Cambridge Science Festival Blog

New & Awesome Science Discoveries

2012-01-17T18:55:00.000-05:00

It was brought to my attention that there is a trifecta of awesome discoveries in the science world that I should share here on the CSF blog.

The Universe is more crowded than we think
"Astronomers See More Planets Than Stars in Galaxy"

The start of complicated life was... easy?
"Test Tube Yeast Evolve Multicellularity"

This one speaks for itself.
"'Lost' Darwin fossils rediscovered"

In Festival news:
We're pumping along, adding more goodies to the Schedule of Events! And look out for an announcement of some special guests who'll be at our Science Carnival!

Google Science Fair

2012-01-12T11:48:00.001-05:00

Gotta love their tagline: Everyone has a question. What's Yours?

Very reminiscent of what the Cambridge Science Festival wants kids ages 5-14 to answer in our Curiosity Challenge (Deadline: February 10th!)

On that note, we're looking for volunteers who can translate the Curiosity Challenge guidelines for students (and especially parents) with different backgrounds. What language can you help with?

CSF 2012 Events and Schedule

2012-01-10T17:14:00.002-05:00

Things are really heating up here in the CSF office. Today, we've started putting up some CSF events onto the schedule! These will update as we go with more events and changes!

Here's what we have -

Soon, we will also have an index of all Festival programs for 2012!

Woot.

Link Salad!

2012-01-06T12:33:00.004-05:00

Happy New Year, everyone! We at the Festival office have hit the ground running this year. Events should be going up onto the website starting in a few days (hopefully!). CSF 2012 is really shaping up to be a great 10 days - Science Circus, CSF Star Party, Science of Baseball, of course our brain marathon Big Ideas for Busy People, and so much more!

We love to collaborate with new friends, so shoot more ideas and events our way! (but soon please!)

Okay, here are some interesting links. Some old, some new, some tried, some true...

Parallelbetween spider silks and melody

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2en7WM/http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/silk-music-proteins-1208.html

“NineStubborn Brain Myths that Just Won’t Die, Debunked by Science”

I have toadmit, I thought a couple of these were true…

http://lifehacker.com/5867049/nine-stubborn-brain-myths-that-just-wont-die-debunked-by-science

Curingcancer in high school... Yea, I'm feeling pretty incompetent right now.

http://online.wsj.com/article/AP27e6b4fd88bf44e49660ba127407d5f4.html

Righty orlefty? Check out how it shapes your moral space.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-hand-you-favor-shapes-moral-space

FAQs about the Call for Entries

2011-12-20T06:00:00.000-05:00

In this tumultuous time of finals, crazed shoppers, end-of-the-year frenzy, schizophrenic weather, and, of course, the Call for Entries for Cambridge Science Festival 2012, we at the Festival office get a lot of questions, some of which I will answer en masse here today.

Q: I am John Doe and have a great idea for a CSF event, but am not affiliated with a University, company, etc. Can I still put in an event entry?
A: Absolutely! We love to see all the different ideas out there for the Festival. Keep in mind - whether or not your entry will be chosen depends on where your event lands on the awesomeometer.

Q: It is after December 6th, are you still taking Entries for CSF?
A: Yes! But pretty please, get them in as soon as possible! (For the sake of our sanity, we'll put our foot down for a hard stop in January.)

Q: I am part of XxxxxX Group and want to be part of the Festival, but don't know what to do!
A: Technically not a question, but we've still got an answer (or several):

Do a fun booth activity at the Science Carnival (past examples: liquid nitrogen ice cream, lego DNA, robotics demonstrations). Also, the Carnival this year is a Circus! Can you do something in the circus theme?
Create an engaging event highlighting science and technology (one such off-the-wall idea: a Science Crawl).
Many organizations are already doing cool events for the community, we'd love to highlight them at the Festival!
There's still time to be highlighted as a Cambridge Science Festival Sponsor for 2012! Check it out.
Contact us, and we can chat.

Q: I am ____@___.uk and have this great idea for the Festival...
A: ...Pretty sure you're looking for the Cambridge UK Science Festival... but we'd love to have you!

Q: Who are you, and what exactly do you do? [People are generally more polite than that though.]
A: Keep tuned in! We'll have Festival staff profiles going up on the blog into the New Year!

Link Salad, bon appetit

2011-12-08T09:37:00.001-05:00

Tips tohack together a 3-course meal with a coffeemaker and much more… particularlyenjoying the how to brew beer with a coffeemaker!

http://www.neatorama.com/2011/12/07/10-awesome-geeky-cooking-hacks/

Everyoneis wrong about how people die when they fall into lava

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/the-right-and-wrong-way-to-die-when-you-fall-into-lava/

Mother andchild’s hearts beat together…

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/scienceshot-human-hearts-beat-to.html?rss=1

Teeth areevolved fish scales?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/teeth-from-the-outside-in/

This Whale Song project invites citizen scientists to help marine researchers understand what whales are saying.

http://whale.fm/

An interesting exercise:

How to picture the size of the universe

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/universe-size/?pid=2574&viewall=true

Links of the Week

2011-12-01T09:36:00.001-05:00

Miscellanea of cool science linkage:

Theuncertainty of memory, Courts are catching on...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/health/the-certainty-of-memory-has-its-day-in-court.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Gender-typedscience learning kits and why they won't help further Science

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/11/29/how-not-to-market-science-to-girls/

…and thespeedy response to the blog

http://blog.scientificsonline.com/2011/11/girlsboys-novelty-kits/

Exploreinteresting science in some of this year’s best science books!

http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2011/11/best_science_books_2011_boing.php

Gene identified for needing less sleep. Now whenwill we get to modify that gene?

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Lifestyle/Wellness/Why-even-4-hours-of-sleep-is-enough/Article1-774229.aspx#.TtU6VhUTu0o.facebook

Flexiblerobots!

http://bostinno.com/2011/11/29/funded-by-the-pentagon-researchers-from-harvard-build-a-robot-with-the-flexibility-of-gumby-video/

Ravens point using beak and wings!

http://www.livescience.com/17213-ravens-gestures-animal-communication.html

edit:
Not a recent blog post, but the first time I've run across it - some interesting claims!
"Botox may diminish the experience of emotions"
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2010/04/botox_may_diminish_the_experience_of_emotions.php

Call For Entries Deadline

2011-11-30T14:46:00.001-05:00

Hey folks!

Do you have your event or Carnival booth entry into the us on our online form? Our deadline is nearly on top of us: Tuesday, December 6th!

Now's your chance! Submit a proposal to run a program or host an event to be included in the Cambridge Science Festival -- which will run April 20 through April 29, 2012. Programs may include lectures, performances, activities, exhibits, tours, debates, workshops, or creative new ideas we've never imagined.

We're looking for ideas that celebrate science, technology, engineering and math in ways that combine spirit, interactivity and audience appeal.

Don't worry! If you still want to participate, let us know ASAP! Contact us, and we can help you work through details.

Other ways to get involved:

Sponsor

Help support the Festival!

Adult

Volunteer with us before, during or after the Festival!

Donate now!

Contact sungmi@mit.edu to:

- Blog for the Festival!

- Take science to the streets with experiments & demonstrations

K-12

- Become a Teen Intern

- Dare to take the Curiosity Challenge! (Deadline: February 10)
- Create a team to tackle the IDEAS Challenge! (Team registration by: December 9)

CSF Teen Interns!

2011-10-17T12:34:00.001-04:00

Come one, come all! The Cambridge Science Festival needs your help and we have 10 teen intern positions open for 2011-2012!

Check out descriptions and applications here!

Links Mashup of the Week

2011-09-29T12:02:00.003-04:00

Hi everyone,
Here are just some links we found interesting over the week. Enjoy!

Cool News

Interested in Brains and dreams

http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity

Dead Sea Scrolls

http://www.pcworld.com/article/240590/dead_sea_scrolls_post_in_time_for_rosh_hashanah.html

[the scrolls] http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/

Journey to Exoplanets App [video]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R76NGRkDUQ

Heart monitoring to itunes credit

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/4u6PCe/www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/38673/

Interesting links

“Bear with us, while we think.”

http://www.slow-science.org/

Very cool timelapse video of the night skies

http://josefrancisco.org/

Preparing Cambridge Science Festival 2012

2011-06-22T13:43:00.004-04:00

It's finally summertime and we at the Cambridge Science Festival are busy brainstorming for next year's festival. We don't want to do it alone though, so please leave suggestions or questions in the comments. We'd love to hear what events you would like to see happen, new organizations to work us, and so much more that only you can think of!

Thank you!

[edit: Check out our pictures from the festival this year! More will be going up soon!]

CSF Op-Ed: Media I Am

2011-05-10T09:00:00.001-04:00

How blogs, tweets, and social media are changing science writing.

Back in the dark ages, books were a luxury for the ultra-rich. When everything had to be copied by hand, written documents were rare, and therefore expensive. Then the printing press came along. Later, the paperback. Books became cheaper, easier to produce.

Once, writing in a public forum was a privilege. You needed permission, an editor’s stamp of approval, to publish anything from a news story to an op-ed piece. Today, anyone can have a platform. Putting your thoughts out into the public realm is becoming a basic right. Now, if only ideas could become cheaper, or easier to produce.

Everything’s changed, and yet nothing has changed.

At the 3rd annual Science Writing Symposium on Tuesday, three great science writers discussed the changes that the Internet, blogs, and social media have brought to their field.

Carl Zimmer has been blogging since 2002, and is the author of 10 science books.

Ed Yong uses his blog to write about “the awe-inspiring, beautiful and quirky world of science.”

Hilary Rosner just started working on a new blog. She’s a freelance journalist, specializing in science and the environment.

In 1998, there were roughly 23 blogs on the Internet. By 2011, that number had increased to 156 million. As the number of “citizen journalists” has increased, and as professional journalists have joined their ranks, the bloggers’ sphere of influence has increased.

The stereotype of the blogger is a pajama-clad outcast writing from the comfort of his mother’s basement, but plenty of blogs are written by professional scientists, like Derek Lowe, a chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry, or astronomer Phil Plait. Graduate students are also trying their hand at blogging, and the quartet that writes for We, Beasties proves that you can be both a scientist and a writer.

Blogs and the Internet offer writers of all stripes opportunities to innovate. First off, bloggers can explore stories that they might not be able to sell to a traditional publication. Secondly, their method of storytelling can be crafted to the unique project at hand. The Internet utilizes extremely short forms (the 140-character tweet) in addition to longer forms (The Atavist won’t consider an article of less than 20,000 words). Also, writers with no knowledge of computer programming have access to a huge range of free tools for adding multimedia to their sites. You can create an interactive timeline for your blog post using Dippity, or add a collage you made on Vuvox. “That is the future. It’s gonna be experiments,” Zimmer said. “We can all take part in those experiments.”

Blogging can also lead to better interaction between scientists and lay people. After Yong wrote a post about “weird, sexually ambiguous chickens,” he received an email from a farmer who had one of the critters, and was able to foster a collaboration between said farmer and a scientist on another continent. The researcher gets a rare animal to study, the farmer gets to be involved in science, and Yong jokes that he should get co-authorship should their research ever appear in Nature.

All the writers agreed that blogging makes journalism more of a meritocracy. Talented new bloggers will get noticed, because even with space to fill and an interactive timeline, great ideas and great stories are just as treasured as ever.

Rosner summed up the panel’s mood quite nicely when she said, “Things have never been as much fun as they are now.”

The panel convinced me that social media is helping both journalists and scientists. And yet, I never felt like they delivered on the second half of the title. How is the Internet changing science writing? What is it really accomplishing in terms of reaching out to a wider public. The panel mentioned that social media is often accused of creating “fjords,” where members of one ideological community get into a very deep conversation about a topic, but never come into any dissenting opinions from people over in the next fjord (or at least, not any dissenting opinions that they’re willing to take seriously). The speakers sort of brushed off the idea that they were only talking to people who already shared their interests and viewpoints, which was very much a missed opportunity from my point of view.

The talk brought up the same questions that I’ve had since I started studying writing: why are we doing this and who are we reaching? The people who read science blogs, like the people who read science-specific magazines, are the kind of people who are already interested in science. When we’re surrounded by other people who really care about science and communication, whether it’s at a dinner or on a website, it’s sometimes hard to remember that a huge portion of the population cares about neither of those things, and that as hard as it’s going to be to reach those people, they have to be our target audience they are the target audience of any truly effective science writing.

So, as writers and scientists, why should we care about these people at all? Because they really are part of our community, with the same right to vote, to run for public office, and to cultivate their own views among others. It’s astounding, but true, that a single evangelical dentist from Texas can dictate what school children all across the country learn about science or social studies. These are the people we most need to reach, whether we do it through newsprint or tweets. I don’t know how to do that. I’m not sure anyone else does either. But I wish we had spent part of the evening trying to figure it out.

Bloggers have all these great new toys. I hope they stretch out of their comfort zones and use them to accomplish great new things.

A live stream video carried the conversation past the walls of the MIT museum and into cyberspace. If you missed it, there’s still time to check it out.

Cambridge Carnival Day

2011-05-09T09:00:00.004-04:00

Even in the midst of a thunderstorm, Saturday’s Science Carnival was spectacular.

With rows of booths and activities as far as the eye could see, the space surrounding the Cambridge Public Library was busy with experiments and energy. There was music, swing dancing, balloons and several tiny children wandering around fully clad in the Pfizer booth’s lab coats, goggles and plastic gloves.

The range of activity options included deconstructing cell phones to check out the metals inside, playing with water hydraulics, witnessing robotic engineering at work and requesting a song from the live “Science Juke Box” chorus. This is only a small sample of the awesome spread of booths lined up by members of the MIT and Harvard communities and Cambridge-area science organizations and businesses.

The event was targeted toward young children, and they were out in droves. But even for those of us beyond elementary school age, the carnival offered a few neat new experiences.

My favorite activities were hands-on: I held a tadpole at one booth on city planning and wastewater routing, feeling him squirm in my hand before placing him into a designated mini body of clean water in the booth’s 3-D plastic model of a city.

I also taste-tested two mystery samples of water to vote on the cleanest, and was then asked to try to identify which was bottled water and which had come straight from the tap. Without knowing which was which, I preferred the taste of tap water. Judging by the other recorded votes, several other people agreed!

One of the other highlights was watching MIT scientists douse a pan full of cream in liquid nitrogen, as it steamed and hissed and smoked. The result: ice cream! Toppings were available to make sundaes, and kids clamored for a taste.

All in all, the Science Carnival was a huge success. The sunshine may have gone home early, but there was enough to do to keep the rest of us busy there all afternoon.

A Night of Nerdery

2011-05-08T09:00:00.004-04:00

Cambridge got a little nerdier on Friday night.

At “Nerdnite Presents Nerdtacular!” a group of self-identified geeks gathered at the MIT Museum for some socializing and a trio of interesting lectures. Over cheap beer and cheese puffs, we alternately chatted and paid attention to the three guest speakers whose topics were perfectly suited to their largely awkward-intellectual grad student audience.

“It’s not true that all nerds like origami, but if you like origami, you’re a nerd. There’s just no way of getting around it.” This is how architecture enthusiast Joel Lamere, who teaches architectural geometry and design courses at MIT, began the first talk of the evening. He admitted a “fetish for folding” and gave a lively presentation about folding paper in curves, like origami with a twist.

Author Louis Hyman took the floor next. He recently wrote a book called "Debtor Nation” and gave his talk on economic history and debt in the United States. “We’re degenerates, sure. But it has nothing to do with our debts,” he said, and went on to explain how government policies are more to blame than individuals for the current state of America’s economy.

The final talk was given by Harvard organic geochemist Hilary Close, who spoke about picoplankton: organic matter that’s a million times smaller than a human, or about how much smaller you are than the earth. In an upbeat presentation, Close discussed how tiny organic players like picoplankton escape from the cellular respiration cycle. This movement of plankton is more important than we might think because it, in turn, “allows oxygen to move freely in the atmosphere so we can breathe.”

What might otherwise have been dry topics were enlivened by each speaker’s great sense of humor and their unexpectedly entertaining PowerPoint visuals. The crowd got livelier as the evening progressed, and laughter peaked and voices rose as the kegs of beer were slowly depleted. A question for nerds to ponder: correlation or causation?

Probing life and learning

2011-05-07T09:00:00.005-04:00

On Friday evening, a large crowd gathered at The Laboratory at Harvard for an exercise in fast-paced, big-time brilliance. At Big Ideas for Busy People, ten scientists each had the floor for five minutes to discuss their work’s significance. Five more minutes for questions followed each presentation, while a prominent countdown clock marshaled the time.

