Samantha Garvey wants to be a marine biologist and the science-focused 17 year old is now one of 61 finalists from Long Island in the Intel Science & Engineering Fair for her pioneering work with mussels.
But the real story of this scientist-in-training is that she is able to excel in the classroom as an honor’s student without all the creature comforts of home. In fact, the teen and her family are homeless and living in a shelter on Long Island, New York.
Both of her parents were unable to work following a car accident. As a result of falling behind on their rent, the family was evicted from their apartment on December 31. After advancing to the Intel finals, this science rags to riches story garnered national attention and a community banded together to get the family a house.
Samantha Garvey, Intel Science Fair Finalist
Now the science. The enterprising Samantha has been studying inedible marsh mussels for the last two years. But a nagging question kept eating at her and prompted her investigation, which she entered into the Intel science competition. She was studying how mussels settle in salt marshes and noticed mussel concentrations appeared to be higher in areas where there were more crabs, one of the mussels’ primary predators.
She tells Good Day New York, “I thought this was weird. How are they surviving in areas where they are being preyed upon?”
Thinking that observation runs counter to what she would expect she did a little experiment, studying mussels in areas of low and high crab predation. She discovered that that mussel shells were actually thicker in super crabby areas and a bit thinner in less crabby waters.
So she tested her theory by putting crabs and mussels together to see what would happen. She discovered that the mussels adapted to the threat by increasing the thickness of their shells.
Garvey says, “I discovered when you expose a crab to a mussel, they grew thicker, heavier shells to defend themselves.”
Hoping to be selected from 1,500 finalists from 65 countries as a $100,000 scholarship winner of the Intel science competition, Garvey intends to study marine biology at either Brown or Yale, her top two picks for her undergraduate studies. From there she would like to continue studying invasive species.
Full interview (6:54) with Samantha Garvey on Good Day New York. Greg finds out why there are holes in mussels at restaurants.
Maggie Arias is on her way to becoming the next iTunes sensation. The Atlanta-area 6th Grader is not your typical pop princess though. She uses “thermosphere” in her song, Aurora, which pays tribute to the beauty and power of the Northern Lights.
When her teacher asked each student to become an expert on a science subject they studied last semester and teach the class, young Maggie chose the aurora borealis. She didn’t want to make a cardboard display or a power point presentation like the other students so she decided to make a song. Since her dad, Chris, is a professional musician, the two collaborated — daughter on science, dad on musicality — to make a hit that kids are downloading.
Maggie tells Fox5 in Atlanta her song “was talking about how big the aurora was and how beautiful it is and how there’s so many different colors. It would be so different if we didn’t have it.”
Her Dad says, “The thing that struck me is how this incredibly powerful cosmic event is turned into such a beautifully serene light show in the sky. If you thought for a second about our magnetic field being different or weaker than it is, yikes!”
To complete her assignment, though the student needed at least five paragraphs of information, including some important science.
Aurora
by Maggie & Chris Arias
Instrument Approach Music, Inc. / ASCAP, ©2011Iʼm in Alaska
The sky is glowing
Without a soundEnergyʼs growing
Red and green oxygenBlue and purple nitrogen
Aurora, you never know how much I adore yaʼ
My magnetic field of dreams
Making magic out of photon streams
Those endless nights in the northern lights
AuroraInside the beauty
More power than lightning
Intoxicating
It should be frighteningRed and green oxygen
Blue and purple nitrogenAurora, you never know how much I adore yaʼ
My magnetic field of dreams
Making magic out of photon streams
Those endless nights in the northern lights
AuroraThe thermosphere erupts in silence
Making beauty of cosmic violence
The sun assaults the skies
You dance before my eyesYou make me wish that I could fly
Aurora, you never know how much I adore yaʼ
My magnetic field of dreams
Making magic out of photon streams
Those endless nights in the northern lights
Aurora
The one idea Maggie wants to convey is that the power of the Northern Lights should not be underestimated. Her dad wrote some of the lyrics with her words ringing in his ears. She says, “20 million amps at 50,000 volts, dad! That’s BIG TIME ENERGY!!!!!!!!”
So they decided to make it a high energy song with a dance beat.
Maggie’s song is available at the iTunes store.
Here’s a preview.
Rosie Redfield, at Home in the Lab
The scientists led by a young researcher named Felisa Wolfe-Simon claimed they were able to get Mono Lake bacteria to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in their physiology and even in their DNA. NASA even hyped the work ahead of the paper’s online publication in the journal Science. The press release announced, “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”
However, Dr. Redfield read the paper and immediately knew it was wrong. She hopped online and pointed out the problems in her blog, RRResearch, which contains her frequent musings about life in her lab working with graduate students. On Dec. 4, 2010 she wrote a long post (and one she thought would be read by few,) which set off a firestorm over the arsenic paper.
Since then, she has appeared in the media and at science conferences talking about her post-publication comments of Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic life paper. This year the journal Nature named her one of the ten science newsmakers of the year. In addition to saying what many other evolutionary biologists thought about the veracity of the arsenic DNA experiment, she also decided to use her blog as an open notebook where she has been busily trying to replicate the original arsenic experiment.
