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October 2007 Archives
Notes from the Underground
by Experiment Cave is a segment that is close to my heart. Of course not literally, as we shot the thing more than a mile beneath the ground in Canada. And of course the heart is a metaphor for my ego. And ego is a metaphor for my consciousness. . . .okay, I'm boring even me.
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Germs....in......SPACE!
by What effect does space travel have on bacteria? A recently published study investigates the question.
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Art, Butchers & Science
by Related to last week's segment on Body Builders, I've been quite interested in following the "issue of tissues" as seen through the lens of contemporary BioArt. Shawn Baily and Jennifer Willet, are artists from my old home town of Montreal, who've formed a research project called Bioteknica.
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Like a Model on the Cover of a Magazine
by Climate science depends on climate models. There is nothing odd about that. All science depends on models.
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Iron Fertilization of Oceans 101
by Phytoplankton take up CO2 in oceans and then go on to die and sink, and drum roll please.... we've got a natural process that helps mitigate lots of the pesky CO2 that's been mucking up planet earth! You see, iron is a limiting factor for phytoplankton growth, so if we were to, say, dump a lot of Fe into the sea - phytoplankton will bloom and carbon would be sequestrated in oceans. To offset emissions, for-profit corporations want to spread Fe where it currently limits phytoplankton. Investors hope to use this process to earn carbon credits which would be traded through markets or sold as offsets for greenhouse gas emissions. But WAIT just one second! Before we jump on the iron fertilization bandwagon, there are a few things important things to consider...
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A day in the life...
by Imagine stepping into a freezer as you walk to work in the morning.
Imagine living without fresh food for 10 months of the year.
Imagine seeing nothing but a flat white horizon in every direction.
And living alongside 17 strangers, thousands of miles from civilization.
Put yourself in my shoes for a day and find out how you would cope...
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The Curious Case of Dr. Megavolt
by This Wednesday, October 31st, while your offspring plop down on your living room floor after a long evening of Halloween pillaging and grow plump with high fructose corn syrup, I ask--nay, URGE--you to witness the awesome power of electricity taunter Dr. Megavolt on WIRED Science.
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What is the Big Round Thing?
by You may have seen Ziya interview Jim Gates on last week's show. If you did not, you can check it out on the show's video archive. Somewhere in there, he mentioned the new experiment called the "Large Hadron Collider", or LHC, which several physicists are all excited about. It will turn on next year, we hope. It will allow us to test several important ideas in physics, and so we're all sitting on the edge of our seats to find out what it will tell us. So what ideas will it be testing for us?
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Greetings, Correlations!
Greetings, Correlations!
I am Chris Hardwick, one of Wired Science's plucky
hosts. The good folks at the Correlations Compound (several leagues
below the surface of the ocean) have graciously allowed me junior
blogging privileges.
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'Tis the season for influenza
Influenza kills 36,000 Americans every year--so why aren't more of our health care workers getting vaccinated?
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On the Retention of Women in Science
We know women in academia make less than our male counterparts, are promoted more slowly, and hold fewer leadership positions. So what's the big deal about examining gender bias? Well, yesterday's Boston Globe Op-Ed by Cathy Young suggests there could be trouble past all the inquiry.
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Digging for Treasure
Yesterday I set out to dig up a piece of history. I wasn't looking for ancient ruins or even dinosaur bones, just plain old snow.
Why? Because Antarctic snow and ice contains a treasure trove of information about past climates. Everyone wants to know how the climate is going to change in the future but before we can predict the future, first we need to understand the past. Trapped in between the buried grains of snow and ice are little air pockets - bubbles of the atmosphere as it was tens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of years ago...
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Climate, Chaos and Confusion
We climate scientists often hear the case made "If you can't predict the weather next week, how could you predict the climate in a hundred years?" The answer to the question is hidden in the question. The weather and the climate are not exactly the same thing, and so what you can say about the one and what you can say about the other are also different.
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New Possibilities for Black Holes
There's been a recent discovery of an unusual black hole. It is about 16 times the mass of our sun. Such large black holes resulting from the collapse of ordinary stars have hitherto been unknown. It doesn't fit well with current theories about how these processes work. This presents an important and exciting puzzle for Astrophysicists. There's evidently more going on than previously thought.
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MRSA: from hospital pathogen to community scourge
Once only a worry in hospitals and mainly among the already-ill, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is now present in our schools and community centers, and has even spread to our farms.
