// April 12th, 2011 // No Comments » // Just for Fun, Science at Home
Having a party over the Easter break? Add some science with these party tricks. Sure to astound and amaze! My favourite is combining vinegar and bicarb, and pouring the resultant carbon dioxide over candles to extinguish them. I’m doing THAT at my next birthday party for sure, then reigniting candles with the smoke. Oh yes. It’s going to happen.
// March 16th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Just for Fun
Enjoy what happens when a gummi bear is dropped into potassium chlorate.
Cool. Why did I never do this in chem class when potassium chlorate was available to me?
How does it work, I hear you ask? (And where can I get this stuff?) Potassium chlorate is KClO3, and contains one potassium, one chlorine and three oxygen. It comes as a solid salt, but can be melted by a Bunsen burner.
At high temperatures it decomposes to potassium chloride (KCl) and oxygen gas (O2). No bigger. Until the sacrificial gummi bear.
A gummi bear is full of sweet, delicious sucrose, a source of carbon and energy. Add it in and BAM! The trifectar – fuel, oxygen and heat – the ingredients for fire. The reaction is hugely exothermic, producing MORE heat which produces MORE oxygen which drives the gummi bear into complete annihilation.
For more gummi bear destruction try drowning them, stabbing them shortly after hatching, or decapitating them with a laser.
Curiously, it’s always the red gummi bear that gets it. That’s discrimination.
// March 11th, 2011 // No Comments » // Just for Fun, Science Communication
I just got home from seeing Daniel Keogh (from ABC’s the Hungry Beast, aka Professor Funk) performing in the 18+ science comedy show The Stupid Species – Why Everyone (except you) is an Idiot.
It. Was. Awesome.
From the complex and perplexing placebo effect to the Asch Conformity Test, it was a playful romp through the psychology of stupidity. Why is love risky (or whisky) business? How can different colours cure the sick? Why are expensive things deemed better than the cheap, but free things are the absolute best?
I could tell you, but not with as much pizazz as Professor Funk.
Go for the science. Stay for the hair (or the epic pants and jokes.)
I awarded major bonus points for starting the show with Venn Diagrams and Pie Graphs. Plus the video on the placebo effect was simply mind-blowing. Also there’s free wine testing *hell yeah!*
The show toured during last years National Science week, and is now in Adelaide on Saturday and Sunday night at the RiAus. Tickets are still available for Sunday at a tiny $10, or $8 for students (book here) and are worth double that. Take your friends, they’ll appreciate your confidence and good taste in comedy.
“We all like to think we’re special. In fact on average everyone thinks they’re above-average. Although we think we’re pretty smart our tendency towards irrational behaviour is what unites us all as humans – the stupid species,” says Daniel Keogh. Follow him @ProfessorFunk.
// March 8th, 2011 // No Comments » // How Things Work, Just for Fun
One of my guilty pleasures is my RSS subscription to Zooborns, a blog all about baby animals. When I check Google Reader, I read sensible, serious blog posts about science until I finally cave and look at the cuteness.
Amongst the treasure trove of nursing giraffes and clinging baby apes was a clutch of baby octopuses! Perhaps clutch isn’t the right word… a handful? An armful! An armful of baby octopuses. Check it out.
Baby octopus at California Academy of Sciences
Conception occurs when a male octopus inserts a modified sperm-containing arm into the female’s oviduct, though sometimes he removes his arm and she stores it in her mantel for later. Each egg, as it is laid, contains a long thread which the octopus uses to hold them all together like a bunch of grapes. A thoughtful mother, she protects them from predators and blows water currents across them for cleaning.
Biologist Richard Ross caught the hatching of the eggs on video, and described it as a waterfall flowing upwards towards the surface.
It’s an exciting event, but unfortunately a mother octopus stops eating to care for the eggs and dies which is a total bummer. With millions of tiny planktonic octopus young born, some should survive, though they are hard to feed and raise.
On a lighter note, Zooborns recently posted pictures of a Snow Leopard cub born in Chattanooga Zoo. Snow Leopards happen to be my favourite animal and the cub is so exceedingly cute I might die. A less attractive addition in Australia is the first palm cockatoo zoo bred in 40 years which has passed through the awkward teenage stage and is starting to fly.
Damn I want to work at a zoo.
// January 30th, 2011 // 19 Comments » // Just for Fun, Recent Research, The Realm of Bizzare
Have you ever noticed a mysterious loss of teaspoons at your workplace? Maybe it’s not teaspoons, but some other cutlery item. At my old work it was forks, which dwindled even when I bought new replacement ones. At the Australian National University neither spoon nor fork were safe, causing some students to eat salad with two knives as chopsticks.
