grail could be your weather-control machine.

Entered on 21 May 2009 at 6:13 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Make mine an iced tea.

BBC says that Coke’ll kill you, man:

This is because the drink can cause blood potassium to drop dangerously low, they report in the International Journal of Clinical Practice.

They tell of the curious case of an Australian ostrich farmer who needed emergency care for lung paralysis after drinking 4-10 litres of cola a day.

He made a full recovery and was advised to curtail his cola drinking.

The pause that refreshes?

Entered on 20 May 2009 at 6:18 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Their Spock probably has a beard, too.

Have you ever really looked at the logo for China’s space agency?

Seem familiar?

Yes, you have seen it before.

Entered on 18 May 2009 at 19:44 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print