A Schooner of Science

Happy birthday blog

// April 25th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

Who’d have thought it? A Schooner of Science turned three just the other day. They grow up so fast…

Here in Seattle the tulips are blooming, spring is springing, and they are celebrating the 50th anniversary since the World Fair was held around the space needle. Time flies…

Tomorrow I’m going down the west coast of the US, so please point out any poignant science spots on the way. I hear there’s some cool fault lines near Las Vegas, big trees near San Francisco, and vampires in Forks.

I need some encouragement to keep the blog updated while I’m gallivanting about – if you want to read more about something, please poke me by posting a comment. It’ll help me get to the fourth birthday.

Thanks for stopping by and reading, hats off to ye.

Exploring first light from the cosmic dark ages

// May 16th, 2011 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

One major project the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be working on is first light, how light arose in the Universe.

A quick recap on the SKA: It’s a radio telescope 10,000 times more powerful than current models. Made up of dishes linked to a data processing unit, the instrument will stretch at least 3,000 kilometres across Australia or Africa. My last post talks more about the SKA itself, what it is and what it means for science.

But now let’s talk about first light.

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state
Then nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started, wait
Barenaked Ladies – Big Bang Theory

But before the earth began to cool and the autotrophs began to drool a lot had to happen. The creation of stars, galaxies, and all things seen and unseen has taken billions of years.

By observing cosmic microwaves we can study how the universe looked at the age of 300,000 years, smooth and uniform. Through telescopes we’ve looked back to when the universe was a billion years old, as protogalaxies merged into galaxies.

But between those times, we know very little. This period is called the dark ages, before stars were formed and started to shine.

First light is the end of the dark ages, the moments when the first protogalaxies and quasars came into existence.

How can we look back six billion years to first light? Telescopes are time machines.

Look at something near you right now, say a pen. What you’re really seeing is light bouncing off the pen, travelling through the air to your eyes. Light moves very fast, but it’s not immediate. It takes a fraction of a second for the light to reach you.

Look a bit further now. Light from our tide-turning moon takes just over a second to get to Earth. Light from our dawn-breaking ball of exploding gas the sun takes a leisurely eight minutes to shine upon us. The next nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is four lightyears away. Light takes four years to travel the distance separating us. You can look thousands, millions, even billions of years into history. (source: Wikipedia)

credit: NASA

The further away you look, the further into the past you gaze. I always imagine what has changed out there in the thousands of years the light has taken to reach us. Is that star still there? Is it in the throes of death, spreading out into a supernova?

First light, then, though it happened long ago we can still see it happening in celestial newly-forming bodies that are very, VERY far away.

Distant and only faintly glowing protogalaxies defy current telescope technology. Finding first light is heralded as the next frontier in cosmology.

Here’s more about the SKA projects.

Telling good science stories – #IAconf

// April 1st, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

Here are some notes gathered at the Inspiring Australia conference on how to write good science stories. This is all about public relations and writing a good media release. There wasn’t much about creating a narrative, or fact-based fiction work, or creative non-fiction. If anyone can recommend a good source for that stuff I’d love to hear it (leave a comment.

Image by Ian Britton

- What’s the impact. Find an analogy – don’t say megawatts, say how many homes you can power. People get that.

- Modern western media is about conflict modelling. For example, with climate change there really is no scientific debate that it is happening, but an editor will say “that sounds great, find me someone who disagrees.”

- Use drama if possible. Don’t exaggerate it, but if something is truly exciting or dangerous, recognise it. You can tell a story, but still be credible.

- Ask yourself: What is the story and why am I telling it? Who will hear the story? What are the tools I have to tell the story and how will I use them?

- You need a GREAT story if you’re going to tell it, then you need to work out how to connect it to the audience. We’ve all been to very good factual presentations that bored us to death. You have to get entertainment in somehow.

- Science communicators are very verbose, and sometimes over-explain things. Use more silence and reflection time.

Syphilis detecting handshake used by sailors

// April 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Just for Fun, Science at Home, Uncategorized

Back in the days before antibiotics, syphilis was a dreadful problem encountered on occasion by hapless sailors on shore leave bewitched by young maidens.

Fortunately they could use their super-secret special handshake to detect syphilis. A demonstration is below, feel free to use it when dating.

Amazing! And you can sneak it in when dancing if you miss your opportunity for the greeting handshake. Thanks to Mr. Science Show, the man in the video for the hat tip.

Common weedkiller causes sex change in frogs

// March 11th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Uncategorized

That picture is two genetically male frogs doing the do. One of them has had a sex change, and is now a laydee frog with ovaries! Why has this happened? It’s been blamed on atrazine.

The paper was published in the March early edition of PNAS. It adds further evidence against the weedkiller’s safety in an ongoing controversial debate.

Heading the team from California and Ohio was Dr. Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Hayes has published several papers on the dangers of atrazine, a herbicide used extensively in Australia and the US. In the past he’s raised concerns that it can disrupt hormones even in small quantities, and this paper provides new evidence which is hard to ignore.

