tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42910201689197444602024-02-20T20:13:18.642-08:00Weekly Science Quizby Douglas ClarkDouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.comBlogger133125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-76057866748725290412013-07-20T20:27:00.001-07:002013-07-20T20:27:48.661-07:00Devils Tower Prairie Dogs<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A black-tailed prairie dog</td></tr>
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One of the most-interesting and social rodents of North America can be found at Devils Tower National Monument: the black-tailed prairie dog. French Canadians called them prairie du chien, and later English-speaking explorers used the English translation.<br />
The prairie dog is actually a member of the squirrel family. They are excellent tunnelers and are aided by their small ears, short tail and powerful legs. Their tan coloring and black tail makes for excellent camouflage against the backdrop of their burrows.<br />
Their range has been drastically reduced over the last century due to loss of habitat and they are now mainly found on protected areas like Devils Tower National Monument or Badlands National Park in South Dakota.<br />
Prairie dogs live in densely populated areas called towns. Large towns are divided into wards which are separated by hills, roads, streams or patches of forest. Wards are further divided into coteries. A typical coterie contains one adult male, three or four adult females and several yearlings and juveniles. However, coteries can be as small as two or as large as 39 individuals. If there are two adult males in the same coterie, one is dominant over the other. The residents of each coterie protect their territory from intruders, including prairie dogs from other coteries in the town.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Devils Tower National Monument</td></tr>
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Prairie dogs use the excavated earth from their burrows to make mounds which serve as watch towers and make dikes to divert water from heavy rains. Prairie dogs repair the entrance to their burrows by pounding wet earth into place with their noses. A burrow contains several chambers including a listening post, a toilet and a multi-chambered living area. One chamber of the living area is usually built above the rest to serve as an underground lifeboat by trapping air when the burrow floods.<br />
Prairie dogs breed from late February until early April. 35 days after conception, four to six blind, hairless pups are born. The mother will actively protect the nest after the pups are born until they are weaned, about six weeks later.<br />
Prairie dogs are almost wholly vegetarian, although they will eat small insects on occasion. Tall plants are cut down both for food and to increase visibility, leaving only a thin covering of grass and other plants surrounding the burrow. The main source of water for prairie dogs comes from the moisture in the plants and roots they eat. Unlike some other prairie dogs, black-tailed prairie dogs do not truly hibernate and on warm winter days they can be seen actively foraging for vegetation.<br />
Many carnivores prey on prairie dogs, including coyote, fox, badgers, mink, bobcats, weasels, owls, hawks, eagles, and rattlesnakes.<br />
Prairie dogs communicate with each other through a variety of methods. When two individuals from the same coterie meet they exchange an identification kiss to show recognition and acceptance. A short, high-pitched warning bark is repeated several times along with a flicking of their tail when danger is sensed. When the town hears a warning bark, they will sit up to see what is causing the alarm. If the warning bark is faster and higher pitched it means a hawk or eagle has been spotted and they will run for the safety of their burrow. After the coast is clear, the prairie dog will throw its forefeet up and point its nose to the sky before coming down on all fours to signal that all is well. This call can also be used to warn prairie dogs not in the coterie that the territory is taken and to stay out.<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="800" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zixnE1c1iFRFlTyNLbFo0MqhpNFWupTQb5filhyeadM/viewform?embedded=true" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-91970066737683698642013-05-20T11:09:00.000-07:002013-07-21T19:23:09.087-07:00The Northern Hawk Owl<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Northern Hawk Owl is adept at capturing rodents <br />under the snow due to their great hearing.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Northern Hawk Owl is a non-migratory owl that resembles a hawk in behavior and appearance. During flight it looks similar to a Cooper's Hawk. It is one of the few owls that is primarily active during the day.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Northern Hawk Owls are unevenly distributed throughout the boreal forest. They live mostly in open coniferous forests, or coniferous/deciduous mixed forests of Canada and Alaska, sometimes extending down to other northern states during winter or after a population explosion in their prey. They are also found across northern Eurasia, reaching Siberia at its eastern range. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Their prey includes small rodents (usually voles) snowshoe hares, red squirrels, and a variety of birds. During winter, they prefer to feed on ground-dwelling birds such as grouse and ptarmigans. The Northern Hawk Owl's fortune rises and falls with its prey. During prey population explosions, their numbers can swell to more than 50,000 breeding pairs, but if food is scarce, their numbers dwindle accordingly.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The hunting strategy for the Northern Hawk Owl is to perch on a spruce tree in open forest and scan the immediate area for prey. If nothing is found, they move on to another location. When prey is spotted, the owl attacks by going from a horizontal position into a gliding dive. If the prey is further away, the bird will flap its wings a few times during the dive to make up the extra distance. This owl has superb hearing and can plunge into snow to capture rodents beneath the surface.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The Northern Hawk Owl is one of the least studied birds in North America. They are hard to study because of a low, fluctuating population density and remote breeding locations. This lack of knowledge makes it nearly impossible to accurately estimate the population levels of this species.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Northern Hawk Owl densities are estimated to be at most six pairs per 100 sq km. But because they live throughout the boreal forest, the North American population is thought to be quite large. In North America, over half of their breeding territory occurs in non-commercial boreal forests, so as long as nothing threatens this habitat, the species should be OK even though the populations seems to be declining. Improved monitoring should be a high priority so that we can be more confident in that assessment.</span><br />
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DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-27414588802323320882013-05-13T08:51:00.001-07:002013-05-13T08:53:38.614-07:00Centrifugal vs. Centripetal<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I went to my daughter’s open house at school last Friday and afterwards we played a bit of tether ball before heading home. And while I’m not that great at tether ball, I can explain the forces involved in the game.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Centrifugal force is what is often used to describe what happens to the ball as it rotates around the pole—it’s being pushed as far away from the pole as possible. But in actuality, centrifugal force is a fictitious force. The only force being applied to the ball, pulling it toward the center of rotation, is a centripetal or center-seeking force. There is nothing actually pulling the ball away from the string, what you have is just inertia as described by Newton in his First Law of Motion: An object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by a force and an object in motion remains in motion—at a constant velocity—unless acted upon by a force. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Newton based his first law on the work of Galileo, who described what he called the Law of Inertia: “A body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion continues to move at constant velocity along a straight line unless acted upon by an external force.” Until Galileo, it was thought that one must exert a force in order to keep an object in motion. Galileo recognized that the reason moving bodies eventually come to rest is because of resistance forces such as friction. Without friction, bodies would continue to move at constant velocity. But I digress…</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> So if you were to cut the rope as the ball is rotating what would happen? Some might think that the ball would fly away from the pole, but that’s not correct. The ball would actually move perpendicular to the pole, due to inertia. The centripetal force of the rope works against inertia by keeping the ball from travelling in a straight path. It is this constant struggle against inertia that makes it seem that the ball is trying to move away from the pole. What we call a centrifugal force is actually just the effect of inertia working against the centripetal force. Your welcome.</span><br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="800" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YmItM64Z11YEsj1lhJ6Y-IvOsZe7Zh-gM79GJ3ehT04/viewform?embedded=true" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-85646721357082807992013-05-06T09:32:00.001-07:002013-05-06T18:06:34.814-07:00The Rose of Saturn<br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Recently, NASA release an incredible photo of Saturn’s north pole showing a massive spinning vortex of a storm they dubbed “The Rose”. This false-color image taken by the Cassini spacecraft shows the storm spanning a 2,000 km diameter which, by comparison, is 200 km wider than Hurricane Sandy. Maximum wind speeds of 530 km/h have been calculated—that is some hurricane!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> See how much you know about the ringed planet by answering these ten quiz questions, below. Good luck!</span><br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="1600" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-LNJsnYo4biaNMnDlGWfEcEzRSR81-7cRIElbqV-JoA/viewform?embedded=true" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-6876784948344567382013-04-29T15:38:00.000-07:002013-04-29T16:57:43.913-07:00Asteroids<br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Asteroids have been making quite a few headlines as of late. Recently, we had NASA announcing its intentions to capture and asteroid robotically and bring it back for study by a manned expedition. The ten-year, $2.6 billion project would partner with private companies to capture a 500-ton, near-Earth asteroid that would be bagged, brought back, and placed in a gravitational parking lot known as the Earth-Moon <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point" target="_blank">lagrangian point (L2)</a>. There, a manned outpost could study it and set up a mining station to harvest its resources, especially its trapped water. Considering that it currently costs $10,000 per pound to haul water into orbit, mining it from an asteroid could save a billion dollars at current launch prices. Add to that the ability to use water to create rocket fuel by splitting it into its elemental components hydrogen and oxygen, it's no surprise that water is also called "space gold".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> On February 15, 2013, a meteor exploded over Russia’s Ural mountains in the Chelyabinsk region, injuring about a thousand people, as the shockwave blew out windows and rocked buildings. On that same day, there was a close flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14, which passed within about 27,000 km of Earth which is closer than the orbits of television and weather satellites that surround our planet. The two events were unrelated. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ceres, the largest asteroid <br />and also a dwarf planet.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> In the weeks after these events, there’s been a renewed call for creating an asteroid detection system. As it stands now, all anyone could do if we discovered a large asteroid headed toward New York City or some other large metropolitan area is “pray,” according to NASA chief Charles Bolden. We only know the whereabouts of about 10% of the estimated 10,000 city-killer asteroids. The Chelyabinsk asteroid is the largest to hit Earth since the 1908 Tunguska asteroid exploded over Siberia, leveling 80 million trees over an area of around 2,100 sq km.