Scale: Earth globe = size of my hotel room

It’s a fitting spot for the first annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, pronounced not aaaass, but triple ay ess) to occur outside of the US. A huge number of people are in attendance, filling the seats and lining the corridors.

Jet lag still nibbles at the ragged edges of my mind, not quite satiated by coffee though I’ve certainly drunk my limit. I’ve been here since Saturday, and been busy with work and museums and squirrels – SQUIRRELS! – and identifying coins and notes (the five and ten are, in size and colour, opposite to in Australia.)

The program is as multidisciplinary as it is multinational. From culture to computing, from food to forest fires.

After a welcome from Chief Jacob – who sang a song with his niece, accompanied by drums, and it was totally awesome – the AAAS president Nina Fedoroff spoke for around 40 minutes on her life.

Giant golden eggs outside the ballroom

She had her first child when she was 17, then went back to school and her partner left her. Single, working mother she made her way through uni, and had another child and a husband a few years later. Then she started working in labs – and back then it was HARD for women in science. Hell, I think it still is.

Guess my age is showing, but I find it strange to think that obvious, even blatant discrimination was happening just a few decades ago. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad in Aus? (Anyone?) Despite that, she did a hell of a good job studying plant genetics, became an expert in the field and was awarded a prize for science in the White House.

It’s nice to hear stories like that – real stories, you know? Bumpy, unexpected journeys that grip success by not only skill, but determination. I’m sure many other stories like hers are out there, and people could really benefit from hearing them.

After that, there was food and drinks in the foyer, but I dashed out to the reporters gala (a GALA, oh my), and missed the lighting of the Olympic torch.

Well, that was day one, and I’ll leave it there for now.

Picture taken from the plane at dawn

So I’m feeling pretty exhausted! I’ll recover some energy before making a big push to post plenty of contact during the conference, including the IgNobel award ceremony and a visit to nuclear science lab TRIUMF.

Here’s some of the seminars I want to attend:

Saturday 18 Feb: Globalising Indigenous architecture: The Power of tradition, providing for the future.
Sunday 19 Feb: The next agricultural revolution: Emerging production methods for meat alternatives.
Monday 20 Feb: Radioactive isotopes in medicine.

If anyone else, specially my peeps in Aus, are coming to the AAAS meeting, send me a comment with your tips.

Must snooze! over and out.

HMB Endeavour in full sail

You know how they say when one door closes, a window opens? For me it’s the opposite. I closed all the windows to open the door, and an opportunity has flown SMACK into the glass. I can’t go on the HMB Endeavour, ‘cos I’m leaving Australia soon! Bummed out doesn’t begin to describe it.

For you peeps still in Aus, here’s the lowdown.

Cook’s Endeavour is currently sailing with a full, hammock-napping, rigging-climbing, star-gazing crew about Australia.

Over halfway through its yearlong trek, it’s docking in Adelaide from 16-23 February 2012 to open to those of the public keen to run their hands across the varnished wood and polished brass and marvel at the many ropes. Swoon. Details here.

If you, like me, want a closer inspection of the vessel and to get in those hammocks yourself, here’s your chance.

From end of May to mid June, the Endeavour is sailing from Sydney to Lord Howe Island to observe the transit of Venus on June 6. It’s a prime viewing location, and one of the first spots in Australia to see the rarest of eclipses.

Cook travelled to Tahiti in 1769 to view the transit, part of a global movement to find out the size of the solar system (specifically, how far Earth is from the Sun, an astronomical unit) by watching the transit in different locations around the world. Worked pretty well, too!

All Australia is in a good spot to see the transit, when Venus moves between Earth and the Sun and looks like a small black dot on our bright sun disk.

