The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Batteries for solar homes.

Over at VentureBeat’s “GreenBeat” section, they’ve got a profile of a promising new Panasonic project, building batteries powerful enough to run your average suburban home for a week:

This is significant for two reasons. First, if home batteries like this one become commonplace, renewable sources of energy like rooftop solar and residential turbines could finally take off. The biggest roadblock to their adoption is that they are intermittent; reliable storage is needed to make them effective. Second, if affordable storage is achieved on the home-level, there might be less need for grid-scale storage, which is pricier and harder to accomplish.

The announcement is hastened by Panasonic’s acquisition of a more than 50 percent stake in Sanyo, making the company a battery manufacturing powerhouse that could trounce almost everyone else in the market….

Tomorrow’s looking just a little brighter now.

Entered on 31 December 2009 at 6:23 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

One tool, two brain functions.

PhysOrg reveals a new discovery (using old tools) of a single brain protein that does two very different things to help us think:

Details of the observation in lab mice, published Dec. 24 in Nature, reveal that semaphorin, a protein found in the developing nervous system that guides filament-like processes, called axons, from nerve cells to their appropriate targets during embryonic life, apparently assumes an entirely different role later on, once axons reach their targets. In postnatal development and adulthood, semaphorins appear to be regulating the creation of synapses — those connections that chemically link nerve cells.

…

Using two lines of mice — one missing semaphorin and another missing neuropilin, its receptor — postdoctoral fellow Tracy Tran used a classic staining method called the Golgi technique to look at the anatomy of nerve cells from mouse brains. (The Golgi technique involves soaking nerve tissue in silver chromate to make cells’ inner structures visible under the light microscope; it allowed neuroanatomists in 1891 to determine that the nervous system is interconnected by discrete cells called neurons.)

Tran saw unusually pronounced “spines” sprouting willy-nilly in peculiar places and in greater numbers on the dendrites in the neurons of semaphorin-lacking and neuropilin-lacking mice compared to the normal wild-type animals. It’s at the tips of these specialized spines that a lot of synapses occur and neuron-to-neuron communication happens, so Tran suspected there might be more synapses and more electrical activity in the neurons of the mutant mice.

Entered on 30 December 2009 at 6:22 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Born in Black Holes

The World of Weird Things blog has a pretty cool look at the part played by big black holes in the origins of the universe:

So this nearly 3,000 kilometer wide brute would be one of the last things to exist in the known universe and in its long life, we should probably expect it to merge with other black holes and gulp down plenty of gas to grow even bigger, maybe even to supermassive proportions, and extending its lifespan to obscenely long stretches of time. Considering that it was far from the only one, one might ask whether we should just look for the center of the universe by the biggest concentration of black holes we can find and finally establish a firm grip on our location in the cosmos. But that’s not how things work.

Entered on 29 December 2009 at 6:54 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Cosmic songs.

Science Line doesn’t care if you’re not supposed to be able to hear spaceship engines go “whooosh” – they say we’re actually being quietly bombarded with sounds from space:

“If there was a way to take the signal and hook it into speakers, we’d be able to hear it,” says Scott Hughes, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The trick is that the signal itself is really, really hard to detect — its effect, says Hughes, is a vibration smaller than the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. This is because the noise from distant galaxies isn’t coming to us through traditional sound waves, but through a different class of energy called gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves get made by big things in the universe, like supernovae and pairs of orbiting, colliding black holes. These events send out ripples of energy in all directions, like a pebble dropped into a lake. Instead of making waves in water, however, the energy emanating from these super-dense objects produces tiny undulations in space-time itself, vibrations in the fabric of the cosmos.

The frequencies are in the range of human hearing – just very, very quiet. We should be able to hear more in 2018, when a project named LISA takes off to listen to deep space.

[via Levitin]

Entered on 28 December 2009 at 9:56 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Human Skull, Plate V by William Miller.