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The asteroid belt lies between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. Even though there are asteroids in other parts of the solar system, most are found here. About half the mass of the belt is contained in the four biggest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea. These have average diameters of more than 400 km, while Ceres, which is also a dwarf planet, has a diameter of about 950 km. The remaining asteroids are thinly distributed and range all the way down in size to dust particles.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Vesta as imaged by the Dawn spacecraft.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Asteroids are rocky. Because they come from the inner solar system, any ice would have been baked off by the sun long ago. Their orbits are fairly predictable, so with good observations, we can track down the big ones and determine if they’re threats.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> There are more objects beyond Neptune. The Kuiper Belt extends more than 100 times farther from the Sun than Earth. Beyond that is the Oort Cloud which extends 10,000 times farther from the Sun than Earth. These collections of small, icy bodies are remnants from the formation of the solar system. When their orbits are disturbed by other objects they can move into the inner solar system, becoming comets. As they come close to the sun that ice evaporates and creates the comet’s tail. They are less dense than asteroids, and tend to be moving faster by the time they reach the inner solar system. Some comets, like Halley’s comet which returns every 76 years, have predictable, periodic orbits.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Knowing where an object comes from is a good indicator as to whether it is an asteroid or a comet. It’s not all black-and-white—objects from the outer solar system might be rocky and some asteroids do have some ice. But overall this is good way of thinking about them.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="800" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dsK2M_9kmRPg3kfzIDOgD-IW1sB1ugadqiNDzqVg3X0/viewform?embedded=true" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-31947206463052355062013-04-21T14:32:00.001-07:002013-04-21T19:39:46.052-07:00The Wave<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Nbcb25YfimsGhJWj2Nk1zRzgd-Xr77ZZdcye2Gv-1cniEJgLBe0DxRgBNzkLXggqdWWyXLkWRKWDDX9mbqol6HLQdFRp1O7MMr-pNPzskB6NHU6OxMAhoAzlFyEz1OMgvt-iqB5YNvtI/s1600/The_Wave_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Nbcb25YfimsGhJWj2Nk1zRzgd-Xr77ZZdcye2Gv-1cniEJgLBe0DxRgBNzkLXggqdWWyXLkWRKWDDX9mbqol6HLQdFRp1O7MMr-pNPzskB6NHU6OxMAhoAzlFyEz1OMgvt-iqB5YNvtI/s320/The_Wave_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Wave, Arizona</span></td></tr>
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This incredible formation of Navajo Sandstone is stunning in its beauty. Formed during the Jurassic period about 190 million years ago, sand dunes compacted and hardened, with erosion forming the wavelike shapes in the structure over time. Everywhere you look, there are stunningly beautiful formations for hikers and photographer to enjoy. These famous undulating forms can only be reached by a rugged, pathless hike.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi_QyWjXpEbnJlVlggFxvKuSCNUNgfI3RtLcqavZXcxL6ZkA7WOX-_r9F8F4s-5LF2M7y0hXIQcbVaKql2wTT69T_dndrz6PGKTGNj5V2eRptbj6KXyiiADnCZtY2tOsidgmoo5mSiHZfz/s1600/treads_&_risers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="157" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi_QyWjXpEbnJlVlggFxvKuSCNUNgfI3RtLcqavZXcxL6ZkA7WOX-_r9F8F4s-5LF2M7y0hXIQcbVaKql2wTT69T_dndrz6PGKTGNj5V2eRptbj6KXyiiADnCZtY2tOsidgmoo5mSiHZfz/s320/treads_&_risers.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Characteristics of treads and risers cut </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">into Navajo Sandstone at The Wave.</span></td></tr>
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The Wave is located near the Arizona/Utah border on the slopes of the Coyote Buttes. It consists of two intersecting troughs that have eroded into the sandstone. The troughs that make this formation have dimensions of about 19 x 36 meters and 2 x 16 meters. At first, infrequent runoff eroded these troughs along joints within the sandstone. After their formation, the drainage basin which fed water to these troughs shrank to the point where it no longer contributes to the erosion. Now the troughs are mostly eroded by wind which cuts characteristic erosional treads and risers into the sandstone along their steep walls. These treads and risers are oriented relative to the prevailing wind direction as it funnels through the troughs.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4rn7oYT9rtt4LotnxYohsHm2JJlubozZ6BxwK1AGcO2AaRDH5QxmgMvGlEBTnWVXuORclcp0hWNjGSK1K5wWG6_U3y4MALxZjhsR29yYN9FlOPq3DcJ3CZOQB__Dl9n3ZQUI7kSDfn66c/s1600/The_Wave_2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4rn7oYT9rtt4LotnxYohsHm2JJlubozZ6BxwK1AGcO2AaRDH5QxmgMvGlEBTnWVXuORclcp0hWNjGSK1K5wWG6_U3y4MALxZjhsR29yYN9FlOPq3DcJ3CZOQB__Dl9n3ZQUI7kSDfn66c/s320/The_Wave_2.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cross-bedded Navajo Sandstone at The Wave.</span></td></tr>
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The Wave exposes large sets of cross-bedded sandstone which represent periodic changes in the prevailing winds during the Jurassic as huge sand dunes migrated across the desert. The thin ridges and ribs seen in The Wave are the result of the different erosion rates within the Navajo Sandstone. The sandstone is soft and fragile, so hikers needs to walk carefully to avoid damaging the small ridges.</div>
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In places, The Wave exposes deformed layers within the Navajo Sandstone, created before the sand was turned to stone. This deformation likely represents dinosaur tracks and the fossil burrows of desert-dwelling insects.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT_HzzfC9KKsLrXhA1Zxt1B8g1QsyO6bZOn7ChQC6c_ALpVvJ4qLkUzLALDBhRKx3Kztnotn1SiWqPx-PSI9QrFmb24ZgENPRmHRS2x7Yn3EojBlyrv5g2lE-OVgb7ni2_fYCW3M-lX2DP/s1600/The_Wave_Map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT_HzzfC9KKsLrXhA1Zxt1B8g1QsyO6bZOn7ChQC6c_ALpVvJ4qLkUzLALDBhRKx3Kztnotn1SiWqPx-PSI9QrFmb24ZgENPRmHRS2x7Yn3EojBlyrv5g2lE-OVgb7ni2_fYCW3M-lX2DP/s320/The_Wave_Map.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Wave is located near the Utah/Arizona border<br />between Kanab and Lake Powell.</td></tr>
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The Wave is located within the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness and is administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), part of the U.S. Department of the Interior. From Interstate I-15, it's about a 2-1/2 hour drive, passing through Kanab, Utah towards Lake Powell. If you want to visit The Wave, you will need to get a day-use permit. The BLM limits access to the North Coyote Buttes Wilderness to just twenty permits per day—ten in advance through an on-line lottery and ten by walk-in lottery at 9:00 am the day before one's intended hike, held at the visitor center in Kanab.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="304" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/y8UsjSWXWLU" width="540"></iframe>
<iframe frameborder="0" height="800" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17TkJ5EsF4VWXds7b037DdZoQ78knlIuYmGHTvZUGqlI/viewform?embedded=true" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-18038437635628309292013-04-15T11:08:00.000-07:002013-04-15T11:37:20.080-07:00Salar de Uyuni<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUArmRuy2a3B6lVSB0CyIqJXM2BrJa7CZtK7SC05xC9hKfC68AmbtC4HgIWuiwUWULKu13jqdNSius6Nb6GOI08EwYoDlE1EbitwoEWX40ez4-wmFOrIqD0lBoxKoNst_mT3s4GZ4Jmtk-/s1600/NmJx2W6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUArmRuy2a3B6lVSB0CyIqJXM2BrJa7CZtK7SC05xC9hKfC68AmbtC4HgIWuiwUWULKu13jqdNSius6Nb6GOI08EwYoDlE1EbitwoEWX40ez4-wmFOrIqD0lBoxKoNst_mT3s4GZ4Jmtk-/s320/NmJx2W6.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">During the rainy season, Salar de Uyuni <br />
becomes the world's largest mirror.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest salt flat at 10,600 square kilometers—about 100 times larger than the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. It is located in the Andes in southwest Bolivia at an elevation of 3,656 meters, making it the highest salt flats in the world. The salt flat was formed as a result of transformations between several prehistoric lakes. It is covered by a few meters of salt crust, which is extraordinarily flat. The crust serves as a source of salt and covers a pool of brine, which is exceptionally rich in lithium, of which it contains 50-70% of the world's reserves. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiicIp3kTfWfIZOygDXPcae8CmN8H80-qVFEhREjXxHnkeYvv1kEVF2fXhKHauUL3CkgoWxQcbMACQCI8NakTAOK8zse_1j7s0B8qcrMkAfwAqcoGV6ycMXJRNs0BiZQ4y3C5RUACHS8wrm/s1600/800px-Piles_of_Salt_Salar_de_Uyuni_Bolivia_Luca_Galuzzi_2006_a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiicIp3kTfWfIZOygDXPcae8CmN8H80-qVFEhREjXxHnkeYvv1kEVF2fXhKHauUL3CkgoWxQcbMACQCI8NakTAOK8zse_1j7s0B8qcrMkAfwAqcoGV6ycMXJRNs0BiZQ4y3C5RUACHS8wrm/s320/800px-Piles_of_Salt_Salar_de_Uyuni_Bolivia_Luca_Galuzzi_2006_a.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Salar de Uyuni traditional salt harvest: salt is <br />
scraped into small mounds to evaporate the water <br />
for easier transportation.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The salt flat is the remains of an ancient lake from about 40,000 years ago. Because it is surrounded by mountains, there is no drainage outlet and the salt collects on the lake bed as the water evaporates. The salt is scraped away from the surface by locals and piled up into mounds. This helps the water evaporate more quickly so the salt can be transported away. Salar de Uyuni contains about 10 billion tons of salt, and each year 25,000 tons are harvested by a cooperative of miners that share in the profits.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The large area, clear skies and the exceptional flatness of the surface make Salar de Uyuni an ideal place to use to calibrate satellite altimeters. It is the major transportation route across the Bolivian Altiplano and is a major breeding ground for several species of pink flamingos. Salar de Uyuni is a climate transition zone, for towering clouds that form in the eastern part of the salt flat during the summer cannot penetrate beyond its drier western edges, near the Chilean border and the Atacama Desert.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> During the rainy season the water creates the world's largest mirror which must be seen to be believed. You can see the sky and clouds under your feet and feel like you're walking on them. Even though it is quite remote, many photographers and tourists take amazing photos at Salar de Uyuni.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> There is currently a political battle going on over the lithium resource that Salar de Uyuni hold. The Bolivian government is not willing to simply export the raw materials needed for the ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries used for electric vehicles, iPhones and other consumer electronics—they want to manufacture locally as well as protect the salt flats from damage. Bolivia is aiming to become the Saudi Arabia of lithium production and they are being courted by conglomerates such as Mitsubishi and Sumitomo who believe that the next wave of automobile batteries must come from Salar de Uyuni. Meanwhile, due to political uncertainty and poor relations with the Bolivian government, the U.S. is sitting on the sidelines.</span><br />
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DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-27137171616970657082013-04-01T10:40:00.000-07:002013-04-01T11:03:49.910-07:00The Passenger Pigeon<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_jtRoLyrI517L1mC0e2vZ1ht0Q_ayBB79L4dcLVIMG0T4Ob2qavufVXd5gFaY1JmKzVHb2pzcuHxP2DLjrlCiw1m_tajA3y9zk5kthwSwrSmdIiQwyYh44eNzN0kS3NfPs4TtWr8f5L9k/s1600/Martha_last_passenger_pigeon_1914.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_jtRoLyrI517L1mC0e2vZ1ht0Q_ayBB79L4dcLVIMG0T4Ob2qavufVXd5gFaY1JmKzVHb2pzcuHxP2DLjrlCiw1m_tajA3y9zk5kthwSwrSmdIiQwyYh44eNzN0kS3NfPs4TtWr8f5L9k/s1600/Martha_last_passenger_pigeon_1914.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Martha, the last passenger pigeon before her death <br />
in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.</td></tr>
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How the most abundant bird in North America went extinct is a story of mass slaughter on a scale even greater than that of the bison. It has been nearly a century since we lost the passenger pigeon, and it remains an example of nature's abundance and humanity's ability to exhaust it.<br />