The same thing was happening at the Burnett Institute in Australia. Teaspoons were critically low, no matter how many new ones bought. Clearly it was time for science.
“Exasperated by our consequent inability to stir in our sugar and to accurately dispense instant coffee, we decided to respond in time honoured epidemiologists’ fashion and measure the phenomenon,” they said in the paper.
They numbered 70 teaspoons and placed them in tearooms around the institute. Lo and behold, they started to disappear. Every week they counted the remaining teaspoons, probably with a lot of suppressed giggling and delight.
After five months, 56 out of 70 teaspoons disappeared, that’s 80%. The half life of the teaspoons was 81 days.
Teaspoons in communal tearooms disappeared faster than those in tearooms specifically for certain projects. Expensive teaspoons disappeared no faster than cheap ones.
According to the study, “at this rate, an estimated 250 teaspoons would need to be purchased annually to maintain a practical institute-wide population of 70 teaspoons.” The cost? About $100. Extrapolate that to the workforce of Melbourne, some 2.4 million people, and you’re looking at quite a wad of cash.
And it’s not just economic loss, it’s also workplace satisfaction. “Teaspoon displacement and loss leads to the use of forks, knives, and staplers to measure out coffee and sugar,” the study suggested. Staplers? You know it’s a bad day in the office when you’re measuring sugar with a stapler. Indeed, nobody in the office said they were “highly satisfied” with the number of teaspoons in a survey they conducted at the end of the study. Yes, they even did a survey.
But why are teaspoons such hot property?
The study gives a few possible theories. Perhaps there are so many teaspoons, people don’t think it will matter if they take one home. Over time the small acts of thievery add up until there are no teaspoons left.
Alternatively, and I can say this no better than the authors, “Somewhere in the cosmos, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, walking treeoids, and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, a planet is entirely given over to spoon life-forms. Unattended spoons make their way to this planet, slipping away through space to a world where they enjoy a uniquely spoonoid lifestyle, responding to highly spoon oriented stimuli, and generally leading the spoon equivalent of the good life.”
Their final theory is les choses sont contre nous “things are against us.” “Resistentialism is the belief that inanimate objects have a natural antipathy towards humans, and therefore it is not people who control things but things that increasingly control people,” says the study. Think of all the time you spend cleaning, buying, repairing, using and selling things. Do items really control our lives, sending us on some materialistic goose chase for reasons we cannot yet understand? I can only assume Yes.
I want to hear from anyone who has experienced this phenomenon, be it spoons, forks or knives. What goes missing in your workplace, and why do they constantly disappear. And what is the spoon equivalent of the good life?
Lim, M. (2005). The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute BMJ, 331 (7531), 1498-1500 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1498
Massive hat tip to James at Disease Prone, who said my posts had slowed down and suggested this paper.
// January 24th, 2011 // No Comments » // Just for Fun
ABC correspondent Karen Barlow snapped this picture while on board the Aurora Australis in what must be the best ever journalism assignment in the history of ever.
This block of wood is positioned prominently atop an iceberg like an actor in center stage spotlight. It’s 66 degrees south, and just north of the Commonwealth Bay.
Clearly this attention seeking and motivational-poster-inspiring little log is hinting at a scientific conspiracy of some sort. Was it placed just so by aliens? Do seals like to eat from wooden place mats? Is it all that remains of a wooden legged, largely gelatinous creature who has since been sea salted and dissolved?
Possible, but I would like to propose an explanation for the mysterious block of wood.
On her Breaking the Ice blog, Karen calls the block baffling. She writes that they are very near the South Pole, and that the compass she brought on the ship has stopped working.
To quote Karen, “The south magnetic pole was positioned on the Antarctic continent 100 years ago. It has since wandered out to sea due to changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.”
Wandered out to sea? Not unlike the block of wood!
Is it possible that this seemingly innocent flotsam is, in actual fact, the true source of South in all the world? Has Karen accidentally discovered the very source of down, half originator of the equator?
Well, if ’tis the case, leave’t well alone Karen. With the International standard Kilo currently suffering an embarrassing loss of weight, now’s not time to start geographical mayhem.
// January 19th, 2011 // No Comments » // Just for Fun, Science at Home
Thought I’d share some pictures of this awesome gingerbread laboratory my dad made me for Christmas.
It’s a science and research lab. Unfortunately some of the roof caved in during transit.
The lab comes complete with helipad. You can see some of the decorations inside through the “sky light.”