William Miller was an engraver and illustrator in the 1800s, known familiarly as “the Scotch Quaker.” He created wonderfully detailed plates of, well, nearly anything that required a technical illustration – lighthouses under construction, botanical specimens, tapeworms or, as here, parts of the human body. Many of the engravings in the marvelous Wikimedia Commons collection from whence this piece came were done “after” someone else. Evidently, a person would draw a picture of a flower or piece of algae under a microscope, then hand it to William to make it work for printing.

This haunting skull, though, is William Miller after W. Miller. It’s part of a series that includes these delicate glimpses inside the fragile white dome.

You can read more about Miller (and his favorite illustrators) over here, at Wikipedia.

Entered on 27 December 2009 at 6:30 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Monkey and Robot go to Mars.

PopSci says the Russians are floating the idea of sending a monkey and robot to Mars. For real:

Russia’s Cosmonautics Academy is in preliminary talks with the [Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy] regarding a simulated space flight to Mars that would lay the foundation for a future mission.

…

That’s where the story takes a real twist: to help the monkey maintain itself during such a long journey, scientists are considering sending a helper robot along on the mission to feed and clean up after the ape. The monkey, of course, would have to be carefully trained to interact with the robot. Yerosha, one of the rhesus monkeys the institute sent into space in 1987, managed to free a paw and run amok during Russia’s last 13-day space-ape adventure, so there’s no telling what sort of calamities might befall a bored Russian ape on a year-and-a-half mission to the Red Planet.

(nb: Someone needs to tell PopSci’s writers that “monkey” and “ape” are not synonyms. No. Apes are the ones without prehensile tails. Curious George has a lot to answer for.)

Entered on 24 December 2009 at 6:19 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Dear Winter.

SONG: “Dear Winter” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Humans Have Hidden Sensory System”, LiveScience (via Yahoo! News), 8 Dec 2009, as used in the post “Skin sense.”

ABSTRACT: So, this is probably the geekiest thing I’ve ever done on here. Here’s an axiom: The longer one puts off recording vocals, the higher the probability of one being physically unable to do them. In this case, laryngitis. I couldn’t even talk, much less sing. So I got a ringer to turn the song into an Arab Strap-style spoken word piece. The well-spoken man’s name is Obadiah. He sounds nice, doesn’t he? He’s one of the speech synthesis voices at the MARY text-to-speech web demo. Other than the fact that “black” and “ask” don’t have an assonance in British English, I was quite happy with him.

The song itself was a confluence of two things. First, I love the idea of a hidden sense that we all have but aren’t normally aware of. Made me think of sense-deprivation tanks and deep meditation. Second, I wanted to write a winter solstice song – one that wasn’t necessarily astronomical or Christmas-oriented.

So. There’s this phenomenon in hypothermia cases. Shortly before the end, some victims will strip off all their clothes, because in a last ditch effort to maintain its temperature, the body dilates all the capillaries in the skin and flushes warm blood from the body core out to the skin and extremities. Suddenly, everything feels warm again. This always struck me as a kind of trick – it’s hard not to think of winter doing this to people with some kind of intent or personality. This song isn’t telling that story – the narrator here isn’t dying of hypothermia – but he is communicating with winter. Somewhere outside. Under the shadows.

LYRICS:
> Dear winter, I closed my eyes the way you asked
> and I stood there in the black
>
> I could barely find the sense of mind to cover up my ears
> Your frozen tears falling on my coat,
> your stinging whispers wound around my throat
> Before it all went numb – and I felt something else come
>
> CH:
> I could see you with my skin, in the movement of the air
> On the longest………. night…….of the year.
>
>
> Dear winter, I can hear you in a way,
> all the silent things you had to say
> While muffled in my gloves and boots,
> and woolen socks and a second-hand snow suit
> Your breath was almost bitter on my tongue,
> as my words hung beneath the sky…
> as something moved, unheard, on high.
>
> CH:
> I could see you with my skin, in the movement of the air
> On the longest………. night…….of the year.
>
> BR:
> The sky opened like a window
> as the night stretched on so widely
> Dear winter, I can’t feel your touch inside me,
> And I am blind. And I am numb.
> But I felt something wordless come
> I can’t begin to say its name, but felt it just the same.
>
> CH:
> I could see you with my skin, in the movement of the air
> On the longest………. night…….of the year.
>