Her documentation of the process is not just fascinating from a technical perspective (which it is) but she carefully crafts experiments to test each question she has about the Wolfe-Simon study, slowly poking bigger holes in what many biologists regarded as a weak experiment anyway. Redfield isn’t concerned whether she is wrong or right. She just follows the science and looks for explanations along the way.
Her writings almost appear motherly and it’s easy to imagine her as a thesis or dissertation adviser to her students. In one post where she recounts her criticisms of the now-infamous biology paper, she admonishes lead author Wolfe-Simon for having sloppy experimental habits.
Within two days of reading the original paper in the journal Science, Redfield saw the flaws in the Wolfe-Simon experiment. She sees scientists making mistakes as just part of the process. But she chastises the all the scientists involved in that research for remaining silent and never correcting the problem.
She says, “Scientists in particular need to be able to admit their errors – we’re working not only at the frontiers of knowledge but at the frontiers of our abilities. Failure to admit we’ve been wrong is a betrayal of the scientific process.”
Since Wolfe-Simon didn’t admit making any mistakes Redfield says she had to prove the findings wrong.
Of the original arsenic research, she says, “Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information. If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I’d send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.”
So after she completed teaching her genomics class in the spring she turned her attention back to the arsenic experiment, which was clearly nagging at her.
On June 1, she outlined her plan of action for reproducing the original Wolfe-Simon experiment. But from the get-go she said, “If I can’t readily get GFAJ-1 [bacteria cells] growing nicely on the phosphate-based version of the medium the paper specifies, I’ll know that I’m out of my depth. At that point I’ll leave the whole mess for someone else to test.”
Her work revolved around two big questions.
Q. 1. Is the approximately tenfold growth difference between arsenic and phosphorus due to the cells’ use of arsenic in place of phosphorus in DNA, RNA and other biomolecules?
Q. 2. Does DNA purified from cells grown with less phosphorus and more arsenic contain significant amounts of covalently incorporated arsenic?
Just before Christmas, she told me, “This is a really simple experiment, a no-brainer,” which originally she thought might take a couple of weeks. It took her six months.
To start her experiment she sent away for GFAJ-1, the allegedly arsenic-loving bacterium on which Wolfe-Simon based her research of Mono Lake in California. (In some science circles GFAJ stands unflatteringly for Give Felisa A Job).
In September, after several months of open experimentation, Dr. Redfield discovered the arsenic-treated bacteria cells only grew when the cells were streaked out on agar plates. When she tried to use a liquid culture medium, she says, “The cells didn’t look so good.”
But for some reason they grew on the agar plates. And when Dr. Redfield fed the bacteria an amino acid she says they grew like crazy. Once she was able to stabilize the cell growth she grew enough GFAJ-1 to analyze its DNA. She wanted to see if the cells were assimilating arsenic into their DNA in place of phosphorus.
Dr. Redfield didn’t think that such a thing would be possible and for decades chemists have concluded the same thing. Yet, That’s what the Wolfe-Simon experiment concluded. Redfield relies on the chemistry which says that the bonds with the arsenic would be so weak that they would fall apart within a fraction of a second. According to the chemistry, she says, “The DNA will just fall apart and the cells will die.”
But she also refutes the Wolfe-Simon conclusion based on biology. Dr. Redfield imagines DNA is like a zipper. She says, “The teeth of the zipper have to be the same size or the zipper will get stuck.” Arsenic is too big to work in place of phosphorus.
After getting the arsenic-laden bacteria to grow, she figured out that the Wolfe-Simon experiment only worked because the agar plates the original researchers used for the cell growth contained a minute amount of phosphorus, which contaminated the experiment by giving the cells just enough to grow.
She says, “I think they used a reagent that wasn’t purified and discovered it had three or four micro molars of phosphorus.” In the paper and in responding to Redfield and other criticism, Wolfe-Simon says that the bacteria couldn’t grow on the little bit of phosphorus on the agar plate. To that Redfield says, “It was lame. I said, ‘Wait a minute.’”
When she did her own experiment, Redfield used reagent grade chemicals and grew her bacteria in arsenate almost to the specified density. When she added just three micro molars of phosphorus she got the same result as the Wolfe-Simon paper.
Once she was able to stabilize the growth of GFAJ-1 cells containing different amounts of arsenic, she sent the bacteria off for analysis at Princeton to see if any of the arsenic made its way into the DNA of the bacteria, as posited by the Wolfe-Simon paper. She expects those results in a couple of weeks.
She says,” I’ve grown the bacteria with and without arsenic and extracted the DNA and sent it off.” Once she gets the DNA analysis she’ll do some more experiments and then write a paper about the whole process.
For the last year Dr. Redfield has helped demonstrate how science can be self-correcting. In the media coverage, experts quickly reached a strong consensus — that the arsenic paper was flawed. And with her open science experiment on a blog, Redfield invited curious colleagues to contribute to the experiment, which was working at the edges of what is known in biology and experimenting in unfamiliar territory.
