Inside NOVA

NOVA on the radio!

2009-12-01T07:12:59Z

If you've been to the NOVA website, you may have seen some of our audio features like "E = mc2 Explained", or "Defining Science". Or maybe you already subscribe to our podcasts (which I highly recommend, and not just because I produce them). Well, this week, we're trying something new in the audio realm. NOVA is dipping into its archives for a collaboration with WGBH radio. The result is the "NOVA minute"--a series of short clips from scientist interviews that we think are especially interesting, timely, poignant, or just fun. They're small and satisfying--kind of like science hors d'oeuvres.

At the moment, we're just testing the radio waters, trying to settle on a format that works. But for the month of December, those of you who live in the Boston area can hear the segments on 89.7 FM every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday just after 8:30 AM. If all goes well, we'll be producing more in January 2010, and will hopefully distribute them nationally in the future. Unfortunately, they're not yet available for download online, but here's a taste of what you'll find on-air. (Apologies for the cruddy audio quality--this was recorded straight from the WGBH radio web stream.)

Want to hear pieces like these in your town? Have a suggestion for what NOVA should do on the radio? Tell us what you think!

On the Origin of Species - 150 Years and Counting

2009-11-24T16:41:27Z

As all you Darwin fans out there probably already know, today marks the 150th anniversary of the great man's work, 'On the Origin of Species.' And here at NOVA we have been ramping up for this event for some time.

While Darwin's 200th birthday (last February) was celebrated with gusto, I think it's equally (if not more) important to toast his decision to publish his 'dangerous idea' about evolution. This was something he struggled long and hard with - until one day a letter arrived in the mail that would force his hand.

]]> Darwin's Darkest Hour.'

When 'On the Origin of Species' was finally published, there were some who were shocked by its implications that God really didn't have a hand in creating species - the common view at the time. The book instead proposes that evolution by natural selection is a much more compelling explanation for the 'endless forms' we see in nature. And in fact, one of the groups the work appealed to the most was the young naturalists and scientists of the day who couldn't wait to verify Darwin's claims by doing their own research. And many of Darwin's theories about natural selection and evolution are still what drive much of the scientific community today.

But even though Darwin was beginning to understand the idea that species change or evolve over time, he still couldn't figure out exactly how it happened. What was going on inside the bodies of all these animals to create such a wide diversity of life?

To learn more about this puzzling question that plagued Darwin, stay tuned for the upcoming two-hour NOVA special 'What Darwin Never Knew' (airing December 29 - check local listings). The program looks at a brand-new science called 'evo devo' that links the enigmas of evolution to another of nature's great mysteries, the development of an embryo.

But even if Darwin didn't have the whole picture when he wrote his great work, we can still celebrate his courage to publish and his astounding ideas that to this day keep us intrigued and prompt us to continue examining the origins of species and all of the lifeforms around us.

Catching the culprit in mammoth murder mystery

2009-11-24T15:35:26Z

Where did all the mammoths go?

15,000 years ago, mammoths, sloths, mastodons, and their giant friends were lumbering around North America, munching plants and admiring each other's tusks. (Except the sloths--no tusks there.) Then, something killed them all off. In Last Extinction (watch online), which premiered last spring, NOVA took on the headline-grabbing hypothesis that a comet wiped out the beasts. But a new study of ancient dung fungus (who said science was glamorous?) suggests that the behemoths were on their way out the door thousands of years before the alleged comet slammed it behind them.

]]> Here's the evidence for the comet: A 12,900-year-old layer of organic material speckled with telltale impact markers like iridium, titanium, and nanodiamonds. But when a team of scientists went digging in the ancient sediment under Appleman Lake in Indiana, they found that the mammoth-dung-loving fungus Sporormiella started disappearing 14,800 years ago, and was almost gone just a thousand years later. Their conclusion: Mammoths and Company were gone long before the comet came on the scene.

Scientists have been debating the fate of the megafauna for decades, and the crossfire is sure to continue. Next stop: The American Geophysical Union conference in December, where the comet camp will duke it out with the comet skeptics. Stay tuned for more!

Image: Mastodon restoration by Charles R. Knight (1897)

Seeing by tongue

2009-11-23T18:41:10Z

Introducing another guest post from our intern Bo Zhang! Read more of Bo's work at Free Radicals, from Boston University's Center for Science and Medical Journalism. Now, here's Bo:

There has been a burst of research on restoring the blind's sight lately, including the development of an artificial retina and a gene therapy treatment that has brought fast and meaningful improvements in patients' vision. It sounds like in the not-too-distant future, blindness could be curable. But while we pour all our attention on the eye treatment, we neglect the fact that other organs could help "see" too - like the tongue.

