Some Animals In Winter

Environmental & Science Education
Behavior
STEM
Biodiversity
Biological Evolution
Edward Hessler

How do animals tackle the cold?

There are several short videos answering this question in this story from David Suzuki's blog for The Nature of Things (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).

The featured animals are a red fox, Sable Island seals, a hibernating squirrel, a wood frog, river otters whose playfulness seems to say "embrace it," and the grizzly bear who sidles up to a river fishing table to lay on the fat for the winter sleep ahead.

Katherine Johnson Honored by NASA

Environmental & Science Educcation
STEM
Maths
History of Science
Women in Science
Edward Hessler

One way to honor a person who has made significant contributions to society is to name or re-name a building after them. On Friday, February 22, 2019 , the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) renamed a computing facility in West Virginia to honor Katherine Johnson. You will recall her from the the book (I'm a book guy.) and movie, "Hidden Figures."

The NASA center is now known as the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility. Among the analytic work she did for NASA was the trajectory analysis for the first human spaceflight (1961) followed by work on John Glenn's earth orbital mission (1962), and Apollo 11 (1969), the mission that landed the first two people to walk on the moon, John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin. Michael Collins was also an important member of that crew.

No matter the hurdles she faced as an African American, a woman, becoming a mathematician, working at NASA in a segregated facility, making complex calculations by hand--try to let that fact sink in, she did her work and did it well. Accurately, too.

In a report I enjoyed by Huffington Post's Carol Kuruvilla "her daughter, Joylette Hylick, told The New York Times her mother 'remains in awe about the honors she's received. Johnson 'can't imagine why people would want to honor her for just doing a good job,' Hylick told the newspaper on Friday." By the way she is also the recipient of the Silver Snoopy award, an award from people who counted and relied on her work--NASA astronauts.

To learn more about Katherine Johnson, see the official NASA biography, a news article on the occasion of her 100th birthday, and the Wiki entry which includes a complete list of honors and awards.

Katherine Johnson is a remarkable person.

Further On Out The Solar System Road

Environmental & Science Education

STEM

Solar System

Nature of Science

Edward Hessler

In 2018, Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington, D.C., announced the discovery of a new dwarf planet that was 120 times farther from the sun than is Earth. They gave it what they thought was an appropriate nick-name, “Far Out.”

Now he and his colleagues have found a dwarf planet even farther out, 140 times farther from the sun than is Earth. So what did they call it? “Far Far Out.”

Sheppard and his colleagues Chad Trujillo at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and David Tholen at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu are in search of larger game, a hypothesized 9^th planet often referred to as Planet 9 or Planet X.  It is thought to be about the size of Neptune and patrols an elliptical orbit that goes around the sun every 15,000 years.

This is the place where the dwarf planets come into play. Their orbits, yet to be determined, would be shaped by this much larger planet. The orbit shapes will take several years to determine. An earlier discovery by Sheppard known as “Goblin” (found around Halloween 2015) has an orbit that suggest influence by Planet 9/X. If the three orbits are clustered, the evidence for the large planet would be greatly increased.

Paul Voosen an Earth and planetary writer for Science has a short article about this announcement. 

About Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo and David Tholen. 

A Wildlife-Human Dilemma

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Wildlife
Behavior
Sustainability
Edward Hessler

The BBC produced a short video on a dilemma involving humans and elephants in Botswana.  Cabinet ministers have recommended to the president that a four year ban on hunting elephants on public lands should be lifted.

NPR's Amy Held fills in some of the important details, the competing interests, values, economics and points-of-view.  Botswana has the largest population of wild elephants in the world. One of the issues is that the number of wild elephants is not known--surveying their numbers is difficult or how rapidly this population is growing is not known. The situation begs for better wildlife management data but it isn't available.

Held notes that cabinet ministers recommended to President Masisi that the ban be lifted to include "'regular but limited elephants culling' as well as creating a legal framework to help grow Botswana's safari hunting industry." Among the recommendations, according to Held is "establishing elephant meat canning, including for the production of pet food and other byproducts."  President Masisi said that "If need be, we will give an opportunity to Parliament to also interrogate it (the report) and allow them to intervene, before we make a final decision."

Still the decision will be made under conditions of uncertainty and in a contested atmosphere.

Friday Poem

Environmental & Science Education
Poetry
Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

Today's poem is by the late poet, Maya Angelou.

An Ice Lens

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Art and Environment
Techology
Edward Hessler

In this video, a photographer shoots through a lens made of ice that he constructed.

His line about the funding of the project made me smile. More or less he said that the project was funded by him. He does leave himself open to invitations that would pay him for travel.

I can finally bring myself to using the world cool for it is a cool lens.

