The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Science Art: Dragon Lake, Siberia

^{Click to embiggen vastly}

This is Dragon Lake, a body of very cold water near the city of Bratsk. It’s a reservoir, like Arizona’s Lake Powell, formed by the damming of a river, in this case, the Angara River. Over time, all those intricate white crackles will soften and fade as the lake makes itself comfortable in its banks. But for now, it’s still new and electric.

Image courtesy of USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office, from the wonderful Our Earth As Art gallery.

Entered on 31 January 2010 at 18:51 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

A moment of silence for NASA?

ScienceBlogs (and the Orlando Sentinel) are not sounding very pleased about Obama’s proposed budget for NASA:

As a final frying pan upside the head, you might require that NASA maintain the most expensive and least useful boondoggle of manned spaceflight – the International Space Station. You might do so even knowing that shortly the Space Shuttle program is being phased out and can only launch a few more times – three, currently. You’d make sure the only way to reach the ISS was through the good graces and launch capabilities of our close geopolitical allies the Russians, with a vague possibility of contracting private launches at some point in the future, presumably when such private launch capability exists. It currently doesn’t.

Well, I hope you enjoyed NASA while it lasted because this ain’t hypothetical. It’s Obama’s forthcoming NASA budget.

I’m withholding judgement until I see what SpaceShip Two can do.

Entered on 29 January 2010 at 19:06 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

A GoST steampunk cameo.

I’ve just received word that the Guild of Scientific Troubadours has a brief walk-in part in the latest novel being drafted by this fine author. It’s an early draft, so who knows what will happen, but thus far dancing robots, monocles and several songs from this very site have been mentioned.

David Barnett, the Guild salutes you!

Entered on 29 January 2010 at 18:48 in the Guild Affairs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

A moment of silence for Spirit.

The Mars rover has been officially abandoned.

The Tech Herald:
However, although the Mars rover has now been written off in terms of fulfilling its core purpose of exploring the Red Planet’s inhospitable surface, NASA still hopes to utilise the vehicle’s limited mobility in order to adjust the angle of its solar panels and help it survive the coming Martian winter.

Entered on 28 January 2010 at 6:03 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Once, we were endangered.

SciAm puts us back in our place with the revelation from our DNA that humans used to be rarer than mountain gorillas:

[A]ccording to scientists from the University of Utah, about a million years ago our ancestors numbered fewer than 20,000. The estimate appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

…One particular transposon first appeared about a million years ago. And by seeing where these sequences now sit, scientists can get a sense of the size of the breeding population back then.

Entered on 26 January 2010 at 6:01 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Frame the deviance.

Neurologists get Sonic Youth. That’s what I think after reading Jonah Lehrer’s ScienceBlogs entry about the way music works in the brain:

The experiment was more compelling. The scientists measured the brain waves of a twenty subjects while they listened to various hymns. It turned out that unexpected notes – pitches that violated the previous melodic pattern – triggered an interesting sequence of neural events and a spike in brain activity:

Our electrophysiological results showed that low-probability notes, as compared to high-probability notes, elicited a larger (i) negative ERP component at a late time period (400-450 ms), (ii) beta band (14-30 Hz) oscillation over the parietal lobe, and (iii) long-range phase synchronization between multiple brain regions.

There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty – we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns – that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance.

[via]

Entered on 25 January 2010 at 6:35 in the Music, Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Aus dem Schoenheitsalbum der Natur by Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel, comparing natural forms for his “Beauty-album of Nature.” If you haven’t seen Proteus yet, you really should – as well as telling the story of Haeckel’s life, David Labrun turns Haeckel’s many drawings of radiolarians into animated flashes of beautiful things evolving into a multitude of new shapes.

This image was found via ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, which I found via Olsen Ross. Follow the links around the bottom of the Animation Archive entry and you’ll find treasure.

Entered on 24 January 2010 at 6:14 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

No song today…

Between playing on Wednesday and moving into a new house, there hasn’t been any time for writing and recording – so the 23rd will go by without a new song.

It will arrive soon, along with a penitential cover.

Thanks for understanding.

Entered on 24 January 2010 at 5:04 in the Guild Affairs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Sperm of a feather…

NPR takes a look at the scrum that happens when sperm team up to reach their ultimate goal:

Fisher wondered whether sperm from two different male mice would cooperate indiscriminately or tend to clump with sperm from the same mouse.

…

Fisher doesn’t know how sperm know whom to buddy up to and whom to snub. All she knows is that they do, and presumably it’s all part of that drive to be the one to pass your genes on to the next generation.

Now I’m wondering if this is a sign of something similar to consciousness….

Entered on 22 January 2010 at 6:27 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Substitute blood.

Perfect for androids or pacifist vampires… maybe. But Science Daily says artificial blood could save plenty of ordinary human lives:

The reason for this failure, according to Professor Chris Cooper, a biochemist and blood substitute expert at the University of Essex, lies in hemoglobin, the red molecule inside blood cells that carries oxygen around the body. Outside the protective environment of the red cell, hemoglobin can be toxic.

Hemoglobin normally changes color from red to claret as it transfers oxygen around the body. However, when it is damaged the iron in hemoglobin is oxidized (like a car rusting) to produce dysfunctional brown and green products.

“Basically, hemoglobin produces free radicals that can damage the heart and kidneys,” explained Professor Cooper. “The trick with artificial blood is to modify the molecule to be less toxic, but still perform the vital role of carrying oxygen around the body. No one has managed this yet.”

What makes Professor Cooper’s group engineered hemoglobin so special is that it is less toxic.

Entered on 21 January 2010 at 6:20 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print