Unfortunately, many people look to this newsmaking event as an example of how science gets things wrong. Some people only heard the original arsenic life story and missed the vibrant discussion of the research and its correction.
In the process of the hub-bub around whether arsenic is a building block of life one evolutionary biologist with a popular blog said, “Rosie Redfield must be the tyrant queen of science.” P.Z. Myers, the outspoken atheist blogger biologist gave her the title, which she wears proudly.
Through it all, Dr. Redfield has remained very sympathetic to Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young post doc responsible for the paper about arsenic life. Redfield has not spoken directly to Wolfe-Simon but sent her an apologetic e-mail after an interview she gave appeared more strident than she intended.
Rosie Redfield understands what it’s like to be a misunderstood scientist. For the last 20 years she has focused on how bacteria reproduce. In 2000 her work raised eyebrows when she wondered, “Do bacteria have sex?” She believes they do, despite what conventional biology says.
To Wolfe-Simon she says, “I understand having an exciting, important idea where everyone thinks you’re wrong.” But, she cautions, “You have to do good science; that’s the only thing that will see you through.”
She feels sorry for how this biological brew-hah went down. Despite what Redfield considers an error in not admitting a mistake, she thinks that the other co-authors on the paper were also complicit in not correcting things before they reached publication and public discourse.
Redfield says, “You can be seen to screw up and it’s not a disaster. That’s just science.”
Science writer David Dobbs followed the story since it broke and says Wolfe-Simon is now caught in the fallout from an over-the-top media press of which she is both part author and something of a victim.
Redfield agrees with his characterization of how both NASA and Wolfe-Simon’s mentors and former lab bosses seem to have abandoned her. In a Wired article in September he notes, “It appears they bought and fueled the bus; put bright lights and banners on it; cheered as Wolfe-Simon drove it a bit wildly honking the horn; and have now thrown her under it.”
Redfield says, “Everyone involved made big mistakes. But the big betrayal wasn’t the errors but the failure to admit them.”
And of her new moniker as tyrant queen of science, she says, “Finally the recognition I’ve been waiting for.”
]]>The voice of nature Sir David Attenborough is featured explaining Iceland musician Bjork’s latest venture — Biophilia. It’s part music album reflecting the connection points between sound, nature and technology. It’s an app for iPhones and iPads. It’s a creation generator for fans of Bjork’s music to tinker and play with sound to make an instrumental backdrop for the singer’s powerful a capella voice.
…but much of nature is hidden from us, that we can neither see nor touch. Like the one phenomenon that can be said to move us more than any other in our daily lives: sound. Sound, harnessed by human beings, delivered with generosity and emotion, is what we call music. And just as we use music to express parts of us that would otherwise be hidden, so too can we use technology to make visible much of nature’s invisible world. In Biophilia, you will experience how the three come together: nature, music, technology. Listen, learn, and create. — Sir David Attenborough, intro to Biophilia
This experiment is described as a multimedia exploration mother application, comprising a suite of original music, and interactive, educational and musical artifacts.
The journey begins deep in the cosmos where galaxies form. Fly through homemade constellations that connect to ten songs, each with a different app and activity. The theme song Cosmogony plays as users decide where to begin their experience.
Biophilia Project Moon App
In Moon, Björk explores the lunar cycles and the effect they have on Earth. The song is based on four different sequences played by four different harpists: Zeena Parkins, Shelley Burgon, Sara Cutler, Carol Emanuel.
About the song, Björk explains, “With each new moon we complete a cycle and are offered renewal — to take risks, to connect with other people, to love, to give. The symbolism of the moon as the realm of imagination, melancholy, and regeneration is expressed in the song.”
The sequences of the song repeat, reflecting the lunar cycles.
18-year-old programmer Max Weisel designed the Moon app for Biophilia. The song is constructed in 17/8 time measure, a far cry from the musical standard 4/4 time. For that reason the app features a musical sequencer with 17 musical moons. Change the position of each moon to change the note it produces. Anyone can create a new melody each time which can be played with Björk’s voice.
Biophilia Virus App
In Virus, Bjork tells the love story between a virus and a cell. And of course the virus loves the cell so much that it destroys it. An interactive game in the app challenges the user to halt the attack of the virus, although the result is that the song will stop if the player succeeds. In order to hear the rest of the song, the players will have to let the virus take its course. Taking some artistic license, the cell nuclei will also mouth along to the chorus.
In her song Thunderbolt the Icelandic impresario uses arpeggios, inspired by the time between when lightning is seen and thunder is heard. She also demanded the creation of new instruments in order to properly show the interdependence of nature, innovation and technology. When she debuted Thuderbolt at the Manchester International Festival in June, she used two Tesla coils as core instruments.
Biophilia Crystalline App
Cyrstalline is the lead single on the Biophilia album and it required a new instrument as well. For this Bjork created the gameleste, a hybrid created by combining a gamelan (gong) and a celesta (organ), giving the singer the option of playing the gong remotely like an organ from her iPad. Crystalline tells the story of structure.
