This Week in Science! (June 16/13)

This Week In Science

Please bear in mind that these are all simply headlines. Please READ the articles linked above before commenting on any of these stories, as a one sentence summary does not present all the facts.

Gene therapy: 
http://bit.ly/ZSA7mF

Multiple Sclerosis: 
http://bit.ly/106VoLK

New layer of the cornea: 
http://bit.ly/16wlVl5

Bioengineered vein: 
http://bit.ly/16YgOO9

Dark matter: 
http://bit.ly/1a1S9Hh

Gene patents: 
http://bit.ly/196Q6QJ

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Galaxy Collisions

What happens when two galaxies collide? Although it may take over a billion years, such titanic clashes are quite common. Since galaxies are mostly empty space, no internal stars are likely to themselves collide. Rather the gravitation of each galaxy will distort or destroy the other galaxy, and the galaxies may eventually merge to form a single larger galaxy.

Expansive gas and dust clouds collide and trigger waves of star formation that complete even during the interaction process. Pictured above is a computer simulation of two large spiral galaxies colliding, interspersed with real still images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Our own Milky Way Galaxy has absorbed several smaller galaxies during its existence and is even projected to merge with the larger neighboring Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years.

(When worlds collide. Literally!)

Thanks as always to NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day!

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From Tuesday May 14 to Monday 20, I will be out of town for (among other reasons) the Jewish holiday of Shavuot as well as the following Sabbath. See you when I get back!

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How Big is the Universe?

How Big is the Universe?

I remember when my son, Exhibit Two, told me that the universe has no edge and no centre. He stood there grinning while he watched my head explode.

The other day, I ran into this video that explains it a bit better.

It still blows my mind but at least I can follow, more or less, that the narrator is saying.

Have fun. And hold on to your hats!

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Mt Fuji with a Sugegasa [菅笠]

Mt Fuji with a sedge hat or sugegasa  [菅笠].

(Lenticular cloud hovering over Mt Fuji, Japan)

This is an example of a lenticular cloud, also known as altocumulus standing lenticularis. These are stationary, lens-shaped clouds that are formed at high altitudes. They are included in the middle layer cloud family because the bases of the clouds are stationed between about 2,000 and 7,000 meters.

These clouds form when moist air is forced to flow up around mountains and large hills. The water is super cooled and condensed from air below the dew point temperature.

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Clock Around the Rock?? (Quantum Mechanics & Time)

The geeks and nerdlings over at ScienceDaily.com have once again failed to disappoint!

A recent article begins,  ”Ever since he was a kid growing up in Germany, Holger Müller has been asking himself a fundamental question: What is time?

That question has now led Müller, today an assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, to a fundamentally new way of measuring time.

Taking advantage of the fact that, in nature, matter can be both a particle and a wave, he has discovered a way to tell time by counting the oscillations of a matter wave. A matter wave’s frequency is 10 billion times higher than that of visible light.

“A rock is a clock, so to speak,” Müller said.

(Quantum mechanically, mass can be used to measure time and vice versa)

In a paper appearing in the Jan. 11 issue of Science [1], Müller and his UC Berkeley colleagues describe how to tell time using only the matter wave of a cesium atom. He refers to his method as a Compton clock because it is based on the so-called Compton frequency of a matter wave.

While Müller’s Compton clock is still 100 million times less precise than today’s best atomic clocks, which employ aluminum ions, improvements in the technique could boost its precision to that of atomic clocks, including the cesium clocks now used to define the second, he said.

“This is a beautiful experiment and cleverly designed, but it is going to be controversial and hotly debated,” said John Close, a quantum physicist at The Australian National University in Canberra. “The question is, ‘Is the Compton frequency of atoms a clock or not a clock?’ Holger’s point is now made. It is a clock. I’ve made one, it works.”

Müller welcomes debate, since his experiment deals with a basic concept of quantum mechanics — the wave-particle duality of matter — that has befuddled students for nearly 90 years.

“We are talking about some really fundamental ideas,” Close said. “The discussion will create a deeper understanding of quantum physics.”

Müller can also turn the technique around to use time to measure mass. The reference mass today is a platinum-iridium cylinder defined as weighing one kilogram and kept under lock and key in a vault in France, with precise copies sparingly dispersed around the world. Using Müller’s matter wave technique provides a new way for researchers to build their own kilogram reference.

Müller hopes to push his technique to even smaller particles, such as electrons or even positrons, in the latter case creating an antimatter clock. He is hopeful that someday he’ll be able to tell time using quantum fluctuations in a vacuum.

Müller’s coauthors are post-doctoral fellows Shau-Yu Lan, Michael A. Hohensee and Damon English; graduate students Pei-Chen Kuan and Brian Estey; and Miller Postdoctoral fellow Justin M. Brown. All are in UC Berkeley’s Department of Physics. The work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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[1] Journal Reference:

Shau-Yu Lan, Pei-Chen Kuan, Brian Estey, Damon English, Justin M. Brown, Michael A. Hohensee, and Holger Müller. A Clock Directly Linking Time to a Particle’s Mass. Science, 10 January 2013 DOI: 10.1126/science.1230767

(PhotoCredit: Holger Müller lab)

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The Hammer and the Feather

Here’s the famous footage of Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott who dropped a hammer and feather on the moon.