40 male frogs (Xenopus laevis) were raised from larva while exposed to 2.5 ppb atrazine. Their gender and testosterone levels were compared to male controls raised without the herbicide.

At sexual maturity 90% of the males exposed to atrazine had less testosterone than normal. In competition with control males, the atrazine treated frogs were less successful in mating. When they did mate, they were significantly less fertile.

The remaining four genetic males looked like females, and dissection of two revealed ovaries. The other two mated with control males and produced offspring which were all male.

Feminisation and decreased fertility spell disaster for frog populations. A drop in reproduction rate is bad enough, but it gets worse. With males masquerading as females they could breed themselves into extinction and we wouldn’t even know.

On the other hand, Dr. Hayes (pictured) has had a bit of a history with atrazine. I’d call it a crusade. He’s done a lot of research on it and some of it has been ripped to shreds by other researchers. In some cases his work has been deemed unreplicable, and that’s a big no-no in the science biz. Your results HAVE to be repeatable, otherwise it’s just not a good experiment.

On the other other hand, those people who’ve kicked the crap out of his work are largely people from EcoRisk, which are partially funded by the manufacturers of atrazine. It’s possible their designs were flawed so the amount of atrazine used wasn’t constant. Plus, well, it is a bit of a conflict of interest, right? But if that’s where the funding comes from…

So an activist on one side and a possibly bias company on the other. Hell, who’s right and who’s wrong? Do we want to take the risk? The Australian and US governments say that it’s a safe herbicide, but the European Union disagree.

While we wait for a decision, frogs may be the ones to suffer.

Or not.

Damn controversy.

The government has our DNA

// February 26th, 2010 // 4 Comments » // Uncategorized

DNA from newborn babies is being routinely screened for genetic testing, and in some cases the sample is kept indefinitely.

Last December a Dublin hospital was found keeping a DNA database in secret and is now under investigation. In the USA and Australia they don’t need to do it in secret, they have government support. Hell, it’s legislation.

Between two and three days after birth, blood is collected from a heel prick and sent for analysis for several genetic diseases, including cystic fibrosis. In Australia, you can say “No” to testing, but it is strongly recommended. I don’t really have a problem with testing, it could potentially identify serious diseases early and let you start treatment early. It’s what they do later that bugs me.

In Australia the blood is kept on a screening card indefinitely in a secure facility. Some groups are allowed to access them, the most alarming of which are the police “when no other sample is available” and ethics-approved health research.

Several Victorian hospitals are researching a written informed consent project to improve parent’s understanding of the screening process. It’s a great idea. Honestly, I can’t believe this was not required from the beginning. People CAN opt out of testing, or can have the screening card returned to them after two years… but how many KNOW that they can do that?

In America the rules change between states as to how long the records are kept, and here’s a list for 2010. In California, Michigan, and Minnesota they are kept indefinitely, as is the case in Florida where it recently became the subject of a CNN report.

For me it brings back my pirate paranoia built upon the wreck of so many X-Files episodes and a dim (but now flaring) belief that the government harvested everyone’s DNA when giving the worldwide smallpox vaccine, and have been documenting newborn DNA ever since. But that’s me. Hopefully it’s not that bad. Yet.

American blog Southern Fried Science also covered the story, and did a really interesting post on why a DNA database is a very bad idea. Makes you think.

I’m blown away by it, what are your thoughts? Are you concerned or do you think I’m being a bit paranoid? Is there something we can do? Is the time for activism nigh?

Making Slime

// October 23rd, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Uncategorized

Arr, how many times have you sailed across the wide ocean seas brimming with bubbling sea life under the silent surface and wondered how AWESOME it would be if the sea was made of slime?

Well wonder no more. Today we makes slime.

Slime is a very useful substance, mostly for turning regular (read: boring) games such as wrestling into much more exciting games, such as slime wrestling. There are plenty of ways to make slime, like you can buy those little packs of ingredients and mix them together like making muffins out of a box. But I sneer at such cookery, I like things old school, and cheap. The results? Messy.

How to Make Slime from Captain Skellett on Vimeo.

The resulting fluid is non-Newtonian, meaning that it’s viscosity is effected by shear. In this case, it is shear thickening, meaning that it gets mighty hard to stir if you try to stir it mighty hard. The other kind is shear thinning, which includes stuff like toothpaste which is easy to squeeze out of a bottle but sticks pretty well to your toothbrush. Newtonian liquids include stuff like water, which don’t care how fast you stir it.

Cornflour, water, and food colouring. Life doesn’t get any simpler than that, and who doesn’t have cornflour that they never used stashed in their kitchen somewhere? I have heard tales of a you tube video where someone fills their pool with this stuff and then runs across it. Yummy. I made this video with a group of friends and we had snacks on the lawn afterward, and there was blue goo EVERYWHERE, all over the ground and people’s clothing’s and towels. SO AWESOME. I heartily recommend it.