Bjork says of the app, “Travel through tunnels and collect crystals to make your own structure of the song.” Each move changes the way the song plays as you pick crystals along the way. Different crystals have a different effect, making the song a living, evolving structure. At the end, each play sees the crystal aggregation they have made and can save and share their structure with others.
The song and app explore structural similarities in crystals and music, using them to express changes between closed and open systems and emotional states in an effort to unify the external and internal worlds.
Cosmogony embodies the harmony of musical and planetary systems. It’s a song inspired by wonder at the cosmos and the question of how the universe came to be. the app acts as the navigation tool to explore the universe of Biophilia in 3D audio by traveling with your fingertips through space.
Bjork Cosmogony Cover
The Cosmogony app also alerts users when new apps are available, by highlighting them within the constellations. It exists to expand on the cosmological and unifying aspects of the mother app function and draws on the lyrics of the song which center around creation myths from different cultures.
Laura Sterritt at Transchordian says, “In this sense, ‘mother’ app takes on an additional meaning by relating to the birth of the universe.”
With her Biophilia project Bjork is embracing technology, collaborating with Apple and National Geographic to break new ground merging music with science to create a new appreciation for both.
Bjork Rocks Science with Biophilia
She tells the Guardian she has a three-year educational tour planned, inspired by Biophilia. The paper reports that in addition to the album, the free mother app and its 10 accompanying song apps, the Icelandic singer is mapping out a string of eight six-week residencies, comprising live performances, scientific expositions, and children’s workshops on nature and music.
Growing up, Bjork says, “My rock star was David Attenborough”. Now the rockstar is helping to reinvent the rockstar, herself.
According to Corey Tate at Spacelab, “The Biophilia experience will have central themes of science, earth, and space; it seems to be at the forefront of the new interactive music cool, with the combination of digital music and interactive experiences on the rise.”
Through 2014, Bjork will visit eight cities around the world, spending a month and a half in each. She will do twice-weekly performances of the album and host scientific exhibitions and classes for students. She says, kids will be able to “try out the instruments on the iPad and write songs and take them home.”
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Within hours of his death, Apple co-founder, inventor and innovator Steve Jobs was being compared to scientist Albert Einstein and inventor Thomas Edison. Though he lacked formal scientific training and had no PhD I think most people would consider Steve Jobs a scientist.
He tinkered, explored and experimented as he found ways to bring aesthetic balance to the uber-geeky world of computer science. In fact, he went so far as to turn computer science into a liberal art, a move that resonated with hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
During an NPR interview Jobs said, “In my perspective … science and computer science is a liberal art, it’s something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It’s not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It’s something that everybody should be exposed to and everyone should have mastery of to some extent, and that’s how we viewed computation and these computation devices.”
That was back in the 1996 when he ran a computer company called Next, which was busy experimenting with ways to make computers less business and more friendly. He sold his company to Apple the next year and then went on to create the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad. From the beginning he recognized that pretty fonts, eye-popping colors, high-quality images and eventually top notch audio and high resolution video were the necessary ingredients to make the personal computer more personal.
Along the way, the visionary who got a reputation as a business anathema for never doing market research, rode his gut feelings all the way to the bank. He started Apple in the 1970s, was ousted in 1987 and returned ten years later to run the company until resigning as CEO in August.
The global reaction to Jobs’ death is a clear indicator of the impact he had on our lives. He helped push computers down in size and put the Internet in all of our pockets. He took the promise of tablet computing and created a new gold rush for touchscreen technology.
But above all, Steve Jobs touched our lives so deeply because he stood for what is possible not just what is available. In tributes outside Apple stores from San Jose to Sydney mourners lay tributes in front of the 300 worldwide Apple retail stores.
Jobs demonstrated what it is to be a citizen scientist and gave us all the impetus and encouragement to follow our passions. Sure, he and his company gave us the devices and put the tools in our hands. But then he stepped back and let us create, collaborate, communicate and innovate.
When digital music almost destroyed the record industry and piracy was replacing valid music sales, Jobs opened iTunes and invented the 99-cent song. Not only did that stave off online anarchy in unlicensed music, it helped the music industry reinvent itself and created new opportunities for unsigned bands and indie artists to find followings and make a living. Jobs created jobs.
Then in 2007, the biggest disruption came as Jobs in a dramatic yet to-the-point product launch announced the reinvention of the telephone with the iPhone. Not only did that change the telephony game but it created mechanism for individuals to innovate applications that can run on the iPhone and all smartphones. Jobs created more jobs. A lot more jobs.
Now, four years after opening the App Store, there are over 550,000 applications available for free or for purchase. App makers are busy innovating solutions to minor and major problems, ranging from how to get a date to where to find the nearest bus.
The elegance of Steve Jobs lies in his ability to listen to his gut as he presented a new technology product to an audience that had never imagined such a thing before. Then he stepped back and watched what the user did with the technology.