Don’t actually look at the Sun, will you, ‘cos you’ll damage your eyes. Use eclipse glasses or shadows. Though I do find eye patches rather fetching…

Transit of Venus, credit NASA/LMSAL

This is another opportunity that has faceplanted into my closed window. I’m going to be in South America during the transit, one of the few places where you get to see zip, zilch, zero. Bummer…

So I’ll be living vicariously through you, dear Australian readers, so make the most of it! See it at home, or hit up the Endeavour and make a trip from it. The voyage in June is $4000, so quite pricey but a trip of a lifetime! Crew will be selected by ballot, and you need to enter here before 10 February 2012 – which is really soon. Do it now. Are you doing it? Go, right now, click here, live my dream. Take a pirate hat!

I travelled on the Young Endeavour back in me younger days, another replica tall ship used as a training sail vessel, it’s one of those memories that just sticks with you. Like seeing Stonehenge or being in a circus. Ballots for that are open too, but only available to people 16-23 years old. If that’s you, check it out and apply now!

Looks like I’m missing out on the sailing action in Australia this year, but I’ve got some pretty sweet plans myself. I’m heading out that door and leaving in just over a week for Vancouver, Canada, where I’m hitting the AAAS annual meeting. I’ll tell you all about it!

Rice University graduate student Shuzhen Ye used an ultraviolet laser to create a Rydberg atom in order to study the orbital mechanics of electrons.

An electron orbiting an excited potassium atom has been confined with radio waves to mimic the movement of the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter.

The Trojan asteroids precede and follow Jupiter as it orbits the sun, like an entourage of bodyguards around royalty. Earth’s first Trojan asteroid was recently discovered, but it’s nothing to the group that Jupiter’s got, numbering over a thousand.

Resembling this comma-shaped group of asteroids, the electron was limited to a confined “wave packet”, say researchers from Rice University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Vienna University of Technology.

How’d they do it? Lasers, radio waves and supersized atoms.

Here’s a video, with my explanation below it.

First they created a Rydberg atom using ultraviolet laser. That’s a highly excited atom, where the outermost electron has jumped up from its normal orbit into a much, much higher one.

As the outer shell electron jumps outwards, the atom becomes bigger. In this case, an unimaginably small potassium atom grew as large as a full stop! Say wha? I mean, that’s HUGE!!! That’s bigger than a bacteria, than a skin cell – from ONE ATOM?! Get out!

Locating that electron, even in a supersized Rydberg atom, is no easy task. Electrons, I was told at uni, wink in and out of existence. They can act as a particle or a wave. Instead of pinning down an electron, you just predict where it’s most likely to be – called a wave function. It’s a fuzzy way of looking at things.

The team could collapse the wave function with a sequence of electric field pulses, which basically limited where the electron would be. That created the comma-shaped wave packet that resembled the Trojan asteroids.

Next job – make it move! They made the localised electron move in an orbit using radio waves, which rotated the nucleus.

Brilliant!

But how can you check where the electron is, and measure your results, when you can’t see it?

The answer was to do it in snapshots. Each snapshots of the wave packet was made using another electric field pulse. Unfortunately, the process destroyed the Rydberg atom, so they had replicate the experiment tens of thousands of times to get enough data to complete the picture.

Seems like a lot of work to make something extremely tiny and wavy move like you want it, but who knows where research like this might lead. To have this kind of control over electons could lead to new types of chemistry, and quantum computing.

Mind blown.

Source: The press release and paper, published in Physical Review Letters this week.

Anyway, last week it asked which land mammal has the longest tail. What do you think?

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Go on, have a guess.

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Got one?

If you thought a giraffe, congratulations. You got it, at least, that’s what the paper said. It’s so dang tall, even its knee-length tail breaks records.

But that’s not the animal I want to talk about. Pff, giraffes. Have you seen them drink? Gimme a break.

I want to talk about the giant anteater that has an almost equally long tail, and a far finer one IMHO.

Found in South and Central America, as far down as Northern Argentina. They eat a lazy 35,000 ants a day with their lovely long tongue and fearsome claws, which rip and tear into rock-hard anthills. They eat quickly for a minute, than meander off to the next anthill leaving the colony to recover.

Plus, they are MASSIVE! Giant anteaters can be over two metres long, roughly seven feet.