The ideas introduced by this group of Harvard and MIT researchers spanned topics as varied as multiverses and optigenetics. These engaging speakers dipped into the origins of life, the roadblocks of rote learning and the reason why we might be able to call our era the most peaceful of the human species’ existence.

Two main themes seemed to crop up several times in the discussion: the search for life in the universe, and the importance of innovative learning.

Alan Guth, a physics professor at MIT, introduced the idea of multiverses and suggested that our universe could be one among many. A few minutes later, MIT Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences professor Sara Seager talked about the search for other earths and signs of life. As for discovering what’s out there, she said “We’re on the verge,” and added that there are probably billions of other planets in our galaxy. It’s only a matter of time before we find them.

Searching for life isn’t always so far-flung: Harvard biology professor Colleen Cavanaugh sees humans as a kind of habitat for other, smaller forms of life called microbes. Within the body’s 100 trillion cells, microbes like bacteria flourish. Whether harmful or helpful, these bacteria in our bodies mean—as Cavanaugh puts it—that we are not alone.

Moving beyond the search for life both big and small, a different cohort of researchers gave talks that related to learning. Sanjoy Mahajan, Associate Director of MIT’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory, started his presentation by encouraging deviance. “It’s best not to follow the rules,” he said, and went on to introduce the idea of “street-fighting mathematics.” This approach to math education encourages thinking on your feet and estimating instead of memorizing formulas and multiplication tables.

MIT mechanical engineering lecturer Amy Smith pushed this idea of learning further, and talked about “creative capacity building.” Her work in Uganda attempts to change a culture of dependency into one of innovation, where people are provided with the tools to build their own small technologies like corncob cutters and sugar cane presses. “This is the way kids should learn,” she said, sharing her view that training schoolchildren in Uganda to think and create should trump efforts at education that hinge on memorization.

From these five brief discussions, only half of Friday’s offerings (find summaries of all topics here) a search for life and a push for creative education shared the stage. These two themes on the eve of the Festival ushered in a few of its valuable broader aims: using science to reach beyond our current limits, and to think broadly about new possibilities.

Standing Up For Science

2011-05-06T19:00:00.004-04:00

Last Tuesday, Sense about Science hosted a great discussion about the interactions between scientists and journalists. Here are 10 tips for young scientists, based on the panel's wisdom.

SPEAKERS:
Leonor Sierra, Sense About Science
Karen Weintraub, freelance health and science journalist
Dr Chris Reddy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Morgan Thompson, Science in the News
B.D. Colen, Senior Communications Officer for University Science, Harvard University

1. Learn why the public should care about your research. If you work in cosmology, you might be able to say something like we’re made of star stuff, and get away with it, as Carl Sagan did. But usually non-scientists are more interested in the practical applications of your work than in the gee-whiz factor. If your research contributes to knowledge about cancer, or climate change, or why we should all switch to a 30-hour work week, tell people that before you get into the nitty-gritty of your experiments. They’ll be more excited about your individual role once they know the big picture. Develop a 100-word summary of your research and why it’s important. Also, when you’re talking to journalists, talk a bit about your interests outside of your work. Getting to know you as a person helps the writer tell a better story and helps the reader see you as a real person.

2. Remind yourself that the public pays for the majority of scientific research. Money from the NSF or the NIH is money from taxpayers. If you’re going to spend it, you have some obligation to help people understand what you’re doing with it.

3. Recognize that you’re bilingual. Specialists—in science, education, law, whatever—speak their own language. Your jargon is useful, but other people don’t know it. Try writing a page-long summary of something interesting you’ve learned about your field in the past year without using any scientific language. When you can’t say DNA, or tumor, or even cancer, you’ll have to get creative with those common English words. It’s hard, and the results aren’t always superb, but it’s a great exercise.

4. Take a class in writing, communication, or even theatre. Improvisational acting can help you learn to be comfortable and confident when you’re talking to reporters or the public. As with any skill, you’ll get better with practice.

5. Pretend you’re tweeting. Here’s another exercise the panel suggested: write a two-sentence summary of what you do that’s accurate to you and understandable to lay people.

6. Accept that not every story will be as accurate and detailed as you want it to be. In science, accuracy is everything. Nobody cares if an academic paper is boring, as long as it’s right. Academic journals have a focused, captive audience. Newspapers don’t. If a science article is boring, the reader goes straight to the celebrity gossip section. Sometimes, the details that matter so much to a scientist are totally lost on the public. At least they get an idea of your work.

7. Correct errors gently. Even if a newspaper article has different standards than an academic paper, journalists strive for accuracy. Sometimes they make mistakes. When you see a mistake, definitely call it to the reporter’s attention. Explain how much you enjoyed their article except for this one tiny thing… If you can help them get the facts straight, you’ll help prevent future errors.

8. Befriend a reporter Some of the journalists on the panel had a scientist mentor. If you make yourself available to a reporter, she’ll bounce ideas off you, and use you to double-check facts. Even if you never get featured in The New York Times as a result, you’ll make a huge impact.

9. Become a teacher or volunteer. There are organizations (like Science in the News) that give grad students great opportunities to work with the public while learning important skills like teaching and public speaking.

10. Try your own hand at writing! Skip the reporter and go straight to the presses. Blogs are free at sites like Blogspot and Wordpress, and you’ve already got a wonderful niche to write about, so if you’re at all inclined, give it a try!

Wonderful Webs

2011-04-29T09:00:00.018-04:00

Charlotte made hers terrific, radiant and humble. With grace, she expended enormous amounts of energy to spin stunning webs. E.B. White introduced the wonders of spider webs to a general audience in his 1952 children’s novel, Charlotte’s Web. Charlotte was know for spinning elaborate patterns, presenting her piglet friend Wilbur’s admirable qualities in silky web words to convince farmers to spare this sensational pig from being slaughtered.

Charlotte was some spider. But the tool she used to spread her message—silk—is one of spiders’ most basic and fundamental adaptations. Spinning a web allows them to trap prey, cocoon their young and float far away on its strands.

On May 3 from 7:00 to 8:30pm, the Cambridge Public Library is hosting a session called “Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating.” There, science writer Leslie Brunetta and evolutionary biologist Catherine L. Craig will delve deeper into the mysteries of this fantastic material.

In the meantime, did you know:

that spider silk is only 20 per cent as dense as steel, but both materials have about the same tensile strength?

that if you wrapped one strand of spider silk entirely around the widest part of the Earth’s surface, the whole string would weigh about the same as a feather pillow?

that spider silk maintains its strength at minus 40 degrees, the colder end of the average temperature range at the North Pole?

that these awesome properties come about from spider silk’s structure, which is part crystal (for strength) and part elastic (for stretchiness)?

that spider silk is chock full of Vitamin K, which helps blood to clot, and that covering a wound with spider silk is rumored to help it heal faster?

that the pH of spider silk is around 4, meaning it’s acidic, to protect against bacteria and fungi?

that it’s hard for scientists to harvest spider silk to study it because spiders eat each other if kept in close quarters?

that researchers can now make artificial spider silk by taking the silk-coding gene out of spiders and implanting it in other animals, like goats?

that scientists only know the exact sequence of genes for silk production in 14 species of spider? With around 40,000 species identified so far, what scientists know now is really only the tip of a much larger iceberg.

Big Ideas for Busy People: Sara Seager

2011-04-29T08:00:00.003-04:00

(Photo by Fangfei Shen)

Sara Seager studies planets. Faraway planets. Very faraway planets. The planets Seager studies are exoplanets, planets that encircle stars other than our sun.

Seager, a Professor of Planetary Science and Professor of Physics at MIT, is one of the top experts in exoplanet science, a field that is currently brimming with excitement.

“The reason why we’re excited,” says Seager, “is because we think that this is a really huge thing. Hundreds and thousands of years from now, people will look back and ask, what are the significant accomplishments of our society in the early twenty-first century? One of them will be that we were the first to discover other worlds and other worlds that might be like Earth. When you think back four hundred years, what do you remember? You think about Christopher Columbus and Lewis and Clark. It’s the exploration—finding things that were new to our culture. And that’s why we’re excited.”

Earth is just but a tiny speck in our universe; there must be other worlds out there too. That’s why the search for exoplanets is so compelling. According to Seager, there are about five hundred known exoplanets and about twelve hundred candidate exoplanets. One of those exoplanets must be able to support life.

For a while, astronomers and physicists have been turning to the tell-tale star wobbles to find exoplanets. An exoplanet and its star exert gravitational forces on each other, which causes the star to wobble. This method, the Doppler method, of finding exoplanets is effective, but it tends to find gas giants, as larger exoplanets cause larger and more measurable wobbling in stars. In the search of Earth-like planets, gas giants are less helpful.

Smaller, more Earth-sized exoplanets can be found using other methods, such as the transit method. Exoplanets orbiting around a star must pass in front of the star at some point, and when it does, the exoplanet blocks out starlight, producing a temporary dip in the perceived brightness of the star.

Seager, as part of a collaboration between MIT and Draper Labs, is working on a fleet of exoplanet satellites that will use the transit method. These satellites are called ExoplanetSat, and they’re surprisingly small. (You can see a picture of Seager holding a to-scale model of the ExoplanetSat at the top of this blog.) Each ExoplanetSat has its own assigned star, and its sole purpose is to point to this star and look for exoplanets.

It will be at least a few years before the fleet of ExoplanetSats are sent up into low Earth orbit. A prototype will go up first, hopefully by late 2012 or 2013, in order to open the gates for ExoplanetSat interest and funding. Once the funding doors are opened, then the fleet of ExoplanetSats can be launched. The fleet may contain as many as a hundred of these small satellites, each focused on its own star.

“It’s like a journey of exploration in space,” says Seager about the ExoplanetSats. “And it’s about finding other planets and trying to find the ones that are like Earth, which is really challenging to do. But it’s the theme of exploring—that’s the big idea: exploring the stars. And hopefully we’ll eventually find a way to go there, and this is one of the first steps we’re doing here at MIT.”

Sara Seager will be presenting exoplanets at Big Ideas for Busy People, which will take place on Friday, April 29 between 7:30-9:30 pm at the Laboratory at Harvard, Northwest Building, 52 Oxford Street.

Climate Change and Martian Bones

2011-04-28T10:00:00.011-04:00

In a virtual world called Arcadia, sifting through yards of Martian bones is all in a day’s work.

Chasing through leaves, over rivers and between red mountains, the goal is to find bone specimens, analyze them and figure out what tragedy happened in fictional Arcadia to leave so many scattered remains and no signs of life.

Launched in 2010, this game called Martian Boneyards is the brainchild of Cambridge-based Educational Gaming Environments group (EdGE). The gaming group is just one division at TERC, a larger non-profit organization that focuses on math and science education.

So how do Martian bones relate to science and math education? The game designers believe that some of the skills you need to succeed in Martian Boneyards—collecting evidence, analyzing data and drawing conclusions—are the same tools someone uses to succeed in science. The game is part of a larger massively-multiplayer online environment (MMO) called Blue Mars, and is built upon the types of investigations central to sciences like forensics and genetic engineering.

If you were at last year’s Cambridge Science Festival, you might remember a preview of Martian Boneyards that was showcased. You can also check out what the game looks like here. This year, EdGE will introduce a new game called Canaries. This web-based science game starts out with the premise that planet Earth is in grave danger. A message from the future advises players that their best attempts at a rescue mission to save the planet involves birds. The rest of the game focuses on gathering evidence, drawing conclusions and making decisions to save the birds—and therefore, to save the planet and the people.

Both Martian Boneyards and Canaries are virtual reality games, but the worlds they depict might as well be our real lives. The problems at their cores deal with environmental sustainability and climate change, topics of high relevance and debate today. Many misconceptions on climate change still exist. TERC believes it’s important to get students and teachers on board with the facts, which is why they’re hosting a session called Climate Literacy 101. It runs from 5:30 to 7:00pm on May 4 at TERC’s headquarters in Cambridge.

In the Martian Boneyards video preview, one line of text appears on the screen repeatedly: “We are not alone.” This message rings true not only in the virtual reality game, but also when it comes to our own real planet. As part of a living, growing, functioning, warming whole, we are not alone on Earth. Isn’t it time, then, to start thinking about leaving enough resources for future generations?

There’s also the fact that a little consideration and restraint when it comes to natural resources is probably a whole lot easier to achieve than a full-scale search for Martian bones.

Lunch with a Luminary: Linda Griffith

2011-04-27T09:00:00.002-04:00

You should meet Linda Griffith. No, really, you should: it could be quite beneficial both to you and to her.

Dr. Griffith works at MIT as a Professor of Biological Engineering, which is a department she helped create. She’s also Director of the Center for Gynepathology Research and a School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation.

Dr. Griffith’s research in tissue engineering has often captured public attention. When she first came to MIT, she worked on a project that involved growing cartilage in the shape of a human ear on the back of a mouse. Stories about the mouse first hit the news in 1995, and still pop up occasionally, such as in this Nova Documentary that aired last January.

Dr. Griffith agrees to come to events like “Lunch with a Luminary” because she feels that scientists have a real responsibility to explain their work to the public—after all, any funding from the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health is taxpayer money. Also, she feels that they have a responsibility to listen to the questions the public is asking. “Real people can have an impact by showing up and asking questions,” Dr. Griffith says. In fact, a question from the audience once changed the course of her research program.

In 2007, Dr. Griffith spoke on a panel at a women’s event at the Museum of Science. The organizers wanted to know how her research helped women, specifically. At first, Dr. Griffith brushed it off as a silly question. Her work involved organs that all people had, like livers.

Around the same time, Dr. Griffith’s niece started suffering from endometriosis, a serious illness where tissue that behaves like the lining of the uterus grows outside of the uterus, causing pain, irregular bleeding, and often infertility. Doctors, some of them female, kept telling Dr. Griffith’s niece that her disease was all in her head, and accused her of making up maladies in order to skip school. By the time she got treatment, her endometriosis was quite advanced. After speaking at the Museum of Science, Dr. Griffith started thinking more about women’s-specific health issues. Since 2009, she has recruited ten colleagues to work at MIT’s Center for Gynepathology Research.

Dr. Griffith is a great speaker with a wealth of interesting stories to share. My favorite was about the time the MacArthur Foundation called to tell her she’d won an award, and she wouldn’t return their call, because she thought it was a prank. The details are definitely worth asking about when you meet her next week.

The MIT Museum invites you to chat with Dr. Griffith on Tuesday, May 3, from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm. Bring your lunch and your questions about tissue engineering, the life of a scientist, interdisciplinary research, the founding of a new scientific discipline, or anything else you can think up.

Big Ideas for Busy People: Sanjoy Mahajan

2011-04-26T06:36:00.000-04:00

Sanjoy Mahajan is a ninja. He is not a ninja in the conventional sense of the word. He does not wear black garb and a face mask, nor does he make stealthy forays into castles. Instead, he dons intuition and reasoning to tackle problems. Mahajan’s specialty? Street-fighting mathematics and science.

Math is a battle for many people in the United States, in part because our math education is just not up to scratch. Mahajan, currently a visiting professor at Olin and the Associate Director of the MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory, has this to say about American math education: “It’s a scandal. It’s an education disaster, and I want to do something about it. I’ll give you an example of how terrible it is. National Assessment of Educational Progress surveyed 50,000 students to estimate the answer to 3.04 times 5.3. The students were given four choices: 1.6, 16, 160, 1600. Thirteen-year-olds were pretty much random guessing. Seventeen-year-olds, only 37% of them actually picked 16.”

To Mahajan, that meant the students have no understanding of the number system at all. They can only do the route manipulation, and when thrown a curveball to estimate 3.04 times 5.3, they couldn’t do it.

Mahajan wants to change this. “I want to change how people thing about numbers, because people are just afraid. They were just so badly taught that they think math is about the one exact way to get the right answer… and they get afraid and paralyzed if they can’t remember every little detail.” Mahajan wants to give people the tools to “street-fight their way out of that paralysis.”

What makes an example of this kind of street-fighting? Take this problem as an example: How would you estimate how high an animal can jump?

Mahajan’s approach is to first assume that every animal has, by mass, the same fraction of muscle. Let’s say that this fraction is 40% (as it turns out, this is not far from the truth), and that all muscles store energy equally. Therefore, the energy an animal has is proportional to its mass. The next question is: how much energy does an animal need to jump to a particular height? Based on potential energy, this is proportional to the animal’s mass and jump height.

So the animal can supply energy proportional to its mass, and to jump, the animal must use energy proportional to its mass and proportional to its jump height. Mass appears on both the supply and the demand side, leaving only height to be the real affecting parameter. Therefore, by this reasoning, all animals can jump the same height. Indeed, it turns out that of mice and men, both can jump to the same height, which is about half a meter.

