Propioception in the studio: Science Mondays

We try to be mindful humans, but there are some things we should just let the mind take care of by itself.  Like our sense of where our body is in space.  I can close my eyes, and move my arms about and know clearly where they are, just as if I was staring at it with open eyes.  I can fling them about and prevent collisions by way of propioception.  I know I am walking, whether or not my eyes are open and if I try to control exactly where my feet will land, my gait will lose its fluidity.  Welcome to your 6th sense.

Not that I should cut glass with my eyes closed, but I should trust my body to find a natural and comfortable position while doing it.

Until we can do that our backs will ache.  So for now we are trusting a multitude of timers to remind us that time is passing.  The timer goes off and I stretch as I reset it.  We float between studio and computer glad to know where we are in space and time.

Those who lack propioception will likely fall down if they close their eyes.  The sensors in their muscles will not tell the brain that they are standing and they will topple.  Taking large doses of vitamin B6 will let a person know this feeling, a clear example of too much of a good thing is not a good thing.

So sit back and close your eyes and be glad to know where your body is in space. It is a blessing we rarely give thanks for, eyes to see, ears to hear, ... muscles to locate ourselves.

Shopping Local for a Scientist at Rocket Hub

photo by Sheba Also

Yes, Saturday has come and pass, but I hope all of you are still shopping locally.  I just did a bit myself by visiting a website that provides scientists a new way of obtaining funds,  from the public.  Mosaic woman and I figured if we can support jazz artists at Kickstarter (more on that tomorrow), we can support a scientist.  Well, as local as I could find was Susan Tsang in New York.  She digs bats in peril and her passion has led to a research project:  Watch the video below and feel free to  Support her here. 


#SciFund Challenge - Flying foxes: where are they from and where are they going? from Susan Tsang on Vimeo.

introducing my students to Julius Sumner Miller

OK, Ted talks are inspiring and PBS's Nova has amazing production, but I had to let my students know how it was done back in the day...

Science Mondays: Z is for Zoogenesis, second definition

Back in the day when I studied Biology I was drawn away from the molecular to the ecological. I wanted to be pondering a wetland not looking at chemical reactions. I wanted to understand the relationship between a plant and an insect, not the human genome.

I wanted to understand evolution by studying how the environment created new species, not how molecules were involved.

Zoogenesis does mean how the first animal came into existence, but it can be applied to the first vertebrate, or bird, or warbler, or how the first Northern Waterthrush emerged.


photo by Orchidgalore



Zoogenesis is full of grays, it is not black and white. Life unfolded.

Two years ago I went in search of a book to help me teach evolution and found a great one at the Doylestown Bookshop: The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B Carroll. And suddenly I was drawn into what I avoided as an undergrad. If you want to understand zoogenesis, it is a great place to start.

for example: Understanding mutations (you and I have many that came from the creation of the sperm and egg that formed us) became as simple as understanding my keyboard mistakes--- deletions, repetitions, copy and paste, additions. All the ways we can mess up the code of English, our bodies can do with our DNA.

I still find it a bit of a mystery, but less so than before I read the book. Here is a photo I took while taking notes in Doylestown's library (a great place to learn about many things including jazz-- they have an amazing CD collection)...

Science Mondays--- C is for Chiral Molecules, from Pasteur to Sacks

photo by Euclid vanderKroew

Chiral comes from the Greek word for hand, χειρ (cheir). Thus humans and chemicals can be left-handed and right-handed.

1848: Louis Pasteur is playing with polarized lights and crystals. Why do some that seem to be identical rotate the light in different directions? Chiral molecules have been discovered. They are as identical as I am to my reflection in a mirror.

1954: Vladimir Prelog begins to delve into the chirality of organic molecules including antibiotics. But Scientists struggle in creating a specific molecule in the chirality they desire. Just because they are mirror images does not mean they do the same thing in our body.

1968: William Knowles finds a catalyst. The problem of creating the biologically active chirality has been solved. His catalyst helps to bind the atoms to the right sides (which could be right or left) of a molecule. The production L-DOPA comes into being.

1969: Dr. Oliver Sacks does his Awakenings.

photo by Wa-J

Chiral comes from the Greek word for hand, χειρ (cheir). Thus humans and chemicals can be left-handed and right-handed.

Science Mondays--- Homeostasis and what we can learn from fish

photo by Chrisam42

a few hours ago, under the quilt of healing, I began to think more about immune systems and such. Our bodies fight so hard to keep things the way it wants it to be... temperature, chemistry, pressures, acidity, solutes, .... Homeostasis.

But when we get sick, the immune system over rides the system. In its attempt to clear our body of what it senses as an attacker it makes us feel bad. Seems strange, but lots of the discomforts that come with a cold or flu are caused by us not them. Not that I would want to go without the immune system.

