Adorable baby octopuses, living happy and free

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 3:16 PM Fri 

To make up for the research kittens.

Note: This starts out somewhat depressingly, with the body of a female octopus that died after reproducing—as all octopuses, male and female, do. But it quickly gets past that, and on to the wee, baby octopuses, floating around the sea. Turn off the sound to block out the sad song, and focus on that.

From jenniel, via Submitterator

      Comments: 21

Research on horribly cute kittens is kind of horrible looking

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 2:50 PM Fri 

"In order to study the way that experience can influence the brain, there has been a great deal of research done on the visual cortex of the kitten."

Oh, this is going to end badly, isn't it?

This short documentary from the 1970s explains, in depth, some research that I mentioned earlier this year in a BoingBoing article on fetal senses. Long story short: Kittens are born blind and do a lot of their sight-linked brain development in the first few weeks after birth. Because of this, they make a handy model for studying how the brains of human fetuses form neural connections and how our sense of sight develops in the womb. It's important research that has helped medical science better understand how to care for premature human babies, besides adding valuable details to our understanding of the brain, in general.

Unfortunately, because kittens are adorable, said very important research looks almost comically evil when filmed. Seriously, this video is one "Thittens" joke away from working as a segment of Look Around You.

So, thanks, blorgggg (Thorgggg?), for sending this video in via Submitterator. I'm sure the Moderators will be thanking you (and me) as well. I do ask that, as we get into the inevitable discussion on animal research, you remember that the scientists involved did not raise kittens in completely dark rooms for sociopathic shits and giggles, but because they thought the potential benefits of the research outweighed the (mostly temporary) damage done to the kittens' visual abilities. You may disagree with that calculation—and you're welcome to do so. In fact, I think that complex discussion about ends and means in specific studies is valuable. And interesting. Far more so (on both counts) than simply labeling anyone who uses animals for research as a for-kicks abuser of fluffy baby kitties.

      Comments: 37

The physics of breaking stuff with your fists

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 10:50 AM Fri 

iO9 recently ran a story on how martial artists are able to break boards and cement blocks, using their hands rather than mystical powers. I thought it was pretty neat, but then I read an interesting counter-analysis by science journalist (and, significantly, martial arts practitioner) John Rennie.

iO9 is right about the lack of magic powers, he says. But they got the physics wrong. Key slip-up: Assuming martial artists strike like a cobra—fast punch, with a quick pull back at the end—when they have their smashing fun times. iO9's theory was that that movement caused the boards to bend and snap. But that's not how it works, Rennie says. In fact, martial artists are taught to follow through with their punches, aiming not at the board-to-be-broken, but at a point beyond it.

So how's the breaking really done? Rennie quotes an episode of the awesome old PBS show Newton's Apple:

One key to understanding brick breaking is a basic principle of motion: The more momentum an object has, the more force it can generate. When it hit the brick, [karateka Ron] McNair's hand had reached a speed of 11 meters per second (24 miles per hour). At this speed, his hand exerted a whopping force of 3,000 Newton's -or 675 pounds-on the concrete. A slab of concrete could likely support the weight of a few people weighing a total of 675 pounds (306 kilograms). But apply that amount of force concentrated into an area as small as a fist and the concrete slab will break.

The fact that martial artists also pick their materials very carefully doesn't hurt, either.

When breaking wooden boards, you use pine (not oak, not mahogany) that isn't marred by dense knots, cut ¾ inch thick and about 12 inches on the diagonal; you hit them to break along the wood's natural grain. (It's not playing by Hoyle but some breakers have been known to bake their boards in ovens before demonstrations to make them more brittle.) One good board, if held securely so that it won't move on impact, is so easy to break that even those with no training at all can be taught to do it in under five minutes.

      Comments: 42

Hurricane Earl IV

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 5:04 PM Thu 

Xeni posted a great NASA image of the 2010 Hurricane Earl earlier this afternoon, which got me hunting around for some information on Hurricane Earls past. After all, this is not the first Earl. There've been three others, as well as some lesser Tropical Storms of the same name. The naming lists for these things are used again every seven years, and individual names are only retired after they've been attached to a particularly damaging storm. Earl, so far, has not.

When the names do get retired, replacing them isn't easy. According to Time magazine, there's a whole list of types of names that aren't allowed. Over the years, the meteorologists in charge of naming have resorted to flipping through the weirder end of baby name books and adding friends' names to the list.