(This reasoning does break down for fleas, however, because their energy is a lot less than their surface area. As a result, fleas end up feeling too much drag, though in a vacuum, they could probably jump just as high.)

Problem-solving of this ilk emphasizes Mahajan’s style of teaching, learning, and, of course, problem-solving. Mahajan realized while studying for his physics grad school qualification exams that he had learned way more in three months than he did in four years of physics education. “I realized there was a lot of things that can be done to improve teaching and thinking and learning,” says Mahajan regarding that experience. “One way to do it is to teach people to think approximately, intuitively, qualitatively.... Don’t try to learn the useless details. Try to learn the broad structure that holds all the ideas together. That was the same way how I decided to teach things, by tools.”

By now, Mahajan has taught a number of courses with this philosophy, wowing students with his adroit problem-solving abilities and teaching prowess. No student of Mahajan’s forgets him or the lessons he teaches.

Mahajan is on a quest to spread street-fighting mathematics. He has already published a textbook called Street Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving (you can purchase or download a pdf for free here), and he is currently working on a new general audience book called Numbersight: Street-Fighting Tools for Mastering the Numbers Around You (“Numbersight” is a play on the word “insight”).

Sanjoy Mahajan will be presenting at the Pre-Festival Event, Big Ideas for Busy People, where ten of Cambridge’s top thinkers will each be giving lightning-paced lectures of five minutes with an extra five minutes for questions.

What will Mahajan be talking about at this event? Street-fighting math and science, of course. And he’s going to answer this following problem: how can you use coffee filters to determine the gas mileage of a 747 airplane?

You’ll have to attend Big Ideas to find out.

Big Ideas for Busy People will take place on Friday, April 29 between 7:30-9:30 pm at the Laboratory at Harvard, Northwest Building, 52 Oxford Street.

Bots That Mimic Bugs!

2011-04-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

Usually, when we think of robots, we think of these guys:

Or these guys:

Not of these guys:

And certainly not of these guys:

But the scientists at Harvard’s Microrobotics Lab and Self Organizing Systems Research Group think about robots a little differently, and if you join them for Bots That Mimic Bugs, you might, too.

“Robots in movies are usually evil,” Ben Finio, a scientist in the Microrobotics Lab, explains. Movies like Terminator have given people the wrong idea about what robots look like, how they work, and what they do.

“Most robots are used for things that are dangerous or boring,” Finio says. On the boring end, there are products like Roomba, a commercially available robot that can vacuum your floor for you. On the dangerous end, robotics is cultivating more and more fans among people who work on bomb squads or search and rescue teams. After a disaster, robots could help keep human first-responders out of dangerous environments, such as buildings that might collapse. Microrobots are especially useful in these situations, because their size makes them easier to maneuver.

The specific robots that Finio works with might accomplish a task that humans can’t do at all. He’s a member of the lab’s robo-bee team. They hope to someday create swarms of tiny robotic insects capable of pollinating crops and fields.

Robots modeled after insects and worms have other cool advantages, too. Check out this squishy, unbreakable worm.

Most of these inventions truly deserve to be called “micro.” The worm and the centipede are among the lab’s larger creations. Finio says that most of the robots can fit in the palm of a person’s hand, while the smaller ones can rest on a fingertip.

Come see a presentation about the squishy, scuttling, and flying robots that the lab is designing. Afterward, there will be hands-on, kid friendly events, including opportunities to build and interact with robots.

Bots That Mimic Bugs is a free event. It will be held on May 1^st from 12:30 to 2:30 pm in Walker Memorial (building 50), 142 Memorial Drive, on the MIT campus.

Making Sense of Science in the News

2011-04-22T08:56:00.000-04:00

Check out these recent headlines from the New York Times:

Defending Vaccination Once Again, With Feeling

March 28, 2011-By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.

E.U. Talks Fail on Food Imports From Clone Offspring

March 30, 2011 - By JAMES KANTER

The Truth About Climate Change, Still Inconvenient

April 4, 2011 - By PAUL KRUGMAN - Opinion

Radiation and Food Supply Concerns Are Growing

April 6, 2011 - By WILLIAM NEUMAN and FLORENCE FABRICANT

Sometimes, reading the newspaper is an angst-inducing experience. I start worrying about epidemics, radiation, climate change and genetically modified crops. I wonder, in the wake of a natural disaster, would our food supply be safe? Is my friend acting in her family’s best interest or putting the whole community at risk when she refuses to vaccinate her children? Am I going to get sick from sleeping with my cell phone too close to my head? Confusion ensues.

These concerns range from the legitimate to the ludicrous, and they’re all based on things I’ve seen in the media. Sorting out the truth is frustrating for scientists and non-scientists alike. Luckily, there are things that researchers, journalists, and readers can do to better understand one another. Sense about Science, a UK-based charitable trust, is running a couple of seminars at the science festival that will give people some basic tools to better understand what they read in the paper.

“What’s Up with Peer Review?”

May 3, 11:00 am-12:30 pm, Followed by a buffet lunch.

The Broad Institute, 7 Cambridge Center.

Before a paper is published in a scientific journal, it goes through a process called peer review, which gives other experts in the same field a chance to look at the research and results and comment on them before the article goes to press. Peer review is an important part of the publication process, but it’s far from perfect. Scientists often debate whether peer review illuminates new ideas, or shuts them down.

And of course, the system is corruptible, as anyone who remembers last year’s Climate Gate scandals already knows. Peer review can be abused. But could we work to develop a system that detects plagiarism, bias, and fraud?

Come join the discussion about how peer review affects research, policy, and the public.

The panel will include:

Leonor Sierra, Sense about Science

Dr. Emilie Marcus, editor in chief of Cell Press

Karen Weintraub, freelance health and science journalist.

Dr. Natalie Kuldell, professor of biological engineering at MIT.

Organizer Julia Wilson hopes that everyone interested in science will attend, especially members of the general public. You’ll gain some insight into how the scientific process works, and hopefully be better equipped to evaluate the studies you read about in the news.

“Standing up for Science”

May 3, 3:30-5:00 pm, Followed by a reception.

The Broad Institute, 7 Cambridge Center.

Are you a scientist? What do you do when you see factual errors or misused statistics in your local newspaper? How do you react when a journalist calls asking for information?

Why does it even matter if the public has good access to science news? Can newspapers and magazines be both factual and entertaining at the same time?

Come listen to a discussion on science-related controversies in the news and leave with some useful tips on how to interact with the media.

The speakers for this event are:

Leonor Sierra, Sense About Science

Karen Weintraub, freelance health and science journalist

Dr. Chris Reddy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Morgan Thompson, Science in the News

Both sessions are free to attend, but space is limited! Please register by emailing Julia Wilson: jwilson@senseaboutscience.org by Friday, April 29^th.

For more information, check out the Sense about Science website.

A Colorful Conundrum

2011-04-20T08:43:00.004-04:00

For some people, solving a Rubik’s Cube takes no time at all. But for many, cracking the puzzle presents a real test. Getting all the colored squares to line up in the right order, let alone doing it quickly, is a head-scratching, mind-bending challenge.

The cube was invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian sculptor and architect. Some of the characteristics of 3-D objects troubled Rubik: he wanted to visualize how their parts could move independently, while keeping the larger object intact.

As a way to play with this property, Rubik invented the cube as a learning tool rather than a puzzle. Realizing the model’s potential after scrambling it and finding himself stumped, Rubik first patented the game in 1975 as the Buvuos Kocka, or “Magic Cube.” In 1980, the toy hit the international scene when it appeared at fairs in London, Paris and New York. By 2009, the Rubik’s Cube had become the world’s top-selling puzzle game with 350 million sold worldwide.

The original version of the Rubik’s Cube has six faces with nine tiny squares on each. Each square is either white, red, blue, orange, green or yellow. The goal is to take a cube with mixed-up colors and solve it, turning each of the six sides into a solid wall of only one shade.

The invisible center of a Rubik’s cube is actually not made up of tinier cubes, as you might imagine. Instead, it’s a core piece made of three axels. The springs and screws inside each cube keep it compact, but easy to manipulate.

The world record speed for solving a standard Rubik’s Cube is 6 minutes and 65 seconds, set by Feliks Zemdegs in 2011. Think you can beat it? Or think you’d like to start by learning more about the basics?

On May 5, you can sharpen your own Rubik’s Cube skills with the help of computer science engineers at “ITA Software's Rubik Cube Challenge.” The event will showcase some of the math behind the puzzle, talk about the simple side of permutations and algorithms, and teach some tips and tricks.

The event is appropriate for ages 10 and up, and requires an RSVP to claire@itasoftware.com in advance. Come to rub elbows with expert puzzle solvers, enjoy refreshments and compete for prizes. The event runs from 2:00-5:00pm at the ITA Offices at 141 Portland Street.

Sparking Curiosity

2011-04-13T09:37:00.005-04:00

Where would you hide if you were stuck in a lightning storm? Ideally in a car or a building with a lightning rod, right? However, would you feel safe from lightning inside a giant metal birdcage? Moreover, should you feel safe? To find an answer, a place to look would be at the ever popular Theater of Electricity, located at the crossroad between the electromagnetism exhibits and the weather exhibits at the Boston Museum of Science.

The Theater of Electricity is literally a theatre; the center of attention is a live-action display of electricity that is performed regularly — and with educational instruction! The Theater certainly has an impressive aura. Giant metal cables encase the stage of the Theater, separating the stage area from the audience. On the stage are the gadgets of electricity, like a kite, big coils, and even a human-sized birdcage. But most attention-grabbing are the two giant metal columns in the center of the stage, topped by two giant conjoined metal spheres: this is the largest Van de Graaf generator in the world.

Standing 37 feet tall, this contraption is capable of generating 2 million volts (by comparison, your ordinary disposable battery can only produce 1.5 volts). While smaller-scale Van de Graaf generators frequent museums and science classrooms, their uses are often limited to producing small sparks and making people’s hair stand up. The Theater’s giant Van de Graaf generator is reserved for the more dramatic task of creating lightning. After all, lightning bolts are just very large sparks, and this very large Van de Graaf generator is capable of producing very large sparks.

The show’s electrical spectacles are run by a museum staffer who not only controls the Theater’s electrical gadgets, but also performs an interactive narration that addresses many curiosities you or your kid may have about electricity: How was electricity discovered? Why does lightning come with thunder? What is St. Elmo’s Fire? How are electricity and magnetism related? Why does static electricity give you funny hair? Can you stay safe inside a bird cage during a lightning storm? Well, the museum staffer decides to answer the last question by bravely entering a giant bird cage onstage that becomes absolutely engulfed in lightning! Yet the museum staffer stays safe, intact and unzapped.

How can that be? Despite the gaps between the metal bars of the birdcage, lightning cannot pass through due to an electrical phenomenon known as the "skin effect." As one show staffer simply put it, the cage becomes a magnet when lightning strikes it; as a result, the charges are pushed out and away from the inside of cage. Thus, any person completely inside the cage is left unharmed. Have trouble believing that? Then go see a show!

Chances are you would not tire from even repeated viewings of the Theater of Electricity. While the wow-factor of real indoor lightning may be enough to encourage revisits, the shows at the Theater switch up material from session to session. Every show has multiple demonstrations, each of which dazzles and enlightens the audience on some aspect of electricity, and these demonstrations vary from performance to performance. In one show, the museum staffer zapped a kite with lightning while telling the iconic story of Ben Franklin’s discovery of electricity and the science that goes along with it. In another show, an audience member was invited onstage to power a light bulb with a bicycle, demonstrating the use of magnets in creating electrical power. But of course, there is always the same eye-popping finale: the indoors lightning storm.

So you want to see the drama of electricity at the Museum of Science? Well, you best arrive early for seats. The Theater of Electricity often fills up fast, and many audience members stick around to watch even if they have to stand. Some people go to the show for the loud bangs and bright lights. Others go for the educational experience. Many go for both. Regardless of your motivation, the Theater of Electricity rarely fails to impress.

The Theater of Electricity’s live demonstrations are performed regularly at the Boston Museum of Science, including throughout the Festival. Click here for demonstration times.

(Be mindful, however, that the show does come with loud bangs and bright flashes. As electrical charges rip through the air, that energy is converted into heat, light, and sound. Therefore, the creation of lightning is a hot, bright, and loud process, whether it is created in thunderclouds in the sky or in the Theater of Electricity. Children and adults uncomfortable with bright lights and loud noises should not attend this show.)

Perception and Deception

2011-04-11T11:52:00.004-04:00

Chances are good that David Ropeik knows what you’re afraid of. A risk perception consultant, previous instructor of risk communication at the Harvard School of Public Health, and author of two books on the topic, Ropeik is well attuned to human fears and certainly knows risk.

The rest of us, however, tend to get risk all wrong. We fear things that come with little actual risk, and at the same time, we are less afraid of more probable harm. For instance, people tend to worry about nuclear power more than fossil fuels, cancer more than heart disease, and vaccines more than coming down with the diseases they prevent. But in each of these cases, the thing we fear less

This phenomenon is what Ropeik dubs the “Perception Gap.” He will be presenting a talk on it at the Festival on May 2, emphasizing how understanding this gap can help us make better judgments.
Ropeik got interested in risk through a background in television journalism. “My reporting covered so many stories where people’s fears didn’t seem to match the evidence,” he recalls.

Early in Ropeik’s career, concerns about air quality arose at Cambridge High School. Teachers were concerned that the indoor air at the school was contaminated, and was causing brain tumors. Even though there was little evidence to link illness to the air, members of the community latched onto the fear. “There are frequently situations like this where people start to put two and two together, and get five,” he says.

Making judgments is tough because we rarely have all the facts in front of us. “We have developed a suite of mental shortcuts that help us to quickly assess partial information and turn it into judgment,” Ropeik explains. These instincts have evolved from early humans. For instance, we are well adapted to recognize patterns, but sometimes we’re tempted to connect the dots and form links that don’t exist in reality.

The problem with making judgments that don’t match the evidence is that it can be dangerous. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a newfound fear of flying made many more people hit the road in cars. But statistically, traveling by car is more dangerous than flying. “Death tolls on American highways rose significantly in those first 3 months [after 9/11],” Ropeik relates. “Some of them died because of the Perception Gap.”

Often, our individual fears grow into social policy. This becomes problematic when our fears misidentify what’s truly dangerous. “Our fear of nuclear power has contributed to an energy policy that favors burning coal for electricity,” Ropeik notes. “Coal kills far more of us from particle pollution, but nuclear radiation has characteristics that make it scary.”

Fear and worry put stress on our systems. Our blood pressure rises, our immune systems are suppressed, and things like fertility and memory are compromised when this stress becomes chronic. We’re also more likely to fall into clinical depression.

With excess worry taking its toll on our health, it can become even more dangerous to fear the wrong things. Ropeik suggests the solution lies in awareness: “Understanding why the Perception Gap exists is the first step toward narrowing the gap.”

Come take that step and learn more and at “Perception Gap - Risk, Fear and You!” on Monday, May 2 at 6:30pm at the Cambridge Public Library.

See more from David Ropeik at Psychology Today: Why the Jubilation in Egypt Resonates Universally.

Science of the Eye

2011-04-08T09:14:00.006-04:00

Your retina, which is the film in the back of your eyeball’s camera, takes light and converts it into an electric signal. Technically, it’s a little chunk of your brain that’s been lodged into your eyeball. The human retina can transmit data at a rate of 10 million bits per second, a speed that’s competitive with your Ethernet connection.

The eye is a fantastic, complicated tool. Nearly every animal has one. For people, it’s the dominant sense, the source of most of the information we receive from the world. We learn to trust our eyes.

Still, vision isn’t perfect. Optical illusions show just how easy it is to trick those retinas (or technically, that brain). Let’s look at a couple examples:

All of the horizontal lines in this picture are parallel.

...Even though they appear otherwise

And this gray bar is the same color, the whole way across.

Test it by covering up everything but the bar!

Here's another trick:

This is a picture of a duck.

...Or is it a rabbit?

At “Science of the Eye,” you can learn more about this fantastic organ by looking at real cows’ eyes. You can also hear about common eye diseases, find your “blind spot” and play with more optical illusions.

In the meantime, check out this cool website to learn eye anatomy and see a video of a dissection. That way, when you get to see the real thing, you’ll already know your sclera from your cornea.

“Science of the Eye” will be held at the MIT Museum on Sunday, May 8 from 10 am to 2 pm. For more details, check out the events schedule.

Picture source: Wikimedia Commons

Human Organs, Microchip Style

2011-04-07T12:02:00.008-04:00

Microchips—tiny integrated circuits made of electrical paths that store information—are small by definition. Some of the ideas surrounding their use, however, are big. Very big.