Early Europeans in North America often commented on the vast numbers of blue and orange, long-tailed, graceful and fast pigeons in the country. One of the first Virginia settlers wrote "There are wild pigeons in winter beyond number or imagination, myself have seen three or four hours together flocks in the air, so thick that they shadowed the sky from us."<br />
As late as 1854, a New York resident wrote that "There would be days and days when the air was alive with them, hardly a break occurring in the flocks for half a day at a time. Flocks stretched as far as a person could see, one tier above another." Other reports describe flocks a mile wide flying overhead for four or five hours at a time during their migration to their breeding areas. The flocks were packed so thickly that 30 or 40 birds could be brought down with one shot and many were killed simply by hitting them with sticks as they flew over hilltops.<br />
Passenger pigeons bred in large colonies, with up to 100 nests in a single tree. Branches broke and whole trees collapsed by the sheer weight of roosting birds. Nesting colonies could cover many hundred of square kilometers of forest. Nests were made of small twigs loosely packed. Usually, one egg was laid and tended to by both parents up until about two weeks after it hatched. Then the chick would be abandoned, still unable to fly. The whole flock would leave, and the chicks would drop to the ground. After a few days, the chicks would begin to fly and take care of themselves.<br />
The best guess to the peak number of passenger pigeons in North America is about 5 billion individuals, or about the same amount as the total number of birds found today in the U.S. One reason the passenger pigeon existed in such large numbers was the lack of natural predators apart from eagles and hawks. They were, however, surprisingly vulnerable to humans. Their habit of nesting in vast colonies and migrating in huge flocks made them very easy to attack. The birds fed mainly on acorns, chestnuts and beech nuts in the woodlands of North America, so as these forests were steadily harvested, the passenger pigeon was left with shrinking habitat and food supplies. The Indians captured the pigeons in large nets and by the 1630s the settlers of New England were doing the same. The young squabs were considered a great delicacy and they were hunted for their feathers as well.<br />
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For the first 200 years after the Europeans arrived, the number of pigeons did not decline much, but after 1830 the practice of using live pigeons for trap shooting began. One resident in Dubuque, Iowa, netted as many as 1,500 birds in one morning and sold them alive for ten cents each for trapshooting. The crippled birds were killed and sold by the barrel, which went for a dollar on the market in Chicago. About 250,000 a year were being killed this way by the 1870s.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQSax4SQCRgK31Tcoe_L09QK0saspiksxjATJ-1tmfh61wCM767EeKQAin6DnYU9MJZ2vW437ciX4gZUYhvePgrqdTRcMHu8GtQm0aj_jSBv9LZPHJvmlhY_tCRgYW_n0vd96ZDJMPmhA3/s1600/passenger-pigeon-jph-490_114021_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQSax4SQCRgK31Tcoe_L09QK0saspiksxjATJ-1tmfh61wCM767EeKQAin6DnYU9MJZ2vW437ciX4gZUYhvePgrqdTRcMHu8GtQm0aj_jSBv9LZPHJvmlhY_tCRgYW_n0vd96ZDJMPmhA3/s1600/passenger-pigeon-jph-490_114021_1.jpg" /></a></div>
The population had been reduced by the 1850s but was still several billion strong. The real onslaught began with the onset of large-scale commercial hunting carried out by well-organized trappers and shippers in order to supply cities on the east coast with a cheap source of meat. It began once railways linked the Great Lakes area with New York in the early 1850s. With the coming of the telegraph, the locations of flocks could be determined, and the birds were relentlessly hunted. By 1855 300,000 pigeons a year were being sent to New York alone. The worst of the mass slaughter took place during the 1860s and 1870s. The scale of the operation was incredible, yet perfectly legal and very profitable. In 1869, Van Buren County, Michigan, sent 7,500,000 birds to the east. But by 1880, numbers had been severely reduced, and a total of "only" 500,000 birds were shipped east from Michigan.<br />
The last nesting birds were reported in the Great Lakes region in the 1890s and by 1900, they were all gone. Some remained in captivity, but it was just a matter of time. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. Who could have dreamed that in such short order a species that was once the most numerous bird on Earth would be gone forever? John James Audubon wrote this about the passenger pigeon: "When an individual is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone." How many more species will some day only exist as stuffed specimens in museums?<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="800" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vkFVmX5MLe412N3KC6ZzX5U80seSg9h6ezyxVUlq8pM/viewform?embedded=true" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-30631797856435405072013-03-18T09:17:00.000-07:002013-03-18T11:53:52.369-07:00Jurassic Park 4<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfsKD6e9O1fCI_UliR0FpX7QaqPnXX5G9dFQJGhPhqiFdQrB2wwidHIKrGWG3aDHRp99FP4ZCGvTqM5TURA3Ue75TDIjYvb_ATtDLTDectFTSsibTQlyrdINFvGGOjkvigKp6zuCbKIMzR/s1600/Deinonychus_im_NHM_Wien.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfsKD6e9O1fCI_UliR0FpX7QaqPnXX5G9dFQJGhPhqiFdQrB2wwidHIKrGWG3aDHRp99FP4ZCGvTqM5TURA3Ue75TDIjYvb_ATtDLTDectFTSsibTQlyrdINFvGGOjkvigKp6zuCbKIMzR/s320/Deinonychus_im_NHM_Wien.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our best guess at what Deinonychus looked like.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Jurassic Park 4 is scheduled to hit theaters on June 13, 2014, so this might be a good time to have a little heart-to-heart discussion with Mr. Spielberg on a few technical details. It’s been 20 years now since Jurassic Park first came out in theaters and paleontologists have learned a great deal since then. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Even though the appearance and behavior of dinosaurs is largely speculation, there are a few things that could be updated. From preserved specimens showing quill knobs, we know that Velociraptor had feathers, probably colored black, white and rust brown. And based on their size, those dinosaurs should be called Deinonychus.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Crichton’s central idea was that the amber which preserved the mosquito also preserved the dinosaur blood from contaminants and harm—a simple idea which made for a compelling story. But there are definitely issues with this. You can’t get dinosaur DNA from a dead mosquito trapped in amber. After sitting in a chunk of resin for millions of years there is going to be mixing of the mosquito’s DNA and the DNA of whatever it fed on and anything else trapped in the amber. Even if it could be done, there’s no way of knowing what kind of animal a mosquito had bitten. How many would Hammond have to go through before finding one that had actually bitten a dinosaur? Not to mention how would extinct plants get cloned since mosquitoes don’t eat plants.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPXJLRQghOjEV_8EuRm6-x-QbO0-Dj1C6X6TjZNr0NulOyHhajfzNYWdZhvVmwsaE9SUlHYq0cI9s8XAbH6ihRlmY2acvuwttH7nGDQTfisaCQ42Jds3xxFSUrLHP4VnljuPaCIesMOJkx/s1600/21782741.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPXJLRQghOjEV_8EuRm6-x-QbO0-Dj1C6X6TjZNr0NulOyHhajfzNYWdZhvVmwsaE9SUlHYq0cI9s8XAbH6ihRlmY2acvuwttH7nGDQTfisaCQ42Jds3xxFSUrLHP4VnljuPaCIesMOJkx/s400/21782741.jpeg" width="173" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A 70-million-year-old T. rex <br />
fossil has yielded soft tissue.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> There’s a better way. One of the biggest developments in paleontological research in the last two decades has been the discovery of soft tissues preserved in fossil bone interiors. These bones come from the badlands, and are excavated using sterile field techniques and without protective polymers and glues to keep contaminants from entering the bone interiors. The fossils are then taken back to a lab where the mineral components are dissolved in baths. If the dinosaur bones were truly permineralized then the entire fossil would basically dissolve in solution. But that didn’t happen when the first lab tests of this kind were conducted back in the early 2000s. After the mineral components had dissolved away, there was spongy, squishy, soft stuff left over. Paleontologists had discovered bits of tissue, blood remnants and marrow from their samples. This was absolutely unheard of when Crichton wrote Jurassic Park. Even though it’s not yet possible to retrieve 70 million year old DNA, this method is much closer to reality than sucking out dinosaur blood from a fossilized mosquito. If you want a park with a triceratops in it, just head out to the Badlands, find some triceratops bones, and mine them for their soft tissues.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The other big change for Jurassic Park would have to be the DNA gap-filling. No more frog DNA. They would need to use bird DNA, preferably a more primitive species like an emu or ostrich. There has been a lot of genetic work done on chickens lately, so chicken DNA might work as well because we know so much about it. In a movie, it would not be much of a stretch to say that we have control over the chicken genome, and thus could reduce it back to a stem state, where the combination of the dinosaur DNA with the trimmed chicken genome lets you build a dinosaur.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Not only could you clone dinosaurs with the soft tissue story line, but marine dinosaurs, too. Giant ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs—there was plenty of scary stuff in the ancient seas. For the purpose of a movie, anything that’s fossilized could be fair game. There are plenty of big, scary extinct animals to choose from...</span><br />
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DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-387884633737549662013-03-11T04:02:00.002-07:002013-03-11T09:09:51.961-07:00The Golden Tortoise Beetle<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK2kl6BPs1mY2Dx3-kYqxi95K1UY5aEUh6WVoZrG8eJxpDzWMqr0xciNxYBh6WG41XMPf5nHkWV1-K6eBs7Feeq17v6G57jYTWOUzQm-u9dlfeZjYf9v1CCLYzpKghi_EdaALPgLVpIuRy/s1600/6F7JytV.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK2kl6BPs1mY2Dx3-kYqxi95K1UY5aEUh6WVoZrG8eJxpDzWMqr0xciNxYBh6WG41XMPf5nHkWV1-K6eBs7Feeq17v6G57jYTWOUzQm-u9dlfeZjYf9v1CCLYzpKghi_EdaALPgLVpIuRy/s320/6F7JytV.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Golden Tortoise Beetle (Charidotella sexpunctata)</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The golden tortoise beetle is a common North American beetles that lives on and eats morning glory leaves. They can also be found on sweet potatoes which belong to the morning glory family. Both larvae and adults feed on foliage of which they make many small- to medium-sized irregular holes. Rarely are tortoise beetles numerous enough to be considered damaging to the host plants.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> In spring and summer, the beetle earns its name by turning the color of brilliant liquid gold. The color is produced by an optical illusion—the outer cuticle is transparent and reflects light through a layer of liquid over the next layer of cuticle. The beetles change color depending on the availability of the liquid layer which they control through microscopic valves under their shell. In the fall and winter, the beetles become less lustrous and are more orange and bronze often with black spots similar in appearance to ladybugs. If you try and add the beetle to an insect collection, it quickly turns dark brown as is dries, and looses its golden color. The beetle is most beautiful while alive.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The larvae hatch out in late May and June and are just as interesting as the adults, but in a much different way. The young larvae are surrounded by many small protuberances giving them a spiny appearance. As the larvae molts, it keeps its old skin attached to a fork-like structure hinged to its rear end. The larvae will add its own feces to the old shell to create a type of shield which it can use for defense. When they are disturbed by another insect or predator, they flip the shield up in the direction of the disturbance. This "poo protector" is an unappetizing and effective deterrent against potential predators looking for a meal!</span><br />
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DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-58915653361805241562013-03-04T09:12:00.003-08:002013-03-04T09:14:03.038-08:00All Eyes on ISON<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) shares many of the same <br />