I/We Don't Know: A Lovely and Important Phrase

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Poetry
Art and Environment
Nature of Science
Edward Hessler

Scientists and many poets are driven by the urge to know.  They love thinking about questions to which their response is "I/we don't know," which is often followed by "Let's find out." By focusing on scientists and poets I don't mean to deny that many others are driven by this need as well.

The Polish-born poet Wisalowa Szymborska received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. She gave her Nobel Lecture on December 7, 1996.  In this sparkling lecture she talked about the nature of inspiration. I choose three paragraphs to highlight but what precedes and follows these is important to tying the ends of her argument together--to learning how she got there and where she ended up.

At this point, though, certain doubts may arise in my audience. All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize. (underline added)

Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their “oeuvre” … (Underline added)

This is similar to the way science works. The answer takes shape over time as new probes are made, new experiments are designed, new models constructed and tested until the scientist has enough evidence to convince her/him that these experiments and interpretations can be "clipped together."

Here is the lecture. And here is the Wiki entry on the life and work, the "oeuvre" of this loved and highly regarded poet. She died of lung cancer, aged 88 in 2012. I can't claim to have seen a large sample of photographs of her but most I've seen show her smoking.

The well-known British evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins gave the annual Darwin Day Lecture this year.  I'm a fan so naturally I recommend listening to the entire talk (~ 48 minutes) but I want to point out that he uses the phrase "we don't know" at about 14:15 of the lecture in which he contrasts the certainty of theology with the doubt that is the hallmark of science. Not knowing goes with the territory.

Dawkins published a very influential book entitled The Selfish Gene which changed scientific understanding of natural selection. In 2017 it was named by The Royal Society, the most influential scientific book of all time. Nature published an essay by Matt Ridley about the importance of this book to scientists and non-scientists in 2016.

A Birthday: # 225

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

February 2, 2019 marked the 225th birthday of Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge of whom I'd never heard. Yep, I'm a few days late.

Runge identified caffeine as the active ingredient of coffee.

C/Net wrote a nice summary which includes a link to the Doodle.

I'm so glad that Google takes the time to do these and includes both the well known and not-so-well known.

Friday Poem

Environmental & Science Education
Poetry
Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

Today's poem is about "stats," statistics.

The poet of this delight filled poem is the late Wislawa Szymborska who received the 1996 Nobel Prized in Literature.

Measles: The Infecting Machine

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Health
Medicine
Edward Hessler

Measles is in the news again, the Pacific Northwest, Indiana, Texas and other places.

The CDC (Center for Disease Control) has a graph of measles cases from 2010 to present (as of February 7 2019). The data are updated weekly.

One reason that measles is so often in the news is that the virus has a "nose" for finding susceptible people. As STAT's Helen Branswell puts it, the measles virus is "a bear to deal with."  She quotes Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases and Research at the University of Minnesota who colorfully explains that "measles makes an infected child into a viral Uzi." Branswell continues with an example Dr. Osterhom knows well.

"Osterholm was involved in an outbreak investigation that illustrates this point clearly. Back in 1991, Minneapolis-St. Paul hosted the Special Olympics. A competitor from Argentina who was infected with measles arrived in the Twin Cities to compete. That one case led to an outbreak of more than 25 other cases in multiple states over three generations of spread.

"Many of the people who contracted measles in this outbreak had no known contact with the child. The investigation concluded some most likely were infected during the event's opening ceremonies--even though they were seated in the upper deck of the domed stadium, more than 100 feet above the point where the teams paraded into the event."

You probably know that the measles vaccine is remarkably effective. That's the good news. So? There is also bad news. These are the fears about the use of the vaccine based on long-discredited research in which a link between autism and the vaccine was first reported. The CDC provides considerable information.


What is it about the measles virus that makes it such an infecting machine? The video accompanying the Branswell article explains.

Development Of A Physcial Theory

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Cosmology
Astronomy
Nature of Science
History of Science
Edward Hessler

I'd forgotten about the videos produced by One Minute Physics or perhaps I should say, videos that are sometimes just about or slightly over, sometimes even longer than a minute. But all worth it.

This one, on magnetic fields is especially good and features the contributions of two scientists whose work was about the workings of the universe: Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. (Clerk = Clark in Scots speak.)

Faraday, originally a budding bookbinder was a keen observer and immensely curious about the natural world--the physical side. While from a poor family ultimately he ended up as a demonstrator and experimentalist at the Royal Institution. (click on our history if you are interested in Faraday's role). He was non-mathematical. Maxwell, on the other hand,was a gifted mathematician who took the careful observations Faraday made and used them to build powerful, explanatory equations. I should add that Maxwell was not as good an analyst as a geometer and his famous equations developed from faulty analytic arguments.