Royal icing, smarties, jelly beans, mint leaves, marshmallows and licorice allsorts decorate the interior while icing sinks ensure proper hygiene. Here’s the view from the front door.
// December 21st, 2010 // 4 Comments » // Just for Fun
It’s that time of the year and I’m feeling decidedly unchristmassy. Perhaps it’s the terror of presents left unpurchased, perhaps it’s the missing tree and decorations, perhaps… well screw it. Christmas just skipped me this year.
Times like these you need to bake. Something sciencey would be nice, but I’ll settle for anything. A gingerbread house would be amazing… A gingerbread LAB would be even better! What exactly would that entail, I wonder? Stay tuned, maybe I’ll make one and find out.
At the supermarket today I bought a litre of long life milk and another of long life custard, Sexy Man’s contribution to a Christmas hamper for the homeless or some such.
After a jubilent sms from the checkout to tell him the good news, I learned he had already bought it himself. Now we have a litre of custard that we’ll never use.
But I’m not the kinda girl to waste food, so my solution is to bake with it. Custard recipes ranged from “custard on banana” to tiramisu… and then I found this.
It’s custard baked inside a whole pumpkin. YUM! Well, actually I’ve never had baked pumpkin with custard before, but I like each item individually. Perhaps together there will be a synergy of flavours!!!
The recipe descibes how to MAKE the custard, but seeing as I have a whopping 1 L already I’m just gonna cram it in and put it in the oven, possibly with a stick of cinnamon. Can I somehow make this concoction sciencey? Time will tell. I may blog the results.
I’m really excited about the recipe because it said you could keep the pumpkin seeds you dig out from the centre and roast them with some spices. Holy shizz, how have I never thought of this? I’ve been throwing ‘em out THIS WHOLE TIME, when they were a source of that holy grail of minerals, iron.
As a vegetarian, iron is kinda a big deal. I had an iron test recently and it came out borderline low. Like, it’s supposed to be between 15 and 200, and I was 15. But like a told the nurse who tried to put me on supplements, “it’s borderline.” We make borders for a reason, you know, If I was 14 I’d accept that I have low iron, but I was 15. I made the grade. I passed goddammit.
Still any source of iron is a cause for celebration. I will be celebrating with pumpkin seeds and orange juice.
Seriously though, that baked pumpkin looks badass, I can’t tear my eyes from it. Are you baking for Christmas? If not, how do you get into the Santa spirit, or has it eluded you too?
// November 17th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Just for Fun, Recent Research
Image by UT-Tokyo for iGEM
Nobody loves sudoku like my granddad, unless it’s these Tokyo scientists. They genetically engineered e-coli to let them solve sudoku puzzles.
The puzzle was a 4×4, not quite the 9×9 that we’re used to. An example is shown in the picture. Each number was assigned a colour, so a red colony was the number one, and blue was two. The bacteria had to become the right colour to fit into the sudoku solution.
To solve the puzzle, the bacteria have to know what numbers are around it. For example, the position in the top left has the following data: There is a one in the column, a three in the row and a two in the box. Therefore it needs to be a four.
To become a number four, it needs to receive signals for one, two and three which makes it flip on a switch to say “four.” The switch works only when it receives three different signals.
Signals were transferred between bacteria using phage – viruses that infect bacteria. For example, a number one bacteria would produce a phage which says “Yo, I’m number one.” When that phage infects bacteria around it, they know they are in the presence of a number one. That helps flip the right switch for the bacteria to solve the puzzle.
More details on the project, which was part of the iGEM competition, can be found here.
Hat tip to The Loom.
// October 27th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Just for Fun, Science in the Movies
This is a link to a blog I heartily recommend. It’s written by the tech consultant of The Big Bang Theory sitcom, which ranks higher in Google than the ACTUAL theory of the big bang. It’s understandable. If you don’t watch The Big Bang Theory, how do you live? I’ve been addicted for a mere seven months now, and already I can’t imagine life before it. It’s a geeky comedy about four nerdy guys and one hot girl. There, now you’re up to date and can start watching mid season. Alternatively, watch this snippet about their take on astrology. Lolz.
I find it really interesting to read a tech consultant’s blog (not just because I’m a stalkerish fangirl either.) I think it would be a cool job to research random information to help people write witty reparte. You know what, if you need any witty reparte written for you, e-mail me. We’ll talk.
The latest post is about the stars in our neighborhood. And to top it all off, it even had some sesame street in it. Now if THAT ain’t a good blog I don’t know what is!
In fact I think I should emulate the awesomeness…
Nah. Just YouTube it.