Science like many other sectors of our culture embraced Steve Jobs’ products with open arms. Now thousands of applications for iPhone and other smartphones are making collection of big data easy and affordable. As a result, crowdsourcing is becoming routine, for everything from counting animal species to measuring happiness through social utilities like Facebook or Twitter.
The deep sadness that total strangers felt upon learning the news that Steve Jobs had died shows the intimate impact the visionary citizen scientist had on our lives. Many feel that something big has been lost. While that’s true. Steve Jobs is gone and with him all of his future ideas. But he inspired us all to create our futures, follow our passions and innovate for a better tomorrow.
In describing the corporate culture at Apple Jobs said, “There wasn’t a hierarchy of ideas that mapped into the hierarchy of the organization. In other words: great ideas could come from anywhere.”
Now it’s up to us to continue where he left off.
Steve Jobs changed how we integrate technology in our lives. He made it more attractive and more personal. But he also made the leap from us being run by technology to using technology as a tool to pursue our dreams, invent, and make the impossible possible.
He will forever be remembered as the man who made the world a little more science fictional.
]]>Apple’s Impact is in our DNA
excerpted from Callie Neylan’s NPR blog post about news of Steve Jobs’ resignation in August
Why do so many of us get so emotional about Steve Jobs, to the point of crying upon hearing he had cancer and tearing up last week while reading his poignant resignation letter? The answer to all of these questions, I think, lies in mathematics and our own DNA.
I’ve been researching design aesthetics recently, and in a nutshell here’s what I’ve found: Beauty is more objective than you might think. It’s based on numbers and proportions. As humans, we’re biologically programmed to seek out and respond to these numbers and proportions because they indicate superiority, in everything from the human form, to great works of art, to musical patterns, to plants, to architecture and to product design. The screen of a Macbook, for example, is a Golden Rectangle, which is based on this magical number: 1.6178, also known as the Golden Ratio, the Golden Mean or the Divine Proportion.
And the pulsing light that softly undulates to indicate that your Macbook is asleep? Well, that mesmerizing light mimics the rhythm of a human heartbeat, a deeply resonating mathematical pattern which can also be found in tidal flows, DNA sequences and blissful cognitive states.The inclusion of these patterns in Apple’s designs is no accident. Steve Jobs knows better than any other modern-day CEO our biological attraction to beautiful things. With the help of Jonathan Ive, Apple’s VP of industrial design, he exploits our biological tendencies to give us exactly what we want. He has an uncanny ability to tap into our genetic propensity toward beauty, seducing us through exquisite product design.
It’s not your average Top 10 list. In fact there are a lot more killer creatures on adventurer Steve Backshall’s World’s 60 Deadliest Animals list. And he is traveling the world in search of the creative ways critters kill each other.
The Nat Geo Wild channel airs the show, which follows Backshall around the world. He gets nipped by stellar sea lions before a pod of killer whales comes to interrupt the party. He gets punched by a mountain gorilla and pokes an alligator. Obviously, he doesn’t recommend trying anything he does at home.
But some of the cousins to the creatures he examines can be found right in our own backyards including, skunks and killer bees.
As he says, “If you are a small animal then yeah everything else wants to eat you.” He decided to go head to head with the top predators to show the purity and majesty of nature. But it’s likely the many close encounters he has had with some of the deadliest that inspired the show in the first place.
Steve Backshall with Jessica the Hippo in South Africa
Steve took a video camera and moved to the jungle of Colombia where he wrangled snakes and ultimately became National Geographic’s Adventurer in Residence after selling his video to them. From there he began traveling the world on expeditions which led to a couple of other wild animal shows, including a stint at the BBC.
Some of his career highlights — sharing a beach with 75,000 nesting olive ridley turtles, having a baby mountain gorilla take him by the hand, and having a red-eyed tree frog leap into his face on camera. He has scaled jungle mountains only to explore giant sinkholes and he has discovered never-before-seen creatures high atop a craggy Venezuelan mountain. The list goes on an on and on.
According to the his Deadliest 60 bio, “He’s been squirted with ink by Humboldt squid, flirted with by tarantula, assaulted by giant arapaima fish, stared out by thresher and great hammerhead sharks, mugged by pink river dolphins, and charged by elephants, but still maintains that wild animals pose no threat to people.”
But he started out as an English and Theatre (he’s British) major who moved to Japan to become a black belt in Karate, teach English and work as a model. Soon after he began writing for the Rough Guides travel book series before finding his niche as a television adventurer.
For those not looking for more than arm-chair danger this weekend, there is a World’s 60 Deadliest marathon on Labor Day on Nat Geo Wild.
]]>Billionaire adventurer Richard Branson announced plans to travel to the deepest parts of the world’s oceans in a single-person submarine this week.
Sir Richard will pilot the one-manned Virgin Oceanic sub as he dives the Puerto Rico trench, located just off the coast of Puerto Rico, sometime in the next 24 months.
Fellow adventurer Chris Welch will act as his back up pilot and be the first human in 50 years to plumb the depths of the Marianas Trench, which plunges 36,000 feet below the surface of the South Pacific.