With densely packed tactile nerve endings, the tongue seems the ideal organ for the task. A device which uses the tongue to stimulate the blind person's visual cortex and let him/her identify light and shapes was developed by neuroscientists from Wicab, Inc. Called BrainPort, the device consists of a lollipop-like electrode array worn on the tongue, a miniature camera mounted on a pair of sunglasses, and a hand-held controller about the size of a cell phone. It works by converting images taken from the camera to electrical impulses that can be felt by the blind person's tongue, and then the signals go from the tongue to the brain.

It's a little bit like Braille, in which bumps felt by fingers are translated into words that the brain can "read." BrainPort allows electricity on the tongue to be interpreted as images by the brain. This technology is called sensory substitution.

The BrainPort is especially good at helping blind people navigate in a real environment. The guy in the video below even does rock climbing with it - how awesome is that? The best thing about the BrainPort is that it's noninvasive, unlike an implant. The device will be ready for sale by the end of this year.

Images courtesy of Wicab, Inc.

Stuff! A Look Behind the Scenes.

2009-11-20T21:27:08Z

Stuff! It's all around us. The metals, plastics, glass, fibers and other materials that make up our homes, our cars, our electronics, our everything! Most of the time we accept this stuff for what it is and don't give it another thought. But not David Pogue.

David is a New York Times personal technology columnist and CBS news correspondent who wants to know, just what is all of our stuff made of? How strong can materials get? On how small of a scale can we work with them? How clean can we get our technology? And how smart can a material become? From the first man to craft a tool using a rock, to the future of robots so small they'll navigate your blood stream, we'll be following David as he searches for the stories behind the materials that make up our world in this four-part program set to air in the fall of 2010.

I'm Dan Parsons, a production assistant on the Stuff crew. So far in production we've locked down the treatment for one of the four episodes, titled "Strong, Stronger, Strongest" and should have the second, "Small Smaller Smallest" complete soon. We've lined up some interesting adventures for our host including trips to a demolition derby, an active Navy aircraft carrier, a steel mill, a diamond cutter and to MIT for a slow-motion look at exactly how things break. There's still a long road ahead of us, so keep checking back as production continues for an inside look behind the production of Stuff!

]]>

LCROSS's Successful Smashing

2009-11-18T15:31:41Z

Last week NASA announced the preliminary results of the moon smashing LCROSS mission that NOVA scienceNOW covered this past summer, and now it's official. There is definitely water on the moon.

(Image courtesy Northrup Grumman/NASA)

When we last left LCROSS, in July, the spacecraft was speeding along its slingshot trajectory toward the moon. On October 8th, about 10 hours before impact, the satellite released Centaur--the white, cylindrical rocket stage in the image above--and nudged it into a collision course with the well of a crater on the moon's surface. The rest of the spacecraft followed about 10 minutes behind Centaur, ready to start taking data as soon as the initial collision kicked up enough dust to analyze.

The crash was less dramatic than hoped. Scientists originally predicted that the headlong impact could send plumes of material shooting up to 10 kilometers above the surface--a reaction that would be visible to telescopes across the country. But, perhaps because of the spongy nature of the moon's surface, the dust didn't spray much further than a single kilometer high. At first, the mainstream media deemed the mission a flop.

But in the months following that impact, NASA scientists sifted through the data and found that the plume, though smaller than anticipated, was hardly a disappointment. The results released last week show that plume contained at least 26 gallons of water. (None of that was water in the liquid form we're used to, since the lack of atmosphere on the moon causes solid ice to sublime directly into a gas.)

What does this mean? For one thing, the moon may be more viable as a way station in space than previously thought. If we can harvest and use the moon's water, either to sustain humans in space, or as the raw material for making hydrogen fuel, we might be able to use the moon as our stopping place and leapfrog on to other planets.

But, as our friend from Reading Rainbow used to say, you don't have to take my word for it.

Check out this podcast, in which David Levin talks to David Morrison of NASA's Lunar Science Institute and asks him to explain why we should bother going back to the moon.

Still not psyched about the new discovery?
Hit play to hear "Water on the Moon," a song composed (and performed in part) by LCROSS deputy project manager John Marmie.

NOVA's new Beta Site and "Mr. Darwin"

2009-11-16T15:41:52Z

We've spent the past--okay, I can't recall how long we've been dreaming of and chipping away at this project. Let's just say forever--working to bring you a new, redesigned, version of one section of our website, and it finally launched at the end of October.