Dr. Donald Ingber, Director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, is on the forefront of investigating what microchips can do for human drug development.

Ingber is one of the speakers at this year’s “Big Ideas for Busy People” event, which is the running start to the Festival on April 29^th, Festival-eve. The evening will involve revolutionary ideas in current science, presented at a rapid pace: picture a condensed version of TED talks. Ingber will deliver a five-minute talk called “Human Organs-on-Chips: No More Animal Studies for Drug Development?”

Virtually all the pharmaceutical companies in the world use animal models to test drugs intended for eventual use by humans, says Ingber. He and his colleagues have been busy reproducing the function of entire human organs, each on a single microchip.

“We’ve recapitulated whole organ systems,” he explains, adding that the Wyss Institute has replicated the chemical system of human lungs on a clear plastic chip the size of a computer memory stick. Their goal is to stop relying on animals for drug testing, and to use this efficient and reliable technology instead.

The chips rely on microfluidics, or networks of liquids confined to miniature channels each about a hundredth of a centimeter in diameter. In a microchip with two main channels, the top one could represent human lung cells, while the bottom would represent capillary cells—the tiny blood vessels that exchange material with the lungs.

Human lungs on a chip. Photo credit: Richard Groleau, Wyss Institute

The interaction between capillaries and lung cells is important. “This is where the action occurs,” Ingber notes. This space is where health issues like pneumonia and cancer metastasis take shape. Toxins in the air enter our bodies most commonly at this interface, too.

Ingber envisions his technology starting to be used alongside animal studies within the next couple of years. In ten years, he predicts, microchip technology might even be more significant than animal studies for developing drugs to address some health problems.

“We have a beating heart on a chip,” Ingber relates with detectable enthusiasm. “We have a flowing kidney. This is the beginning.” The ultimate goal, he notes, is to engineer a whole human on a chip.

To find out more, come out to The Laboratory at Harvard’s Northwest Building, located at 52 Oxford Street in Cambridge. “Big Ideas for Busy People” runs from 7:30-9:30 pm on Friday, April 29, 2011.

Are You Tasteblind?

2011-04-02T11:00:00.006-04:00

Imagine being handed a small cup of liquid to taste, and as the liquid sweeps over your tongue, you taste nothing special—it’s just sugar water, you think. Meanwhile, the person next to you has downed an identical cup of liquid, only to spit it out in disgust. Now imagine the same scenario, but you and the person beside you are chimpanzees instead.

An experiment was conducted in the late 1930s on chimpanzees to see whether they could detect the presence of a certain bitter compound called phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC for short. For the experiment, twenty-seven chimpanzees were given solutions of sugar and PTC. Twenty of them reacted to the solutions rather negatively. (Some of those twenty even behaved hostilely to the experimenters in an attempt to express their distaste with the drink they were given.) Those twenty were labeled as tasters because they could taste (and hated) the bitter PTC. The remaining seven drank the solutions without fuss, apparently not tasting any bitterness, and were labeled as nontasters.

The origins of this experiment were quite human and emerged into our scholarly knowledge through a puff of smoke—or rather, through a puff of powder. In 1931, A chemist by the name of Arthur L. Fox was preparing powdered PTC when a cloud of it flew into the air. To Fox’s surprise, a nearby co-worker complained that the dust cloud tasted bitter in his mouth. Fox, who got a much more intense hit of the dust, tasted nothing. Even after tasting the powder directly, he still couldn’t discern any bitterness.

This powder cloud accident with PTC, which could be the chagrin of any laboratory (for sending powdered chemicals into the air is rarely a good thing in terms of safety), instead launched Fox into an interesting discovery in science.

The bitterness of PTC, as it turns out, can only be detected by certain members of the human population (and the same deal for chimps and other primates, for that matter). After the incident in the lab, Fox went on to test this peculiarity in PTC tasting on more people and found a clear divide between the people who could taste and the people who could not taste PTC. Current studies seem to indicate that about 70% of humans are tasters, while the rest are nontasters.

Much like being colorblind, being “tasteblind” to PTC has been linked to mom and dad—or in other words, genetics. PTC has played a powerful role in genetics since its discovery. Since it’s easy to test for the ability to taste PTC (simply give the subjects some PTC to dab against their tongues), PTC has been used in many genetics experiments to investigate topics like inheritance as well as evolution. However, given that PTC does not actually occur naturally in food, why did we evolve to have a seemingly useless gene that determines our ability taste the bitterness of PTC?

Studies have looked into this question of evolution, which led to studies such as the ones conducted on the chimps, human’s closest living evolutionary relative. The particular chimp experiment described earlier was unfortunately cut short due to World War II, but lasted long enough to link genes to a chimp’s ability to taste PTC. Moreover, the experimenters noticed the genetic distribution of nontasters and tasters in chimps look suspiciously similar to that of humans, suggesting that humans and chimps received their ability to taste PTC from some common ancestor.

Even eighty years after Fox’s 1931 discovery, scientists are still investigating why evolution gave some of us the power to taste PTC. The most common hypothesis is that it is linked to food preferences in some way that is evolutionary favorable. Perhaps unlocking the secrets behind PTC will help us understand why tastes in food are so varied. However, there are no definitive experimental results proving this… yet. Studies have also suggested further interesting implications of PTC, such as how people who can taste PTC may have lower body mass index and are less likely to be addicted to nicotine.

Now the question is—can you taste PTC? You can find out if you’re a taster or a nontaster as well as learn more about PTC and genetics during the Festival’s Science Carnival. Look for the Science of Taste & Paint booth during 12-4pm on Saturday, May 7 at the Cambridge Public Library!

Inspiring Minds: Meet Women in Science

2011-03-31T13:33:00.013-04:00

Two summers ago, I worked at the Chulabhorn Research Institute in Thailand. Its tongue twister name comes from its founder, the youngest daughter of the Thai king. “When I grow up, I want to be just like Chulabhorn.” I remember one of my co-workers saying. “She’s an organic chemist and a princess!”

Though it is unlikely my friend will grow up to be a princess, if she follows the trend that modern women are setting, she can be an organic chemist and just about anything else she pleases.

Here are a few examples:

Erika Ebbel Angle is a biochemistry student at Boston University. She’s also a former Miss Massachusetts. And an entrepreneur. While she was still an undergraduate, Erika founded an organization called Science from Scientists, which sends scientists into classrooms to give students a hands-on introduction to the joy of performing experiments.

Linda Elkins-Tanton is a professor of geology at MIT. She’s currently studying how the planet formed, but ten years ago she was the editor of a wine magazine.

Meghna Chakrabarti, who currently works as the host of WBUR's "RadioBoston,” earned her first degree in civil and environmental engineering. She had jobs in engineering failure analysis, teaching human physiology, and researching flood control solutions for Venice, Italy before becoming a reporter.

Studying science can help girls build an outstanding resume, even if they decide to follow a different career path. Plus, it’s fun.

But despite all the perks to studying science, there are also setbacks and hurdles that affect women differently than they affect men, an idea Phoebe Cohen, a scientist with the MIT NASA Astrobiology Team explores in this letter to her 12-year-old self.

Find out how to push past them. Over the course of 3 days, a total of 17 different women will share their stories. Come learn about the awesome projects these women have undertaken, and pick up some career tips, too. This panel may be one of the most eclectic at the entire festival. Its members include doctors, lawyers, engineers, and oceanographers. They study everything from dolphins to airplanes to eyeballs.

Join them at the Museum of Science on April 28-30 and get inspired.

For more details, check out the Museum of Science website.

Countdown to the Festival!

2011-03-21T22:48:00.000-04:00

So You Think You Can Be Princess Leia?

2010-05-02T20:57:00.000-04:00

“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi; you’re my only hope,” might have crossed your mind if you thought about going to see the MIT Museum’s holography collection through the Cambridge Science Festival’s “Explore Holography” event. Perhaps you decided to go because you were excited at the prospect of being able to don your Princess Leia costume and reenact that famous scene. And maybe, you were completely disappointed when you finally saw what the Museum meant by “holograms.” The truth is, most of what you see in the news and media claiming to be holograms actually aren’t real holograms. Sure, they might provide some cool 3D visuals, but they’re not done using the holographic technology that I discussed in my previous two blog posts.

Most of what we think we know about holography comes from television and movies. If you’re like me, you probably watched the original Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and saw the scene where R2D2 plays back a “holographic” video of Princess Leia’s plea for Obi-Wan Kenobi’s help. The robot projected the video in the middle of thin air, which was marvelous – but the result of computerized special effects post-production, not holography. Fast forward a few years, and we’re watching CNN’s coverage of the 2008 US presidential election. Wolf Blitzer “beamed” Jessica Yellin, a news correspondent who was in Chicago at the time, into the New York studios to have a “face-to-face” chat via “hologram.” However, it wasn’t a real hologram. A hologram needs to be projected from a medium; it can’t just float in air. Yellin even revealed the magic behind the illusion: she was standing in a tent with 35 cameras arranged in a circle pointing at her. Each camera captured one perspective of her body and fed the video to a cluster of 20 computers to crunch the data and send to the studios in New York to project onto blue screens. Blitzer couldn’t actually see Yellin in real time; he was actually talking to a blue screen and watching monitors that had the video of Yellin inserted into the video of him. Hardly holography. The same thing is true of the movies Minority Report and Iron Man, where Tom Cruise and Robert Downey Jr. didn’t need computer screens because they were able to interact with the information in a hologram that floated in midair. Also not real holograms.

After seeing what real holograms look like, you might be reminded of those 3D movies that you have to wear a pair of red and blue glasses to watch. They seem pretty similar, right? The images seem like they’re literally popping out of the screen, but they don’t use the same technology at all. To make those movies, each frame is rendered in red and blue, each of which is a slightly different viewing perspective of the same object. Why the different perspectives? Well, it’s based on how the brain processes visual information. Your eyes are spaced about two to three inches apart, so each eye captures a slightly different perspective of an object. Your brain combines the two images so that you can see the object in three dimensions. 3D movies do the same thing and overlay the two images. When the light hits your red and blue glasses, each lens filters out one of the colors (red lens filters out red light so that your eye receives only the blue light, and vice versa). As a result, your eyes and brain get two images from different angles, so the film looks 3D. This method is actually an illusion and can’t be considered holographic technology.

Lastly, you may have seen or heard of “touchable holography,” which is a technology that some researchers at the University of Tokyo developed in the fall of 2009. This technology adds a tactile dimension to holograms. The researchers claim that viewers cannot interact with traditional holography. To change this, they use Wii remotes to sense the motions of a viewer and move the hologram accordingly. To make the viewer feel the hologram, a beam of ultrasonic waves is directed at the viewer, which generates pressure on the surface of the viewer’s body. While all this is exciting technology, it cannot be called true holography. What the researchers call a “hologram” is actually an illusion made with some curved mirrors. An LCD projector projects an image onto the mirrors, which reflect the light to a point close to the viewer, so the image appears as if it were 3D and floating in air.

Hopefully, I’ve dispelled some common misconceptions about what a hologram is and isn’t. Holography has great promise for the future (e.g. data storage and true holographic video), but it won’t be quite like the things we’ve seen in sci-fi movies or even TV news shows. If you have any questions about holography in general, feel free to leave a comment!

Questions with No Answers

2010-05-01T13:26:00.000-04:00

I live-tweeted while watching the webcast of "Big Ideas, Busy People" on Friday, April 23. "Big Ideas, Busy People" was a brand new event during the Cambridge Science Festival where ten lecturers presented 5-minute presentations with a 5-minute question and answer session afterwards. It was a perfect event to live-tweet, as that helped me remember the many points made that evening. It was definitely easy to get lost in a concept, and then lose track of the presentation. I wanted to blog a post-festival write-up of this event right away, but then I attended "Lunch with a Laureate" on Monday, April 30th. Robert Merton, the 1997 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, was speaking.

So many ideas were thrown out during both events that I feel I might end up condensing too much if I try to write a post-festival blog post from my notes. My tweets are still available from "Big Ideas, Busy People," and the recorded event will soon be available at MIT World. Merton's talk should also be fed online. Since both events will be available electronically, it might be futile to try to summarize them. Thus, I decided it would be more useful to discuss asking questions at public events.

I noticed audience members seemed frustrated at either event if the speaker couldn't give a direct answer. With all the questions that the speakers were asked, I don't blame them for not answering overly-specific questions with little relevance to their research. For example, Merton's research, which won him the Nobel Prize, is largely related to options pricing modeling and derivatives. However, Merton was asked a very specific question by an audience member, "What do you think should be done with investing in China?" Merton prefaced his answer, "when you win the Nobel Prize, people expect you have answers on everything; I have ideas that doesn't mean they're right." This was a polite way for him to avoid saying too much, since his idea was just an opinion, not necessarily based on all the facts.

A similarly overly-specific question happened at "Big Idea, Busy People," when Professor Mark Hauser was unable to answer a question on whether or not Amy Bishop was evil. He did not even follow the court case, and he reminded the audience that he was not a clinician and thus unable to professionally make those judgments.

I was always taught and firmly believe there is no such thing as a stupid question. However, some questions are best not asked at a large events that are under time-constraints. At both events I attended, others were dying to pose questions that possibly could be answered.

This reminds me of a time, I attended a review session for a class, and the teacher responded to a question with the line, "this is not going to be tested." The student persisted with her question, even given the response, and the whole class stayed an extra hour as a result. We lost valuable time that could've been spent learning concepts of relevance to the test. The student's question was meant for Office Hours, where students can ask general questions one-on-one with the instructor, and it was not appropriate for a Review Session, where the sole purpose is to prepare for an upcoming test. If a question doesn't have relevance to the audience, especially in timed-events, it's better to move on. This may sound rude, but the intentions are not to offend the questioners. It's to give others the opportunity to ask their questions.

Good questions at these events are concise and to the point. As John Durant put it in the beginning of "Big Ideas, Busy People," questions should be twitter-style contributions (i.e. 140 characters) with a question mark at the end. Specific questions are harder to answer. The best indication your question is too specific is when you have to preface it with lengthy remarks so the audience can follow along. You can still ask questions relevant to your curiosity without telling the audience your life story and why you want to know the answer. If concise and relevant, the speaker should be able to answer the question quickly. An example of a good question happened at "Big Ideas, Busy People" when a ten-year old asked a question about string theory and 11 dimensions; Lisa Randall, the speaker, was able to answer the ten-year old's question in less than a minute because it was concise. Another way to ask good questions is when the professor hints he or she wants the question. Lisa Randall told the audience to ask her about Brain World, a universe that goes beyond 3-dimensions, and when someone did, she was thrilled to discuss it.

It's exciting to see esteemed professors give insightful lectures. This excitement comes with responsibility though as it's also important to be considerate of those around you when asking your questions. When there's only five-minutes to answer questions, you should really be asking questions that the professor can answer briefly and wants to answer.

"Big Ideas for Busy People" and "Lunch with a Laureate" are throught-provoking events where audience members ask many questions. Sometimes, questions with no answers are better to be debated amongst friends. After watching Mark Hauser speak on, "what is evil," I found myself asking my friends whether or not they thought bullies were evil after watching the Simpson's on a Sunday evening. This sparked a long, insightful discussion that a 10-minute limit would've drastically hindered. If you didn't get your question answered at the event, try asking your friends: you might end up surprised at how much you can learn from just talking to others.

Learning years of science research in five minutes

2010-04-28T14:26:00.000-04:00

I spent Friday contemplating nuclear waste, parallel universes, and psychopaths.

Usually I don't jump around thinking about those topics, but during Big Ideas for Busy People, an event preceding the Cambridge Science festival, along with nearly five hundred other attendees I learned about these topics and more all within the course of two hours.

In brief and condensed presentations, ten scientists spoke about whatever they liked in their field of expertise. For example, George Church provided a set of reasons why synthetic life is important; Angela Belcher described how genetic information can be used to make structures without DNA; and Marc Hauser presented us with a philosophical question, asking us whether people who do bad things are actually evil by birth or evil by actions.

What I especially appreciated was that each speaker brought their own style to the talks, not recycling presentations from other events but tailoring what they said to the task of talking to the public for precisely five minutes. Their methods of presenting were all rather different - some used humor to get their point across, others called upon the audience to participate - but everyone was clearly enthusiastic and excited about their topics.

Nearly all the speakers went a few seconds past the five minute buzz, but most skillfully managed to pass along their main points within the time limit. They all spoke fairly quickly, seemingly keeping the time constraint in mind and trying their best to express as much as possible. I wouldn't suggest increasing the time limit though, since the time pressure forced the scientists to focus on concepts instead of getting bogged down in details.

