The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Science Art: Nikola Tesla’s Letterhead

If you’re one of history’s greatest electrical inventors, it is only suitable to have stationery that’s equal to your stature.

The central image is of the unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower; other inventions pictured include the oscillation transformer, steam-and-gas turbine and a telautomaton (that is, a remote-controlled device; this one is a boat).

Found via (where else?) Letterheady.com, an archive of interesting letterheads.

Entered on 28 February 2010 at 6:56 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The wise nap.

UC Berkley has me hankering for some shut-eye… for my brain’s sake:

In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels.

At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn.

These findings reinforce the researchers’ hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s short-term memory storage and make room for new information, said Walker, who presented his preliminary findings on Sunday, Feb. 21, at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, Calif.

Entered on 25 February 2010 at 6:24 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Life is dangerous.

NPR has introduced me to the Medea Principle; just as the Gaia Principle states that a planet can be thought of as a single living organism, this idea states that the single biggest threat to life on other planets…is life:

Drawing on a detailed study of the geological record [University of Washington paleontologist Peter] Ward argues that rather than James Lovelock’s “Gaia” – the supportive Earth-mother – a better image to carry in thinking about life and the planet is Medea the mother in Greek Myth who killed her own children.

A principle point Ward deploys for his unusual thesis is the simple fact that most of the planet’s dramatic and dangerous mass extinctions were caused not by outside events but by life itself changing (polluting?) the environment on which it depends. In Ward’s view life has “biocidal” tendencies, which over time have led to sharp declines in biomass and diversity.

Life, in composite, does have a way of screwing with numbers. Ward’s book is here on Amazon, and more thoroughly reviewed yonder.

Entered on 24 February 2010 at 6:54 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Staring

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

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Body of Sea Urchin is One Big Eye,” LiveScience , 28 Dec 2009, as used in the post “Spiny eyes. With legs and mouths.”

ABSTRACT: Floating down. How strange it must be to see always all around you, to be able to move slowly, but never speak or wave or pick up anything – only to watch, only ever to watch.

I remember going snorkeling with my mother as she showed us how the Greeks eat raw sea urchins fresh from the sea. I have eaten uni myself at sushi bars – hopefully they didn’t see me coming.

This should sound more like the Residents. My body keeps staring at you.

Entered on 23 February 2010 at 6:43 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Hypno-Soup!

The Wall Street Journal reveals the lengths to which modern corporations go to make hot soup seem even homier:

Campbell began dissecting its condensed-soup marketing that summer, around when executives had started considering how to refresh the product line.

Researchers interviewed about 40 people at their homes and later in grocery stores. The team also clipped small video cameras to the 40 testers at eye level and had them later watch tape of themselves shopping for soup. Vests that the testers wore captured skin-moisture levels, heart rate, depth and pace of breathing, and posture. Sensors attached to the video monitor tracked eye movements and pupil width.

The researchers found that warmth and other positive attributes people associated with Campbell’s soup at home evaporated when they faced store shelves.

Typically, consumers show simultaneous blips in most of their biological metrics when they decide to buy something. These indicate the emotional reward they feel for making a choice and may help drive future purchases, Mr. Marci says.

…

In interviews, participants also said the soup pictured on the can and shelf labels didn’t look warm. And the big spoon holding a sample of soup on each label provoked little emotional response.

Shoppers will begin seeing changes in the Campbell section of supermarkets this fall. Among them: Condensed-soup varieties will be sectioned into four, color-coded categories such as “taste sensations” in orange and “classic favorites” in light brown. The company’s logo will be smaller and moved lower so it’s not as prominent.

Bear in mind, the stuff in the cans hasn’t changed.

Entered on 22 February 2010 at 6:50 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Gingko bilobe, Dictionnaire encyclopédique Trousset, 1886 – 1891

This is the plant that produces those memory-enhancing extracts you see in the health food aisle of the drug store – the one that long-lived Chinese monks reputedly tended for thousands of years, brought from Japan to Europe by Dutch traders. It grew in Triassic forests when the dinosaurs were young. Whether or not it actually helps fight age-related memory loss is still the subject of some debate, but it certainly is a striking plant.

The picture came from the marvelous Old Book Illustrations site, which is an absolutely gorgeous resource. The encyclopedia engravings are just the beginning.

Entered on 21 February 2010 at 6:53 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Eldest alphabet.

New Scientist takes a closer look at the squiggly bits around some famous cave paintings – shapes that might just be some of the world’s oldest written messages:

While some scholars like Clottes had recorded the presence of cave signs at individual sites, Genevieve von Petzinger, then a student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, was surprised to find that no one had brought all these records together to compare signs from different caves. And so, under the supervision of April Nowell, also at the University of Victoria, she devised an ambitious masters project. She compiled a comprehensive database of all recorded cave signs from 146 sites in France, covering 25,000 years of prehistory from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago.

What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites…. Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful – perhaps even the seeds of written communication.

They’ve got some of the symbols up here.

Entered on 19 February 2010 at 6:27 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Mosquito nose transplants.

So Science Daily says – and they don’t seem to be making this up – that scientists are stopping malaria by transplanting mosquitoes’ noses into frog eggs and fruit flies:

The mosquito’s “nose” is centered in its antennae, which are filled with nerve cells covered with special “odorant receptors” that react to different chemical compounds. The insect ORs are comparable to analogous receptors in the human nose and taste buds on the tongue.

“We’ve successfully expressed about 80 percent of the Anopheles mosquito’s odorant receptors in frog’s eggs and in the fruit fly antennae,” says Laurence Zwiebel, professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt, whose lab performed the frog egg transplantation.

…

In some cases, the researchers found that a single odorant triggers several receptors while in other cases receptors are specifically tuned to unique compounds. In particular, they found 27 Anopheles receptors that respond strongly to compounds in human sweat.

“We’re now screening for compounds that interact with these receptors. We call those that do BDOCs (behaviorally disruptive olfactory compounds),” Zwiebel says. “Compounds that excite some of these receptors could help lure mosquitoes into traps or repel them away from people while others that block receptor activity may help mask people.”

Entered on 18 February 2010 at 6:24 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Einstein, music and the frontier of beauty.

You’ve got to read this story.

Entered on 17 February 2010 at 20:56 in the Music file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Hot, Heavy Matter.

Science News reports on the hottest, heaviest science ever to come out of a research lab:

Talk about hot and heavy. Scientists have taken the temperature of a minuscule glob of dense, hot matter formed in the grisly aftermath of collisions between gold atoms traveling near the speed of light. The material reaches an estimated 4 trillion degrees Celsius, about 250,000 times hotter than the sun’s interior, and higher than any temperature ever reached in a laboratory, researchers reported February 15 at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

The measurements, which will be published in an upcoming Physical Review Letters, provide a more detailed description of the superhot, superdense soup of matter called quark-gluon plasma, which may mimic the conditions of the infant universe, the researchers say.

It only lasted a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, so they could only tell how hot it was by how bright it was. They counted photons.

Entered on 17 February 2010 at 6:09 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print