characteristics as the Great Comet of 1680.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Be sure to keep tabs on comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), which is hurling toward a close approach with the sun this fall. Even though ISON is still a long way away, located just inside Jupiter’s orbit, it has already formed a tail of gas and dust stretching 90,000 km.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> This is thought to be the comet’s first pass into the inner solar system and promises to provide us with a spectacular show between November 2013 and January 2014 after it has its close encounter with the Sun.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> C/2012 S1 was discovered in September 2012 by two amateur astronomers using the International Scientific Optical Network in Russia, hence the nickname ISON has been adopted by the media.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> ISON has been recently observed by NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft. Deep Impact, which was launched in January 2005, was originally used to study comet Tempel 1 by hitting the comet with a small metal probe then doing a close flyby to study the debris it kicked up. In 2010, Deep Impact flew past comet Hartley 2 and is now on its way to a January 2020 visit to a near-Earth asteroid that is large enough and close enough to us to be classified as a potentially hazardous object (PHO) by NASA.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> C/2012 S1 will be well placed for observers in the northern hemisphere during the last two weeks in December 2013. Some speculate that if it does not break up as it reaches perihelion it could become brighter than the moon at its peak, but many sungrazing comets do not survive the encounter. It has been calculated that as it nears the Sun it will reach a peak temperature or 2,700°C, hot enough to melt iron. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> ISON’s orbital path is similar to that of the Great Comet of 1680, another sungrazer that is also known as Newton’s Comet because Isaac Newton used it to verify Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Newton’s Comet was one of the brightest comets of the 17th century. It was noted for its extremely long tail and at its peak it was bright enough to be seen during the day. Time will tell if ISON will someday be known as the Great Comet of 2013.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxOHWCe7KD-VS-TYsgXgK8Sa8qKAghVaw5t0M5ZklWVZflSgymHXQc25UMhtAlfbRe5ziLFsr7ZPZRwm1INg9RJTR3nmiqe9KLoyStzHAXrZ3wV_oasFI2VCRxg93fu-NSs__2D7gN2a3f/s1600/cluster2-fast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxOHWCe7KD-VS-TYsgXgK8Sa8qKAghVaw5t0M5ZklWVZflSgymHXQc25UMhtAlfbRe5ziLFsr7ZPZRwm1INg9RJTR3nmiqe9KLoyStzHAXrZ3wV_oasFI2VCRxg93fu-NSs__2D7gN2a3f/s1600/cluster2-fast.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of the two Fly's Eye Cosmic Ray Detectors.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Oh-My-God particle was an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray—most likely a proton—detected on October, 1991 in the skies over western Utah. Its observation by the University of Utah's Fly's Eye Cosmic Ray Detector was a shock to astrophysicists, who estimated its energy to be approximately 50 J. In other words, a subatomic particle with kinetic energy equal to that of a baseball traveling at about 90 kilometers per hour.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The particle was traveling at almost the speed of light. Assuming it was a proton, its speed was only about 1.5 quadrillionth of a meter per second less than the speed of light. In other words, if it were in a race with a beam of light, the Oh-My-God particle would fall behind only one centimeter every 220,000 years.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The energy of this particle is some 40 million times that of the highest energy protons that have been produced by the Large Hadron Collider. However, only a small part of this energy would be available for an interaction with another proton or neutron. Most of the energy would remain as kinetic energy. The effective energy available for such an interaction is still 50 times greater than the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Applying special relativity to such a fast particle yields some incredible results. Time passes more slowly as velocity increases, and for anyone hypothetically travelling on the back of this particle time would nearly stop. For example, a trip to the Andromeda Galaxy, which is more than two million light years away, would have a perceived travel time of only three and a half minutes. Special relativity also tells us that there is a length contraction in the direction of motion. If the Earth were somehow able to match the speed of the Oh-My-God particle, it would pancake down to a thickness of less than four hundredths of a millimeter!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The University of Utah experiment relied on two telescopes searching the sky for the characteristic flashes of ultraviolet light that are produced when a cosmic ray collides with a molecule in Earth’s atmosphere and creates a shower of secondary particles. The two telescopes were covered in photomultiplier tubes and looked like the compound eyes of a fly. By capturing almost all the light in the shower, they were able to make a good measurement of the particle’s energy.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> These ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are very rare. Since the first observation, only about fifteen similar events have been recorded to confirm the phenomenon. What cosmic process transforms an ordinary particle into an Oh-My-God particle? A supernova or supermassive black hole might explain it, but when astronomers followed the impact track back to its source they found nothing unusual in that direction.</span><br />
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DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-74537802594983191302013-02-11T09:53:00.000-08:002013-02-11T11:10:56.150-08:00The Water Bear<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The tardigrade is also known as the water bear.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A polyextremophile is an organism that can survive many types of extreme environments. One of the most complex polyextremophiles is the tardigrade, which can live in just about every environment possible here on earth, plus some not on Earth (more on that later). Tardigrades are about a millimeter long when fully grown. They are short and plump with eight tubular legs, each with 4-8 bear-like claws. Given that they also move like a lumbering bear, tardigrades have earned the nickname water bear.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Tardigrades typically live in marine, fresh water, or semiaquatic environments, but you can also find them in the mosses and lichens found in forested areas. As long as there is some water around, they can thrive. They feed on the fluids found in plant and animal cells. Their mouth is able to pierce the cell walls so that they can then suck out and ingest the inner parts of the cell. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Tardigrades can survive being completely desiccated for nearly 10 years as well as exposure to high levels of chemical toxins. They can survive extreme heat (150 °C) for a few minutes and extreme cold (-200 °C) for a few day. When exposed to extreme cold their body composition changes from 85% water to only 3% which keeps their body from being damaged by ice crystal formation. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The can survive extreme pressures far greater than that found at the Mariana trench. In 2007, tardigrades were sent into space on the Russian/EU satellite Foton-M3 for ten days. Even after being exposed to the <a href="http://weeklysciencequiz.blogspot.com/2013/02/dangers-of-vacuum_4.html" target="_blank">vacuum of space</a> for this long, most of the samples survived after being rehydrated back on Earth, some of which had also been fully exposed to the Sun’s radiation. Tardigrades were also sent into space on the final flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour where experiments showed that cosmic radiation and microgravity did not significantly affect their survival, confirming their usefulness in space research.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> You’re probably wondering just how these creatures could be so resilient. They rely on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptobiosis" target="_blank">cryptobiosis</a>—a state of suspended animation that they can enter in response to adverse environmental conditions where all metabolic processes stop. Their bodies dehydrate into a dense, mummified disc called a tun. They can remain in this state indefinitely until their environment becomes hospitable once again. When this happens, the tun plumps back up and the tardigrade return to its previous metabolic state.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The vacuum chamber that Jim LeBlanc was in <br />
when his spacesuit lost all pressure.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Recently, a reader asked “What happens to the human body in a vacuum? For example, if an astronaut removed his space suit.”</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> This reminds me of a scene from the movie <i>2001: A Space Odyssey.</i> In the movie, HAL has figured out that Dave is planning to disconnect him when he returns to the ship, so he refuses to let Dave back in. Dave is forced to go in through the unpressurized emergency airlock, but there’s a problem: he doesn’t have his space helmet. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Terrifying, but Kubrick got the science right. Short-term exposure to the vacuum of space would not make your body explode or freeze solid as some movies have depicted. If you don’t try to hold your breath, exposure to space for about 15 seconds would cause no permanent injury. Holding your breath would be bad, though, because in a vacuum your lungs collect gas from your bloodstream and expands with the drop in pressure. Holding your breath would cause your lungs to overinflate and possibly rupture. This is similar to how scuba divers need to exhale when rising to the surface or risk damaging their lungs. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Temperature would not be an immediate problem because although space is very cold, a vacuum is a perfect insulator. You would only gradually radiate away your body heat. Exposure to direct sunlight would give you a sunburn. Your saliva and tears would quickly evaporate and you might have eardrum troubles.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> After about 15 seconds, oxygen-deprived blood from the lungs reaches the brain causing you to lose consciousness. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> At such low pressures, your body fluids will boil away. Moist surfaces such as the eyes, mouth and airways experience this immediately. Fluids inside your body also start to vaporize. This happens rapidly in the lungs and under the skin. Bubbles of water vapor that form in the bloodstream will interrupt the circulation. This is called ebullism. No one knows how long the human body can withstand the vacuum of space—perhaps a couple of minutes. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> In 1965, this actually happened to Jim LeBlanc while working at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center (now called the Johnson Space Center). He was testing a space suit in their vacuum chamber when the tube that was pressurizing his suite came loose and his suit was almost completely depressurized within seconds. He stayed conscious for about 14 seconds and they began repressurizing the chamber right after he passed out. After regaining consciousness, he recalled that he could hear and feel the air leaking out of his suit, and the last thing he remembered was the saliva on his tongue starting to boil.</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="304" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/KO8L9tKR4CY" width="540"></iframe>
<iframe frameborder="0" height="900" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1JUqeg4wXDlgoB_UpCPHt5Nc0fkEqQfRE4rgX4k1usJ4/viewform?embedded=true" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-75220819418461547602013-01-29T12:21:00.003-08:002013-01-29T12:27:47.439-08:00Violet Skies Are for the Birds<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFJx3i5gOq4Ryv13Ls49tgL4FC3uExQvXXOFxaP_-lAEWSgg851aSU5wFlXYZ2q5I6mXvXoUCEKaGGGePstZPU_QZkD6p2f-WrrmPoHsZtUfNUyMayuxHHEgfTWDpddP2PwERvDST1XR__/s1600/sunflower-clouds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFJx3i5gOq4Ryv13Ls49tgL4FC3uExQvXXOFxaP_-lAEWSgg851aSU5wFlXYZ2q5I6mXvXoUCEKaGGGePstZPU_QZkD6p2f-WrrmPoHsZtUfNUyMayuxHHEgfTWDpddP2PwERvDST1XR__/s320/sunflower-clouds.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I love the XKCD webcomic, especially when it features a science-related theme. <a href="http://xkcd.com/1145/" target="_blank">Comic number 1145</a> poses the question “Why isn’t the sky violet?” which I will attempt to answer this week. But first we need to understand why the sky is blue: it’s because of Rayleigh scattering.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Rayleigh scattering (named after the British scientist Lord Rayleigh) occurs when sunlight passes through the atmosphere and is scattered by air molecules. The light from the sun is a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow, each with its own characteristic wavelength. Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated this nearly 350 years ago by using a prism to separate white light into its different spectral colors.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmAr6tXa93VBYe-AIa_B54pKkTbMuAPU_HeSGD1dG03Qa6LEtFws_v9tzW1t5Qq9wTFNI-RSiTIHDbec3w-WZwF0wQl6xnJbQl0YoMnpEOqssbY5pjmN5IZifuuTgqDoQ4IXWsClwx3wMy/s1600/rayleigh_scattering.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmAr6tXa93VBYe-AIa_B54pKkTbMuAPU_HeSGD1dG03Qa6LEtFws_v9tzW1t5Qq9wTFNI-RSiTIHDbec3w-WZwF0wQl6xnJbQl0YoMnpEOqssbY5pjmN5IZifuuTgqDoQ4IXWsClwx3wMy/s320/rayleigh_scattering.jpg" width="245" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Rayleigh scattering:</b> blue light is scattered <br />