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The Age of Aquarius
Ever stare out at the great blue wondering what's going on below the ripples that seem so serene? When I do, I often envision the myriad of whales, corals, dolphins, turtles, sharks, and all sorts of critters going about their day in a maze of complex interactions that we can only imagine from up here. So what's really happening just below the surface?
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Scientific Group Wins Peace Prize
The Nobel Committee announced the award of this year's Peace Prize jointly to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Gore is cited by the committee as " probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted." Much attention will be duly given to Gore's role in doing exactly that, especially in the US. Still, it would be a shame if the attention to Gore's contribution completely distracts attention away from his co-recipient, the IPCC.
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Rediscovery
Humans are born naturally curious creatures. As youngsters, our world is mainly governed by what's within reach - or even better - fits in our mouths. For most of us, that changes as bigger folks start telling us to stop playing in the mud, eating crayons, and picking up beetles. But I've yet to encounter a first grader who's not fascinated by science - just not necessarily aware of it. Bring up dinosaurs around most six year olds and they'll be captivated in moments. 'You mean ginormous ancestors of birds lived here? REALLY?!' Heck, two decades later, even I'm still mesmerized!
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The Emergence of a Strange and Novel Pathogen
As I mentioned, my research focuses on emerging infectious diseases--that is, diseases that have been newly discovered, or are expanding in geographic range, or perhaps moving into new populations. Typically when we see organisms in that first group--novel to man--we think of bacterial or viral pathogens, such as SARS or E. coli O157:H7. However, sometimes things get even more weird, such as the strange case of the contagious Tasmanian devil facial cancer.
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Giant Magnetoresistance Recognized
Magnetoresistance has nothing to do with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants or its charismatic leader. It's to do with your ipod, your laptop, and pretty much any device that uses hard drives to store a ton of vital information (you know, those valuable pictures of you at that party the other night) in a small place. Magnetoresistance is a material's ability to change its electrical resistance in response to an applied magnetic field.
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Future Distribution
Some things announce themselves as the future. Blaise Aguera y Arcas' Photosynth software is one of those things.
I suspect it was experiences with technologies similarly robust to Photosynth that led William Gibson to famously remark: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."
For your reading pleasure (and my future biographers' research needs) I present you with the origin story of my (soon to be famous?) opening line of this blog entry.
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It's Nobel Week!
It's that time of year everyone! Every year there's a period of about a week during which all the Nobel prizes in the various categories are announced. This is the week. Rather than wait for the press to announce, you can keep an eye on the Nobel site here, and find out who won, what for, and get as much detail as you like about the significance of the contribution the prize is for, and details about the people who won it.
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We Don't Need Another Hero
RoboDoc is our segment about the Da Vinci Surgical System, and was selected for the obvious technophilic, Wiredness of it all. I mean, it's surgery with robots!
I could do the usual rant on the controls (motion scaling, tremor reduction, etc.) and provide a litany of superlatives regarding the robot's accomplishments (smallest patient, youngest patient, et al), but I want to tell you a story about the people involved. Here's what happened right before all that amazing footage of the Da Vinci in action was shot.
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Life In A Test Tube!
Okay folks, it's not marine biology, but this is tremendous news in the world of science...
Today The Guardian reports that Craig Venter has created a synthetic chromosome. Call it life imitating science fiction where the big question now is, what will this mean to you and me? Such a breakthrough will undoubtedly have enormous implications across disciplines and Venter suggests there is the potential for solutions to climate change while others warn of possible new weapons
for bio-terrorism.
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Tortoise vs. Hare
Politics, business, culture, and sports can be relied upon to provide some fodder for the news media every day, yet there's not that much sense of long-term improvement. Day to day changes in science are very small, and rarely newsworthy. We science writers have a lot to write about, but it's not usually about current events.
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Deep Impact: Sputnik
Today is the 50th Anniversary of the USSR's launch of the satellite Sputnik. The impact of this event on our culture should not be underestimated. America was scared, shocked, and panicked. The full meaning of the event was not clear to everyone, but the idea that "the Soviets were ahead" did not sit well, and it spurred a huge investment in science and technology - including recognizing the importance of better science education in schools. It must have been an amazing time. The culture was changed forever.
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The Making Of...
So I'm not a scientist and I've been feeling a little inadequate about it. To deal with the shame, I've devoted myself to making good, responsible television about them.
What I do here at WIRED Science is find and develop the ideas and stories that we turn into television and web content. Of course I don't do this on my own. There are a bunch of us working on this new project. It's a process. When things are going right, it's a creative process.
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