To date, no manned submersible vehicle has traveled more than 21,000 feet. Branson’s new sub, which was unveiled in Newport Beach, California this week can safely dive to 37,000 feet and operate unaided for up to 24 hours, according to the Virgin Oceanic website.
While Branson is hot to help commercialize space and is probably already planning tours to the bottom of the planet, there is a lot of science that this pioneering effort will generate.
He is working with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego to collect water and animal samples associated with the deep dives. Scripps Institution department professor Doug Bartlett is an expert on microbial life in extreme environments and his knowledge will guide Branson’s team to collect samples during their five deep ocean dives.
Landers that will accompany Branson on his dive will be outfitted with science equipment to collect water and bottom sediment as well as film the deepwater submarine as it passes by. A day after the dives the sub will rendezvous with the landers and gather the data for analysis.
The Scripps team will then study all the samples brought back from the depths and look for any novel organisms as well as potentially beneficial enzymes or genes.
Scientists from University of Southern California, the University of Hawaii and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute are also partnering with Virgin Oceanic on this unprecedented expedition of science and adventure.
Branson says that the sub will be pressure tested over the course of the next three months before the mission begins later this year. The sub is specially designed to withstand the 1,000 atmospheres of pressure found at the bottom of the deepest places on Earth, approximately 1,500 times the pressure of an airplane.
5 Dives 5 Oceans
1. Chris Welch dives the Marianas Trench — 7 miles down and the deepest spot on Earth.
2. Sir Richard Branson dives the Puerto Rico Trench — 5 miles down and the deepest spot in the Atlantic Ocean
3. Human pilot to the Molloy Deep — 3.5 miles down and the deepest spot in the Arctic Ocean
4. Human pilot to the Diamantina Deep– 5 miles down and the deepest spot in the Indian Ocean
5. Human pilot to the South Sandwich Trench — 4 miles down and the deepest spot in the Southern Ocean
]]>“We will unlock the wonders of the oceans still unknown to humankind or science.” — Sir Richard Branson
The national snake hunt is now hissstory! After a six-day search for an Egyptian cobra, the director of the Bronx Zoo told a relieved city that the snake was found in a non-public area of the zoo’s reptile house.
The poisonous snake disappeared from a Bronx Zoo exhibit and caught the nation’s attention as it spent nearly a week on the lam. One clever snake fan even created a fake Twitter account and posted dispatches from the runaway reptile.
Bronx Zoo director Jim Breheny says the snake was found right where zookeepers expected — still inside the reptile house, coiled in a dark corner. During the time of her disappearance, keepers searched for the 20-inch snake three times a day. Breheny says patience was the zoo’s greatest tool. During a press conference last Thursday, he said once she felt comfortable to explore her environment he knew they’d find her.
Now that the celebrity snake has made a name for herself she needs a name. The as yet unnamed cobra may be called Houdini for her surprising escape or perhaps Cleopatra.
This is not the first great snake escape. Vanity Fair lists a few others in recent memory.
Dan Malone, a herpetologist at the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan told Mlive.com that snakes are natural escape artists. Even though every zoo has strict venomous snake handling policies, the Bronx Zoo hasn’t yet said how the sneaky cobra escaped.
Because she is so small — weighing only 3 ounces — the pencil-thin snake could have slipped between panes of glass in her enclosure, slithered through a grate or screen cover or just taken advantage of human error.
]]>Mireya Mayor explores remote areas of the world is search of elusive and endangered species. The wildlife expert and anthropologist also educates students and parents about the importance of conservation wherever she goes.
After watching the movie Gorillas in the Mist before practice one day, the former Miami Dolphins cheerleader decided to devote her life to science.
Now she is being called the real life Indiana Jones and is the author of the new book, Pink Boots and the Machete.
She is also part of the National Geographic program Find Your Footprint and Proctor and Gamble’s Future Friendly project.
]]>The top and bottom of the world are frozen solid but they are also a popular place for adventure-loving young scientists to travel in search of the world’s biggest questions.
In Antarctica researchers are trying to understand dark matter and dark energy which comprises 96% of the universe. And in Greenland, a team of scientists just finished drilling the largest ice core in an effort to understand natural climate cycles and to measure the impact people are having on the planet.
Even as these exciting projects are enticing intrepid souls to far corners of the world, the U.S. is losing out to other nations when it comes to science education. The U.S. ranks 48th in the world in K-12 science education and American math scores rank below at least 30 other countries.
Astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson is a worried about the future of science in America.
“Science is not just ‘we’re here and science is there.’ We’re embedded in a scientific world at every turn we take.” — Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Children of Blackawton School in Devon, England learn about bee behavior
A group of UK primary school children have achieved a world first by having their school science project accepted for publication in an internationally recognized peer-reviewed Royal Society journal. No one will dispute that this is the youngest group of fledgling scientists to ever be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The paper, which reports novel findings in how bumblebees perceive color, is published in Biology Letters this week. The young science scholars didn’t just help with the research on bumblebees spatial and color recognition, they designed the experiment, collected data and even wrote the scientific paper that was just published.