Time: How are hurricanes and tropical storms named?

      Comments: 14

Another oil rig explosion, and the science of dispersants

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 4:40 PM Thu 

Another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded today. All crew members survived. Right now, nobody knows whether or not the explosion caused a leak in any of the seven wells that the rig collects from. There have been reports of an oil slick on the water near the fire, but that could just as easily be from the finite amount of oil stored on the rig—which would still a spill, but a significantly less problematic one.

Other than that, there's not really much information out about this right now. If anybody's learned anything from Deepwater Horizon it seems to be that you're better off, PR-wise, if you don't have to correct everything you say two days later.

To give you something to chew over in the meantime, though, Deep Sea News has been doing a really interesting series on the science (such as it is) of oil dispersants. It's interesting, not just because of the basic facts, but also because it gets into the details of why we don't know more.

Dispersants must be applied successfully and have a high effectiveness once in ocean waters. This sounds easy, in principle--once you've perfected your Corexit formula in the lab, just spray it from a helicopter, and voila! Except there are a lot of factors which you also have to take into account: the composition of the oil spilled, sea energy, whether the oil has been subjected to weathering at all, exact type of dispersant used and the amount which you sprayed, and ocean temperature/salinity.

Thank goodness for all those lab tests over the years which figured all this stuff out, you say. Um, well actually it seems like even designing simulation experiments is difficult, and different tests can report different effectiveness scores for the same dispersant. It is difficult to accurately scale up lab tests in order to predict dispersant action on real spills. Older studies used methods and analyses which have since been discredited. Wave-tank tests can probably provide upper limits on dispersant effectiveness, but there are SEVENTEEN (!!) critical factors that require strict control for accurate results (Fingas 2002). Field tests in open ecosystems are even worse for measuring the fate of oil and controlling variables. In terms of measuring dispersant effectiveness, tank tests, field tests, and lab tests all disagree. Awesome.

Part 1: How effective are dispersants on real oil spills?

Part 2: How toxic are dispersants?

Part 3: Do dispersants really promote degradation of oil?

Image of a random oil rig: Some rights reserved by kenhodge13

      Comments: 24

Looking for Bigfoot in Minnesota

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 3:13 PM Thu 

Yesterday, while flipping through my Minneapolis Continuing Education fall catalog, I noticed a class on the Great Mysteries of Science, which turned out to be lake monsters, Sasquatch and UFOs. The class was to be taught by a retired University of Minnesota professor who has since participated in an expedition to study said Sasquatch.

Now, this surprised me, because I had previously pegged Bigfoot as one of those coastal elites, who spent all his time in the Pacific Northwest and shunned the forests here in flyover country. But, apparently, Sasquatch is a Real American after all. In fact, sightings are common enough in northern Minnesota that the Bigfoot Field Research Organization recently organized a Sasquatch search party up there. Forty-two people went along, including my friend, travel journalist Frank Bures, who wrote about the experience of "'squatch hunting" for Minnesota Monthly magazine.

We'd been split into 15 camps, and we were carrying an armament of investigative equipment: night-vision scopes, walkie-talkies, GPS, infrared cameras, thermal-recording devices, video and audio recorders, and more. Someone handed me a thermal imager, which would show bright heat signatures of the living things in the forest. I scanned the area around us but saw nothing except a few warm rocks and something that may have been a raccoon.

"We've got some activity here," came another report across the radio. "They're walking around our site." Whenever the group laughed, apparently, there was a rustling in the woods. When they laughed really hard, there was even more rustling.

Those lucky bastards!

Read the rest

      Comments: 13

Best security check ever

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 11:11 AM Thu 

Bad news: Facebook simultaneously became sentient and figured out that zombies are popular. Would you like to become a Fan of Facebook devouring your brains?

Via Josh Helfferich

      Comments: 35

Undergrads at the University of Colorado sent a NASA satellite to its fiery demise on August 30th. But don't worry. They are not in trouble. In fact, they were specifically tasked with the job of decommissioning the satellite—figuring out where and when to send it screaming through Earth's atmosphere so as to ensure that any leftover bits land someplace where they won't do much damage—as part of a class. An incredibly awesome class. — Maggie • Comments: 6

Gunman at Discovery Channel headquarters

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 11:29 AM Wed 

A gunman has taken at least one hostage at Discovery Communications headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.

