The Last Word

By: | February 25, 2012

February 20 – 24

This week, Michelle bestowed upon a grateful universe the phrase “probably unpleasant but non-lethal chipmunk ear punches”

Cassie wept as a doctor sang to her awkwardly in Spanish

Ann showed us that up close, cosmological dark matter looks like poppies

Tom found the sole heir to They Might Be Giants’ science song dynasty

And Ginny channeled Joan Miro to explain, in beautiful surrealist anime, how fantastic lengths of DNA manage to coil themselves into an impossibly tiny nucleus.

Extra credit: “Before you go off to start building your apocalyptic weapon, do bear in mind two things.”

Have an awesome weekend, everyone! See you on Monday!

There are two primary types of scientist (science music, part II)

By: | February 23, 2012

Science or music, music or science? Too often when it comes to science-inflected tunage, that’s the choice one has to make.

The best songs, usually, are only tangentially about science. The Low Anthem’s “Charlie Darwin,” for example, is stirringly beautiful, and improves with each listen well into the hundreds. But poor old Darwin doesn’t ever rise above the level of metaphor — and there’s certainly no mention of his long decade spent immersed in the painstaking study of barnacle systematics.

At the other end of the spectrum, any number of recent lab-based music videos — the “Large Hadron Rap,”  “Bad Project”  — have been full of fun and verifiable science content. But oh dilly, are they nerdy. And musically, they don’t rise above the level of novelty acts.

That’s what makes Nimbleweed so darned special. After the jump: quite possibly the best science songs you’ve ever heard. Continue reading →

Crying Shame

By: | February 22, 2012

A week ago, I found myself sitting in a small phlebotomy room at the back of my doctor’s office. Had you been a fly on the wall, this is what you would have observed: On one side of me stood a young nurse holding a hollow needle and a glass tube with a brown rubber stopper. On the other side stood my doctor, a jovial gray-haired fellow. My left hand limply grasped the doctor’s right middle and index fingers. I was weeping.

“Squeeze them,” he said, as the nurse plunged the needle into my arm. “Squeeze them as hard as you need to.” Behind his voice lurked desperation. “You’re not squeezing. Go ahead and squeeze!” Presumably he was referring to his fingers. But I didn’t want to squeeze. I wanted to die. I wanted the doctor to go away and leave me alone with my misery. I wanted the torture to end. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow the whole goddamn lab.

The needle was in and it hurt. The bloodletting was taking forever. I began to hyperventilate. Dr. Feelgood tried another tack. “Can you count to five in Spanish?” he asked. I can. In fact, I’m fluent in Spanish. But that moment seemed like a bad time for a language lesson. “Not right now,” I replied. The good doctor could not be dissuaded. He began to sing. “Uno, dos, tres amigos. Cuatro, cinco, seis amigos!”

For those who don’t know, “Uno, Dos, Tres Amigos” is a children’s song popular with the five and under crowd. I am thirty-three. If I hadn’t been sobbing, I might have laughed. Finally the needle came out. The doctor disappeared. The nurse apologized. I fished a crumpled tissue out of my pocket and wiped my wet cheeks and nose. And then I got the hell out of there.

You may have gathered by now that I have an extreme fear of needles, a disorder known as belonephobia. Continue reading →

Matter In the Universe, At Present

By: | February 21, 2012

This is the universe at present.  You’re seeing not the light but the dark — you knew that most of the universe’s matter is dark, right? — and its motions.  Not until the far right end are you seeing the light.  Go ahead and clickety click all over this; zoom it in and out, drag it around. It’s a computer simulation based on and ending with observed reality.  But it doesn’t read from left to right; it’s less the chronology of the universe’s life than a series of its aspects.  It’s so beautiful you might faint. Continue reading →

Evolve or Die

By: | February 20, 2012

Several years ago, on a soggy but majestic mountain afternoon, I hiked into the Yosemite backcountry to meet UC-Berkeley mammalogist Jim Patton. Patton and his colleagues at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology were retracing the steps of renowned naturalist Joseph Grinnell, who surveyed California’s wildlife early in the last century — and obsessively documented his work in voluminous, barely legible field journals. (Fellow archive nerds, see some wonderful examples here.)

Thanks to Grinnell’s tireless note-taking, Patton and his team were able to repeat the surveys, and get a sense of how Yosemite’s wildlife has changed over the past 90 years. Of the 30 mammal and bird species studied by both Grinnell and the modern-day Berkeley team, 14 show no significant change in their range, but 16 have shifted their habitats, with lower-elevation species consistently expanding their range uphill and higher-elevation species — the pika, the alpine chipmunk — retracting the lower limit of their range. The pattern suggests that many of Yosemite’s critters are already responding to climate change, and habitat models developed by the researchers strengthened this conclusion.

But that’s not the end of Grinnell’s legacy.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 18, 2012

February 13 – 17

This week, we all showed a bit of ankle to commemorate Valentine’s Day (well, Cassie showed her toes)

Guest poster Sarah Zielinski told us what we’ll find in “Pickering’s Harem”

Richard got punked by Tom Cruise while explaining the differences (and similarities) between show biz and science

Hogan faced Hayden in an LWON Battle Royale (okay, the battle was to see who could be more accommodating and polite but STILL! CAGE MATCH!)

And LWON pal Abstruse Goose demonstrated the plight of an over-specialized molecular biologist

Extra credit: A lifelike horse head mask

See you Monday!

The Woman Who Discovered the Key to Measuring the Universe

By: | February 17, 2012

By the late 1800s, astronomy had moved on from simple human observation to the collection of images of the sky on photographic plates — pieces of glass coated with light-sensitive silver salts. At the time they were made, these plates could be analyzed only through tedious, labor-intensive work. A person had to scan and measure and compare stars in the images before their position and brightness could be calculated and discoveries made.

In 1879, Edward Pickering, head of the Harvard College Observatory, began hiring women to do this work. Paid just 25 to 30 cents an hour for their labors, women were cheaper than men, but Pickering found that they were also better than the male scientists who had done the work previously. The women were more detail-oriented and worked harder. (That didn’t mean they were more respected, however. Today this group of women is often called the “Harvard Computers,” but when they were working they were called “Pickering’s Harem.”) One of the computers was Henrietta Snow Leavitt. Continue reading →