“This paper represents a world first in high quality scientific publishing and I’m proud that Biology Letters is supporting this highly innovative approach to science education. This is a unique way of encouraging children’s engagement with science by getting a group to write about their work in a publishable format. I hope that it will inspire other groups to realise that science is not an exclusive club but something that’s available for everybody.” — Professor Brian Charlesworth FRS, Editor of Biology Letters
It’s not every day that the words “science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no-one has ever done before” appears in a scientific journal. But since it was written by kids, the published article reflected their excitement. The BBC has a podcast that accompanies its story about the bumble bees of Blackawton. But the interview with Beau Lotto the lead bee researcher on the Biological Letters site will give you a thorough overview of the experiment (17:03).
]]>In an exclusive interview with CBS News’ Bill Plante, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman from “MythBusters” talk about President Obama’s appearance on the popular Discovery Channel show on December 8.
In the episode the two myth-busting men are summoned to the White House and receive a directive from the President himself to put the myth of “Archimedes death ray” to rest once and for all by using a full scale re-enactment.
The myth goes something like this. Archimedes is said to have ordered 500 soldiers to harness the power of the sun to reflect rays off of polished shields pointed at oncoming Roman ships. The myth indicates that the tactic worked and the Roman ships caught fire.
Mythbusters will use an old cruise ship lifeboat, outfitted to look like a Roman ship and sail it toward a mob of shield-wielding middle and high school students standing on the shore of San Francisco Bay.
Is the sun powerful enough to start a fire? You bet. But is the formation of shields into one, big reflecting mirror enough to scuttle a ship? You’ll have to watch and find out.
]]>Getting girls interested in math and science can be a daunting task. But for child actress and star of the Wonder Years TV show Danica McKellar is working to excite girls about math and science. She’s written three books and now is teaming up with DeVry University to get girls to take a second look at science and engineering careers.
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VSS Enterprise
December 7 is a day that will now live in a new kind of infamy. It was the day that Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space company unveiled its new Space Ship 2 and almost blew 800 guests away — in hurricane-force winds — in the process.
Video of the destruction in the Mojave Desert where 105 mph winds ripped through site where VIPs celebrating the new spaceship had to be quickly evacuated.
Photo by: Alan Radecki, MojaveWest Media Works.
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While most serious scientists are wringing their hands, wondering who will win the Nobel prizes, a different group of scientists is celebrating the lighter–but just as bona fide–side of science.
The 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony shined a silly look at science at Harvard last week. Here’s a breakdown of the winners in each category. The Ig Nobel goes to…
Economics:
Icelandic bank management and auditors–for demonstrating how to bankrupt a national economy.
Math:
Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank–for printing currency ranging from one cent to 100 trillion dollars.
Public Health:
Elena Bodnar–for inventing a bra that’s good during an emergency. 
Physics:
Katherine Whitcome, Daniel Lieberman and Liza Shapiro–for answering the question: Why don’t pregnant women tip over?
Medicine:
Donald Unger–for proving his mother wrong and discovering that knuckle cracking doesn’t cause arthritis.
Veterinary Medicine:
Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson–for discovering that cows with names give more milk at dairy farms.
Peace:
Stephan Bollinger–for determining that empty beer bottles will do more damage then full ones when smashed over someone’s head.
Chemistry:
Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor Castano–for making diamonds out of tequila.
Biology:
Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei–for finding a bacteria in panda poop that eats kitchen garbage.
Literature:
Ireland’s Police Service–for writing more than 50 traffic tickets to Prawo Jazdy, the most frequent driving offender in Ireland. The name in Polish means…”Driving License.”
Cast of ABC Television's Flash Forward, courtesy of ABC
When the ABC Television series FlashForward pushed the collective consciousness of the world (in the context of the show) forward six months, the book on which the action-adventure series is based flashed up the Amazon book ranking last week.
The content of the show is being closely guarded but to get a sense of what’s coming, look no further than FlashForward, the novel by Robert J. Sawyer.
Or to the real-world particle physics about to start at CERN below Switzerland.
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Every year the brightest science minds head south in July–somewhat like the swallows to Capistrano. This is more like the string theorists to the world Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.
There, they meet in an unconference, trade brilliant notions and form collaborations to address real-world problems. Sponsored by Nature and O’Reilly Media, SciFoo ’09 included a raft of science celebrities, scientists and interested looky-loos.
SciFoo attendee Dr. Shirley Wu was on the scene and gave REALscience a bird’s eye view. Dr. Kirsten “Kiki” Sanford (The Bird’s Brain blog) also gives a little report from SciBarCamp, another science unconference nearby and just before SciFoo. The host of This Week in Science (and good friend of REALscience) talked about “spinning science.”
Most of what happens at SciFoo stays at SciFoo. But a few things trickle out, once the excitement settles. Here’s the REALscience report from last year for reference.
Watch the video Science Foo Camp 2009: by Nature Video
Watch science comedian Brian Malow on Late Night with Craig Ferguson.
Photo of SciFoo courtesy of Duncan Hull
For the full SciFoo ’09 report listen here.
