Green Lantern

Green Lantern is a Slate.com advice column that provides "illuminating answers to environmental questions"  (not related to the comic book of the same name.) Want to know what jewelry companies/gemstones are the most environmentally responsible? Is it better to roll down your windows or turn on the ac when driving? Why are environmentalists always saying don't waste water if water gets recycled? The column answers these and hundreds of other queries.


They do an amazing job of providing sources - each one page article contains about 20 links to original studies, background sources, relevant companies, etc. They also have practical, real world advice for people who like the environment but also like their cars and aren't about to start bicycling everywhere. They're not preachy and they're not too technical, but they do a good job of reflecting what's scientifically accepted and what's contentious. If you're looking for a topic for an ecologically related paper or project, this is a great place to start.

Sweet / Sour Flavor switcher

I recently saw this article on Salon about Miracle Fruit (Synsepalum dulcificum), which can change how you perceive taste. This seemed amazing to me. Blocking molecular receptors does seem like a big deal, but tricking them so that you actually taste "sweet" when you eat "sour" is much more interesting.
The phenomenon has apparently been around a long time. These berries are used as a traditional food in Africa and the active ingredient "miraculin" was isolated in 1968 and published in Nature and Science. There is some, but not much research going on with it. It hasn't been FDA approved, but is widely used globally and is legal to grow in the US. It's available for less than $2 a berry on Amazon.com. Salon.com also did a taste test with another natural product, Sugar Destroyer (Gymnema sylvestre).  Except for the fact it would involve all sorts of IRB safety paperwork, I think this would make a really fascinating science fair project or a good activity for a science club.

Science Halloween Costumes

Here are some of the best ideas of heard of / thought up for geeky Halloween costumes.

1. Meso Woman - a meso compound is when you have a molecule two or more chiral centers, but the overall compound is not chiral - it's superimposable on its mirror image. Organic chemistry is often enough to frighten even the bravest souls!
One way to do it: Get two "bopper headbands with different balls (green (Cl) and white (H) make sense). Switch the balls so each headband has one ball of each color. Secure them to each shoulder with green pointing forward on one side and pointing backwards on the other side.
Bonus accessories: Wear non-polarizing sunglasses (meso compounds don't polarize light), label your shoulders R and S.
Credit: Bridget Trogden

2. Dark Matter - Physicists tell us that 80% of all the stuff in the universe doesn't interact with light (or any electromagnetic radiation) and we can't actually tell if its really there.
One way to do it: Wear all black and be really mysterious.
Bonus accessories: pin an image of gravitational lensing to your chest, or an image from one of the Dark Matter games. Play the song Dark Matter by Porcupine Tree or Andrew Bird

3. Schrödinger's Cat -  Schrödinger proposed an analogy to point out the weirdness of quantum mechanics. Part of the theory predicts that if you put a cat in a box under specific conditions and don't open the box, the cat will be simultaneously both alive and dead. It's a zombie cat! The ψ function tells us so.
One way to do it: get cat ears, paint on whiskers, and use a cardboard box with a head hole cut out to cover your torso.
Bonus accessories: Carry around a vial of poison (HCN) and a Geiger counter. Write Schrödinger's equation on the box. Bonus point if you dress as a zombie cat and explain quantum entanglement to people who ask what you're supposed to be.

4. Prion - Prions are "proteinaceous infectious proteins" that cause brain problems like mad cow disease. Their discovery changed  how we think about infectious agents.
One way to do it: The normal prion protein is shown at left. You can spiral tape up your legs to represent the helices, or drape 2 Slinkies from your shoulders. Use a rope to make the belt, and attach a couple of sheets of paper to represent the beta sheets.
Bonus accessories: Carry around a crazy looking cow, make a plaque that says "amyloid" and put it on your head.


What's the best science costume you've seen? Post thoughts in the comments.