Entered on 23 December 2009 at 17:31 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Why She’s Beautiful

LabSpaces measures out the mathematics of beautiful girls:

Pamela Pallett and Stephen Link of UC San Diego and Kang Lee of the University of Toronto tested the existence of an ideal facial feature arrangement. They successfully identified the optimal relation between the eyes, the mouth and the edge of the face for individual beauty.

…

“People have tried and failed to find these ratios since antiquity. The ancient Greeks found what they believed was a ‘golden ratio’ – also known as ‘phi’ or the ‘divine proportion’ – and used it in their architecture and art. Some even suggest that Leonardo Da Vinci used the golden ratio when painting his ‘Mona Lisa.’ But there was never any proof that the golden ratio was special. As it turns out, it isn’t. Instead of phi, we showed that average distances between the eyes, mouth and face contour form the true golden ratios,” said Pallett, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at UC San Diego and also an alumna of the department.

“We already know that different facial features make a female face attractive – large eyes, for example, or full lips,” said Lee, a professor at University of Toronto and the director of the Institute of Child Study at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. “Our study conclusively proves that the structure of faces – the relation between our face contour and the eyes, mouth and nose – also contributes to our perception of facial attractiveness. Our finding also explains why sometimes an attractive person looks unattractive or vice versa after a haircut, because hairdos change the ratios.”

Entered on 22 December 2009 at 6:16 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Better science = less limits + longer time.

MIT economists are weighing in on the science of creativity in a search for the source of big ideas:

“If you want people to branch out in new directions, then it’s important to provide for their long-term horizons, to give them time to experiment and potentially fail,” says Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and an author of the study. “The researcher has to believe that short-term failure will not be punished.”

The results are contained in a working paper released this fall, “Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences,” by Azoulay, Gustavo Manso, an assistant professor at Sloan, and Joshua Graff Zivin, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego.

The researchers believe their evidence shows it is possible to manage lab work in a way that increases the chances that scientists will produce breakthrough findings, not just incremental advances within an established paradigm. “You can generate innovation, but the details matter,” says Azoulay. “What you want to provide incentives for is future performance, not performance today.”

…

The researchers identified 73 life scientists given HHMI support in three years — 1993, 1994, and 1995 — and tracked their work through 2006. Because these scientists were quite well-regarded before getting HHMI funding, the study compared them to groups of similarly accomplished scientists receiving NIH grants: one group of 393 scientists who had received early-career prizes, and another group of 92 scientists receiving the NIH’s MERIT funding, awarded to highly promising projects.

Among other things, Azoulay, Manso, and Graff Zivin analyzed how often these scientists published articles that were among the top 5 percent or top 1 percent of the most cited papers in their fields. They also studied “creativity” in lab research by seeing how often the scientists began using new keywords to describe the subjects of their articles.

Their findings show that compared to the early-career prize winners with NIH grants, the HHMI-funded scientists produced twice as many papers in the top 5 percent in terms of citations, and three times as many in the top 1 percent. Compared to the NIH-funded scientists with MERIT grants, the HHMI group produced about the same quantity of papers in the top 5 percent by citation, but 50 percent more papers in the top 1 percent.

Entered on 21 December 2009 at 6:54 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: The Known Universe by AMNH

The American Museum of Natural History revisits “Cosmic Zoom”, starting at the Himalayas and moving outward (and, as far as we can see, backwards in time – through older and older sources of light) to the afterglow of the Big Bang, then back again. The visualization of man-made satellites around Earth at around 1:30 is especially lovely.

Entered on 20 December 2009 at 6:22 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print