Three feet of that length is all tail baby. Long, hairy tail. Not quite long enough (by inches!) to rival that of the giraffe, sadly. Still… you know… I was pretty close.

Here’s Wikipedia’s image of the giant anteater. Notice anything weird?

Giant anteater, image by Malene Thyssen

How much does its front foot look like a panda? I had to look twice to make sure the animals weren’t cohabiting or something.

Made me wonder if there aren’t other, even more exciting tails out in the animal kingdom. Comment if you’ve got ‘em.

So, just a quick one to tide ye olde blog over ’till I’m properly back on decks.

Thought I’d share this rather funny column with you.

‘Tis McSweeney’s (hast thou heard of it?) called Dan Savage’s Wild Kingdom. Just quietly, it’s high-llarious!

This post includes various organisms calling a talk-back radio show looking for some late night dating advice. Here’s a sampler:

CALLER: Dan, I have a question for you. Why is it that when a female bluehead wrasse fish sleeps around, she’s a slut, but if she becomes a male through simultaneous hermaphroditism and sleeps around, he’s a stud? Double standard much?

Read Dan’s reply, and the other caller queries, here. Do click it, ye scurvy dog, there’s plenty of lols to be had.

Fond frolicking and frothy waters, the Captain.

Chocolate orange icecream pudding with side of holly. Image by webmink

Holly includes about 400 species in the genus Ilex. The cultivated species is Ilex aquifolium, and about 20 or 30 of those bright berries can kill an adult. Poisonings are more likely in pets or children, and about five berries will make a kid feel sick.

It’s the usual suspects in symptoms – sleepiness, sore tummy, vomiting, diarrhoea. Larger doses cause paralysis, kidney damage and death.

Chemically, they contain a cocktail of active ingredients. Among them are the triterpenes, precursors to steroids which are cytotoxic (kill cells), steroids and a nitrile called menisdaurin.

Traditional medicines use holly for fever, gout and chronic bronchitis.

Holly, image by 4nitsirk, flickr

A couple of species native to North America, I. vomitoria aka yaupon and I. cassine, make caffeine and were used to make “black drink”, a stimulating brew also used as a vomit-causing emetic.

South American species I. paraguariensis contains as much as 1.6% caffeine (five times more than the above species) and some of the cocoa chemical theobromine in their leaves, and tasty tannins.

Also called yerba mate, I. paraguariensis is brewed to make mate tea, which is delicious. It’s pronounced MAH-tay, but be careful not to put the emphasis on the second syllable. Wikipedia says that makaes mah-TAY, which means “I killed” in Spanish.

So it’s fine to have a sprig of holly in the house for Christmas, just don’t make a holly pie out of it!

Harsh words, right? I mean, vampire squids are totally awesome!

The vampire squid inhabits the cold, high-pressure environment of the deep sea. Light is absorbed by the water, making it perpetually twilight. A vampire in twilight, that’s not horrifying, that’s dreamy, amiright? Don’t hit your head if you swoon.

We don’t know much about these little dudes because they dwell in that most mysterious of spots, the deep sea. Vampyroteuthis infernalis means vampire squid from hell, but it’s not even technically a squid. Or an octopus. It’s got an order all of it’s own.

They have a consistency similar to a jellyfish, quite gelatinous. Like many jellyfish, it swims by shooting out a jet of water behind it to propel it forward, but it has a couple of fins for manouvering. It has eight arms and two extra arms which hide in its ‘pockets’ and can extend the length of its body when needed.

This National Geographic vid is pure pirate gold for high quality images of the creature.

They hold the title for the largest eyes relative to their body. An individual about six inches long has an eye an inch across, about the same as a full-grown dog. All the better to see you with, my dear. They also have a receptacle behind their eye for spermatangia, the tough sac of sperm ejaculated from the specialised arms of a lover. Just imagine date night

The most brilliant behaviour is their bioluminescence. These guys glow!

