Monthly Archives: April 2017

The Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn has made a startling discovery on the moon Enceladus. The molecule hydrogen (H2) was found in a series of close fly-bys through a continuous jet of icy particles called a plume shooting hundreds of miles into space from cracks in the moon’s surface. Hydrogen is candy to potential bacteria that could be living in that ocean and further indicates that active chemical reactions between water and rocks are happening in the ocean. Does this mean that there is life? No. Does that mean that if life were to exist, it could survive? Yes. Saturn’s little moon Enceladus has surprised everyone. Enceladus is a tiny moon (310 miles in diameter) so was expected to be a cold, inactive world. After a seven year transit, Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, and in 2005, the spacecraft discovered plumes of mostly water coming out vigorously from…

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It’s a beautiful morning, the birds are singing, the sun is peaking above the horizon, and you are enjoying your morning jog. Nothing can dispirit this event except the sudden betrayal of your shoes as they spontaneously untie themselves. This occurrence is common to anyone who has worn laced shoes. Usually, this is a minor annoyance, as you take the moment to kneel down and retie your laces. However, to a group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, this sparked a scientific pursuit. This group of researchers published a study investigating the physics of shoelaces becoming untied in a typical running or walking situation. Their study involved two different experiments: real-world force measurements, and controlled measurements. For the real-world force measurements, the scientists had a volunteer run on a treadmill wearing different types of shoes. These different types of shoes included hiking boots, running shoes, casual shoes, and…

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Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) RNA is similar to DNA. If DNA were a zipper, then RNA is only one side of the zipper. Both DNA and RNA are long molecules made up of smaller molecules – a sugar, a phosphate, and a nitrogenous base. RNA’s purpose is to act as a messenger carrying instructions from DNA for controlling the synthesis of proteins. Those proteins determine the expressed characteristics of the living thing to which it belongs.

Protein A protein is a very complex, large molecule that is a chain of smaller molecules called amino acids. Proteins are made according to instructions from DNA. They make up the bodies of every living thing on Earth and are also important players in chemical reactions. When a protein facilitates a chemical reaction, it is called an enzyme. (All enzymes are proteins, not all proteins are enzymes.)

Quasar The name comes from “quasi-stellar radio sources” and was shortened to quasar, before astronomers knew what they were They are massive objects far away in space that emit massive amounts of energy. They are thought to have black holes at their center. They may also be the beginnings of new galaxies.

Exoplanet Also called an extrasolar planet, it is any planet that orbits a star other than our Sun. Read more about extrasolar planets here and here and here.

It goes without saying that forests are important. As the lung of our planet, they strongly contribute to converting carbon dioxide that we exhale into oxygen for us to breath. Since the dawn of civilization, forests have been under threat. Forests are harvested for wood and many other resources and cleared to make room for farmland and buildings. But attitudes toward forests are changing. Foresters are working harder to make sure our forests can be regenerated for civilization’s many needs and wants. Forests cover about 14.5 million square miles and about 28 thousand square miles are lost yearly. International initiatives have been launched to halt deforestation and increase reforestation. In fact, the 2011 Bonn Challenge and the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests have a combined aim to restore 580 thousand square miles of forest by 2020 and 1.35 million square miles by 2030. Resources to enable this are limited,…

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Most people can identify a familiar face in a photo, even if the picture is taken at an unusual angle, or in poor lighting. Think about how easily you may recognize someone you know in a social media feed or a photo album. Our brains become trained to recognize the facial features of someone we often see.  However, there is a large difference in human ability to correctly identify the face of a familiar person compared to an unfamiliar person. Similarly, facial identification software can also be trained to identify a specific person. This is done by uploading “training” images of the person in different settings and lighting conditions. The more training images used, the more familiar with the person’s image the software becomes. This training process for computers to recognize and classify objects of interest is a branch of science called computer vision. Since it is more difficult for…

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Trains have been the fundamental backbone of transportation and shipping for a few hundred years. Despite the ubiquity of trains, the details of their workings are a bit of a mystery. Trains have come about as more of a feat of engineering than one of science. Thus, the detailed scientific theory of trains has remained aloof. There are some common unknowns with trains. For example, if you’ve watched a race on a round track before, you notice that lanes that go around a curve are different distances. That is because the distances on the inside and the outside of the track are different. This principle obviously holds for trains too, then why is it that a train can turn on the tracks? Source: Sciworthy Original The inner versus outer track distances is actually solved because trains of conical wheels. These conical wheels can allow the train to slide sideways slightly…

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Our understanding of animal cognition has grown dramatically since the days of Jane Goodall in the 1960s. Great apes, a family of primates which includes chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans, are often the subject of psychological research. The present study explored an important aspect of social intelligence in these great apes — the ability to tell if another individual believes something that is wrong. This is called a false belief, and is contrasted with a true belief – when the belief is based in reality. The experimenters set up a rather clever experiment. This experiment was based on a technique used by psychological researchers to study the social development of 16 month old infants. However, the great apes in the study were around 18-19 years old. The researchers presented two scenarios in two separate studies. The first study presented the apes with a false belief and a true belief scenario. The…

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