Unlike standard academic lectures, the audience had the chance to ask questions for five minutes after each speaker's presentation. Plenty of good questions came up, some asking for clarification on points, like why universes are spherical, but others asked broader questions such as whether we could just dump nuclear waste in the oceans to be folded into plate tectonics. The audience might have been mostly adults, but one particularly striking question on the number of parallel universes came from the ten year old son of one of the speakers, Max Tegmark.

Given the experimental nature of the event, its location in The Laboratory was particularly well-suited. The large room was filled in front with couches, but as more and more people came chairs were set up to the very back edges. If Big Ideas can draw such a big crowd the first time it runs, maybe if done again it'll have to be in an even bigger setting.

Video of the entire event should be posted on the Cambridge Science Festival's web site in upcoming weeks, and hopefully the Festival will put on another Big Ideas for Busy People next year!

Lunch With a Laureate: Dr. Richard Schrock

2010-04-26T22:24:00.000-04:00

Environmental issues are very popular these days, and with good reason. I've heard many ideas suggesting how we can improve our environment or at least minimize the damage we do to it, ranging from driving more fuel efficient cars to using solar and wind powered energy. An equally important, though less publicized frontier for improving the environment, is in the production of chemicals. The chemical processes that produce fuel, drugs, and plastics also produce toxic waste. One way to improve the environment is to substitute a different chemical reaction which would produce the same end substance, but without the dangerous byproducts. Unfortunately, such "green" alternate reactions do not exist for many current manufacturing process, but scientists are hard at work to change that reality. In 2005, MIT’s Richard Schrock won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing one such new reaction.

Schrock co-developed a reaction in organic chemistry called olefin metathesis, which is more environmentally friendly and efficient than alternative methods in the production of drugs, fuels, and plastics. This reaction is often compared to a dance, where pairs of molecules switch partners and bond with other molecules. You can watch an animation of the chemical reaction here: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2005/animation.html. The dance analogy is so apt in describing Schrock's reaction that his Nobel Prize Diploma included a colorful painting of dancing people. You can view the diploma here: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2005/schrock-diploma.html

Schrock's reaction has been adopted by companies such as Shell Chemicals in the petroleum industry and Materia in the pharmaceutical industry. Shell Chemicals uses olefin metathesis to create chemicals which it advertises as being useful for cooling, lubrication, detergent, and waterproofing. Materia sells chemical compounds created via olefin metathesis called “pharmaceutical building blocks,” which can be used to develop new drugs. Olefin metathesis also benefits the oleochemical industry, which produces the vegetable oils and fats used in food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. It is remarkable what a far-reaching influence a single chemical reaction can have with regard to industrial efficiency and environmental improvement.

You can meet Richard Schrock on Friday, April 30 from 12 Noon – 1 pm at the MIT Museum, where he caps a week-long “Lunch with a Laureate” discussion series. You can ask him questions about his research, the award of the Nobel Prize or the multiple applications and implications of olefin metathesis. Even (especially!) if you missed the others, be sure to catch this last “Lunch with a Laureate” in the 2010 Cambridge Science Festival!

Hotter Than Your Hottest Date

2010-04-25T22:05:00.000-04:00

Ok, maybe it’s not the kind of hot date you’re thinking of, but this hot date will be pretty hot. It is a date with your one and only sun! It’s always there, but have you taken the time to explore it? Do you even remember it’s there? Do you even give it the time of day? Many cultures have religions that worship the sun. However, many of us live day-to-day taking our sun for granted.

Maybe we don’t think about because it is 93 miles away from us on earth. Maybe we don’t think about it because our planet earth seems so amazing that we think it’s probably the most amazing thing in existence. We may think earth is cool, but the sun might just be cooler.

First off, compared to earth, the sun is massive! The sun is more than 300,000 times heavier than the earth. It would take more than 100 earths to span the entire width of the sun. And, more than one million earths would fit in the middle of the sun! Although it is huge, there are other stars out there that are hundreds of times bigger than the sun.

Ever thought about what it’d feel like to be on another planet? Well, if you were able to be on the sun, you would feel massive. The gravity on the sun is 28 times more than on the earth. Someone that weighs 150 pounds on earth would weigh 4,200 pounds on the sun.

We think of it as our source of natural light and heat but do we even know anything about how it works? Did you know light from the sun takes about 8 minutes to arrive at earth? If the sun ever stopped shining, it would take us 8 minutes to realize. Pretty scary, huh? It radiates heat and shoots off a steady stream of charged particles, called solar wind, at a rate of 280 miles per second through the solar system. Solar flares, another type of wave of charged particles, also come out of the sun. Why are they important? Well, they can disrupt all satellite communications and knockout all electricity on earth.

And, by the way, this is what the sun looks like up close and personal...

Just last week we celebrated Earth Day. When do we celebrate Sun Day? Every week? (Get it, Sunday?) Just kidding. In fact, we do not have a popular national holiday to celebrate the sun. Why is that? I do not know. If the sun ever decided to stop working or decided to start over-working, we’d all be dead. Basically, all of life depends on the sun’s normal functioning. The sun is about 4.5 billion years old. And, it’s only expected to shine for another 5 billion years. Let’s start appreciating now.

On April 27 through May 2, the Cambridge Science Festival is hosting a “Solar Lunch” on the plaza in front of the Museum of Science from 12pm-1pm. It will be a great opportunity to learn about the sun and actually see parts of the sun up-close and personal. Let’s make it a date, a hot date. I am not sure if food will be provided. Regardless, come out, meet new people, learn a lot, and give some attention to your one and only sun. See you there! (Weather permitting.)

I found the facts I included on the sites below. Please visit them to learn more cool facts about the sun.

http://facts.randomhistory.com/2009/07/06_sun.html

http://www.listfied.com/10-interesting-facts-about-the-sun.html

Holograms: More than just pretty pictures?

2010-04-24T20:45:00.000-04:00

At this point, you may be wondering, “Why does MIT, a university known for driving innovation, care about and collect pretty 3D pictures?” Well, it turns out that holography has some pretty important real-world applications, such as data storage.

As you probably know because you’re reading this blog, we live in an age of information. Of course, this explosion of information wouldn’t be possible without ways to quickly store and transfer large quantities of data. So far, we’ve been relying on conventional optical storage technologies (e.g. CD’s, DVD’s, Blu-Ray) to handle this need. While current storage needs are being met, storage technologies must continue to improve in order to keep pace with the rapidly increasing demand.

This is where holography comes in. Although optical storage technologies have improved by leaps and bounds since the advent of CD’s (DVD’s can hold 15 times more information than CD’s and Blu-Ray discs can hold 10 times more than DVD’s), they are still limited to recording information on the surface of a disc. They all use lasers to etch a spiral of individual bits (1’s and 0’s) onto the surface of a recording medium, but holographic data storage uses lasers to etch pages of bits throughout the entire volume of a recording medium. Theoretically, holographic discs can store 40 times more data than Blu-Ray discs can. How exactly is this done?

In my first blog post, I went over the process of using holography to make images of physical objects but how would we go about using holography to store information that lives inside of a computer and that we can’t actually touch or see? Suppose that you want to store a movie onto a holographic disc. Your computer converts the data into a sequence of bits and sends this to a spatial light modulator (SLM). The SLM is a screen that arranges this sequence into a page of bits. Each bit is represented by either a black or white square (0 is black; 1 is white), so that the LCD screen looks like a checkerboard of black and white squares. Now that the data is rendered into a visible form, we can make a hologram of it. Once again, a laser beam is split into a reference beam and an object beam. The object beam goes through the SLM and comes out carrying the pattern of the image that was displayed on the SLM. The two beams eventually meet at some place within the recording medium (e.g. at the surface or in the middle), which records the interference pattern of the two beams. To read a page of data, you recreate the object beam by illuminating the recording medium with the reference beam. The recreated object beam hits a charged coupled device (CCD), which is a sensor that is connected to a computer. The computer takes a page of black and white boxes and converts them back into a string of bits and back into data.

Note that the reference beam must approach the SLM from the exact same angle that was used to write a page of data; otherwise, the phase of the beam will be different and you will recreate the wrong object beam. Because you can recreate different object beams by varying the phase and wavelength of the reference beam, it is possible to store multiple holograms in the same volume of recording medium. You can also stack holograms on top of each other by using mirrors and lenses to specify the location of the interference pattern within the medium. So far, the company InPhase Technologies was able to cram 500 Gigabytes into one square inch of medium that was as thick as a CD. Based on this figure, a disk the size of a CD could hold up to about four Terabytes (one Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes) of information. With this technology, we could fit the entire printed collection of the US Library of Congress onto three discs.

Not only are holographic discs superior to CD’s, DVD’s, and Blu-Ray discs in terms of storage capacity, they also permit high data transfer rates. One page of data (equivalent to 125 Megabytes) can be read with a single flash of light, whereas CD players are limited to reading one bit (1/8th of a byte) per flash of light. Since multiple holograms stored in the same volume of medium can be read by altering the angle of the reading laser, high transfer rates are possible since the angle of a laser can be manipulated quickly without inertia, unlike a CD player which relies on a mechanical part to move the laser back and forth. Another advantage of holographic storage is that it can be searched extremely quickly. If you illuminate a disc with an object beam, you will reproduce the corresponding reference beam and its angle, which immediately identifies the page on which the information is stored. This means that database searches can be done using physics rather than software.

So if scientists already know how holographic data storage works and have even built a few prototypes, why haven’t we seen any of these systems on the market today? In this technology, lasers have to be directed and aligned very precisely. Any slight deviation would make it near impossible to store and retrieve error-free data. For this reason, the components of the system are extremely expensive to manufacture quickly and in large quantities. Another issue arises out of the ability to stack multiple holograms. When a computer attempts to read a disc’s data, the reference beam will reproduce its corresponding object beam, but will also produce a lot of noise from the other holograms that are stacked on top of it. The more holograms there are, the more noise there will be. Noise makes it difficult to retrieve correct data. It’s like trying to watch TV with poor picture quality. You might be able to discern a few shapes here and there, but you can’t be absolutely sure of what you’re seeing. Theoretically, thousands of holograms can be stacked in a disc as wide as a CD, but it doesn’t make sense to do that if you can’t retrieve the data. The developers of this technology need to figure out how to reduce the noise as much as possible before the product can be commercialized.

A Berry Efficient Solar Cell

2010-04-24T02:09:00.001-04:00

A short walk through the Cambridge Science Festival will reveal an important fact: the festival is not just for science. It’s for technology, presentations of innovative ideas, and fun, hands-on activities. The CSF offers such a wide variety of activities that it has attracted cool, sometimes strange, modern technologies. Among the strangest is the blackberry solar cell - no, not a solar cell for the BlackBerry phone, we’re talking about the actual fruit - small seeded dark berries whose juice can be used to harvest energy from the sun. To see this technology in action and make a solar sell for yourself (for free!) head over to

the Cambridge Public Library at 449 Broadway between 12:30pm - 1:30pm or 2:00pm - 3:00pm for “The Blackberry Solar Cell: A green Chemistry Activity.” This activity is definitely for all ages.

If blackberries can be used to capture solar energy, what other unusual uses might fruit have? Perhaps a postage stamp made out of lemon rind, or a dress made out of apples?

An investigation of the many uses of fruit first reveals the most common uses: food, beverages, gifts and decorations. After all, where would we be without grape juice, fruit baskets, and holly at Christmas?

After a bit more research, increasingly unusual uses for fruit show up. Some uses seem to be completely unrelated to fruit. The following products are good examples: various type of pain killers - opium which contains morphine and codeine is made from the fruits of opium poppy; dyes - cherries and walnuts can be used as natural dyes; musical instruments - gourds are dried and hollowed out to make instruments; skin care products - supposedly, applesauce makes a great facial mask; and leather polish - banana rinds will do the trick!

Looking further into fruity practices, medicinal applications seem quite common. It is amusing, or possibly disturbing, that nearly every fruit has been claimed to have some medicinal benefit. Cranberries heal UTIs, rose apples are a brain and liver stimulant, figs cure warts, and goji berries boost your immune system. This widespread claim that “fruit is medicine” either suggests that fruits are generally good for one’s health and contain vitamins and minerals that promote wellness, or it suggests that people are desperate in the search for cures to yet incurable diseases. Most effects of fruit on health are not scientifically, clinically, or even methodically tested/proven to be beneficial. Therefore claims of healing fruit should be taken with a grain of salt whereas a product like a solar cell can be shown to work without doubt. Either way, it can’t be denied that fruit has had a large effect on the health of the world, whether as a medicine or simply a good source of nutrition.

After taking a look at some alternative uses of fruit, a blackberry solar cell is undoubtedly the most unique. Imagine a small electronic device whose materials include (1) indium tin oxide conducting glass, (2) iodide electrolyte solution, and (3) blackberry juice. That third ingredient is slightly shocking! However, the blackberry juice plays an important role in the solar cell, acting as a dye that first absorbs the light from the sun that the solar cell can then convert to electricity. If you’d like to see this for yourself, head over to the Blackberry Solar Cell event.

It's pretty clear that fruit is not common in electronics. Why would someone think to use blackberry juice as a solar cell? In an increasingly green society, looking toward more natural and non-toxic materials is beneficial for the inventor and the environment. This presents an opportunity to introduce more natural products into modern technology, like trees grown for biomass to create renewable energy, or corn grown for ethanol. These green technologies already exist. What will be next?

Apple dress adapted from this photograph.

Bottled Water vs. Tap Water -- Who Wins?

2010-04-22T23:40:00.000-04:00

...Is there a difference? Should you prefer one over the other?

Well, let’s start with this fact: some of the bottled water you buy is actually tap water. That’s right, tap. While bottled water may come from more pristine-sounding places like natural springs and wells, other bottled water is simply dressed-up tap water. Sure, it might have undergone some extra treatments, such as dechlorination and some tweaking of mineral content, but it is still tap water placed in a fancy and portable plastic container.

Let’s do some math first. Water from the tap is dirt cheap. Water from the bottle is much less so. Typically, buying a bottle of water at a vending machine or convenience store costs you at least $1 per half-liter bottle. That’s $2 for a liter of bottled water, and there are about 3.8 liters in a gallon. This puts us at $7.60 for a gallon of bottled water. Now compare that to current gas prices of around $2.75 per gallon. Makes bottled water seem like a rip-off, doesn’t it?

Water doesn’t have to be that expensive, even with purification treatments. When you’re buying bottled water, you’re paying less for the water and more for the cost of bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, and of course, company profit. Not to mention, buying bottled water means producing more waste in the form of plastic containers. The more tap water and less bottled water you drink, the better you are being to the environment.

Why do people bother with bottled water then?

For many, it’s a matter of hygiene. Whether the source of the water was from a spring or a tap, bottled water comes with a reputation for being cleaner and thus healthier; but is that actually the case?

In America, where the public water infrastructure is quite good, the answer is no. Experts trusted by the bottled water industry agree. According to a report by ABC News 20/20, “Even Yale University School of Medicine's Dr. Stephen Edberg, the person whom the International Bottled Water Association told ‘20/20’ to talk to, agreed that bottled water is no better for you. ‘No, I wouldn't argue it's safer or not safer.’” Moreover, the safety of tap water is supported by studies: one 4-year study by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found that tap water is often subject to even more stringent regulation and testing than bottled water. Not much to fear from tap water then.

Conclusion: in the U.S. it is not necessary to buy bottled water out of health concerns.

However, there are those who claim that bottled water just tastes better. Is that actually the case too? Blind taste tests of bottled vs. tap water have been favorable towards tap water, but why don’t you taste the results yourself at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival?

At the Science Carnival on Saturday, April 24 between noon and 4pm, the Cambridge Public Library will be holding the event Bottled Water v Tap Water, where you can learn more about the differences and similarities between the water from the bottle and from the tap—all while sipping on a refreshing cool drink of water.

This event is sponsored by CDM.

Image Credits:
• Bottled water image modified from Brett Weinstein’s photograph.
• Tap water image modified from Alex Anlicker’s photograph.

A Carnival With No Clowns?

2010-04-22T01:03:00.000-04:00

When I think of attending a carnival on a Saturday afternoon, I think of clowns, cotton candy, farris wheels, and amusement booths. The Cambridge Science Festival is hosting a “Carnival” this Saturday as a kick-off event to their 10-day festival. But, there will not be clowns or cotton candy or any of the things that first come to mind when I think of carnival except for the booths. What can you expect from this so called “carnival”?

When you walk up to the attraction booths, you will not be handed a handful of darts and asked to pop the water-balloons to receive a prize. Rather, you may be asked to spit in a cup to sequence your DNA or maybe asked to peek into a suitcase that contains fiber optics made out of Jell-O.