The video is about 5 minutes long and worth every minute. The narrator is Neil Turok who directs the Perimeter Institute in Canada, a home for talented theoreticians.

This work provides a glimpse into how science works, e.g., Maxwell's equations don't pop from the air. They are based in empirical data.

I remember a comment a physicist once made on his first encounter with Maxwell's equations as a graduate student. He almost left his Ph.D. program, thinking that if this is what was expected of him as a graduate student that he should quit. He realized that he was not capable of making this kind of contribution. Few are.  He stuck to it and became a good physicist.

Hot Pink

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Biodiversity
Biological Evolution
Nature
Edward Hessler


There are so many things yet to be learned about the natural world. Some of them are learned first by chance and then are more carefully scrutinized. Here is a recent one.

The current issue of Nature reports on another of the rare examples of fluorescence in mammals. It was discovered when a researcher studying lichens with UV light shined the light on a flying squirrel. It shimmered hot pink so he and his colleagues checked museum specimens of 135 other squirrels. Only the new world flying squirrels show this characteristic.

The short news item in Nature notes that "The role of the hot pink fur is unknown, but the team says it could help the animals find — and perhaps impress — each other in low light. The pink fur pattern could also mimic the plumage of owls, which possess a similar secret glow, to confuse avian predators."

The study was originally published in the Journal of Mammalogy and was done by researchers at Wisconsin's Northland College. And here is the Smithsonian Magazine story which includes a link to the original paper and other information.

h/t Molly

Friday Poem

Environmental & Science Education
Poet
Art and Environment
Edward Hessler

Today's poem is about January in another place than here in the upper midwest.

The poet is Denise Levertov who died in 1997.

Seeing A Cancer From The Inside

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Health
Medicine
Nature of Science
Edward Hessler

Video journalist Dominic Smith in a recent article in STAT, reports on one of the first uses of virtual reality technology by oncologist Dr. Ray Mak and researcher Christopher Williams of Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

More than a year ago Bill Hobbs was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lungs (commonly associated with exposure to asbestos). It is rare. It is aggressive. Life expectancy is in the neighborhood of a year.

Some physicians are using virtual reality technology in their study of images of cancers.  It improves the quality of the visualization, perhaps because it is so immersive. Mr. Hobbs was asked whether he wanted to look at what the physicians were seeing, images of his insides and the effects of radiation treatment.  He is the kind of person to leap at such an opportunity.  Hobbs exclaimed, almost from the outset "'I'm going 3D, boys.''

Hobbs noted that while “It doesn’t change anything in the sense of, am I going to get better quicker because now I know something I didn’t know? Not particularly. But what it does do is show you what they’re doing and they can tell you why they’re doing it, and that’s a good feeling to have.

Smith's reporting reveals Hobbs' optimism and enthusiasm to get on with things no matter the circumstances. In addition there is a video which of this remarkable person and this stunning technology which seems certain to improve understanding of treatment plans.

I Love Bread

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Culture
Edward Hessler

It was Oprah who said that but I'm in that group of people, too.

This recent New Yorker video is about breadmaking and bakers who love talking about bread and their techniques.

A Time Line of Hominin Evolution

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
Biological Evolution
Biodiversity
Edward Hessler


Hominins are the group that includes modern and ancient humans and all of the other extinct relatives. Today, our closest living relatives are chimpanzees, but as the American Museum of Natural History notes, "extinct hominins are even closer. Where and when did they live? What can we learn about their lives? Why did they go extinct?"

The fossil information scientists have collected and analyzed is the subject of a ~ 6 minute film, a time-line of 7 million years of hominin evolution. Our family tree is as fragmented as you might expect but an evidence-based picture has emerged and continues to grow as new fossils are found.

Did you ever think that we are the last hominin, the last of relatively young line?

Ellas Beaudin and Briana Pobiner of the Human Origins Program, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History have summarized the top 6 human evolution discoveries of 2018.  Here they are in headline form. For what these discoveries mean, Beaudin and Pobiner discuss each of them.

--What does it mean to be human?
-- Migrating modern humans: the oldest modern human fossil found outside of Africa.
-- Innovating modern humans: long-distance trade, the use of color, and the oldest Middle Stone Age tools in Africa.
--Art-making Neanderthals: our close evolutionary cousins actually created the oldest known cave paintings.
--Trekking modern humans: the oldest modern human footprints in North America.
--Winter-stressed, nursing Neanderthals: Neanderthal children’s teeth reveal intimate details of their daily lives.
--Hybridizing hominins: the first discovery of an ancient human hybrid. Beaudoin and Pobiner admit to some hype here. The original authors refused to go this far referring to this ancient human known as Denny was a “first generation person of mixed ancestry.” 

Jason Organ who blogs for the on-line journal PLOS just published Beaudin's and Pobiner's story.