But I started thinking about fish as I waited for the call for dinner. One of my favorite classes at East Stroudsburg University was Ecological Physiology (or how to maintain homeostasis in nature).

And to this day I love to share these facts with my students: Salt water fish drink a lot but rarely urinate. Fresh water fish rarely drink and urinate frequently. It is all about balance. Craving what you truly need. Holding onto what you require. Letting go of the excesses.

Learn from the fish, is what I say.

Science Mondays--- flashback to 1979

photo by Todd MacDonald

I guess it was soon after the doctor visit when I discovered Springsteen. I remember a sunset. I had forgotten it till this weekend.

There was a crisis which was unexpected to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Our power plants were built with so many safeguards that they thought of a meltdown was impossible. But the fear was on the mind of others. Twelve days before Three Mile Island became known around the world, this movie hit the big screen.

The best place to see a sunset in those days was to cross route 512 and walk behind a clothing factory. I remember watching a sunset. What day of the crisis was it? Surely not the first two when all reported that all was well on the Susquehanna River. Our governor having seen an evacuation plan that would have caused chaos (each county was to evacuate into the other) was at a loss when after days of all is well got a call to evacuate.

Seven years later in the worst case we have seen, Russia reports all is well.

So this weekend I wondered how well things were in Japan, they seemed to be telling more than we did in 1979. Maybe it is their history, which has led to a respect for radiation. Maybe it is respect for the citizens.

Peace to all those who have left their homes, all those living just outside the radius of evacuation, and to all those who know the whole story and are trying to prevent anything else from happening to a devastated nation.

This morning I introduced my students to an island they had never heard of, what is it they say about the reason to know one's history... if you have an hour:

By the way, the safeguards did work at Three Mile Island, except it shocked someone in the control room and they turned off the emergency cooling system.

Science Mondays--- tectonic

Driving Into the Fault Line
by Giant Ginko

I am going to venture into plate tectonics this week at which point I may say, since I have said it often before,

What happens when India met Asia? Instant Himalayas, geologically speaking.

What I want to happen of course is for my students to ponder the amazing planet on which we live and for them to know that if one wants to feel the earth quake or see it spew, it is best to stand upon on a boundary crack.

and as far as humans causing quakes: Here are the top 5 ways according to Wired Science.

...

Science Mondays--- Hearts

as yesterday's post came to an end, I realized I had not ventured into the science of hearts


1. Bleeding Hearts: the above variety from my front yard is pure white, but they do come in red and pink. It is a symbol of undying love. I hope to remember that this spring when they emerge and greet me as I walk down my porch steps. advice on growing this perennial

2. the rapidly beating heart. Generally speaking birds beat mammals which beat all else. It has to be with our "warm-blooded" metabolism. Hummingbirds can exceed 1000 beats per minute. Shrews win out for mammals which can have 800 beats per minute at rest and an excited shrew was clocked in at 1,511. It is believed that large mammals live longer because they do not wear out their body parts as quickly. The elephant hearts weighs in at 50 pounds and beats 30 times a minute.

3. the hibernating heart: The chipmunk goes from 200 to 5 beats per minute when it heads into hibernation.

4. The future heart transplant: Doctors have ventured into what would make amazing science fiction. They have found a way to take an organ, strip away all the cells, but leaving the protein matrix. Then provide cells and the right conditions and a dead heart can become functional again. If they master this technique, organ transplants could be revolutionized. Waiting to receive a donor liver would be replaced with waiting for your cells to create a new new liver on the matrix of another one. Rejection concerns would plummet. Watch the second chapter of this Nova Now to learn more.

5. 36 interesting facts about the human heart

6. no heart? If trees have no heart then how do they pump water to those high branches. The water is pulled by the leaves using the water and the evaporation out of the leaves (transpiration) and it helps that water is excellent at adhesion and cohesion so that the molecules can form a column. If the column broke, it would be hard to pull the water up.

7. Heart Mountain in Wyoming consist of material 300,000,000 years older than the rocks at its base.

photo by mayrussian7

8. The Heart Nebula is a place where stars are emerging.

...

Science Mondays--- Catastrophs vs Gradualists

photo by chrissam42

I am sure it seemed like it had to be one way or the other way to those who argued the point. Isn't that true to too many arguments. Back in the day I stepped directly into the feud between the direct instructors and the whole linguists. I emerged alive and somewhere in the middle. But that is another story.

This story takes us back to the time when scientists were beginning to see evidence that not every geological change emerged suddenly in gut wrenching catastrophic events. Others clung to all things catastrophic, so an us versus them battle ensued.

While much is gradual: river valleys, continental drift, sedimentation.

It is hard to say that the following are not catastrophic: volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts.