According to the festivals website the “Carnival” will feature many interesting attractions and hands-on workshops that will allow you the opportunity to make ice cream using liquid nitrogen, sequence your DNA, build electrical circuits, explore your brain, learn about cancer drug development and sustainability projects, and much much more.

You will not attend the traditional clown show; rather you will attend a Laser Show to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the laser. Instead of watching clowns juggle, you will see chemists make science come to life.

When I go to a carnival, I want to see clowns and I want cotton candy. But, I guess, as a scientist, I could settle for something else. Do you think carnivals need clowns and cotton candy? I will leave it up to you to decide this weekend.

The carnival will be from 12pm-4pm this Saturday (April 24^th) at the Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway. There will be free shuttles from Harvard Sq, Cambridge Public Library, Museum of Science, Kendall T, Stata Center, MIT Museum, and Central Sq. Please visit the Cambridge science festival web page for more information.

Spit In A Cup And See Your Future

2010-04-21T23:20:00.000-04:00

Yup, it’s really that simple. This weekend come spit in a cup and learn about your DNA, which ultimately can reveal to you your future. How? Well, everyone has DNA. It is our genetic code; many refer to it as the “blue print” of human life. It makes you, YOU and me, ME. The difference between our DNA is the sequence of the chemical bases. All DNA is made up of four chemical bases: Adenine (A), guanine (G), cystine (C), and thymine (T). We each have an estimated three billion of these bases in our genome. They are organized in an infinite amount of sequences throughout our bodies and in turn it makes every individual unique. The sequence is specifically referred to as the genome. Our genomes are unbelievably huge! Your entire genome fills 200 1,000-page New York City telephone directories. And, if you unwrap all the DNA you have in your cells, you could reach the moon 6,000 times!

Your DNA sequence, or genome, can reveal a lot. Your sequence is completely unique to you. No one else in this world has the same DNA sequence as you do. However, some parts of your genome are like other peoples. This commonality, along with other research mechanisms, has allowed scientists to research what these sequences code for, in other words, how these sequences affect your body. Scientists have been able to identify specific sequences that flag diseases and health traits. Additionally, sequencing DNA can reveal information about ancestry and genealogy.

You have the opportunity to sequence a part of your genome this weekend at the Science Carnival featured at the Cambridge Science Festival. I know what you’re thinking, it sounds like a cool opportunity but it’s going to be complicated. I promise you it won’t be. You will use a common, easy way to extract your DNA –you will swirl salt water in your mouth and then spit it out into a cup. This extracts DNA from your cheek cells. You and a lab technician will amplify a fragment of your genome and then sequence it in a DNA sequencing machine….and, wa-la! You will be able to see the very code that dictates your body, makes you the person that you are, and ultimately determines important aspects of your future, like your health.

This amazing opportunity is being provided by DIYbio Boston at the Boston Open Source Science (BOSS) Lab on April 24^th and 25^th from 12-4pm. The process takes approximately six hours but it can be broken up over 2 days. There is a price you will have to pay, 40$. The BOSSlab is located at 339R Summer Street, Somerville, MA 02144. For more information on the event, please visit the event’s website at http://bosslab.org/reading-genes.

To learn more cool facts about DNA, please visit this website where I found the cool facts I included in this article: http://www.eyeondna.com/2007/08/20/100-facts-about-dna/.

Thinking about Thoughts

2010-04-21T15:43:00.000-04:00

The human mind does an incredible number of even more incredible things. Take, for example, the age old act of bartering. Whether trading ears of corn for livestock, or complex corporate negotiations, a large part of human enterprise has relied on our ability to think about others’ specific desires and intentions. We want what is best for us and our family or community, but realize that we need to compromise because the other party wants the same. Additionally, the other party may hold a grudge, or be ignorant towards current market values, and so on. All of this amazingly complex analysis happens at lightning speeds within the mind, while we haggle prices or make offers.

We use this complex ability every day, and it has drawn the attention of many scientists. According to MIT Professor Rebecca Saxe:

“Thinking about other minds is the foundation for both personal relationships and societal institutions, and the human capacities to read and write fiction, to teach skills and pass knowledge down generations, and to make moral judgments, especially to forgive accidents.”

The human brain and mind (which are not necessarily one and the same) are very active fields of research, and comparatively young. Saxe is one of many researchers investigating how we think about other peoples’ minds. A particularly elegant experiment done by H. Wimmer and J. Perner in 1983, dubbed the “Sally-Anne test.” According to Saxe:

“A preschooler is presented with [...] two main characters, Sally and Anne. He is told that Sally has a ball, that she has put the ball in a brown basket and gone outside; that Anne takes the ball from the basket and plays with it inside the house and then puts it in a green box; and that Sally is now coming back inside to get her ball. Where, he is asked, will Sally look for her ball?

We know that Sally will look for the ball in the brown basket: that is where she put it, and she thinks it is still there. Five-year-olds see it the same way: they breeze through the false-belief task. Not so three-year-olds. The younger children consistently predict the opposite: they expect Sally to look for her ball in the green box, where the ball really is. It's as if the three-year-olds cannot take Sally's (false) belief about the ball into account in predicting her behavior.”

So, somewhere along the line in human development, we learn how to think about people who have minds just like our own. This ability to infer and reason about another person's states of mind is called a 'Theory of Mind' (ToM). We can ask: “Do we learn our Theory of Mind from interactions with people, or is it an inherent, instinctual quality?” This is one of the questions that Saxe’s research hopes to address.

Concretely, Professor Saxe uses multiple kinds of brain imaging methods to see if there are specific mechanisms present in the physical brain that correspond to our ToM. For example, fMRI imaging combines normal MRI, which is capable of scanning the brain in incredible detail, with oxygen level analysis, which corresponds to activity in the brain. So, using fMRI scans, Saxe’s research can pinpoint areas of activity when subject are presented situations where they must employ their theory of mind.

“The brain regions involved in Theory of Mind are incredibly robust. We can find the same regions, in 90% of individual subjects, after just 20 minutes of scan time. [...] The 'Theory of Mind' regions thus offer a rare window through the brain to the mind.”

The implications of her work are far reaching. Philosophers have long debated the relationship between “the mind” and “the brain”, and this work may start to uncover the strings that hold them together. Additionally, her methods provide a window into things like Asperger Syndrome and Autism, where people experience severe difficulty in social situations where ToM is needed.

If you’re interested in Professor Saxe’s ideas you have an amazing opportunity to hear her talk about them this coming Friday evening, at “Big Ideas for Busy People!”. I heartily encourage you to attend; nothing compares to hearing the ideas straight from the visionaries themselves.

How to Watch a Laser Show

2010-04-20T18:35:00.000-04:00

This Saturday, the Cambridge Science Festival opens with a lunchtime laser show. This is the final post in a series of posts designed to familiarize you with lasers.

What: Cambridge Science Festival Laser Show
When: Saturday, April 24, Noon
Where: Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway. Free shuttles run from the Harvard Square Red Line T stop.

Enjoy the festival, everyone!

Interview with an Artist

2010-04-20T01:52:00.000-04:00

Joseph Choma is a student in Design and Computation at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. He will present a special exhibit, “Design for the Ideal Polling Booth,” at the second floor of the MIT Museum from Saturday, 4/24 to Sunday, 5/2. He will personally be available for discussion by his exhibit on the second floor of the MIT Museum on Sunday, April 25th, from 1PM to 3PM. I recently got the chance to have an e-mail interview with Joseph, and here’s some of what we talked about.

Christine: Tell me about your project.

Joseph: The project is called, Design for an Ideal Polling Booth. Its intent is to provoke thought and awareness on how easy it is for us to take seemingly little things like a "polling booth" for granted. The act of voting was once a fiercely aggressive act, which did not always take place within a polling booth but sometimes at a public polling place. During the 1800s, it was normal for violent disputes to ignite at these public events. Optimistically there is a hope that by expressing the polling booth's significance, people may walk away from the exhibit with a more serious stance on voting, and learn to appreciate their rights.

Christine: What are the best features of your polling booth?

Joseph: The best features resonates on the surface experience. A surface can have a texture, but at some point if that texture extends far enough out into space, it's depth is no longer perceived as a two dimensional, but rather it becomes a spatial threshold boundary. This polling booth defines a threshold boundary with quills or spikes that radiate around a common center point. This pushes a viewer to step away from the booth while increasing the personal space and comfort for the individual voting inside. Architecturally, it sets a bound between the viewer and the user.

Christine: What was the most frustrating part of working on this project?

Joseph: It was particularly difficult to translate my digital design into a physical structure. Parametric design software doesn't care how many unique modules your design has or what physical material the design is composed of. In the end I realized perhaps it is better not to just try to recreate what I have designed in the computer as accurately as possible but rather to re-look at the project through the lens of the physical material. MIT Professor George Stiny describes a design process where you can embed anything that you see without being constrained by memory or a fixed universe. I tried to limit my digital bias and memory, so instead, I asked the material: what can it do? what does it want to be? and how does it want to be formed? This led me to an unusual hybrid fabrication process which combined digital fabrication connection accuracies with handcraft material manipulations.

Christine: Where did you get your project idea from?

Joseph: When I began working on this project the polling booth concept wasn't even in my mind. I began by “playing” with a buckyball. I drew diagonal lines off the circle's center points, and then I suddenly tried extruding those curves to a point. I realized that I had created a form of volume packing structure, and this gave me the idea to try to embed other forms into the system. I went on to pack vaults into the structure, having them radiate around a common center point. By embedding vaults into the structure it redefined the exterior boundary with what appeared to be spikes or quills. When I began to translate the digital design into the physical world, the definition of vaults became dropped and instead it became about making literal spikes. At some point, when I was trying to understand what this strange space could be, I decided to reposition it as an art piece, calling it a "Polling Booth" brought new intellectual content to the piece – like when the artist Marcel Duchamp labeled a urinal as a fountain.

Christine: What lies ahead for this project?

Joseph: This piece began to spark a notion that the inner boundary and the outer boundary of a surface could each define their own formal figure due to the project's unique "spikes." By defining that formal figure not even within the depth of its own surface thickness but rather within the illusion of thickness by having geometric texture become spikes is still an interesting concept to me. The fabrication process of using digital technologies to help control hand crafted connection accuracies still excites me as well. I began the fabrication techniques at the object scale and now at the installation scale, and next I would like to prototype at the architectonic scale (e.g. create a larger-scale model). I am also interested in composite materials as well as partially fixed and flexible molds.

Christine: What is your favorite project that you've ever worked? Why was that your favorite project?

Joseph: My favorite project is always the project I am currently working on, because if it wasn't why would I be working on it? The next project I work on should be “better” than the last, or at least that's my hope.

Christine: What advice would you give for someone wanting to go into design?

Joseph: In order to design you need constraints. Tools influence the way in which we design. This influence should not be obsessed about but you should also be conscious of the limitations of the medium. An individual should use the constraints of a tool as a mechanism to generate new unpredictable ideas. Don't try to preconceive a vision in its entirety, have faith in the medium you are exploring, and stay open minded. Be patient, keeping making and looking.

STOP THROWING AWAY ELECTRICITY!

2010-04-17T03:01:00.000-04:00

The Truth about Phantom Loads

It’s possible that you might be paying for extra electricity without knowing it. You may have already cut back on your energy consumption in the typical ways, replacing light bulbs and purchasing energy-efficient appliances. Test your knowledge of home energy efficiency at the Energy Efficiency Game Show from 12:00 noon - 4:00 pm on Saturday April 24th at Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway, as part of the Science Carnival at the Cambridge Science Festival.

So is it possible that you might still be paying more for electricity than you actually use? Imagine this scenario: settling down on the sofa during a calm winter evening, you turn on your energy efficient floor lamp to begin peacefully reading,

Green Your Home All-In-One: For Dummies.

Just as you get to an exciting section on combination compost/recycling units, an intrusively loud noise erupts from the neighbor’s open window ripping into your thoughts. You look with disgust at their wide-screen television (150 watts) playing on full volume while their gas fireplace (1,500 watts) sends heat into the room and straight out the open window. Every light inside the house is on, not to mention they

are using incandescent bulbs (1,000 watts). The microwave (1,000 watts)

is heating some leftovers that you assume have been in the refrigerator (100 watts) for at least a week

while their

• cell phones charge (20 watts)

• their computers compute (100 watts)

• the DVD system plays (20 watts)

• the printer prints (50 watts)

• and the dishwasher washes (1200 watts)

GRAND TOTAL OF VERY UN-GREEN NEIGHBOR’S POWER CONSUMPTION: (5,140 watts!!!)

5,140 watts is the power you’d use to do 17 pushups per second. That’s 1000 pushups per minute! If they had to power their own house by doing pushups, at least they’d be in shape.

Your neighbor is wasting so much electricity, yet you manage a measly total of 10 watts just for your reading light. (You are wearing a parka because you don’t use heating anymore, and you gave also up refrigerated foods.) When you turn out the lights to call it a night, you think you’re using no power at all. Think again! It turns out the devices you have plugged in are using electricity without your knowing it. Your television and your microwave are off and yet they are leaking power from the outlets. They are acting as phantom loads.

Phantom Loads

Phantom Loads, also known as standby power, leaking electricity or vampire power, is the power that leaks into electronic appliances even when they are in the off or standby mode. Most electronics operate in standby mode the majority of the time, yet are still using power. A desktop computer for example uses 21 watts in sleep mode. When it is completely powered off, it still uses about 3 watts. You’d have to unplug the computer completely to stop this leakage! Take a look at this website for leakage rates of some typical household appliances.

Living in a house without heat or refrigeration, as in the scenario above, might be unreasonable. However, adding up the leaking power from some common appliances give surprising results.

These phantom loads total up to 23 watts with all appliance completely off. Sleep mode can add another 15 watts to a computer or 10 watts to a DVD player. The average US house uses around 1000 watts which means phantom loads account for more than 2% of the energy used by households. By some estimates (http://www.aceee.org/pubs/a981.htm), phantom loads comprised 5% of the entire US household power consumption amounting to a total of $3.5 billion dollars annually spent on wasted power. If the quantity of wasted power isn’t shocking enough, the amount of wasted money should be.

How the phantoms be stopped?

Surge protectors help. Plugging appliances into surge protectors and then shutting these off at night will eliminate phantom loads. Alternatively, unplugging the appliance would do the trick. Also, shutting electronic gadgets off completely rather than leaving them on sleep or standby cuts power consumption enormously. Again, replacing appliances with energy-efficient versions is a good way to contribute to energy conservation and to save $$.

This website tells you how you can check whether your home has phantom loads

http://www.kouba-cavallo.com/phantom.html

Check out these websites for more information on phantom loads:

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/consumer/tips/home_office.html

http://www.aceee.org/pubs/a981.htm

http://www.energy-saving-electronics.info/standby-power.htm

Physics Demos @ MIT

2010-04-15T09:23:00.000-04:00

Image Credits:
TSG@MIT Physics Homepage
TechTV

What's in a laser?

2010-04-13T18:23:00.000-04:00

Eleven days from today, the Cambridge Science Festival opens with a lunchtime laser show. This is the third in a series of posts designed to familiarize you with lasers -- before the showtime lights dim.

What: Cambridge Science Festival Laser Show
When: Saturday, April 24, Noon
Where: Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway. Free shuttles run from the Harvard Square Red Line T stop.

Next week: what to look for at the CSF laser show.

Lunch With a Laureate: Dr. Jack Szostak

2010-04-13T16:16:00.001-04:00

Nobel Prizes are sometimes awarded years after the research leading to them was conducted. Often the awarded scientist has moved on to other areas of research. Such is the case with Dr. Jack Szostak, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for research that he conducted in the 1980s. He won the Prize for his discovery of telomerase, an enzyme which is critical to the replication of DNA.

It turns out that DNA cannot be copied all the way to the end of the strand. So if we had nothing to protect the ends of our chromosomes, they would become smaller and smaller each time they replicate. Thankfully, shrinking chromosomes are avoided by a wonderful protective mechanism called a telomere. A telomere is a non-coding stretch of DNA at the end of a chromosome which protects the chromosome from losing important information each time it is copied. Because the telomere does not code essential information, it is okay that it is not fully replicated. However, if the telomeres were to get shorter and shorter each time DNA was copied, eventually the telomeres themselves would cease to exist and then there would be nothing protecting the important information from being deleted.

This is where Szostak's discovery, telomerase, comes into the picture. Telomerase maintains the length of the telomeres, ensuring that the protective cap at the end of our chromosomes remains strong. It turns out that telomerase is involved in the processes of aging and cancer. When the telomerase breaks down, genes are not copied well, causing aging. Hyperactive telomerase has been shown to be responsible for the rapidly multiplying cells of cancer. The discovery of telomerase is so important that it was even in my introductory biology textbook.