There's no official police statements about who the gunman is or what he wants, but there's a list of demands circulating on Twitter—said to be the gunman's manifesto. (Edit: The original site is now down, I'm linking to a version one of our readers saved.) I'm not sure what the original source of this list is, yet, but I'll let you know if/when I find out. The demands are centered around a proposed new programming lineup for The Discovery Channel, pushing Malthusian ideas on population and Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212. Seriously. This would be almost funny if it weren't for the whole hostage thing.

The Discovery Communications building is being evacuated. Here's hoping everybody makes it out safely.

UPDATE: According to DCist, the list of demands apparently dates to 2008, and is linked to James Jay Lee, a man arrested that same year for disorderly conduct while protesting at the Discovery Communications building. No one has any idea who the gunman is at this point, so it's unknown whether this is the same guy. WUSA9 TV in Washington D.C. first tweeted the old demands as being linked to the current gunman, but it's unclear how they came to that conclusion.

For now, let's assume they aren't linked. It's worth noting that Discovery Networks have received a lot of threats recently because of Animal Planet's Whale Wars show, which follows the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as it attempts to deter Japanese whaling ships.

UPDATE #2: Law enforcement officials are now saying that they believe the gunman is that 2008 protester, James Jay Lee.

Image of gunman taken by a colleague of Discovery employee Jason Divenere That colleague is now safely out of the building.

      Comments: 79

There are eight million stories of chemistry laboratory disasters. They all end in explosions. (Except for the ones that end in accidentally making mustard gas.) You might think of this Reddit open thread as a public service—one read-through and you will never forget to wear safety goggles ever again. — Maggie • Comments: 10

It's "Ask a Museum Curator" Day on Twitter

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 10:12 AM Wed 

It's Ask a Museum Curator Day, and museums all over the world are answering your questions on Twitter. Here in the United States, you can query curators of everything from various Smithsonian museums of science, history and culture in D.C., to the Art Institute of Chicago. It's a great way to learn about museum collections from the people who know them best, as well as ask a few burning questions you've just been waiting for an expert to answer.

Sadly, the #askacurator hashtag is full of spammy things that are making it mostly useless, so I'd recommend picking a specific institution and checking out it's Twitter feed. Some of the fun things I've learned today:

Renaissance Italy was the birthplace of the mazzocchio, a torus-shaped hat which is one of the Museum of Math's favorite bits of math-based fashion.

Stamps are occasionally issued jointly by two different countries—usually to commemorate some historical event or achievement that suits political purposes. The Smithsonian Postal Museum has, as an example, a stamp issued by the U.S. and Canada to mark the anniversary of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

According to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Hadrosaurus Foulkii were the common dinosaur species of New Jersey. Today, they're famous for being the first dinosaur to have its skeleton mounted for display.

Meanwhile, Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art correctly calls out the statue of Guanyin of the Southern Sea as a high point in their collection—but sadly fails to mention that the statue is part of an entire temple, taken apart piece by piece and reconstructed at the Nelson. They've got several rooms like that, all of which I loved as a kid.

      Comments: 6

This is what a quadrillion looks like

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:57 AM Fri 

The Tonic offers, via Submitterator, a handy series of images that helps visualize great, big, scary old numbers, in order to make them a little less meaningless.

It starts with a single 1 cubic millimeter block, and builds up from there, until you get something the size of a skyscraper.

There's also some nifty facts about things that happen in quadrillions, though I don't know how accurate they are. To wit:

This [quadrillion] is a number so huge, it has basically no practical applications (unless you wanted to talk about the number of ants that lived in the past 2 and a half years).

Back to the human brain: it's estimated that our synapses each fire about 300 to 400 times per second, but at peak moments they can fire as many as 1000 times a second. It's impossible for every synapse to fire at the same time, but we can still calculate the upper limit of possible brain events per second. Given the estimate of 60 to 100 trillion synapses, that means it would take between 18 and 100 of these mammoth, skyscraper-sized blocks to represent the range in the number of events the human brain is capable of sustaining in a single second. That's a whole city! And in 10 seconds? That's right: it would take up to 1,000 of them -- 1 quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) mm³ in total.

Ignis Fatuus: A Quadrillion To Scale

      Comments: 18