]]>The trash can smoke ring generator is a signature finale in Steve Spangler’s stage show… and was recently featured on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Everyone always wants to know how to make Steve’s classic giant smoke rings… now you can make them at home with a special Fourth of July twist!
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The Big Apple, known for its art and theater, rolled out the red carpet to celebrate the crossroads of art and science at the 2nd annual World Science Festival.
The festivities got underway June 10 with a star-studded gala event at Lincoln Center, followed by a reception celebrating renowned naturalist E.O. Wilson’s 80th Birthday.
REALscience was there and Richard Romano reports from New York City. Listen to his story here.
Photos: World Science Festival board member Alan Alda, Gala co-chair Glenn Close, Dr. E.O Wilson, Dr. James Watson, Gala Reception, by Richard Romano
]]>Famed mathematician Stephen Hawking has been rushed to a hospital and is seriously ill, Cambridge University said Monday.
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Bear biologist Chris Morgan is one of the foremost experts on grizzly and other rare bears. He travels the world raising awareness about these feared and revered animals.
From the last remaining Cascade Grizzlies to the rare sun bear on the island of Borneo, Dr. Morgan is watching how people, the environment and the bears are all changing.
BEARTREK
BEARTREK Preview from Landon Acohido on Vimeo.
As the line between fact and fiction blurs in television and film productions, Hollywood is turning to the National Academies of Science for a much-needed dose of reality.
A new initiative, called the Science & Entertainment Exchange was announced yesterday and will match creative screenwriters and producers with scientists to keep the fiction realistic or at least scientifically accurate.
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After a very private battle with cancer best-selling author Michael Crichton died in Los Angeles. The man who made a career of making scientists perpetually angry could not outwit a devastating disease.
He opened the minds of hundreds of millions of readers around the world to scientific possibilities. Unfortunately his what ifs were enough to terrorize and tantalize audiences.
But his nuggets of scientific truth were layered with intriguing fiction that often blurred the lines between the two. And that is what angered the scientific research community.
But I suspect even his most vocal critics will miss the fascinating machinations of this creative mind.
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Einstein had a way with words, which confused many. His apparent contradictory opinions on science and religion allowed both the religious and non-religious to claim him as one of their scientists and great thinkers.
A new letter going up for auction sheds a little more light on the mystery of Einstein’s religious views.
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Computer science is in a slump. Ask Microsoft. The software company is putting its money on Michael Buckley, a computer programming professor at University of Buffalo. He is “computing with a cause” in order to reinvigorate student interest in technology.
]]>Dr. Michio Kaku examines the link between science fiction and real science. From the technological advances of teleportation in Star Trek and a death star in Star Wars, Kaku rates the impossibility of such realities in the future in his new book, Physics of the Impossible.
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Dr. Quentin Wheeler is legitimately the bug guy at Arizona State University but he has become famous for his clever naming of the insects rather than for his discoveries.
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Dr. Patricia Hunt just landed on Scientific American’s list of Top 50 Researchers of 2007. Two years ago she was working away on long term research and then a lab accident led to a major discovery.
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Researchers at University of Minnesota have overcome a huge hurdle when it comes to building transplant organs. Using a new technique, they removed all the heart cells from a rat heart and replaced them with younger cells. And, much to their surprise the heart started beating again. This is the first step toward creating bioartificial organs. This could lead to the same process with kidneys, lungs and livers.
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A new documentary takes a look at the coldest of the cold—absolute zero.
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New research from Alabama may spell the end for sickle cell anemia, a serious blood disorder that affects many African Americans. Using the new non-embryonic stem cell technique that was announced a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Tim Townes has created a way to correct the DNA mutation and make new sickle-free blood cells. Next stop. Diabetes.
See the video interview with Dr. Townes, courtesy of University of Alabama at Birmingham.
]]>Scientists are excited about a 67 million-year-old duck-billed hadrosaur so well-preserved its skin and possibly some internal organs are intact. It’s not quite the makings for a real-life Jurassic Park but this is perhaps the best example of what dinosaurs were really like. These remains were discovered in 1999 by a 14-year-old boy in North Dakota, who is now a graduate student at Yale, working on his PhD in paleontology.
]]>A snowboarding scientist is trying to make life’s hard knocks a bit softer.
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When it comes to science, publishing is crucial for researchers. The quality of their science is scrutinized by peers who read their papers. For many scientists rising to the top of a given field requires publishing not only a lot of papers but by having other scientists cite their work in other papers. A giant science publishing company just released a list of top cited scientists.
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A group of scientists hot on the trail of what makes cancer spread has discovered a protein that might be responsible.
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After years of inventing useful peanut-based foods, Mohomed Ahmedna has announced his latest creation–the allergen-free peanut.
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Two unlikely partners–call them the Felix and Oscar of science–are helping to fuel the biotechnology revolution with their hydrogels.
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This week, a group of scientists received a $500,000 award for discovering that the universe is rapidly accelerating. The discovery is almost ten years old but the discoveries it spawned are still reverberating through space.
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