more strongly than red light as it passes <br />
through the atmosphere and is why the sky <br />
is blue during the day.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The amount of scattering is inversely proportionate to the fourth power of the light’s wavelength. That means that the shorter-wavelength components of sunlight (blue and violet) are about ten times more strongly scattered than the longer-wavelength components at the red end of the visible spectrum. Rayleigh scattering is responsible for the blue color of the sky during the day and the orange color during sunrise and sunset. It’s also the reason that the sun itself is yellow when overhead and red at sunrise and sunset.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Now back to the original question: since violet light has an even shorter wavelength than blue light, why does the sky appear blue instead of violet? </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> First, the sun produces a lot more blue light than violet light. The Sun’s spectral peak is in the green range and as the wavelength decreases from blue to violet there is a steep drop-off in intensity.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmXJjU9t4uMglgqUQqXXMdm_4Y-VkdHv1VYmrCLQl_UIslNfoawKh6R4aX7Cs9lF7YJGEA9HgT8OOLstKj77nBwqAmkmybtMdD8Xdz9Rc2MbjeNd9QC3jwLGYcVMY-Y7UaPAkj0GPEsj_o/s1600/sun_and_vision.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmXJjU9t4uMglgqUQqXXMdm_4Y-VkdHv1VYmrCLQl_UIslNfoawKh6R4aX7Cs9lF7YJGEA9HgT8OOLstKj77nBwqAmkmybtMdD8Xdz9Rc2MbjeNd9QC3jwLGYcVMY-Y7UaPAkj0GPEsj_o/s1600/sun_and_vision.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Solar emission intensity compared to human cone cell responsivity. Both are shown <br />
as a function of wavelength.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Second and more importantly, even though blue and violet both have short wavelengths, our eyes don’t see violet as well as blue. We have three types of color receptors in our retina, called cone cells. There are short-, medium- and long-wavelength cone cells that respond most strongly to blue, green and red light, respectively. Cone cells are stimulated in different proportions and our brain uses this information to construct the colors we see. Across the visible spectrum, it turns out that blue provides the maximum responsivity.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKluf-szcBKgweT5SR1CTlUuvX5oI8eTptCK4YxRr5ScaOvIyFg5wQKK3mfS5xu0l5CyK3XXCqv8_55kbqRvRbZxTsHdaGWvjVJmqSjs0pUcjE9zOc4QZaW1Vu0cy1dK9qV3fZTIW9OpsB/s1600/red+green.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKluf-szcBKgweT5SR1CTlUuvX5oI8eTptCK4YxRr5ScaOvIyFg5wQKK3mfS5xu0l5CyK3XXCqv8_55kbqRvRbZxTsHdaGWvjVJmqSjs0pUcjE9zOc4QZaW1Vu0cy1dK9qV3fZTIW9OpsB/s1600/red+green.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This image demonstrates how <br />
yellow light can be perceived <br />
as a mixture of red and green <br />
light. Take a few step back from<br />
the monitor to see the effect.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Since the cone cells are sensitive over broad, overlapping ranges of wavelengths, many colors can be seen by mixing other colors. Take yellow for example. There’s a good reason why caution signs are yellow—yellow light lies right between green and red on the spectrum and causes a large response in both the medium- and long-wavelength cone cells. Regardless of whether you see pure yellow or a mixture of red and green, your eyes can’t tell the difference. When two colors can be created with different spectral distributions they are called metamers. In this same way, the sky’s combination of violet and blue triggers the same cone response as pure blue plus white light, which yields the pale blue color that we see.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> It’s no coincidence that we see things the way we do. Human evolution is shaped by our environment—the ability to separate the colors around us provides an evolutionary advantage. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Even though humans don’t see violet in the sky, some birds might because they have an extra type of cone cell that extends their color vision into the ultraviolet range. The male Blue Grosbeak appears mostly blue to humans but has plumage shifted to the UV range that he uses to his advantage during courtship. The Common Kestrel uses its UV-enhanced vision to find voles by following their scent trail which reflects UV light, making it visible to this clever hunter. So maybe violet skies are for the birds.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="945" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dERFM3dlTjRPbEVtc1JROTlIRWFkalE6MQ" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-37279929920339045072013-01-21T21:03:00.000-08:002013-01-21T21:11:20.039-08:00Big Brains<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIDxDjWxQOKnxpXeHvWkPwV7gRLfyiJfnuE-BwLVu3omUpL_2GecL4RVJe9ooFBy8S89-y5J90i65-oCLXiRhpMc22Od58kR9KwzW4rYCLtxbRq-cLZoZyflxfxW9LsdYOjrHH4ymDbXwT/s1600/galapagos.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIDxDjWxQOKnxpXeHvWkPwV7gRLfyiJfnuE-BwLVu3omUpL_2GecL4RVJe9ooFBy8S89-y5J90i65-oCLXiRhpMc22Od58kR9KwzW4rYCLtxbRq-cLZoZyflxfxW9LsdYOjrHH4ymDbXwT/s400/galapagos.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>
There’s probably no single event more significant in the history of human evolution than the harnessing of fire. Many species make and use tools, but only humans control fire. Fire provided early humans a means to protect themselves from predators. Fire provided humans with warmth and light, and expanded productivity into the night. Socializing around a campfire may have been an essential part of human development.<br />
Perhaps the biggest benefit of fire was for cooking. Cooking food provided better nutrition and made food safer to eat. Cooked meat was easier to digest because less energy was spent digesting the tougher proteins and connective tissues.<br />
Cooking plants that contained starches made the complex carbohydrates they contained more digestible so that more energy could be absorbed from them. The human digestive system has evolved after we started eating cooked foods: our teeth, jaws and digestive tract have all gotten smaller, allowing our developing brain to have a greater share of the food energy taken in. Eating cooked food helped provide the extra energy required to support a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.<br />
The earliest known evidence for the controlled use of fire comes in the form of ash and charred bone excavated from a South African cave that is known from previous digs to have been occupied by early man. These materials were found alongside stone tools in a layer dating back about a million years.<br />
Although modern humans are the only human species alive today, originating about 200,000 years ago, other human species once roamed the Earth, such as <i>Homo erectus,</i> which arose about 1.9 million years ago.<br />
Some anthropologists think that Homo erectus was cooking as far back as 1.9 million years ago and was the reason that they experienced major brain expansion at that time. Others think that brains got bigger just by the introduction of meat into their diets and that while there was the opportunistic use of natural fire, it was not until about 300,000 to 400,000 years ago that early humans fully mastered the use of fire.<br />
One thing is certain—our brains have tripled in size over that last two million years. But evolution doesn’t say anything about whether larger brains are good or bad, just that it happened. Author Kurt Vonnegut believes that our brains have over-evolved: “Our brains are much too large. We are much too busy. Our brains have proved to be terribly destructive.”<br />
Vonnegut explored this theory in his 1985 book <i>Galapagos</i> where our big brains have brought civilization to the brink of destruction. The last humans ironically survive because they get stranded and isolated on the Galapagos Islands made famous by Charles Darwin. They spend the next million years de-evolving.<br />
As evidence for his theory, Vonnegut says that big brains invented nuclear weapons and the Third Reich. Even Einstein noted that “He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice,” indicating his belief that war is a huge step backwards in human evolution. And while I’m more optimistic, I didn’t witness the bombing of Dresden firsthand as did Vonnegut, nor did I have to flee my home and country out of fear for my life as did Einstein. Food for thought…<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="832" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dDdLem5oYVpBQ2hfZ1I2bXMyRXA2elE6MQ" width="540">Loading...</iframe>
DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-11112626749355123122013-01-14T07:00:00.003-08:002013-01-14T07:06:27.917-08:00Dark Lightning<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfePQaFp2MUTSa__E7KFtNUqXmIYoe9KWu4p3osCL3StlI7xqy1YqtG0PXjmgJg9LIYOrOT1NKO4KBfMlfilqR284ZeTP4AjHCXwxULJj7nORcmIqYR5nHhR-rB2sde3w5xfEStJnKo1nz/s1600/Dark_Lightning.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfePQaFp2MUTSa__E7KFtNUqXmIYoe9KWu4p3osCL3StlI7xqy1YqtG0PXjmgJg9LIYOrOT1NKO4KBfMlfilqR284ZeTP4AjHCXwxULJj7nORcmIqYR5nHhR-rB2sde3w5xfEStJnKo1nz/s320/Dark_Lightning.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Artist’s conception of the Earth’s magnetic field (in pink) <br />
funneling positrons (in yellow) and sending them to the Fermi<br />
Gamma-ray Space Telescope where they were observed.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an Earth-orbiting space observatory that is being used to perform high-energy gamma-ray astronomy. Launched in June of 2008, this telescope is probing the cosmos for gamma rays and high-energy events. And while it is finding many sources for these events, such as supernova explosions and distant, supermassive black holes from other galaxies, it has also found an unlikely source closer to home.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> In 2009, the telescope was hit by a stream of high-energy positrons—the antimatter version of electrons—coming from a thunderstorm on Earth. 100 trillion positrons had been funneled into a tight pulse by the Earth’s magnetic field and hurled straight to the observatory at nearly the speed of light. To put that number into perspective, it’s more than what hits the Earth’s atmosphere from all other cosmic sources combined. Somehow, antimatter had been produced in the clouds above Earth and the best theory we have to explain it is dark lightning.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Earth-orbiting satellites have been observing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_gamma-ray_flash" target="_blank">terrestrial gamma ray flashes (TGFs)</a> from thunderstorms as far back as 1994. And it is also known that gamma-rays at the right energy can produce electron-positron pairs.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Normal lightning occurs when unbalanced electrostatic charges in the atmosphere trigger a massive discharge between a cloud and the ground or between two clouds. A light flash traces the path of the charged particles which heat the air to 30,000°C, nearly six times hotter than the surface of the Sun. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-3Qj9gnElXrGFsWY2FLiDNc56plozN3iouZUCiNx9KrsUEVlK1moWD56a-K_W6pHK-Jhbu4T1sK55scEP4gHnhtLuVIqB8Oq5G0DTKZwnU7vlbUnAHSmqamRDTIuvu9ewjuexyd7oDFpV/s1600/500px-Feynman_diagram_for_Pair_Production.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-3Qj9gnElXrGFsWY2FLiDNc56plozN3iouZUCiNx9KrsUEVlK1moWD56a-K_W6pHK-Jhbu4T1sK55scEP4gHnhtLuVIqB8Oq5G0DTKZwnU7vlbUnAHSmqamRDTIuvu9ewjuexyd7oDFpV/s320/500px-Feynman_diagram_for_Pair_Production.svg.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Feynman diagram for a gamma ray photon <br />