When startled, squid may shoot out ink to confuse predators. That’s not much good when you live in twilight, so instead the vampire squid shoots out glowing balls that dazzle and confuse. Over a thousand discrete bright particles within a matrix of mucous. Picture that, you’re out looking for a snack late at night, feeling pretty hungry, you think you smell something good and suddenly there’s some wacko waving glowsticks and snot in your face!

Another defensive ploy is to go into pineapple pose. Turning their bell-shaped tentacles over them, they completely change their shape (going kind of inside out). They light up some spots on their head which animals may take for eyes, which glow and then shrink as if the animal has swum away. Even if you didn’t buy that the animal was gone, looking at the videos, you wouldn’t want to eat that.

Stephen Fry gave respect to these sweet deep sea entities in this clip from QI. Hat tip to Dr M at Deep Sea News.

Oh… and about that quote Occupy Wall Street are marching for. The vampire squid’s diet seems to consist of molluscs, fish and crustaceans. As far as we know, it’s not a blood sucker, and Tree of Life. describes the funnel as absent. That must make it hard to stick said metaphorical blood funnel into anything, whether it smells like money or not.

Recommended links

In the QI link, they say the bioluminescence explosion is like John Barrowman! You might know Barrowman as the immortal Captain Jack Harkness from Dr Who and Torchwood, but blow me down, that captain can dance!

Still got time for more videos? Here’s David Attenborough talking about the deep ocean.

The majority of this info was from Tree of Life.

Sunglasses made by lasers

A few companies give the public access to the technology, but I like that this one is all about the eyewear (you know… sea-glare.)

Three dimensional printing creates objects by building up layers of material like stainless steel or polyamide plastic, usually as a powder. Each layer is stuck to the other with a a hardcore high-powered laser. Some materials are laid down as a liquid, instead of a powder, and then hardened to a solid. Instead of cutting out a design, they build it up, making it easier to do very fine work and one of a kind items.

The technology has been pegged for such epic, borderline science fiction things as creating organs by building up layers of cells – which I don’t think anyone has actually done yet, though someone did print an ear out of silicone.

Beehive have started designing a user interface so people can design their own eyewear, and they’ll 3D print it for you. SO COOL!

Bubble images printed into 3D eyewear. Makes me think science sunglasses!

They’re are crowd sourcing funds for the project, and asking for pledges. Each pledge gets a reward, including sunglasses made with their technology, and if they don’t get the necessary dough by the end, you get your money back.

I think a little cut-out molecule on the side would be pretty cool. Maybe of caffeine, you know, keeping it real the morning after a big party. Or the stages of mitosis along the sides, with the glass sections being the moment where it has split apart into two cells.

There’s heaps of possibilities, I can think of a few ace neurobiology and chemistry themes… What would you make?

Joseph Rossano's artwork at the Museum of South Australia

For those of you who live in or around Adelaide, I recommend popping into the SA Museum and checking out a funky artwork by Joseph Rossano. It’s just in the foyer (past the security people, before the staircase) and features a set of big, blue butterflies behind frosted glass.

The butterflies look blurry – on purpose – but if you have one of those new-fangled iPhones you can scan in the QR code next to them and sneak a peek behind the glass to the species inside. The QR codes are a barcode symbolising the DNA barcodes, a short stretch of DNA written on the side of each of the frames.

My current work, BOLD, utilizes two-dimensional QR codes–a surrogate DNA Barcode– to link the viewer to the science behind the art. By scanning one of my sculptures–for example a colorful butterfly collected by Area Conservacion Guanacaste parataxonomists and hosted in the Smithsonian Institution’s collections–the viewer transports one’s self to Dr. Daniel Janzen’s natural history of the specimen and other collateral data. All of the specimens portrayed in this series are deliberately indistinct behind their window, thus making it difficult to discern the organism’s true identity. – Joseph Rossano artist statement.

It’s a fun way to explore and interact with DNA barcodes (if you don’t know what I’m on about, read this) and imagines a future when DNA barcoding devices are handheld for species identification on the fly.

Be quick though – it’s in the last weeks and will be returning to America after that. Keep an eye on this artist though, looks like there’s some great science art in the portfolio.