Because our beta is meant to compliment the fall season of programming on evolution, it includes all kinds of content that touches the topic. So I've been knee deep in natural selection and developmental biology for all that time. Still am, to be sure, as we continue to migrate more of our content to the new site and the new format.

Some time ago, I ran across this:

Few things delight me more than adorable portrayals of the history of science. This is the "Botanical Version" of the song. The original version, below, tells more of Darwin's story (and skips over naming quite so many plants.)
]]>
It's the level of detail that makes this song so charming. Take a look at the lyrics.

MR DARWIN
(Lyrics taken from Singtastic.com Copyright David Haines 2004)

Mister Darwin on the Beagle sailed the oceans and seas
To South America and Tahiti and New Zealand, Maldives
To Australia and Tasmania, Keeling Island and Saint Helena
To Ascension and Mauritius and Brazil, de Verdes and Galapagos Islands
Mister Darwin on the Beagle sailed away for five years

Mister Darwin on his journey watched the plants, beasts and birds
He drew pictures, gathered samples, kept a journal full of words
He saw beetles, iguanas, giant tortoises, flightless cormorants
He saw finches, frogs and lizards, duck-billed platypuses, albatrosses
Mister Darwin wondered where they came from and he soon had ideas

Mister Darwin, when he got home, wrote these new ideas down
But he didn't like to offend so didn't share them around
Twenty years passed, Mister Darwin got a letter from a Mister Wallace
Now this young man had discovered
Just the same thing Mister Darwin found
Aboard the Beagle, Mister Wallace had the self-same ideas

Mister Darwin and Mister Wallace formed a team for some time
But Mister Darwin wrote his big book in eighteen hundred and fifty-nine
"On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection"
Everybody read the book, everybody had an opinion
Some people praised it, others damned it, Mister Darwin's big book

Mister Matthew was a gardener and when he read Darwin's book
He wrote a letter to the paper saying "Just take a look
At the book I wrote nearly thirty years ago, I had all the same ideas"
No-one listened and Mister Matthew and Mister Wallace were forgotten
Over all the years and now we just remember Mister Darwin's big book

Now when you think about natural selection
Just spare a thought for those forgotten two
Remember those names, just a brief recollection
Alfred Russell Wallace and Patrick Matthew

I'm not sure about you, but before this song, I'd never heard of Patrick Matthew. The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online offers both the text of Matthew's book, and Darwin's response after he was made aware of it:

"... I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection.
"I think that no one will feel surprised that neither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, had heard of Mr. Matthew's views, considering how briefly they are given, and that they appeared in the appendix to a work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture. I can do no more than offer my apologies to Mr. Matthew for my entire ignorance of his publication. If another edition of my work is called for, I will insert a notice to the foregoing effect."
Charles Darwin, Down, Bromley, Kent.

And Darwin did insert a notice, mentioning Matthew, in the second and third editions of his work.

What We're Reading: "The Long Thaw" by David Archer

2009-11-03T19:24:52Z

Worried about warming but confused about carbon? Try University of Chicago geophysicist David Archer's The Long Thaw, which tells you nearly everything you need to know with down-to-earth clarity and brevity. Archer is known for his studies of "the long tail" - the lifetime of CO2 released by human activities - which he and his colleagues have shown will continue to heat up the planet for thousands of years to come. He calls it "a climate storm" with an impact that will "last longer than Stonehenge." Yet reading The Long Thaw is sobering and enlightening rather than depressing. It's packed with informative, accessible background on past climate cycles and why they are relevant to assessing today's warming. Ultimately, Archer argues, the fate of our climate depends on what we do with earth's vast coal reserves. If we burn all that coal, it has the potential to take us to a hothouse world last seen not long after the demise of the dinosaurs. Yet Archer doesn't preach or waste much space on climate skeptics. His clear-eyed epilog settles quietly on the issue of ethics. Solutions to warming will only work if the nations that have benefited most from fossil fuels take on most of the burden of fixing the problem. The Long Thaw is published by Princeton University Press (2009, $22.95).

What your eyes know

2009-11-02T20:40:23Z

Meet NOVA intern Bo Zhang, a graduate student in Boston University's science journalism story. In her first Inside NOVA post, Bo describes an electronic contact lens that can read your cholesterol level, blood sugar, and more--all from your eyeball. You can read more from Bo at Free Radicals, a brand new web magazine from the BU science journalism program. I'll hand the microphone over to Bo:

Ever imagined reading your body temperature from contacts? It seems like this contact lens with built-in LEDs will beat out any fancy colored competitors.

Scientists from the University of Washington have been developing a digital contact lens that has miniature antennas, control circuits, and an LED integrated in it, aiming at in-eye health monitoring, since 2004. Because scientists have found the surface of the eye contains a surprising amount data about our body, including cholesterol and blood glucose level, the lens is a non-invasive way to get real-time health data.