decaying into an electron-positron pair.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Dark lighting may seem crazy, but there is mounting evidence that it’s real. Like ordinary lightning, dark lightning also tries to neutralize the unbalanced electric fields in a thunderstorm. Under the right conditions, the thunderstorm creates a powerful avalanche of electrons shooting away from Earth at nearly the speed of light. The electrons collide with air molecules in the atmosphere to produce gamma rays. Next, the gamma ray energy transforms into electron-positron particle pairs. Further collisions between these particles and other air molecules creates a repeating cycle—a self-generating, self-sustaining particle accelerator. Once the loop gets started, it can discharge the thundercloud as fast as lightning. And because the cascading electrons and positrons generate more gamma rays than visible light, the process is practically invisible to the human eye. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Researchers once thought the gamma ray flashes from thunderstorms were a weird by-product of ordinary lightning. Now many think it is dark lightning instead. The gamma ray burst monitor onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is perfectly suited to record these flashes and new data processing techniques have improved the burst monitor’s performance. In mid-2010, a testing a mode was initiated which allows for the detection of faint gamma ray flashes that had previously gone undetected. Now Fermi should be able to catch nearly 1,000 flashes each year. With an abundance of new data, researches hope to gain new insights on the mysteries of dark lightning.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="716" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dHlnZy1Sal9MZXpQcHlyNnFIVlZ5VVE6MQ" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-17815566345696444402013-01-07T10:01:00.001-08:002013-01-07T10:48:28.404-08:00A Hundred Authors Against Einstein<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1rDylG9fVtU2-TS-XC9MTzuDtFI-73UsC74cLo4mdctQtg1QuH8bnid-oSBtfc7-1KfDb-tb66HlnlSQG2g5E3l8LpaHbBxlZaQiCckc2Xipm2lV6y_Tj-Ca5cwVKkKeOg_NbV03pKhPl/s1600/gegen_einstein.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1rDylG9fVtU2-TS-XC9MTzuDtFI-73UsC74cLo4mdctQtg1QuH8bnid-oSBtfc7-1KfDb-tb66HlnlSQG2g5E3l8LpaHbBxlZaQiCckc2Xipm2lV6y_Tj-Ca5cwVKkKeOg_NbV03pKhPl/s320/gegen_einstein.jpg" width="258" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The book “Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein” <br />
(A Hundred Authors Against Einstein) was<br />
published in 1931.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The old adage “there is strength in numbers” is not always true, especially when it comes to science. Science is not advanced through polls or consensus. Observation and experimental evidence is what matters. Thankfully, being in the minority does not necessarily mean one is wrong.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Case in point: The book <i>Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein (A Hundred Authors Against Einstein),</i> a collection of various criticisms of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Published in 1931, it contains short essays from 28 authors, and published excerpts from 19 more. The balance was a list of 53 people who were also opposed to relativity for various reasons.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The book was not a reaction against Einstein from the physics community—only one physicist had contributed. Nor was it supported by the younger generation—only two of the contributors were much younger than Einstein. It was a dying cry from the old guard of science that felt left behind by the new physics and incompetent because they didn’t know what to do with it. Before Einstein published his work, Newton’s theories were gospel among the scientific community. Einstein had the temerity to use space and time as a way to think of our Universe, not just an <i>a priori</i> condition in which we lived.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbHxZmRwGnNgR1WHiBQUSdeNqnLVy-jRuioy5DbXKHSSel5A8bgdoafMM25HbkDJQ8iy_Tblb6wKuKo8E0QDt8RpGxEvQtJxoBAwGOAKwdXXJCTaynuwd8wXyom35zQ57NqTdQ_ch-BlXz/s1600/500px-Coord_system.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbHxZmRwGnNgR1WHiBQUSdeNqnLVy-jRuioy5DbXKHSSel5A8bgdoafMM25HbkDJQ8iy_Tblb6wKuKo8E0QDt8RpGxEvQtJxoBAwGOAKwdXXJCTaynuwd8wXyom35zQ57NqTdQ_ch-BlXz/s400/500px-Coord_system.jpg" width="197" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Before relativity, space was thought <br />
to be best represented by Euclidean<br />
geometry (above). Relativity requires<br />
the extra dimension of time be <br />
considered when representing <br />
space (below).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Many had a philosophic objection to relativity, based on Immanuel Kant’s assertion that space was intuitive and could not be perceived by observation or experience. Newton’s view that space was absolute and existed independently of what it contained, as defined by Euclidean geometry, had ruled for over two centuries unchallenged. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> When asked about the book, Einstein retorted by saying “Why 100 authors? If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!”</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Einstein’s fame from the success of his ground-breaking theories had created a backlash. Even thought the book contains no outright anti-Semitism, six of the authors were either anti-Semitic and/or Nazi sympathizers. The rising Nazi movement denounced Einstein, calling relativity “Jewish physics”. Einstein left Germany in 1932 out of fear for his safety and never returned. The Nazis had put a price on his head, publishing his photo on the cover of one of their magazines with the caption “Not Yet Hanged”. Einstein moved to the United States, settling at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in New Jersey.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Of all the contributors to the book, the one that I found the most distressing was Emanuel Lasker. Lasker was a German mathematician, philosopher and the World Chess Champion for an incredible 27 years. Einstein and Lasker had met through a mutual friend in Berlin in 1927, and over the course of many walks together they exchanged opinions about a variety of topics. According to Einstein it was a somewhat lopsided exchange, in that Einstein received more than he gave. Nonetheless, they developed a close friendship. Given that Lasker was also Jewish and had been forced to leave Germany after the Nazis took power, it’s disheartening that he had gone against his friend, but apparently it didn’t bother Einstein.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> To Lasker, the notion that no matter how fast you travelled the observed speed of that light was constant was ridiculous. Einstein claimed to have “never considered in detail, either in writing or in our conversations, Emanuel Lasker’s critical essay on the theory of relativity” and thought of Lasker as a Renaissance man and uniquely independent. Many years later, when asked to write the forward to a posthumous biography on Lasker, Einstein was forced to address this reproach to relativity, saying that “…chess playing of a master ties him to the game, fetters his mind and shapes it to a certain extent so that his internal freedom and ease, no matter how strong he is, must inevitably be affected”. In other words, Lasker—while brilliant—lacked the capacity to think outside the box.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="857" iframe="iframe" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dDI0WVVSUENzRW01OHJ6MTV2WUwyWFE6MQ" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-84550374501797858992012-12-30T11:12:00.000-08:002012-12-30T11:18:19.772-08:00A Fallacy, Naturally<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQJallxIx7Wrsv7BsYa8XJseQ3L3roY1nIWQ59ogCgB8D7YY25XUZRNyNHCpVUme32rd1ByXUyPYWZ8RdadLR7gN-b1hH66HcRBi3Dj9tuIoGlbL1b-PUgSoZ-wSMu3bWL54_1PdUQu9-3/s1600/Kilauea-Volcano.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQJallxIx7Wrsv7BsYa8XJseQ3L3roY1nIWQ59ogCgB8D7YY25XUZRNyNHCpVUme32rd1ByXUyPYWZ8RdadLR7gN-b1hH66HcRBi3Dj9tuIoGlbL1b-PUgSoZ-wSMu3bWL54_1PdUQu9-3/s320/Kilauea-Volcano.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Volcanic eruptions must be good, right?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If I could reverse one trend in the year ahead, it would be the use of the word "natural" in advertising. Our legal system spent too many resources in 2012 wrestling with whether products like Sobe® lifewater® or Dreyer's ice cream could legally claim to be "all natural" (the lifewater suite was dismissed, the Dreyer's suit was allowed to continue).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Even if we could agree on what is natural, all-natural, unnatural or not-in-the-least-bit-natural, nothing can be ascertained from such information. British philosopher Julian Baggini says "There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse)."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The idea that chemicals are artificial and necessarily bad is absurd. Everything including our own bodies are made of the same basic building blocks. Living things, both plant and animal, require the same ~30 elements to live and be healthy. We would be much better served by reading the calorie and fat content of that ice cream instead of trying to figure out if the chocolate is natural.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Most biologists denounce an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature" target="_blank">appeal to nature</a> (also known as a naturalistic fallacy) because they want to describe the natural world honestly, without extracting morals about how we ought to behave. Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker explains "If birds and beasts engage in adultery, infanticide, cannibalism, it must be OK. The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so on. It also lies behind the romantic belief that humans cannot harbor desires to kill, rape, lie, or steal because that would be too depressing or reactionary." I could not agree more.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Maybe I'm just more sensitive to crass marketing than most—I don't know. It could be because I work in the industry, so bad marketing hits a nerve with me. Or maybe it just bothers me that these sort of tactics work so well—a sign of a generally uneducated public, at least as far as science is concerned. I borrow from the Irish comedian Dara O Briain: "Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you." </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Don't even get me started on what marketers have done with the word "organic".</span><br />
<div>
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="776" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dEE1SmZGMWFuVlpuUXprU3BwTC1wWGc6MQ" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-75660338520618120672012-12-23T08:03:00.001-08:002012-12-23T13:05:16.255-08:00Understanding the Big Bang<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwevz94AHMmzk9IUabPtb9ETYSt3m9cOtVYgliamZMo3fjRCmxLds0Ttd3MJ2fq-cKWPApAHmVNM_x0oK2vuxpFrd9DiYLC38sBAyZhHVCL5BYp5XjMs1tlPAwlOQj2VgTHZ6l6FT07DuK/s1600/Universe_expansion.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwevz94AHMmzk9IUabPtb9ETYSt3m9cOtVYgliamZMo3fjRCmxLds0Ttd3MJ2fq-cKWPApAHmVNM_x0oK2vuxpFrd9DiYLC38sBAyZhHVCL5BYp5XjMs1tlPAwlOQj2VgTHZ6l6FT07DuK/s320/Universe_expansion.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An artist’s concept illustrating the expansion of<br />