I am glad I am living in the day when more and more scientists and theologians are saying both happen. The Golden Mean strikes again.

and thus this week we transfer our attention away from the 99.999999999999999% of the universe which we do not call Earth. Glad to be home from space.

...

Science Mondays: Cosmos News of 2010 Quiz

photo by tonynetone

1. Our universe may exist within a ________
2. The problem with warp speed is that it would ________
3. By using a ______ we can see what it would be like to watch stars move behind a black hole.
4. Neptune may have eaten a ________
5. Sadly the attempt to be a ___________ freefalling dude got put on hold because of a law suit not a lack of a space suit.
6. Jupiter lost a ___________
7. Space-time may be old hat because of a new theory and pencil ______
8. Saturn's Titan could be a good place to find _______
9. The sun is eerily ________, and this is a bad thing.
10. Just when you think you have seen everything ___________ are detected from a nearby Galaxy.

By the end of next week I am hoping my students can answer all these questions. For now you can find the answers at New Scientist. Click next .

Science Mondays--- ALL

Mosaic Woman gave me All of Science for Christmas. She just may know me very well.

In the past few years, I have taught the following courses: Biology, Physics, Anatomy, Geology, Ecology, Earth & Space, Zoology, and something I have come to call Social Science.

"What, no Chemistry'" you say, well you would have to go back to my very first year of teaching to see that on my resume.

"No Meteorology, no Botany, no .... " well give me time I do have to keep the horticulture program flowing.

I dig science. And I have a job where a small group of students, who need a bit more attention than the average group, get to spend a few or several years experiencing my passion. Maybe it is a good thing I never got that doctorate I planned on but never even started.

Science Mondays --- Now!

photo by Greehawk68


I am digging Nova Science Now and the host Neil deGrasse Tyson is a wonderful host. Is he the Carl Sagan for this time? An astrophysicist with passion and a desire to have the universe speak to us.

When he was 9 years old he was taken to a planetarium and when the lights dimmed the universe "called to him." And he has been in love ever since.

I also dig Nova's The Secret Life of Scientists which highlighted Dr. Tyson and he tells about that day as a nine year old hearing his calling, about his passion for wearing art inspired by that very same cosmos, about his science, and answers 10 questions.

Apparently he is one of the faves on Colbert:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Neil deGrasse Tyson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog March to Keep Fear Alive

anyway, my students and I are digging it and I wish the man in front of the camera keeps being joyful and passionate about science

Science Mondays--- stumbling onto a real shooting star, Mira

photo by Darek Smid

Entering my classroom I had my plans set for the week, but I wasn't sure what topic I would be teaching in 90 minutes. I knew that I wanted the students to practice taking notes from an article and I knew I would head to Science Daily , click on video, click on time & space...

And I would pick something and go from there.

Mira is a star with a tail, a Red Giant that is spewing hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen into the universe as it moves rather quickly to its future home as a White Dwarf. We have known about Mira for hundreds of years, yet we have only known about its tail for a few of them. It all has to do with how we are blessed that the atmosphere blocks so much UV light. It took a satellite mapping the universe's UV light to see the tail. Which is long, way long.

When I told my students that Mira was a variable star, many impressed me by saying "Cepheid." But I told them they were wrong and then explained to them that the universe has more variables than the Cepheids and in fact the others are called Miras.

So I stumbled upon a truly shooting star, which is planting seeds into a universe ready to create new stars and planets:

Science Mondays--- wartime measures double the universe

Photo by Dana Graves

Cosmic Times jumps from 1929 to 1955, because this happened.

So today I told the story of how blackouts in 1943 LA allowed a view of outer space that indicated there were two types of Cepheid Variables and thus the universe doubled in size.

I spoke of how when the story started Henrietta Leavitt, who was noticing what had to be noticed, was looking at Type 1's.

Shapely would venture into clusters of stars where Type 2's hung out. He would use a bit of parallax data using a nearby Type 1 to start measuring distant stars.

Hubble and Humason (the mule team driver and later telescope master) would venture into galaxies other than our own and see Type 1's and use Shapely's distance formulas.

Then Blaade took advantage of those blackouts, and saw there were two types, he realized Hubble and Humason had used a bad "Yardstick" and now our nearest galaxy neighbor was 1.6 billion light years away. The whole universe had doubled in size.

Read the Science Times Edition

and more fashion of 1955:

Science Mondays-- change of plans

Sunday afternoon I got home from being away from home since early Friday morning, hung out with Mosaic Woman then made a pizza for a friend who came over to do some plumbing. I was bit tired when I began to plan out the week plan for teaching but had a plan written out when I hit the school this morning. I changed it before my second class showed up. Realizing I was leaving a few students behind, I made a list of 21 vocab words and started a review. We will review some more before testing them this Friday

I also saw it as an opportunity to show some cool videos which my students have been finding and placing on the wikispace page we are creating as a class.