In the almost thirty years since Szostak made his discovery of telomerase, he has moved on to other areas of research. Currently, he is intrigued by how a bunch of chemicals turned into the beginning of life billions of years ago. His lab is developing an artificial cell that can undergo Darwinian evolution, modeling the early development of life. Szostak's model of the evolutionary cell consists of two self-replicating parts: the genetic material inside the cell, and the membrane enclosing the cell. The genetic material needs to allow the current cell to be copied, but it must also allow for variations to evolve into their own unique cells. This research is exciting, as it will allow us to better understand the early stages of life by seeing evolution in action. Szostak also hopes that his research on early cells will further our understanding of how cells work today.

You can meet Jack Szostak on Wednesday, April 28th at the MIT Museum as part of the weeklong Lunch With a Laureate series. He'll be available between 12 Noon and 1pm for an informal discussion about his life, his work, the Nobel Prize, and anything else you want to ask him. Bring your questions about telomerase, cells, aging, and the origin of life. Also, don't forget to bring your lunch!

Big telescopes; Bigger Questions; and Really Big Mistakes

2010-04-09T15:55:00.000-04:00

Imagine its 1930, and you’re a veteran Harvard astronomer, talking to ordinary folk about your work.
It’s the most exciting time in your field since Isaac Newton, but its surely sort of embarrassing too.
Those folk might reasonably say to you: “Hey, just ten years ago, most of you people thought our Milky Way galaxy was the whole universe – and now this Hubble fellow tells us there are billions of galaxies just like ours out there.”
Or – referring to Cecilia Payne - they could say: “What’s more, you people all thought the stars were made of IRON, like my CAR, until just last year, when a LADY – someone’s assistant! – proved they’re made of hydrogen gas, which couldn’t be more different! Have you got ANYTHING right?”
Now – in 2010, after a decade of equally stunning new discoveries – Harvard’s astronomers face a remarkably similar time of excitement and embarrassment.
Embarrassment, because – until very recently - astronomers thought they at least knew the basics of what the universe was made of.

Alas, it now turns out they have no idea what 96% of the universe is made of. Dark matter? – there’s ten times more of this stuff than all the stars in all the galaxies, but no one’s identified even a gram of it yet. Dark Energy? – not a clue.
And it gets worse. Their best theoretical models for the strength of this “anti-gravity” force (the one that is accelerating the galaxies away from each other) turns our to be the most numerically incorrect answer OF ALL TIME! – the measured value of this force is 10 to the power of 120 times weaker than the scientists thought.
So – like I said: discoveries to make a rhino blush.
Luckily, Cambridge astronomers get most of it right, and bounce back fast when they don’t.
In 1920, Harlow Shapley – director of the Harvard Observatory – was the losing member of the “Great Debate”, in which he had insisted that the “spiral nebulae” seen through telescopes could not possibly be galaxies outside our own. (Hubble proved him wrong).
But he went on to found the National Science Foundation, and helped turn astronomy into one of the most popular of the pure sciences among the broader public.
In recent times, another famed local astronomer – Robert Kirshner – got it embarrassingly wrong when he declared that the brightest supernova in modern times – “Supernova 1987A” – was a dud, since the star that should have exploded was still there. (In fact, he later realized ruefully that this surviving star was one which had always been behind the exploded star, from earth’s point of view, and that the supernova had been the real thing).
But within 10 years, Kirshner would more than make up for it, as a key member of the team which found that the expanding universe was not slowing down - as it “should” under the influence of gravity - but was accelerating apart. Using a different type of supernova from the 1987A variety (which is powered by gravity) to measure huge distances, their team was able to determine the ultimate fate of the universe: one heck of a statement to tuck in your resume.

The point is: in this field, excitement, optimism and wonder always win over disappointment, and its infectious. So, in 1930, Shapley founded a monthly Observatory Night for the general public, who were invited to peer through its telescopes and learn from its scientists.
These interactive lectures for lay people virtually packed out the Phillips Auditorium on Gardiner Street, and they’ve been doing much the same every month for the past eight decades.
It was here that Carl Sagan briefed the public on the possibility of life on other worlds; that Margaret Geller spoke on her co-discovery of nothing less than the biggest object in the universe – the “Great Wall” of galaxy clusters, over 500 million light years across. (By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy is about 100 000 light years across.) More importantly, she found that this unimaginably large structure was also remarkably THIN – and that it appeared to form the shell around a vast void, like the skin of a bubble. This gave us our first accurate imagining of the whole of creation – a spidery cobweb of uneven threads of stuff and bubbles of nothing.
And the Cambridge Science Festival will commemorate the stellar history of the event with “80 Years of Astronomy” at the same venue, at 7:30pm on April 24.
Event Host David Aguilar says visitors will get to peer through the 9-inch telescope on the roof – just as they did in 1930 – and check out “The Great Refractor”: a 15 inch telescope which was once the best in the world. (Although he’ll likely contrast this once formiddable instrument with the monster 30 meter-wide reflector telescopes now planned.)
In addition to the rich history, Dr Charles Alcock – director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics - will reveal the biggest questions facing tomorrow’s astronomers – and the amazing new tools they’ll use to answer them.

We are who we friend

2010-04-08T14:41:00.000-04:00

Want to be happy? It might be as easy as surrounding yourself with happy people.

Nicholas Christakis, Professor of Medical Sociology and of Medicine at Harvard University, examined thousands of social connections and found that happy people tend to associate with happy people, while lonely people tend to associate with lonely people.

The effects our friends have on us extend further than that. Smokers and obese people are more likely to group together, affecting each other through their mutual decisions.

In colorful, branched diagrams, Christakis maps out social networks and uses them to examine how we group together. Below for instance is what could be called a web of happiness, showing happy people in yellow, intermediate people in green, and unhappy people in blue, with the other colors indicating different types of social relationships. The different types of people tend to cluster together, as can be seen by the fact that most of the yellow sections group together and most of the blue sections group together - happy goes with happy, unhappy with unhappy.

"Happiness in a Face-to-Face Network in 2000," from Christakis paper "Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis Over 20 Years in the Framingham Heart Study."

This is the power of social networks, the real life web of connections we make with other people. As much as we consider ourselves to be independent individuals, Christakis's research shows our friends, family, and coworkers influence us more than we realize.

Our behaviors model those around us because the people we associate with affect our expectations of what is normal and we start to unconsciously imitate them. Just like viruses can move from one person to the next, thoughts and feelings can move like an infection through an entire social network.

Those we're closest to influence us the most, and our influence on others wanes as we travel further through our social network. But in our tangled social web, Christakis has found that even people you've never met can affect your life.

Christakis is just one of the ten scientists speaking at Big Ideas for Busy People, a Cambridge Science Festival event where leading researchers give five minute presentations each for a general audience. The title for his presentation is: "Why social networks are like carbon," and while Christakis is keeping quiet now the exact topic, saying "it's going to be a little bit of a secret;" but in a phone interview he made it clear that it'll be based on his current research.

"I want [the audience] to understand that we live our lives embedded in these elaborate and enormous structures that are known as 'social networks' and that these social networks affect everything that we feel, think, or do," Christakis said.

This isn't an ordinary talk for Christakis because of the precise five minute speaking limitation, but he says that doesn't daunt him. He says feels "more entertained than constrained" by it, but it'll be interesting to see how he and the other speakers adapt to this format.

To hear Christakis talk and nine other scientists speak about their ideas, come to Big Ideas for Busy People Friday April 23, 7:30 - 9:30 PM at The Laboratory (Northwest Science Building, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138)

To read more about Christakis and his research, check out his web site: http://christakis.med.harvard.edu/index.html or his book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. After the Big Ideas event there will also be a reception to speak with the presenters.

Of Lightbulbs and Lasers

2010-04-06T17:06:00.000-04:00

On April 24, the Cambridge Science Festival will open with a laser show. You'll be sitting in the dark, waiting for the show to start -- and then you'll think, "WAIT! How does that work?"

Let's start with a thought experiment...

Lasers and lightbulbs continue below the cut!

What: Cambridge Science Festival Laser Show
When: Saturday, April 24, Noon
Where: Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway. Free shuttles run from the Harvard Square Red Line T stop.

Next week: how do we get from stimulated emission to a laser pointer?

Hello Holography

2010-04-05T21:30:00.000-04:00

Are you tired of your boring old two-dimensional photographs? Ever gone through your old family photo albums and wished that you could relive some moments? Don't despair; holograms are here!

Holograms are commonly described as "3D photographs," though the processes involved in making the two different types of photographs are quite different. Both conventional photographs and holograms are made on a flat piece of photographic film that reacts to different intensities of light, but holograms render information about the depth of the object: the object appears to literally pop out of the page. How do holograms manage to do that?

When you take a conventional photograph, your camera opens the shutter to let light through to hit the film. The light that enters your camera has already hit and reflected off the object that you're capturing. The object reflects light with different intensities (brightness) depending on the physical characteristics of the object. The chemicals on the film (usually a light-sensitive compound called silver halide) react with the light. How much the film reacts depends on how intense the light is. The regions that react more are darker in the resulting photograph. So, a photograph is merely a record of the intensity distribution of the object. However, it does not record any information about the phase of the light waves (see Figure 1), which we need if we want to know anything about the depth and dimensions of the object (a point that is further from the camera will have a phase different from the phase of a point closer to the camera).

Figure 1

How, then, do holographers capture—and then render—information about depth? They do it by making use of a standard or reference. This is similar to when you measure something with a ruler. You could just lay your ruler down on the surface that you're measuring and record a number, but that number is useless if you don't know what that number is relative to. You need to designate a specific point as zero (i.e. the reference). In holography, this reference is called the reference beam. The reference beam will combine with the light from the object, creating an interference pattern (see Figure 2). The film records the interference pattern. Since the intensity at any point in the interference pattern also depends on the phase of the light from the object, the hologram contains information about the phase as well as the intensity of the light waves.

Figure 2

Figure 3

In order to get a useful interference pattern, a laser must be used for the light source because lasers emit light of a single wavelength (color). Light from the sun or light bulbs contain multiple wavelengths. It is crucial for the reference beam and the light from the object to have the same wavelength because we want an interference pattern that looks like the wave in Figure 2. If the two light waves have different wavelengths, they would not combine to form a wave that we want (Figure 3 is an example of this).

Now, let's look at the set-up for doing holography (Figure 4). A laser is pointed at a beam-splitter (e.g. a prism), which splits the beam into the reference beam and the object beam. These two beams will continue to have the same wavelength throughout the whole process. The object beam only reflects off the object, and the reflected light contains waves with different phases depending on the physical characteristics of the object. The reference beam and the object beam are then recombined, and interference patterns are created between the waves at each point. These interference patterns are then recorded on the film.

Figure 4 (HowStuffWorks.com)

When you look at the finished product, it might look like a sheet of random squiggles, but not like the image of the original object. Remember that the film only records the interference pattern between the object beam and the reference beam. You “bring it to life” by illuminating it with the reference beam. Going back to our distance measurement analogy, if you measure only the distance between point A and point B, you cannot go back to that space and pinpoint where point B was if you didn’t record where point A was. In the case of holography, point A is the reference beam and the distance measurement is what the film captures. Bringing the image to life is figuring out where point B is. When you shine the reference beam on it, the film will reflect that light, thus recreating the object beam. When that light hits your eyes, you don’t see a flat 2D image; you see the 3D representation of the object. Seeing that light is the same as simply looking at the object directly (light has to bounce off of an object and into your eyes in order for you to see that object). Your brain will interpret the light from the film the same way it will interpret the light from the object, so the image will appear as it would appear if you were simply looking at the object directly.

If I’ve piqued your interest in holography and you’d like to see some holograms, you should go to the “Explore Holography” event on April 27th from 3-4PM at the MIT Museum, where Seth Riskin, the Museum’s Manager of the Holography and Spatial Imaging Initiative, will take you on a behind the scenes tour to look at these marvels of science and art. Enrollment is limited and pre-registration is required. If event fills up before you get a chance to register, you can still visit the Museum’s holography collection (the largest and most comprehensive collection of holograms in the world) on MIT Museum Free Day (April 24th, 10AM-5PM) or on your own time (the Museum is open daily from 10AM-5PM).

Next time, I’ll talk about the different applications of holography.

An Ideal Polling Booth?

2010-04-05T21:00:00.000-04:00

Have you ever thought about the design process behind a polling booth? If you haven’t, it’s completely understandable since most polling booths are not very sophisticated or aesthetically appealing. Then again, there’s only one requirement: to protect the privacy of the voter, and this can be done simply with curtains.

When I tried to find the history of the architectural design behind polling booths and how they’ve changed with the addition of new voting technology, I couldn’t find anything. Even with Google. I couldn’t even find anything about famous polling booths. The closest site I could find to the history of polling booths discusses the mechanics behind how voting data has been collected (e.g. paper ballots, mechanical level machines, etc.)

The Internet cares more about the nearest polling booth than the actual design behind the booth. Then again, the designs aren’t usually memorable. Can you remember what the last booth you voted at looked like?

However, not all architects share this indifference to polling booth design. Joseph Choma, an MIT grad student, is schedule to present his design for the ideal polling booth on the second floor of the MIT Museum in the Emerging Technologies gallery from Saturday 4/24 to Sunday 5/2, and he will be available for discussion on Sunday 4/25.

Choma has posted an image of his first prototype polling booth design on his blog, architectuREdefined. His prototype clearly illustrates that polling booths do not need to be boring, challenging the banal nature of current options. His design is well thought out. As Eric Howeler noted, Choma’s design “acknowledges that the act of voting is a fiercely individual act, and the defensive structure serves to define a personal space/zone around the voter.”

This is one exhibit you just can't miss.

Quantum Confusion

2010-04-04T20:15:00.000-04:00

I’m going to let you in on a secret that I’ve learned as an undergraduate physicist at MIT.

No one understands quantum mechanics.

That seems odd, considering that most all of modern technology relies on it. Sure, physicists do the calculations (and do them spectacularly), but turning the crank on a machine doesn’t tell you why it does what it does. The problem is, science is really good at answering the question of “what happens,” but not so skilled at “why it does.” This leads physicists to uncomfortable situations when trying to tell people what in the blazes they’re talking about.

The mathematical foundations of quantum physics are rock solid; indeed they are the most statistically accurate theory we’ve ever created when it comes to testing predictions. The odd part is, the math involved is incredibly different then anything we had used before. A series of rules, called “axioms,” are followed. This is an idea descended from the Greeks, who realized that if you want to prove anything, you have to start from some basic unprovable assumptions (e.g., parallel lines will never touch).

It’s within these axioms that the weirdness of quantum physics hides. We can’t test why the weirdness exists, because we had to assume its existence to get anywhere.

For example, you may have heard of the famous example of “Schrödinger’s Cat.” Often told, this story is a way that physicists try to explain one particular weirdness about quantum mechanics. The story goes something like this:

“A mechanism is set up containing a radioactive material that could randomly decay at any moment, and when it does, a poisonous gas is released. If a cat is sealed in a box with this device and isolated from the outside world, quantum mechanics tells us that at a given moment, instead of a cat who is definitely alive or dead, we’d have a quantum cat who is alive and dead at the same time. Then, when the box is opened and observed there is a 50% chance of us seeing a dead or live cat.”

This is pretty confusing. The thing is, quantum mechanics really deals with insanely tiny object, like atoms or electrons. Connecting a tiny object (random decay of a radioactive material) to a large object (Schrödinger’s Cat) is a way of making us see how weird are the things quantum mechanics says go on inside tiny objects.

One of the axioms of quantum mechanics is that we cannot say an electron is doing one particular thing at a given time, and that we have to account for numerous possibilities instead, until an observation happens. The math then tells, incredibly accurately, the probabilities for different outcomes.

What the math cannot tell us, though, is what “exists”; in fact, the math doesn’t care about our philosophical notions of existence. The reality is that when an electron is flying around, we have to take various possibilities into account at once. From this uncomfortable situation, we run into the issue that an electron can “be” in two places at the same time; and even weirder, that these two possible electrons can “bump into” and affect each other! It’s like the live cat being able to sniff the dead cat’s body!

We’ve done countless experiments, and there’s no way around it. In the real world, a single electron can and does bump into itself. And no one knows why.

In my next post, I’ll be telling you about something even weirder: the work of a scientist, Alan Guth, who thinks the universe might have spawned from pure nothing. I’ll only be able to scratch the surface, but you’ll be able to hear more from Professor Guth himself at an incredible event happening during the Festival called “Big Ideas for Busy People,” which Meghan has already blogged about. There, you can hear prominent scientists from a wide variety of fields talking about the beautiful, and often counterintuitive, truths about our world. Its a great opportunity to hear revolutionary thoughts from the pioneers themselves, and I am really excited to see it happen!