the Universe after the Big Bang.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The term Big Bang was originally coined by the English astronomer Fred Hoyle in an attempt to help listeners to a radio program that he was a guest on understand the difference between it and the popular Steady State theory of which he was a proponent. The Steady State theory had been around since 1920 and proposes that matter in the Universe was being continually created, and had existed pretty much as it does today for all time. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> In 1931, the Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître first suggested the evidence for the expansion of the Universe, if projected back in time, meant that all the mass of the Universe was at some point concentrated into a single “Primeval Atom”. Einstein initially refused to accept the concept, telling Lemaître that “Your math is correct, but your physics is abominable.” It would take Einstein another four years to embrace the theory.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Simply put, The Big Bang theory states that because space is expanding, the Universe must have been much denser in the past. Einstein’s theory of gravity lets us run time backwards to calculate the density of the Universe billions of years ago. As a result we know that the observable Universe must have expanded from an extremely dense and hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> During the Big Bang, matter did not explode into space from a point. The Big Bang was an expansion of space itself that filled all of space with energy right from the beginning. </span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAiJvKO_DDkPkPHos1iHXC2v_7JfVk_O8FfLZDi76JdMxIFqJWrg51LTc7Sp4pwsdGIdpbHcEiamUHeiOi7lbzP8co2V-YY4jkcndR4e0bfbICuubaot-MBJHXX7GDCGONd2J7h17zAHRI/s1600/1280px-CMB_Timeline300_no_WMAP.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAiJvKO_DDkPkPHos1iHXC2v_7JfVk_O8FfLZDi76JdMxIFqJWrg51LTc7Sp4pwsdGIdpbHcEiamUHeiOi7lbzP8co2V-YY4jkcndR4e0bfbICuubaot-MBJHXX7GDCGONd2J7h17zAHRI/s320/1280px-CMB_Timeline300_no_WMAP.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Timeline of the Universe.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Evidence indicates only that the early universe was extremely dense, but not necessarily extremely small. Even though the observable portion of the Universe was once packed into an incredibly small volume, it was not surrounded by empty space—it was surrounded by more matter and energy which is now beyond the observable Universe. This leads to an amazing little-known conclusion: if the whole Universe is infinitely large, then it was always infinitely large, even during the Big Bang.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Current evidence also tells us that the Universe is either infinitely large, or else is so large that we cannot detect its curvature from what we can observe—similar to how we can not tell that the Earth is round by looking at our back yard.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The observational evidence for the Big Bang is overwhelming and is known as the Four Pillars of Big Bang Cosmology: Hubble expansion as measured through the redshifts of distant galaxies, the discovery in 1965 of cosmic microwave background radiation, the abundance of hydrogen and helium in proportions predicted to have been produced during the Big Bang, and the formation of galaxies and large-scale structure such as galactic superclusters.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> But the Big Bang is not the whole story—its details are a subject of intense research. The Big Bang theory says nothing about how the universe came into being in the first place—it just assumes that energy, space and time already existed. And because current description of physical laws do not yet apply to such extremes of nature, we may never know what actually happened during the Big Bang. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<iframe frameborder="0" height="800" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dF9pMVlKRXlCdmt4ak1HalR5QzUtSGc6MQ" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-54434961116909745302012-12-17T09:28:00.001-08:002012-12-17T11:53:29.776-08:00Space: The Misunderstood Frontier<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLifqz9-TLv4dlh_7U8Vx3_auSvJqaWxg9vTrBA2P9a7vrowE6cgm_MbDTQl5xrZOPbT50FiBx3SmqxJaUUb6NB9lcNgFb5L9v5o6hUA0-zf7Nk9WDcQR3UyIGcx47WuWhBXxMv-bEvReH/s1600/Spacetime_curvature.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="141" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLifqz9-TLv4dlh_7U8Vx3_auSvJqaWxg9vTrBA2P9a7vrowE6cgm_MbDTQl5xrZOPbT50FiBx3SmqxJaUUb6NB9lcNgFb5L9v5o6hUA0-zf7Nk9WDcQR3UyIGcx47WuWhBXxMv-bEvReH/s320/Spacetime_curvature.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, <br />
gravitational attraction between masses results from <br />
their warping of space and time.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This week I am going to deal with some popular misconceptions about space and the Universe in general. Next week I will tackle the Big Bang theory.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> First off, we must realize that when we look out in space we are looking back in time. It takes a long time for the light from distant objects in the Universe to reach us. Light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach us, and light from nearby stars takes years. Distant galaxies are seen as they looked millions or even billions of years ago. Galaxies extend out far beyond what we can see today, but how far no one knows. Because the Universe has been evolving and expanding over time, most of the light from the distant reaches of the Universe has not yet had time to reach us. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> As far as we can tell, there is no edge to the Universe. Galaxies extend as far as we can detect in every direction with no sign of diminishing. Even though galaxies extend much further than we can see, we don’t know if the Universe is infinite. So when a galaxy is described as being near the edge of the Universe, what is really meant is that it is near the edge of the observable Universe.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Until Einstein showed that space has structure, astronomers thought of space as just the emptiness that contains matter. But Einstein showed, through his general theory of relativity, that space is flexible and can be warped. Now when we talk about the expansion of the Universe, we are referring to the stretching of space itself—not just galaxies moving apart through space.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The notion that space is expanding was predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravitation which describes a simple but universal relationship between matter, space and time. It was a prediction that Einstein initially couldn’t embrace. He modified his theory by adding a term to achieve a static Universe that he called a cosmological constant. Later, after observational evidence by Edwin Hubble indicated that the Universe was indeed expanding, Einstein abandoned his constant calling it his biggest blunder.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Today, we know that not only is the Universe expanding, but that it is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. Cosmologists use the term “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy" target="_blank">dark energy</a>” to explain this mysterious energy that Einstein had embraced, then discarded. The best explanation we have today for dark energy is that it is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy" target="_blank">vacuum energy</a> associated with virtual particles—quantum fluctuations which produce particle pairs that blink into existence and then annihilate in a times pan too short to measure. This happens everywhere, throughout the Universe. But there is a big problem with this theory—vacuum energy is far too weak to account for the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. One thing is clear—discovering the properties of space remains one of the core problems of modern science.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<iframe frameborder="0" height="704" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dFd3ZnRTTXpOOEk2Q3FMRTF5bnNocFE6MQ" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-82093424115570131752012-12-09T20:40:00.002-08:002012-12-12T15:54:40.271-08:00Ten Great Moments in Science<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This week’s quiz will test your knowledge of science history. As you read these ten great moments in science, try to match them up with the year in which they occurred.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> I’m starting something new this week: a ladder competition. If you submit your name along with your answers I will keep a running tally of the top ten scores over time and update the results weekly. See if you have what it takes to make the top ten!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Here are the years to choose from for the ten items below. Each year is only used once.: 1543, 1665, 1687, 1775, 1859, 1905, 1909, 1919, 1923 and 1928.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHG732WIZg6l5ggq7Xay6Isc_0PnyOaD0T4xDK1rcHyRdmDAmjTLWiotQg43XkTcG9Gn4MZyjg11JXOELQx5Ck7k_XQTBXvwK0dZx-87SFjIVsQ0T_8X4IDiR5Qp3zagJZfWHU0DM6KBj8/s1600/principia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHG732WIZg6l5ggq7Xay6Isc_0PnyOaD0T4xDK1rcHyRdmDAmjTLWiotQg43XkTcG9Gn4MZyjg11JXOELQx5Ck7k_XQTBXvwK0dZx-87SFjIVsQ0T_8X4IDiR5Qp3zagJZfWHU0DM6KBj8/s1600/principia.jpg" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">1) Newton publishes <i>Principia,</i> describing the three fundamental laws of motion forming the basics of classical mechanics. ______</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAqAL66kPA4qO6955fVJaI3nYArthyphenhypheneKq5h6O7ttXGPaC9KYHybigNnYuDMhyphenhyphenUj9Zzmr9KTVQ6pW8ZZZVq6jHq6F048irGtlaFkQED2xipQkolakaW62X0mHEfBUBW5kWHFakK7X0kA6qC/s1600/gold+foil.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAqAL66kPA4qO6955fVJaI3nYArthyphenhypheneKq5h6O7ttXGPaC9KYHybigNnYuDMhyphenhyphenUj9Zzmr9KTVQ6pW8ZZZVq6jHq6F048irGtlaFkQED2xipQkolakaW62X0mHEfBUBW5kWHFakK7X0kA6qC/s1600/gold+foil.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">2) Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, under the direction of Ernest Rutherford, perform the gold foil experiment which probes the structure of the atom demonstrating the existence of the atomic nucleus. ______</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzmchOGoriNznZh73KzW0JbrPFRIfp1eFC8Rs7m6ODbHrPtgtYf4WPsE7WXV1WihDqgcf0WRyhUWcVUOcPyNJQUF9pZjd-22amPWTpnXTiFin9Q8U3mR_K_IkrKxuK_XaKyssgXNx2vz91/s1600/Charles_Darwin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzmchOGoriNznZh73KzW0JbrPFRIfp1eFC8Rs7m6ODbHrPtgtYf4WPsE7WXV1WihDqgcf0WRyhUWcVUOcPyNJQUF9pZjd-22amPWTpnXTiFin9Q8U3mR_K_IkrKxuK_XaKyssgXNx2vz91/s1600/Charles_Darwin.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charles Darwin</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">3) Darwin’s <i>On the Origin of Species</i> is published and becomes the foundation for evolutionary biology. ______</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">4) Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen. ______</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguL5NB70qNBUIc3iDAGRuvdBI4dG57HYDYy_cegkzmHV-SKb5nulzGM5e7I-yjDuFYKrTL0EJSw5dJYLkI9NxOUz_q9PnfCG9gWs09cupZBcqG9os6X3hGHxEmda5ParJ2RU87NTr8nixp/s1600/einstein.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguL5NB70qNBUIc3iDAGRuvdBI4dG57HYDYy_cegkzmHV-SKb5nulzGM5e7I-yjDuFYKrTL0EJSw5dJYLkI9NxOUz_q9PnfCG9gWs09cupZBcqG9os6X3hGHxEmda5ParJ2RU87NTr8nixp/s1600/einstein.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">5) Albert Einstein’s Miracle Year, where he publishes four articles that contribute to the foundation of modern physics, covering the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and mass/energy equivalence. ______</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH4r81gdcfiuEKphs8a613vrS_5JrZxcppFUbFA8jXC8cspzH1i0UwTfyyPPHd1V4fcC7nWAzeTVs7s5aDdAk2w2LuhKo4kWgaFR6pJkveNi-ZJ0xp9DTnntm1sGuie8V-GctTKAdVxCGl/s1600/Copernicus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH4r81gdcfiuEKphs8a613vrS_5JrZxcppFUbFA8jXC8cspzH1i0UwTfyyPPHd1V4fcC7nWAzeTVs7s5aDdAk2w2LuhKo4kWgaFR6pJkveNi-ZJ0xp9DTnntm1sGuie8V-GctTKAdVxCGl/s1600/Copernicus.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nicolaus Copernicus</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">6) Nicolaus Copernicus describes a heliocentric solar system with the Earth and other planets revolving around the Sun, challenging the common perception at the time that the Earth was the center of the universe—as had been the assumption since the time of the Greeks. ______</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">7) Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic. ______</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">8) Arthur Eddington observes the bending of light during a total solar eclipse, confirming Einstein’s theory of general relativity. ______</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">9) Robert Hooke coins the term “cell” to describe the building blocks of life that he saw and described in his book <i>Micrographia.</i> ______</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwcht5DHWuZNWxwqOCzFe-nnevOOpOIjqEqnIbejh0ZSh_kqLP3fLyxHh096FM3Bu2iz57vjZngunbqXlhjh6iRGcmZL9yFarBWfgucvVm3pf9u7a7LvKoxnfs5BrHkPQE_rMAshGMNb58/s1600/andromeda.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwcht5DHWuZNWxwqOCzFe-nnevOOpOIjqEqnIbejh0ZSh_kqLP3fLyxHh096FM3Bu2iz57vjZngunbqXlhjh6iRGcmZL9yFarBWfgucvVm3pf9u7a7LvKoxnfs5BrHkPQE_rMAshGMNb58/s1600/andromeda.jpg" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">10) Edwin Hubble discovers that Andromeda is a galaxy, proving that the Milky Way is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the visible universe. ______</span><br />
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DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-4126257808108094622012-12-01T13:18:00.001-08:002012-12-13T13:25:24.229-08:00Did Einstein Really Say That?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWcJPRiqp6flRejtCEJ_M_MgrWD-YLeRXFix2mFttdlJPBecmQxLdn1VHZJ6C8GUNSaF-2jqtK6A3oVewTAugPdqRtedBC1nCrShawaOWx9gJNfmWx-jKScdOwRPu9COl_AjpZfkzGFPQR/s1600/Did_Einstein.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWcJPRiqp6flRejtCEJ_M_MgrWD-YLeRXFix2mFttdlJPBecmQxLdn1VHZJ6C8GUNSaF-2jqtK6A3oVewTAugPdqRtedBC1nCrShawaOWx9gJNfmWx-jKScdOwRPu9COl_AjpZfkzGFPQR/s320/Did_Einstein.png" width="320" /></a></div>