Here are a few. Enjoy.

as for the photo at the top of the page, I searched my flickr site for "plan" and that is what came up.

Science Mondays---- from here to there

Connections by Seth Anderson

In the next three days during my Social Science class...

we will go from Benedict to a surplus of sheep to the spinning wheel arriving from China to great wealth in Bruges to a turn in the weather to the Black Death to emergence to lots of linen rags to Linen paper to the printing press to Aldus Manutius to water organs to Jacquard Looms to Iron Ships to mass immigration to 1880 overwhelmed census workers to the Hollerith Machine to punch card computer data...

no wonder the BBC called the series Connections

Science Mondays--- of light and excited electrons

I am hoping that my students will soon be able to explain how scientists have the nerve to tell us what elements are located in distant stars.

Without checking my sources... let me tell it this way.

Do you remember those energy levels that electrons like to hang out in while orbiting the nucleus, well if you hit their being with a boost of energy such as electricity or heat, an electron will grab hold of that energy and take a trip to a higher energy level. Think of a glowing rod of iron being removed from a furnace. But hey excited, while it is a hoot, doesn't tend to be a stable state for humans or electrons and the electron falls back down to a normal state of being. OK, think back to a time you felt really excited, are you now glad your heart has plummeted back to a normal state of being.

Well each element has their unique electron at the upper most level and I've been told that when electrons plummet light is emitted. Yes, excited electrons are quite busy in places like bulbs and suns and molten stuff.

So you take your handy spectroscope and check and point it at that light source and you can see the fingerprints each element has placed in the creation of light. OK, so imagine many things happen that get you excited all at once, since each is triggering you slightly differently we could see the unique aspects of each when we divide your excited self into its components.

OK, maybe this will help...




and that is how the scientists believe Green Pea Galaxies are metal-poor.

and that takes us just one Doppler effect from understanding why scientists claim we live in a not so static universe and we will be hanging out with a dude named Hubble in 1929 to get that point across.

Science Mondays--- and how would they know such a thing

So I tell my students the speed of light and I hope for a question like... Why should we believe that? After all it moves at 299,792.458 kilometers in one second. The question I throw out, how is it possible to measure something that for all practical purposes moves at the rate of, instantaneous? Don't believe me, turn on a light bulb and try to see it go from the light to the wall.

I talk about Ole Christenson Romer who was puzzled at how a moon of Jupiter was not where it was supposed to be when it should be there and how it varied and how that variance was proportional to distance from the Earth and so in 1676 he concluded light had a constant speed.

Then we jumped to France and a man who went by Hippolyte Fizeau (cool names can get fading students to perk up) and with some mirrors came within 5% of the speed in 1849. Leon Foucault gets us within 500km/sec by adapting the experiment then an American named Michelson takes the same idea to much longer distances and gets it down to within 50km/sec by 1879. The story goes on until the final two steps in the process--- the laser and the exact distance of a meter.

Science unfolds just like our lives. It is a story of better evidence throwing out what needed tweaking. So we trust light moves fast, but a mystery is still there...

Why is it constant, if it remains in the same medium? But who knows, is it really constant? I have never measured it, but if it is not constant, that would throw astrophysicists for a spin. For now the evidence leans towards being constant.

Science Mondays---- trusting one's data

Last Monday I wrote about using NASA's cosmic times curriculum for 1919. This morning I finsihed 1919 then took a side route away from what is next... 1929. Reading up on Red Shift made it clear to me that I better teach a unit on electromagnetic radiation (light) before moving on to Hubble's findings.

Today we discussed Maxwell, who came up with equations to study how magnetism and electricity can induce each other (think coal, nuclear, hydro energy spinning huge magnets surrounded by copper wires fueling our life style).

Anyway, Maxwell's equations (see photo above) found that when one of the fields induces the other, then waves traveling at the speed of light would be created. It took him a moment or two or three before he realized that he had redefined light as electromagnetic radiation.

Last Friday in class, we spoke of Einstein and how he did not trust his data and that later he called it his greatest blunder... which led to a discussion of what we consider our greatest blunder will likely change as we get older unless we do a great blunder early on in our years.

Anyway, when Einstein plugged numbers in his Theory of General Relativity it told him the universe was far from static. But he could not wrap his mind about a universe that was growing or shrinking, so he did what any good scientist would do... add a constant to keep reality and the equation balanced. By 1929 Hubble will provide evidence for an expanding universe, but Einstein will still have some doubts. Guess he wasn't quite up to facing that blunder yet.

How are your self doubts doing these days? Beginning of school years can always make me wonder if I am capable of getting all required tasks completed ... I get to what has to be gotten and go from there.


and so much depends upon Henrietta Leavitt...