19 year old nursing/pre-med dual major who is trying to figure out life, and all of it's combined complexities.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Acro Yoga waterfall WIP
Known as Polychaetes (bristle worms), they survive intense sea pressures where sunlight never penetrates. Picture: CRASSOUS/SPL/BARCROFT
Creatures of the deep: terrifying macro pictures of polychaetes or bristle worms
good:
It’s Time to Bust the Myth That Girls Don’t Like Science
Research shows that girls are interested in STEM fields, but aren’t given information about the opportunities. If schools focus their efforts on ensuring that girls are informed about STEM opportunities, the number of women becoming computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians is sure to soar.
Looking through my followers list is proof enough for me that there are loads of young women interested in STEM fields, whether it’s for their job or just expressing their identity.
We need to show them the opportunities. We need to engage them in the opportunities. And we need to fight the other social pressures that pull them away from positive feelings about science.
It honestly really bothers me when people brush off my academic credentials as me ‘just being naturally smart’. And I’m not being some pseudo-humble asshole fishing for compliments when I say I’m really not abnormally smart, and I’m not smarter than anyone I surround myself with. I just work my ass off for the grades I get, and for you to say it’s all just because I’m ‘just naturally smart’ really pisses me off because you discredit all of my hard work, and then pretend like its an un-achievable dream for anyone who isn’t a genius in order to soothe your own conscious because you didn’t work as hard.
Ten Things Bacteria Can Do That You Can’t
We humans like to think we’re pretty great. We have things like the Mona Lisa, and the Large Hadron Collider, and The Kind of Chocolate Sauce That Turns Solid When You Put It On Ice Cream. Still, it turns out that if aliens were to visit planet Earth and kidnap the dominant species, they’d go for bacteria over us any day. There are more of them, they’re more diverse, they’ve been around a lot longer, and between the lot of them, they’ve achieved a lot more. Have a look at ten things that bacteria do with their bare flagella that we could never manage to duplicate.
10. Live for 34,000 years.
In Death Valley, researchers found salt crystals that had tiny, fluid-filled pockets in them. In those pockets were 34,000-year-old bacteria. Not a species of bacteria that was 34,000 years old; an actual 34,000-year-old organism that had put itself in suspended animation for tens of thousands of years. And they didn’t look a day over thirty.
9. Be their own ecosystem.
In a goldmine in South Africa, there isn’t much room for life. There’s no sun, and no complex plants or animals providing nutrients to feed on. There is, however, a kind of bacteria. One kind of bacteria. It takes the heat of the mine and the water that fills the bottom and harvests everything it needs from the elements - literally. There is no life in the mine besides Desulforudis audaxviator, the world’s most self-sufficient organism.
8. Make gold nanoparticles.
Gold sprinkles the land, but in only a few places does it come in solid enough form that it’s worth collecting. And the main reason it does that is bacteria. Certain bacteria dissolve gold into nanoparticles, and those nanoparticles move freely through the soil until they collect in certain areas. Whenever a prospector strikes it rich, he or she should thank the humble bacteria. I’m guessing they don’t, though.
7. Glow in the dark.
Bacteria are the source of most bioluminescence in sea life. Some squid carry bacteria in their bodies that allow them to glow, and many bioluminescent fish have pouches of bacteria which manufacture the enzyme luciferase, which glows in the dark. And not just under black light. That’s cheating.
6. Be the world’s tiniest ninja.
Nanobacteria occupy only 20 nanometers. They’re somewhat controversial, since some scientists believe that such a small space can’t possibly hold the components necessary for life. And maybe that’s true. For these bacteria are not life - they are death! In the lab they tend to occupy dying mammalian cells. In real life, they’ve been linked to numerous health problems - but the link has never been certain. They are silent. They are untraceable. And they are deadly.
5. Live on Mars.
Oh, I’m not saying they do. I’m saying they could. Discoveries of colonies of live bacteria in liquid pockets in the dry valleys of Antarctica, they could definitely live somewhere below the surface of Mars.
4. Survive in boiling water.
Most of us are only comfortable in that tiny fraction of an inch that our shower knob that allows us to get the right temperature of water. If we so much as nudge the knob, or if someone in the room flushes the toilet, we jump out of the water, screaming. Not so with botulism bacteria. This deadly little number can survive boiling water. It’s only when the water is pressurized, so it boils at a higher temperature, that botulism dies off.