Retraction Watch

Retraction Watch is a great new blog that describes all the papers that have been retracted from major publications. I had no idea so many prominent papers get retracted until I saw them all in one place. Marcus and Oransky, who run the blog, do a little investigative reporting to try and tell a more complete story instead of just the journal's uninformative "This paper has retracted by the authors" statement. Its fascinating to see how the errors come to light, how different authors respond, and what mistakes led to the need for retraction. It really sheds a light on the process of science - how ambition and pressure and reputation influence scientific publications as much as empirical data, how Principal Investigators don't usually do any of the actual benchwork, how the peer review process often fails and in these cases triumphs... Anyone looking for examples of ethics cases in science couldn't ask for a better resource than this.

Mandelbox

 Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, died last week. He fundamentally changed mathematics, and allowed us to start grasping the complexity that underlies the natural world in a new way. He developed math  that can be used to better understand things as disparate as coastlines, broccoli and clouds.
At left is a Mandelbox, named in his honor and found at Jos Leys' excellent mathematical imagery web page. It looks kind of like a Borg-ish cube, right? But if you look closer (below), you can see amazing intricacy. The whole cube arises from a single straightforward fractal.

   

Flavia de Luce books

Alan Bradley's new heroine is an eleven year old living in a small British hamlet in 1950. She's a clever detective, precociously self-aware, and a really good chemist. Unlike most fiction, where science is merely a plot device (CSI, H. G. Wells, Star Trek, etc.) these books actually include real reactions.  Should you need to concoct hydrogen sulfide to poison an annoying sister, resuscitate a poisoned victim with pigeon droppings, or perform a pregnancy test on a stranger you meet weeping in a graveyard - Flavia's methods are reasonably possible and accurate for the time period. But mostly, they're a lot of fun to read. These are definitely grown-up books, despite being narrated by a child.

Bradley won the Debut Dagger Award with the first 15 pages of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and became a commercially published author at the age of 70. He's Canadian, not British, and has no chemistry training (though he does have a degree in electrical engineering). So it's pretty amazing that he writes so convincingly as a young British chemist. If you're looking for fun, interesting reading, these are great.

Knight Science Journalism Tracker

KSJ Tracker is a blog for science journalists, to help writers keep track of who is reporting what. But it's also a really convenient  resource for people who aren't journalists. Right now, you can get short synopses on breaking stories about sunspots, Native American remains and museums, bee disease advances, Japanese comet dust collectors, baseball stats and physics and a whole lot more. The writing is usually clever and often raises interesting critiques of the culture and the way science is covered in the media.

Micrographs

What do you think this is?

A Kandinsky painting? The Eye of Sauron on LSD?  An ameoba trying to disguise itself as Rainbow Brite?

It would probably take about 3.196×10²⁸²³⁰³ guesses for me to get this (that's the same odds as a monkey typing Hamlet). It's Rolling Rock beer, one of the thousands of amazing photomicrographs collected by FSU's National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. They have images of everything from the latest drugs to religious symbols, brain tissue to a burger and fries. I was particularly amazed at how different all the different frozen beer crystals look under a polarizing microscope. Read about some of the details, or just look at the amazing pictures.

First post: Zotero

I'm starting this blog to record and share things I enjoy. There are LOTS of things I like thinking about and learning about. Most of them are science-y. This one is for anyone who does research (any research, not just scientific).

How it works: You download the Mozilla extension Zotero. Then you can either import a collection of pdfs/Endnote library, or you can build a new one. When you are reading a paper online, you click a button on the browser, and it downloads the bibliographic information and any other files you want (personal notes, keywords, pdfs, etc). You can collaborate with groups to share your references, and there are hundreds of options for citation styles to use with your favorite word processor.

It took me about 10 minutes to upload several hundred pdfs to a library. Now I can access them from any computer, do full text searches, and export bibliographies in whatever style I need (like Endnote does). Its free, with an active support community. There are issues (it duplicates some things, has weird period placement, etc) but for this would have makes it so much easier to keep track of references for term papers, grants, etc. First 100 MB of file storage is free.