This experiment was conducted in order to prove Galileo’s theory that in the absence of atmosphere, objects will fall at the same rate regardless of mass.

Before Galileo, the accepted theory was that heavier objects would fall faster than light objects.

Well done!

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Nerd Humour (and why I love it)

Ever heard or seen nerd humour?

Let me give you an example…

Or how about some literary nerd humour…

How about this version?

You either get them or you don’t.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You can open it up, analyze it and figure out exactly what makes it tick…

But the frog rarely survives the process.

I think one of the things I love most about nerd humour is that there is a certain amount of elitism involved with it.

It’s the ultimate “in” joke because you know only about 6% of the population truly “gets” it.

So lighten up, get in touch with your inner nerd… and have a good snorty chuckle.

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Spaghettification: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Death by Black Hole

We’ve all spent sleepless nights, tossing and turning, as we pondered this profound question…

What happens I fall into a black hole?

Worry no further, boys and girls.

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains it all for you!

You’re welcome.

Sleep tight!

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Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist. He is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. This talk is based on his well-reviewed book, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries.

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Popping A Water Balloon At 6200 frames per second!

There is something about high-speed photography that always gets to me.

You don’t really learn all that much from watching this film clip… but it sure is interesting and, more importantly, fun!

I don’t know about you but I think this is SO cool!

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Weird World of Water (or, Stanley & Kumar Go to the Lab!)

As there was no court on Remembrance Day and as I’d already done all my errands and most of my goofing off earlier, I decided to go for a pleasure drive on The Information Super-Highway.

As is so often the case, one of my pit-stops on my Info-Web-Roadtrip was… ScienceDaily.com.

The science geeks and nerds there once again failed to disappoint!

(Catch a wave and your sittin’ on top of the world)

The title hit me immediately. How could I not read an article called Weird World of Water Gets a Little Weirder?

Water sure is different. For one thing, water can exist in all three states of matter (solid, liquid, gas) at the same time. And the forces at its surface enable insects to walk on water and water to rise up from the roots into the leaves of trees and other plants.

Rather than wade slowly into the piece, I dove right in, plunging headlong into the article. (OK… No more cheesy water metaphors. I promise)

(Ploop!)

The article begins, “Strange, stranger, strangest! To the weird nature of one of the simplest chemical compounds – the stuff so familiar that even non-scientists know its chemical formula – add another odd twist. Scientists are reporting that good old H₂O, when chilled below the freezing point, can shift into a new type of liquid.” [1]

That’s right, boys and girls… liquid water, when chilled, becomes even more liquider (liquidish? liquidy?). It turns from a liquid but then into another kind of liquid. So instead of going from a gas (steam) to a liquid (water) to a solid (ice), the transition is more like gas, liquid, another kind of liquid, then ice. Or not.

OK, it’s time to bring in the experts because I’m messing this all up.

(Splash!)

Chemical physics research scientists Pradeep Kumar and H. Eugene Stanley (aka Stanley & Kumar), using computer simulations, found that when they chilled liquid water in said simulations, its propensity to conduct heat decreases. No surprises there. But, and here’s the really cool (no pun intended) sciency part, when they lowered the temperature to about 54 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the liquid water started to conduct heat even better. At that temperature, the nature of liquid water undergoes sharp but continuous structural changes whereas the local structure of liquid becomes extremely ordered – very much like ice. These structural changes in liquid water lead to increase of heat conduction at lower temperatures.

(You just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?)

In other words, the experiments suggest that at very low temperatures, water changes from one kind of liquid into an entirely different form of liquid. The evidence to support that theory is the ability of the ‘second liquid water’ to conduct heat more easily as a result of its new ordered structure. In fact, the conductivity of the super-cooled water is equal to the conductivity at the highest heat. [2]

The researchers say that this surprising result supports the idea that water has a liquid-to-liquid phase transition.

The practical application of this discovery is, at this time, unclear. [3]

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[1] The report entitled ‘Thermal Conductivity Minimum: A New Water Anomaly‘ is published in the ACS (American Chemistry Society) Publication Journal of  Physical Chemistry B.

Pradeep Kumar, Center for Studies in Physics and Biology, Rockefeller University, New York, New York.

H. Eugene Stanley, Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts.

[2] For you chemistry and physics wonks out there, here is the abstract:

 

“We investigate the thermal conductivity of liquid water using computer simulations of the TIP5P model of water. Our simulations show that, in addition to the maximum at high temperatures at constant pressure that it exhibits in experiments, the thermal conductivity also displays a minimum at low temperatures. We find that the temperature of minimum thermal conductivity in supercooled liquid water coincides with the temperature of maximum specific heat. We discuss our results in the context of structural changes in liquid water at low temperatures.”

[3] In other words, I’m having a hard time trying to figure out the practical applications mainly because I know nothing about physics or chemistry. But I’m pretty good at finding photos of owls being shpritzed with water.

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