3. Modify their own genes.
Bacteria gain new abilities by swiping genes from other bacteria they encounter. If humans were able to do the same, it would be a little like being able to grow spots after petting a leopard. The process is called horizontal gene transfer, and it allows the bacteria to gain resistance to antibiotics.
2. Protect themselves from radioactivity and toxic environments
Some kinds of bacteria that live in radioactive areas have worked out ways of defending against taking in heavy metals. Not only is this of interest to biologists, but engineers are working out ways of using these bacteria to harvest heavy metals. Humans shrink from Uranium. Bacteria pick it up and use it as armor.
1. Digest your food.
Yes, you can’t even do that on your own. As thousands of yogurt commercials have no doubt told you, you need bacteria to help you. And while they’re down there, they do things like protect against other types of infection, regulate your immune system, and some, Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, even fight elements that cause cancer.
That’s right. The goop in your stomach fought cancer today. And what did you do? Via The Huffington Post, Wired, Discovery, The Charlotte Observer, Wired, Science AGoGo, Making Your Own Beer, Current.com, Nanowerk, and The Naked Scientist.
(LINK) A Shocking Idea: Nerves Might Run on Sound, Not Electricity
Most people know that nerves work by passing electrical currents from cell to cell. But you might be surprised to learn that no one knows exactly how anesthetics stop nerves from carrying pain signals.
That’s why two scientists believe that we really don’t know how nerves work after all.
According to their controversial theory, electricity is just a side effect of how nerves really operate: by conducting high-density waves of pressure that resemble sound reverberating through a pipe.
“Nerves are supposed to work like a series of electrical transistors,” said Andrew Jackson, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. “This picture is at best flawed.”
If correct, Jackson and Thomas Heimburg, a Niels Bohr biophysicist and co-author of a recent paper describing their theory, would turn a long-held (and Nobel Prize-winning) theory on its head.
Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1963 for describing the electric transmission of impulses along nerves — a now widely accepted theory known as the Hodgkin-Huxley model.
But Jackson and Heimburg say that the inability to explain how anesthesia works, combined with other counterintuitive aspects of the theory, mean that nerves don’t rely on electricity to carry messages.
For example, the Hodgkin-Huxley model still hasn’t accounted for observations made a century ago by scientists Hans Meyer and Charles Overton. They demonstrated that the strength of an anesthetic could be predicted by its solubility in olive oil rather than its chemical structure. The more soluble the anesthetic, the stronger it was.
Since olive oil is similar to the lipid molecules that make up nerve cells, Jackson and Heimburg started questioning the generally accepted belief that anesthetics block electrical pulses by fitting themselves into pain receptors on cells. That seems next to impossible, they said, because anesthetic molecules come in many shapes and sizes, and it’s difficult to imagine that they all happen to physically fit into all receptors.
“That is about as likely as tossing a coin 1,000 times and having it come down heads every time,” Jackson said.
Their theory, published in the Biophysical Journal, explains how nerves and anesthetics work as follows: Nerves are made of lipids that are liquid at body temperature. A yet-to-be-defined mechanism creates high-pressure, semisolid waves that move through the cells, delivering messages.
Anesthetics, they suggest, lower the temperature at which lipids become solid, making it difficult for the waves to form, thereby preventing nerves from sending pain signals. They also suggest that as the waves travel, they change the shape of the cell membrane, producing the electrical pulse that scientists currently mistake for the primary function of nerve cells.I am extremely skeptical about this. But the reason I’m posting is that I think it’s awesome that people are challenging accepted ideas and assumptions, and doing research to back it up.
It’s important not to let science turn into an orthodoxy, and while we regularly talk about the “facts” of science in contrast to the many pseudo-scientific memes that are around, we mustn’t let those ridiculous ideas close our minds to all controversial ideas.
The key difference is approach. If the person is using science and some common sense, then it’s worth considering. After all, many of our well established and fundamental scientific facts were considered “crazy” at one point.
So keep thinking, keep imagining, and keep testing!
Science!
Celebrating 50 Years of Space Flight with Corn Mazes (2011)
Space Farm 7, as the program’s called, has enlisted seven of the top agritourism farms across the country to each create a unique, elaborate corn maze that highlights the progress and successes of the agency since it put a man into orbit. The mazes are strategically located near NASA’s research centers, and each design represents the unique contributions made by each location.
[NASA Space Farm 7 via Craft]
In Gabon, hippopotamuses surf the waves off the coast.
If you only look at one Russian underwater photography site today, make it this one. Alexander Semenov is doing some great work. Here’s his equally impressive Flickr stream.