Fireflies - Your Backyard Beacons

2010-04-04T13:46:00.000-04:00

While sitting on the porch of a dainty New England cottage, you spot a Lampyridae and notice its bioluminescent abdomen. In other words, you’ve sighted a firefly! You sit back and marvel at the simple beauty of its illuminated flight. Feeling more adventurous, you might attempt to capture the blinking beetles in a jar. Whatever your reaction, you have rediscovered the endless entertainment of fireflies. Why not experience this entertainment all day as scientists and bug lovers come together at the Boston Museum of Science for Firefly Day? This day-long event, taking place on Saturday April 24th, will feature all things firefly.

An entire day devoted to fireflies––sounds like a short day. After all, they are just beetles who fly around flashing at other beetles, right? Wrong! They are the capstone of natural selection, the product of evolutionary magnificence concentrated into one single blinking bug butt. These critters have evolved to flash signals, unassisted, at one another using firefly Morse Code.

Ever wonder how or why they flash? Fireflies are among a select group of organisms that produce light through a process called bioluminescence. This process involves the mixture of two chemicals found in animals (bio) which react to produce light (luminescence). That’s not so unusual. There are more popular light-producing chemical reactions, like burning wood. The molecular bonds in the wood store energy that is released during a fire. Similarly, energy stored in the molecular bonds of the bug’s chemicals are released during bioluminescence. Here’s the difference: when wood burns, it mixes with oxygen and uses heat to speed up the process. The “cool” thing about fireflies is that they don’t need heat. Their chemicals produce light without needing any external help. While the reaction in fireflies is a lot different than fire it is amusing to imagine each bug with a tiny campfire on its back. Unfortunately, as you’ve discovered, that’s not the case.

Now that you know how these blink at each other, are you curious as to why? Find out at Firefly Day at the Boston Museum of Science! Events from the 2009 Firefly day can be seen here.

In the meantime, want to attract more fireflies to your home? Here are a few tips from this website.

Avoid the use of chemicals on your lawn if you want fireflies to make a home there. Would you want your living room smelling like Roundup?
Turn off the lights outside. Fireflies rely on darkness to successfully send blinking signals.
Provide your fireflies with a place to live during the day such as overhanging trees or tall grass. As an added bonus, this may also obstruct the view of nosy neighbors.

And remember, if you capture the fireflies in a jar, be sure to let them out quickly! Most of the blinking fireflies are males anyways. You wouldn’t want to leave too many males in a confined space for too long. It’s no wonder they all end up dead the next day.

To find out more about fireflies, check out these websites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly

http://www.firefly.org/

http://dnr.wi.gov/org/caer/ce/eek/critter/insect/firefly.htm

http://hymfiles.biosci.ohio-state.edu/projects/FFiles/

How Harvard women cut the keys to the Universe

2010-04-02T14:02:00.000-04:00

“I’ll bet you that my HOUSEKEEPER can do a better job!”

This – or something like this – was apparently the line yelled at a male assistant by Edward Pickering, head of the Harvard Observatory, in 1877.

No one knows what blunder sparked the outburst, though we can bet that it was a whopper, given that women weren’t allowed even to operate a telescope at the time.

But we do know that Pickering made good on his bet – first hiring his housekeeper, and then many other women, to measure the brightness of stars – and that winning it would prove to be probably his greatest contribution to science.
Two of “Pickering’s harem” would devise entire new and efficient ways to classify the stars, while a third – Henrietta Leavitt - would do nothing less than revolutionize the way humans measured and understood their universe.
(Edwin Hubble would simply use Leavitt’s ideas and the world’s best telescope to make “the discovery of the century” in the 1920s – that our universe is filled with galaxies like our own, and is expanding.)
Still another woman, Cecilia Payne, would later come to Harvard to join the world’s most female-dominated science lab in the world, and discover for the first time what stars are really made of.

As a Harvard astronomy undergrad, I first heard the story of “Pickering’s women” in class, from one of their modern-day sisters: planet-hunting astrophysicist Dr Lisa Kaltenegger.
Wow, I thought.
Why wasn’t there a movie?

Of course, it was tough enough for women to get their hands on scientific instruments 100 years ago, far less the credit for their work. (Come to think of it, almost all the credit for Rosalind Franklin’s iconic discovery in biology – the crystalline structure of DNA – went to Watson and Crick just 50 years ago, so what’s new).

The Cambridge Science Festival will offer three sessions which celebrate women in cutting-edge science: “Inquiring Minds”, to be held from April 29 to May 1 at the Boston Museum of Science. The dozen speakers represent a remarkable diversity of scientific talent, from marine biology to chemistry and aerospace design.

But, for me, the thread of female scientific genius can be followed just as easily at any of the six astronomy-related events at the Festival, including “80 Years of Astronomy” (April 24), "From the Mysteries of the Brain to the Wonders of the Universe," (April 24) and “Cambridge Explores the Universe” (May 1).In fact, if they keep their eyes peeled, visitors to the latter – held at the Harvard Observatory – might find the names of two of the women I mention in this blog attached to two of the instruments they’ll get to play with (I ain’t sayin which).

“Cambridge Explores the Universe” is likely to be the most family- and fun-oriented of the astronomy events, with telescope tours, planetarium shows and even the chance to operate a robotic telescope at the MicroObservatory during the four hours of the open-house.

But there are some truly jaw-dropping story-lines behind the discoveries made at this place since 1839, and I’m particularly looking forward to the “Scientist Café” – where you’re invited to collar any of the working astronomers over a coffee and get them to give you an insider’s tale.

First, back to 1877: Asked to plot the brightness of stars onto photographic plates, here was the problem that Pickering’s blundering male assistant confronted: the brightness of the star on the photograph didn’t really tell you anything about it.
That’s because – unless it was a very nearby star, like Sirius - you had no idea of knowing how far it was from the earth.

Imagine being asked to measure all the lights from a photograph of an ocean scene on a moonless night.
The brightest one could be a 30 watt flashlight held in a life raft, 10 yards in front of the camera, and the dimmest could easily be a million candle-power lighthouse 3 miles away.

Using a combination of herculean patience and stunning insight, Leavitt discovered a pattern in a variety of star called "cepheids" which revealed their true power.
(Like a bell: the bigger the star, the slower its vibration cycle from bright to dim and back to bright.)
Although exploding stars are now used to measure the farthest distances, “Leavitt’s Law” – the relation between “period and luminosity” -remains the most accurate measuring tape in the universe.

But what about all the other stars? The ones that didn’t vibrate so reliably?
Again, “Pickering’s women” found the answer.
According to Debra Davis – editor of Woman Astronomers – his housekeeper, Williamina Stevens, and her unborn child had been abandoned by her husband just months after arriving in the US, and she was eager to find some means of financial independence.
Formerly a teacher in Scotland, Stevens proved so expert at plotting the brightness of stars on her boss’s photographic plates that she headed a project to survey the entire night sky (funded by another woman of central importance to astronomy: Anna Draper) and was appointed Harvard’s Curator of Astronomical Photographs.

Within 10 years, yet another female colleague, Annie Jump Cannon, invented an efficient new way to classify all stars at Stevens’ urging, and perhaps the most famous string of letters in all of science – “OBAFGKM”- to describe how they are organized.

As it turned out, nature would reward Cannon’s idea with an almost magical symmetry in the way that all “healthy” stars are arranged.
Incredibly, stars which are divided into groups of OBAFGKM (our Sun is a “G” star) by the fingerprint-like characteristics in their light, called “spectral lines”, can be arranged exactly the same way no matter if you’re dividing them by their size, their color, their total power output; their mass, their temperature, or even their life expectancy. (So all “O” stars will live shorter lives than all B stars, which will live shorter lives than A stars, etc. And O stars will also be bluer in color (And hotter. And bigger) than B stars, which will be bluer in color (And hotter. And bigger) than A stars, etc, etc.)

So that’s the distances and types of stars taken care of by Pickering’s pioneers.
But what about what they’re actually made of? (And most of the universe, for that matter)
Within three years of her arrival in Harvard from England – but working for Pickering’s successor - Cecilia Payne stunned the science world with an answer no one could challenge.
While her male counterparts had long insisted they were mostly made of iron, Payne proved it was hydrogen.
Other aspects of her research would form the foundation of the modern picture of how planets form, and how the elements are made.
And yet Payne was rated no higher than a “technical assistant” by her male director for 13 years after her groundbreaking discovery.
In the end, the pieces of knowledge we have about Harvard’s women astronomers are a lot like the faint points of starlight on their telescope plates: the blurred and often overlooked evidence of searing power.

I'd really welcome any comments or additional info folks might have about female astronomers.
Next week: I reveal how visitors will come face to face with a real, working time machine at the Festival.

Thanks for reading; cheers - Rowan

* (Rowan Philp is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT)

The “Coolest” Way to Make Ice Cream

2010-04-01T17:16:00.000-04:00

What is the secret to delicious and quick homemade ice cream? Liquid nitrogen.

Don’t believe me? Stop by the Cambridge Public Library between noon and 4pm on Saturday April 24--the Science Carnival is hosting an event called “Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream Making!” where YOU not only get to witness the amazing spectacle of making liquid nitrogen ice cream, but also get to consume the delicious final product.

It’s a pretty cool looking process. Here’s a photo from the first time I made liquid nitrogen ice cream:

Nitrogen is readily found in our atmosphere, but only in its gaseous state (incidentally, nitrogen gas makes up 70% of our atmosphere). Liquid nitrogen, on the other hands, does not occur naturally on Earth. Liquid nitrogen only exists under super-cold conditions. I’m talking -321°F cold, way colder than any place on Earth. By comparison, room temperature is around 70°F, and the coldest recorded air temperature on Earth was “only” -129°F (that honor went to Russia in 1983).

If liquid nitrogen hits any temperature above -321°F, it boils immediately into nitrogen gas. That’s why the ice cream looks like it is steaming in the above picture. Liquid nitrogen “steams” into gaseous nitrogen as it boils, just like how water steams into water vapor when it boils. Same concept and same process, except liquid nitrogen boils at a much lower temperature, and thus its “steam” is correspondingly much cooler. Colder things are denser than warm things, so while steam from water rises, the “steam” from liquid nitrogen sinks. (You can see this in the photo and at the festival!)

Due to liquid nitrogen’s coldness, you must handle it carefully with proper equipment, like gloves and specialized cold storage containers, and such matters will be properly taken care of at the Science Carnival.

But why use liquid nitrogen for making ice cream? It’s not necessary to have liquid nitrogen to make ice cream, but it certainly makes the task much easier (provided that you don’t have trouble acquiring liquid nitrogen).

Making ice cream sans liquid nitrogen is a slow process, one where you must churn the ice cream a lot while it is being cooled. This is the usual approach of ice cream making machines you find at factories and in home kitchens. Why the churning? For texture! We love ice cream not only for its flavor but also for its texture. Churning ice cream while it cools prevents it from solidifying into solid blocks--after all, eating rock-hard ice cream would be no fun. Churning also whips the ice cream, aerating it to the fluffy and smooth consistency we love. Like any recipe that involves a lot of aeration (ever tried making whipped cream or meringues, for instance?), this takes a while, but liquid nitrogen turns ice cream making into a snap.

The secret lies in the extreme coldness of liquid nitrogen. Boiling at about 400°F below room temperature, the transformation of nitrogen from liquid to gas form is incredibly violent. Think about a pot of boiling water on a stove. If you turn up the temperature on the stove, the water boils more violently. Same concept applies for liquid nitrogen (just at much cooler temperatures), thus liquid nitrogen boils with extreme ferocity: it fizzles and sizzles and immediately turns into vapor, like water splashed onto a very hot pan. This intense bubbling action serves as a whipping and aerating mechanism. All you need to do is create an ice cream base (a combination of milk, cream, sugar, and flavorings) and pour liquid nitrogen into the base while stirring, cutting down on the amount of work you need to do churning. Moreover, all of the liquid nitrogen evaporates, leaving you only with delicious ice cream.

Without a doubt, the “coolest” way to make ice cream is with liquid nitrogen.

Famous Scientists in Five Minutes

2010-04-01T00:04:00.000-04:00

In what ways do our friends influence us? How do our minds think about other people's minds? Where is the universe from - did it just come from nothing?

They're big questions, certainly. They can't exactly be figured out in an afternoon. But the Cambridge Science Festival is holding an event called "Big Ideas for Busy People" where these questions, and more, will start being answered.

In Big Ideas for Busy People, top scientists will talk about these ideas in the context of their own research at an evening event preceding the start of the Festival. Ten leading researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will present their work in precisely five minutes each, with five minutes available for questions from the audience.

Ever wanted to know what will power cars in the next ten years? To get an idea of the event, one of the speakers is Angela Belcher, Professor of Biological Engineering and Material Science and Material Engineering at MIT. She studies how to turn viruses into tiny nanowires, and how these nanostructures can be put together to produce powerful batteries, and so for it she'll talk about how DNA can be used to create energy-storing devices.

I'm studying biology, so I'm especially excited for Rebecca Saxe's talk about how the brain thinks about abstract ideas and Ed Boyden's presentation on how brain circuits are connected. But the ten speakers will talk about a range of topics such as biology, sociology, physics and astronomy. Plenty of topics floating around!

The event is completely new and experimental, and since their task is to boil down years of research into five minutes, presenting it clearly and quickly enough for us all to understand, it'll be interesting to see how well these scientists can do it.

The world around us is fascinating - come learn about it! Hear straight from prominent scientists about life and the universe at "Big Ideas for Busy People" on Friday April 23. It is a two hour event for adult audiences beginning at 7:30 PM in The Laboratory, Northwest Science Building 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.

To learn more about who's speaking at the event, read next week's post introducing another speaker, Nicholas Christakis, whose research focuses on social networks.

The Light Fantastic: An Illustrated History of Laser Development

2010-03-30T13:43:00.000-04:00

Hello, everybody! Welcome to the Cambridge Science Festival blog. My name is Amali, and this is the first part of a three-part Tuesday series about LASERS.

I'm writing about lasers for two reasons: firstly because I like lasers, and secondly because the Cambridge Science Festival opens with a laser show on Saturday, April 24. I want you to be ready.

This week's topic: milestones in laser development.

The answer's under the cut...

In the fifty years since Theodore Maiman's first pulse of light, lasers have become ubiquitous. They read DVDs and scan barcodes. They're in your pocket laser pointer. And on April 24, they'll be lighting up the room at the Cambridge Science Festival's laser show. Mark your calendars!

What: Cambridge Science Festival Laser Show
When: Saturday, April 24, Noon
Where: Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway. Free shuttles run from the Harvard Square Red Line T stop.

Next week: how does a laser work?

---
Credits for reference photos:
Einstein:Nobel Prize Foundation
Townes: Nobel Prize Foundation
Schawlow:Jose Mercado/Stanford News Service
Gould: Geoffrey Gould
Maiman: AIP Emilio Segres Visual Archives, used with permission.

Lunch With a Laureate: Dr. Eric Chivian

2010-03-30T12:00:00.001-04:00

The rich intellectual environment of Cambridge has so many Nobel Laureates, and soon you'll have the unique opportunity to meet one (or more) of them! Next month, from Monday, April 26 through Friday, April 30, is the Cambridge Science Festival's week-long Lunch With a Laureate series, and the MIT Museum will host free daily lunchtime discussions with Nobel Laureates from 12-1 pm.
Thursday's lunch will be with Dr. Eric Chivian, a Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry who co-founded the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its efforts to prevent nuclear war. In addition to his attempts to prevent nuclear warfare, Chivian founded Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment to increase awareness of environmental change and its effects on people. The Center champions the idea that people are an essential part of the environment and that when we destroy our environment, we damage ourselves as well. Through these initiatives, Dr. Chivian continues to be active in promoting world causes 25 years after receipt of his Nobel Peace Prize.
If you attend the event, you'll be able to meet Dr. Chivian and ask him questions about his political position. You can ask him about the history of his organizations or about the factors that influenced his work. You can find out his opinion on current conflicts and the proper way to deal with the many humanitarian crises around the world, and you can get his opinion about health and public policy issues. You can also ask Dr. Chivian about how receiving the Nobel Prize changed his personal and professional life. Come armed with questions and comments and don't forget to bring your lunch!

The Basics:
Lunch With a Laureate: Eric Chivian
12-1 pm
Free
Thursday, April 29 2010
MIT Museum, 265 Massachusetts Avenue, first floor in the MIT 360 area