Part of a new kind of technology called augmented reality (AR), or a combination of physical real world and a virtual computer-generated imagery, the lens sounds exciting - as neat as something you would read from a sci-fi - but also terrifying. What would a person wearing such contacts look like? Is it safe to have a device with circuits touching your eyeballs? Although live rabbits have been tested wearing these contacts for 20 minutes at a time and without being hurt, we still have to be patient to wait until more promising results to be revealed.

For more on the contact lens, visit the Wired Gadget Lab.

Image courtesy of the University of Washington.

Obama Speaks at MIT on Clean Energy

2009-10-23T16:22:07Z

I just found out that President Obama is speaking at MIT (just a hop, skip and jump across the river from our offices) about clean energy research and to promote Senator Kerry (D-Mass.) and Senator Boxer's (D- Calif.) energy bill. You can watch online here. Or it's on live on the White House's channel on Fri. Oct. 23 at around 12:30 pm EST here. Obama is only the second sitting president to visit MIT (Bill Clinton was the first in 1998, when he gave the commencement speech).

All's fair in love and spiders

2009-10-23T14:10:32Z

Gentlemen, please take a moment to be thankful that you are not an Australian redback spider.

Just one in five bachelor redbacks ever finds a lady redback to call his own. If he's lucky enough to get that far, just as his search comes to an end and mating begins, she eats him. Alive. While they are mating. NOVA scienceNOW covered this gruesome seduction, and explained its evolutionary utility, in a profile of University of Toronto evolutionary biologist Maydianne Andrade. After all, if you only get to mate once, you had better be sure the mother of your spider babies isn't going to go hungry.

Now, Andrade and her colleagues have uncovered a fiendish new detail in this strange romance. To earn the right to be devoured, the male redback has to perform a prolonged (100 minutes, minimum) courtship ritual. If his wooing isn't up to snuff, his would-be partner will eat him (are you sensing a theme here?) without mating and move on to the next suitor.

The worst news of all for an upstanding male redback is that a nasty "sneaker" male who wants to skip the courtship rigamarole will sometimes shadow a stronger suitor, wait for him finish his romancing, then slip in and take the lady redback for himself. Kind of like Cyrano de Bergerac, but with spiders. And cannibalism.

Yet more proof that good guys never win--but at least they might not get eaten.

The folks at Nature have this all on video.

]]>

A Little CSI Work of My Own On CSI Miami

2009-10-21T14:21:26Z

The other night I happened to flip by an episode of CSI Miami and when I saw it included a plot line involving bacteria, I perked up. The episode, called 'Bad Seed,' had the CSI-ers investigating a woman who had been poisoned by E. coli from some contaminated lettuce she ate. The investigators traced the source to feces run off from nearby cattle onto the farm where the lettuce was growing. So far so good. Then the show takes a turn and the woman's boyfriend gets sick - but not from E. coli.

]]> Clostridium thermocellum, had swapped genes with its 'cousin,' the deadly Clostridium botulinum (that causes botulism). And somehow that cousin's deadly botulism toxin gene wound up in the corn the victim ate.

Here's where I have a problem - no food company would use a bacteria with a potentially deadly protein to genetically engineer a crop. And because they use such precise techniques, researchers know exactly what gene they put into a crop - so there's no way a gene for a deadly toxin would 'accidentally' get into a crop (as is suggested by this episode). Also, that crop would go through so much testing that if such a potentially deadly result came up, it would never make it to market (and certainly not to someone's dinner plate).

Genetically engineered corn does exist - it is called 'Bt corn' - after the bacterial toxin 'bt' it contains to ward off insects. This toxin is used by organic farmers as a 'natural' pesticide and the genetically engineered version has had to go through many safety trials in order to be approved by the FDA and EPA.

The topic of genetic engineering is often under debate (check out some viewpoints from this NOVA/Frontline program), but it's important that people understand the science before making up their mind. This episode of CSI Miami, while entertaining, seemed misleading to me - at least where the science is concerned.

520 Days of Solitude

2009-10-20T20:24:32Z

I have a neat job. Reading about science, chatting with scientists, and generally getting to exercise the curiosity muscle until it's all big and beefy--this is about as good as it gets.

But. Sometimes there are days when my dream job would really be staying in bed past noon, watching Gilmore Girls reruns until all the witty repartee makes my head hurt, and reading those trashy magazines I only let myself pick up at the gym or in the doctors' waiting room--because if you're exercising or about to get poked with a needle, my reasoning goes, you deserve a little indulgence. My point: Sometimes the best kind of work would be no work at all.