My internship ends next Tuesday. I’ve never been so sad to leave a workplace before.
This family of three striped yellow-eared bats appear to pose for the camera as they huddle together in a palm tree. Photographer James Christensen stumbled across the rare creatures during a holiday in Achiote, Panama.Picture: James Christensen/ Minden/solent
9 Equations True Geeks Should Know
The world’s complexities and uncertainties are distilled and set in orderly figures, with a handful of characters sufficing to capture the universe itself.
For your enjoyment, the Wired Science team has gathered nine of our favorite equations. This article was published November 4, 2011. Some represent the universe; others, the nature of life. One represents the limit of equations.
1. Euler’s Identity
Also called Euler’s relation, or the Euler equation of complex analysis, this bit of mathematics enjoys accolades across geeky disciplines.
Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler first wrote the equality, which links together geometry, algebra, and five of the most essential symbols in math — 0, 1, i, pi and e — that are essential tools in scientific work.
Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was a huge fan and called it a “jewel” and a “remarkable” formula. Fans today refer to it as “the most beautiful equation.”
2. The Entire Universe in Figures: Friedmann Equations
Derived from Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, the two Friedmann equations describe the life of the entire universe, from fiery Big Bang birth to chilly accelerated expansion death.
3. Boltzmann’s Entropy Formula
Nature loves chaos when it pushes systems toward equilibrium, and geeks call this universal property entropy.
The equation describes the tight relationship between entropy (S), and the myriad ways particles in a system can be arranged (k log W). The last part is tricky. k is Boltzmann’s constant and W is the number of microscopic elements of a system (e.g. the momentum and position of individual atoms of gas) in a macroscopic system in a state of balance (e.g., gas sealed in a bottle).
4. Electricity and Magnetism: Maxwell’s Equations
Without these four equations, every lolcat on the Internet couldn’t exist. First put together by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861, the formulas describe all known behaviors of electricity and magnetism and show the relationship between the two forces. They state that a moving electric charge will generate a magnetic field while a shifting magnetic field similarly creates an electric field.
5. Certain Uncertainty: Schrödinger Equation
Erwin Schrödinger’s famous equation reigns supreme over the smallest objects in the universe. It illustrates how subatomic particles change with time when under the influence of a force. Any particular atom or molecule is described by its wavefunction, the probability of where and when the particle appears, represented by the Greek letter psi.
6. All Life Is an Island: Island Biogeography
Though physicists can describe the universe’s expansion in a few lines, the basic properties of life on Earth are far harder to quantify. During the latter half of the 20th century, biologists arrived at the theory of island biogeography, which described the dynamics of animal populations on islands.
7. The Essence of Evolution: Nowak’s Evolvability
At its most basic level, life is what replicates itself — but how did it begin? It’s the ultimate chicken-and-egg problem, and one that scientists studying what’s called pre-life try to answer. On the left side of the equation, proposed by Harvard University mathematical biologist Martin Nowak, is a symbol representing all possible strings of molecules; at right are the speed of chemical reactions, the tendency of shorter strings to be more common than longer strings, selection pressures and fitness ratings. As Nowak has shown, all that’s necessary for life to emerge are molecules subject to forces of selection and mutation. If those conditions are met, self-replication will emerge with the inexorability of gravity.
8. The Razor’s Edge of Outbreak: R-Nought
Brought to mainstream attention by the thriller Contagion, R0, pronounced R-nought, is a very simple figure: It refers to the average number of people an individual infected with a pathogen will go on to infect. If it’s less than one, the disease will burn itself out; if greater than one, it will spread. In a world where a flu virus from Mexico can infect millions of people around the world in a matter of months, this equation is as symbolic as it is straightforward.
9. Hot or Not: The (Limited) Mathematics of Beauty
Not everything can be quantified, especially when it comes to matters of the human heart and mind. For decades, psychologists and biologists have tried to represent physical beauty in formula form; but even if some tendencies emerge when hundreds of individual preferences are measured, what any one individual considers beautiful is impossible to predict.
At right is an equation from an unpublished attempty by Israeli computer scientists to design a program capable of quantifying the attractiveness of a face. “Y” is the empirical beauty score; at right, various measurements of how different features in a face compared to a baseline face. The program was brilliantly coded, but it didn’t work very well.
(Source: weileash)
Joanna Barnum has assembled her beautifully rendered portraits of biologists into a 2012 calendar just in time for the holiday shopping season.
(Source: music-is-my-life8)