It is very popular, nowadays, to strengthen an argument by quoting Einstein. The problem is that many of the quotes attributed to Einstein were never actually his. Some were him repeating a quote of another individual, but many others seem to be completely made up. Einstein has become the source to a treasure trove of phony quotes, largely because the internet has enabled us to share so much without sourcing anything.<br />
Einstein did not humiliate an atheist professor as an undergraduate, but Google returns over 61,000 hits on the subject. Nor did he trade places with his chauffeur and let the driver give his lecture instead. Recently, Einstein has been resurrected to say that if all the bees disappeared mankind would be extinct in four years. A classic case of a quote being invented and attributed to someone famous to give it extra credence. Einstein has been used by both sides of the debate on religion.<br />
So, how well do YOU know what Einstein said? Take our quiz and find out—you might be surprised.<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="1432" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dC10dndPWEhTdWJnTmVsYS1ReU9oZHc6MQ" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-57780506890288829112012-11-17T01:56:00.001-08:002012-12-13T13:26:10.340-08:00The Last Arctic Penguin<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgg2dBlf6LjCB9MwhGzfoDtdw6pDd56iKuQd6lGMYeKR4UIfarts4cjc9b6cAAETWi8my14I4jRUSc35A-bitmxriPklaQfx5TcuL4sh4Fl9nHZh05RFRpHxkvS2sht9dK456ebcr0jnRq/s1600/GreatAuk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgg2dBlf6LjCB9MwhGzfoDtdw6pDd56iKuQd6lGMYeKR4UIfarts4cjc9b6cAAETWi8my14I4jRUSc35A-bitmxriPklaQfx5TcuL4sh4Fl9nHZh05RFRpHxkvS2sht9dK456ebcr0jnRq/s200/GreatAuk.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Penguins today are not found north of the Equator, except in zoos and on Christmas cards, but this was not always the case. What follows is a sad tale of how the penguin of the north met its demise. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Off the coast of England, secluded by blankets of fog and gray rain clouds, is Lundy, which translates to the old Norse words for “puffin island”. This enormous block of granite rises over a hundred meters above the treacherous seas that surround it. Its towering, rocky cliffs and ledges providing breeding grounds for thousands of seabirds. It was here in 1835 that an islander saw a pair birds, the likes of which he had never seen before. He called them the “king and queen murres...because they were so big and stood up so bold-like”.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Only one bird fits such a description. By the time of this encounter, the species in question had become so rare that to locals they were little more than legend. They spoke of a murre so large it was unable to fly, with a beak big enough to make that of its cousin, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razorbill" target="_blank">Razorbill</a>, seem small in comparison.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEcxf8ck2HEupXWSrofYy4f_Q00lzvdcxBRdQzlmsXAy5A9Bo0LPFKCmGI_-zqN2gSKVMA8Qm-1_Syoll7in6W_FxGAmzVZE5oToHPo0-5sxK2DMYwRSVWcjEmkdWKD_m6O7nv8gaO5MzN/s1600/penguin_auk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEcxf8ck2HEupXWSrofYy4f_Q00lzvdcxBRdQzlmsXAy5A9Bo0LPFKCmGI_-zqN2gSKVMA8Qm-1_Syoll7in6W_FxGAmzVZE5oToHPo0-5sxK2DMYwRSVWcjEmkdWKD_m6O7nv8gaO5MzN/s320/penguin_auk.jpg" width="264" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Great Auk, although not directly related<br />
to the King Penguin, filled a similar ecologic<br />
niche in the north that the King Penguin fills<br />
in the south.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> This original “penguin” was in fact the now-extinct Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis), once found in vast numbers around northern shores of the Atlantic. Although no relation to true penguins, they were similar in appearance, filling much the same ecological niche as the King Penguin that lives on the islands around Antarctica. In fact the word “penguin” was initially a synonym for Great Auk, and is thought to have come from the Welsh pen gwyn which means “white head”. As Europeans travelled to southern seas, the word was used to describe the birds they found there.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> As the Great Auk passed into legend among the people of the North, it was quickly acquiring a prominent reputation among collectors. Its last hideouts were sought out by seamen looking for specimens to sell to wealthy collectors and museums for incredibly high sums.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Some 78 skins and 75 eggs have been recorded and throughout the nineteenth century examples were regularly offered for sale, many of them at Stevens Auction Rooms in London, a venue celebrated for the natural history items they sold. So close was the connection of this firm with the dispersal of remains of the Great Auk, that its address was simply, “Auks, London”. In early years, Great Auks and their eggs fetched just a few pounds each but by 1900 a choice egg sold for £330. By 1971, a stuffed bird sold in London to an Icelandic museum for a record £9,000.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn9oz4Hit8CaEZ5_LqUFHvDn_f0IU64sDF9AMORiHDgW0DgR9rh2rzvwECVp0ObL2eXCupGVVsuX3f9DTAZvlQEoQm_CvFN0cVoPX1tPRfv0XrWqdh8TtE7kRaMMb4ictGd9B2e9MyNmIK/s1600/auk%2526egg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn9oz4Hit8CaEZ5_LqUFHvDn_f0IU64sDF9AMORiHDgW0DgR9rh2rzvwECVp0ObL2eXCupGVVsuX3f9DTAZvlQEoQm_CvFN0cVoPX1tPRfv0XrWqdh8TtE7kRaMMb4ictGd9B2e9MyNmIK/s320/auk%2526egg.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Great Auk (Pinguinis impennis) <br />
specimen and replica egg, Glasgow.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The eggs of the Great Auk, for which there was such fierce competition, were dirty yellow-white in color, particularly around the fat end, with an irregular pattern of pale grey or brown. A single, large egg was laid—about as large as an Emu egg, and pyriform shaped, so that when nudged they move in a tight circle instead of rolling away and being dashed to bits on the rocks. This feature is of great importance to a bird that makes no nest. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> On the rocky platforms that provided the Auks with their home, territory would be defended by a few low croaks. The beak could be used to administer an unpleasant bite but, apart from this, Auks were more or less defenceless.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> At breeding colonies, their great size set them apart from the other murres but they could also be immediately distinguished from the Guillemot and the Razorbill by their more upright stance. Most eggs were found in June and hatched by July. Their diet was made up of fish, crustaceans and other marine invertebrates which the Auk could pursue through the water with tremendous speed and agility.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> At one time the Great Auk was widely distributed across the North Atlantic, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the west to Norway in the east and as far south as the Channel Islands. The Little Ice Age pushed the Auks south as these birds could not thrive under arctic conditions. With the advance of the great ice sheets during this time, more of their breeding islands became exposed to polar bears.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Despite their wide distribution, Great Auks preferred to breed in colonies at just a few select locations, leaving many seemingly suitable sites unoccupied. Rookeries were known to exist at the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Newfoundland coast, near Iceland, and at St Kilda.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The Great Auk was an excellent swimmer, using its wings to propel itself underwater. On land it was clumsy and slow, waddling as it dragged itself across rocky shores. Their large size, combined with a pathetic inability to fly or evade capture, made the Great Auk an easy target for hunters. To those who eked out a meager living among the bleak isles of the north, or sailors and fishermen anxious to replenish stocks before venturing into the icy waters of the Arctic, such a bird was irresistible. Vast numbers were slaughtered for their feathers which were used to make pillows. On Funk Island, the unfortunate creatures were herded into pens, clubbed to death and tossed into vats of boiling water to loosen their feathers. The fires beneath these cauldrons were fuelled by the fat and oil from auks that had already met a similar fate.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> By 1800, the Great Auk was all but gone. The few recorded encounters with the species after this time make up a sordid list of human cruelty and ignorance. One bird was captured on St Kilda. Two men and two boys spotted it from a boat, sitting upon a low ledge. The men landed at either end of the shelf and began a steady approach while the boys rowed close to the rock, just below the spot where the bird was resting. As the men drew nearer, the Auk, by now becoming increasingly alarmed, made a desperate bid for the safety of the water but instead jumped straight into the arms of one of the waiting boys. This bird was kept alive and sent to Edinburgh, but managed to escape during one of its leashed swims, never to be seen again.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Many years later, an elder resident of St Kilda claimed to have caught a Great Auk with the help of two accomplices. The bird was found sleeping and was captured and taken to the islander’s hut. There they kept it in captivity for three days, until a big storm arose. Thinking that the bird had caused the storm and was really a witch, they clubbed it to death.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQnZYWG-7N8Oo8FnsjniVyEjcW0MMUwpEAjWdODpEWq1onVzRqTyElM7OmUr0gdW-1q8diK36oRrDJxE6vxSFYiHuQdBwgna49OILBHAy5O_PO3sDbIbRC46KZf-AHfpLoVSPlZidL-AJT/s1600/Edley_close.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQnZYWG-7N8Oo8FnsjniVyEjcW0MMUwpEAjWdODpEWq1onVzRqTyElM7OmUr0gdW-1q8diK36oRrDJxE6vxSFYiHuQdBwgna49OILBHAy5O_PO3sDbIbRC46KZf-AHfpLoVSPlZidL-AJT/s320/Edley_close.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eldey island, the last home of the Great Auk.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The Great Auks’ last colony was on Geirfuglasker, an islet off the coast of Iceland, but in 1830, it was sunk by volcanic activity. Nearly 50 of the surviving birds continued to breed on the nearby Eldey island and it was here that the species was hunted for the last time. The colony had been ravaged by museum collectors for over a decade, when on the morning of July 3, 1844, a party of three sailors landed on the island. Among a group of Guillemots, they spotted a pair of Great Auks and immediately attacked. The frightened creatures frantically tried to escape, but were overtaken. One was trapped between rocks and the other captured just a few steps from safety. Both were strangled to death. The female had been sitting on an egg which was crushed during the scuffle. Their skins were sold to a collector in Reykjavik. And while no doubt other individuals lingered here and there, soon after, somewhere in the cold and lonely waters of the North Atlantic, the last arctic penguin died.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<iframe frameborder="0" height="776" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dEVJU0FWY3RfQ3ZhQzVwaW5KUVdNbWc6MQ" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4291020168919744460.post-44819660510630914962012-11-12T09:32:00.000-08:002012-12-13T13:26:37.417-08:00The Water Quiz<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH3stzYnpdjnzrLnlod50XysiblwFGDgfeTMUGAMcMC1Vq8mG0o0m5v5X_ojh4T8dLYQEwZ4-srV1YQa3elx5MJuT9HbrWd5aFGyLMShj0K-v6eFbrAiuv-EJ3rhk4ufceMibdqGw2edL-/s1600/Water_droplet_blue_bg05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH3stzYnpdjnzrLnlod50XysiblwFGDgfeTMUGAMcMC1Vq8mG0o0m5v5X_ojh4T8dLYQEwZ4-srV1YQa3elx5MJuT9HbrWd5aFGyLMShj0K-v6eFbrAiuv-EJ3rhk4ufceMibdqGw2edL-/s320/Water_droplet_blue_bg05.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Water is quite arguably the most important substance on Earth. Without it, life could not exist. Its high polarity makes it a universal solvent, able to dissolve both organic and inorganic compounds. And because it exists as a liquid at room temperature, it can transport those compounds through the body. It's high surface tension and adhesive/cohesive properties allows capillary action. In plants, water flows against gravity from the roots through the plant stem to provide nutrients to the rest of the plant. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> How much do you know about this incredible substance? Take this week's quiz and find out.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="1474" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dF8xNjR4WGl4cG1VNWRBamIzUHpudmc6MQ" width="540">Loading...</iframe>DouglasClarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09665946087592290425noreply@blogger.com0