Science/Technology blog

At Point Reyes National Seashore, environmental ideology has run into hard science, with a tug-of-war for management of an estuary coming down to the question of what is the most ecologically healthy thing to do.

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Snipped from the Blog.SCIAM.com.

This article was really interesting to me for many reasons. One, I think any new discovery about the brain is REALLY cool. I don’t think that needs much explanation. Second, I have noticed a very strange way that I process information in comparison to that of “normal” people. Not that I am a genius or anything, ha ha, but I do tend to “think” outside my “consciousness”. My problem solving is more like a reaction than a act of “thinking”. If that confuses you even further, let me give you a story that led me to this strange conclusion.

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Photo Credit: John CalambokidisChances are, if you’ve ever been swimming, you understand that it’s hard to dive deep. But marine mammals do it all the time — and they dive to depths beyond our imagination. Sperm whales, beaked whales, elephant seals all have an amazing ability for deep-diving, and along with that, fascinating specializations to their anatomy and physiology. Decades of research have demonstrated that diving mammals undergo a reduction in heartrate (bradycardia), a shunting of blood from the periphery to the core of their body, and have innovative features for preventing lung collapse and maximizing heat storage and blood oxygen. These features seem to have evolved multiple times in marine mammals and, interestingly, marine mammals of all sizes, from seals to blue whales, use the same energy-saving behaviors.

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Posted in Coupons at 8:00 pm by David Bradley — Click to comment

Laptops, college gear, textbooks, CDs, and DVDs, all available at a discount thanks to our eCampus coupons page and almost all essential for working on chemistry news, well maybe not the CDs or DVDs, and probably not the college gear. And, come to think of it not the textbooks either, most of my textbooks are almost two decades old! So, really just the laptops then? I guess so, and even then only one needed.

So, meanwhile, in the Alchemist chemistry news section over on ChemWeb this week - two smelly discoveries caught my nose. The first points the way to a clearer understanding of how we smell, while the second explains the biochemistry of geosmin, the earthy smell of freshly turned soil and the particular bouquet after rain showers. We learn from GATech scientists how a sensor array can weigh up atmospheric or aqueous pollutants and why stirring a dendrimer solution could explain the origins of life. Finally, this week, researchers in California have taken the first steps towards building a gamma-ray laser using a quasi-molecule based on positronium. And, the award mentioned this week goes to the RSC’s Project Prospect team, which received the 2007 ALPSP/Charlesworth Award for Publishing Innovation.

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Posted in Health, Bio at 4:00 pm by David Bradley — 4 Comments

For years, the notion that bacteria could cause ulcers was brushed aside, until the work of Robin Warren, who “rediscovered” the gut microbe Helicobacter pylori, was finally accepted. More recently, periodontal disease, a bacterial infection of the gums, has been implicated in heart disease, it’s the toxins released by the bacteria that are to blame. And in a recent discussion with one leading researcher about the genetics of obesity, he told me that he considered it more likely that a bacterial infection was more likely to be to blame for some cases of obesity than genetics and conversely there may be bacteria that make some people thin.

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The Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant object visible
to the unaided eye. Credit: Conrad JungVery often, the term “naked eye” is used to describe what can be seen with human eyes alone, unaided by tools like telescopes, microscopes, infrared cameras, ultraviolet detectors, and so on. Back in the mid 20th Century, then director of Chabot Observatory, Earl Linsley, coined what he felt was a more accurate (and maybe less provocative?) term to describe what can be seen in the night sky with unaugmented human vision: the unaided eye.

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Image from Wikipedia, originally from socialfiction.orgI’m in mourning: In early September, Alex the African grey parrot mysteriously died. I never met Alex personally, but I’ve heard him speak. Yes, he spoke. He also counted. And he could tell you which of a pair of keys was the bigger one, or the yellow one. He was the specially trained subject of the Avian Learning Experiment (thus his name), and for us animal lovers, Alex offered some evidence that the sentience we perceive in our furry and feathered friends may be for real.

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OK, I’ll admit it, I’m a java junkie. So this silly online quiz fit the bill for a little Friday humor:

What Your Latte Says About You

You don’t treat yourself very often. You find that indulging doesn’t jibe with your very disciplined life.

You can be quite silly at times, but you know when to buckle down and be serious.

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In dry years, fires in California cost billions of dollars and often result in lost lives. QUEST goes inside the fire season, looking at how the history of forest management could be feeding today’s flames.

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For as long as I can remember, the background of my father’s side of the family has been a bit of a mystery. There’s not much to go on in terms of family traditions, and we have only a very fragmentary family tree to work with. I guess that since many of my ancestors are at least reputed to have been “dirt farmers,” they were too busy eking out a sparse living to keep decent records of their ancestry.

We have reason to believe that somewhere in the late 1600’s / early 1700’s, my father’s ancestors came across the pond from somewhere in the British isles, and that the family name seems to have a fair amount of history behind it. But various sources (references both online & offline, “Your Family Name” booths at fairs and the like) have given us a variety of stories for the ultimate source of the surname. Some sources say it’s an old term of respect for a village elder; others that it’s a mangled version of an Old English term for a local landmark, and so forth.

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