If this sounds appealing--and not just for a day or two but for a few hundred days--then polish up your resume, because your dream job has arrived: Professional Pretend Astronaut.

]]> The European Space Agency (ESA) is recruiting a crew of six individuals between 20 and 50 years old to live in a sealed isolation facility in Moscow for 520 days: that is, the duration of a round trip to Mars plus a 30-day stay on the Martian surface.

What's it like to be locked in a pretend spaceship for 520 days? To get an idea, the ESA partnered with the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems for a preliminary 105-day simulated mission earlier this year. The crew had work to do while locked up in the cramped module--taking psychological and physiological tests, getting themselves out of simulated jams--but crew members admitted that they got pretty bored. As New Scientist put it:

In his off-time, [German engineer Oliver] Knickel passed the time by writing letters, learning Russian, and playing poker and dice with his crewmates.

But the isolation and confinement in a cramped space did take its toll. "I had a hard time focusing on the things I was doing," Knickel told New Scientist, adding that he did not retain newly learned Russian vocabulary words was well as he did back home.

How to beat the pretend-astronaut blues? Buck up knowing that you're paving the way for a new generation of spacefarers who will make the real journey to Mars. Sure, they'll get most of the glory, but knowledge gained from your experience will make their long voyage a little more bearable.

Unless, that is, new propulsion methods like VASIMIR come on line first. VASIMIR could cut the Earth-Mars travel time down to thirty-nine days. Thirty-nine days? That's shorter than summer camp! A pretty bitter pill for anyone who volunteered to be sequestered for hundreds of days for the Greater Good.

Arts and crafts and science

2009-10-13T20:54:13Z

Thousands of scientists spend their lives studying things that are, for all intents and purposes, invisible. Viruses. Neutrinos. Black holes. Things that most human beings have never, will never, or can never see or touch.

But artists and scientists are finding new ways to make the invisible visible. Luke Jerram, a British artist, worked with glassblowers and virologist Andrew Davidson to create glass sculptures of viruses and bacteria, recently displayed in a London gallery. Watch the glassmaking in action:

]]>

Then there's seamstress Julie Peasley, who enlisted a team of physicists to help out with her collection of plush subatomic particles. I've been dropping Chanukah-gift-hints for these things every which way since at least 2008, with no results. (Mom, are you reading this?)

A top quark, in plushie form.

Even mathematicians are getting in on the craftiness: They've found that knitting and crocheting are great ways to create strange geometric figures like the Lorenz manifold.

Do these collaborations help make "invisible" science more accessible--or am I just a sucker for anything soft and googly-eyed? Tell us what you think!

Biting Evidence

2009-10-13T20:30:57Z

Here's a special guest post by Pamela King, a Northeastern University journalism student interning with NOVA's web team this semester. She'll take it from here!

He was known as the "snaggle-tooth killer." Ray Krone had been sentenced to death after an impression of his teeth in a Styrofoam cup was used to peg him as the murderer of a Phoenix bartender. The victim had been found with bite marks on her body, but at that time little other physical evidence was available. DNA testing later proved Krone could not have been the murderer, and he was released ten years after his conviction.

]]> Krone's story is just one of many that is leading scientists to study the fallacy of bite mark evidence. Researchers like Daniel Blinka, featured in the video above, are working to standardize the cataloging and matching of bite mark identification so that it might one day be as reliable as DNA evidence.

According to Blinka, characteristics of bite marks have not always been measured accurately and are therefore not yet suitable as courtroom evidence. To address this problem, Blinka, along with a research team, is compiling a database of wax bite mark models from volunteers. The models can then be compared with images of actual bite marks, and the researchers, using specialized software, can measure dental identifiers such as arch width and tooth rotation. Although members of the research team will need to collect many more samples to do so, they hope to eventually use the database to find out how frequently dental characteristics occur in a population.

A recent study conducted at the State University of New York at Buffalo, however, reveals that collecting bite mark evidence may not be as simple as biting into a wax mouthpiece. When a person is bitten, the researchers say, teeth indentations disappear quickly, and only bruised skin remains. This leaves forensic dentists with the difficult task of definitively distinguishing, based on bruising alone, one biter from another whose teeth might be similarly aligned.

The study's authors were among the first to use cadavers in their experimentation, instead of wax or Styrofoam, to better replicate the elasticity of living human skin.

Krone and others have since been exonerated by DNA evidence, but the Innocence Project, a group that works to free wrongfully convicted people, is calling for the scientific validation of any method of evidence analysis employed in cases where lives and liberty hang in the balance.