The New Cincinnati

By: | June 1, 2010

In 2007, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey had just filled a public database with a gazillion galaxies and Kevin Schawinski, a graduate student, needed a sample of the ones called, for their shape, ellipticals.  Identifying shape isn’t something computers are much good at, so Kevin looked for his ellipticals, culling out the spirals and irregulars, by eye.  He looked through 50,000 galaxies and decided he had to try something else.

He and his friends set up a website, called Galaxy Zoo, on which the general public would click on a galaxy, then click Spiral or Elliptical.  The first day Galaxy Zoo opened to the public, the number of clicks crashed its server, truly, melted the wires.  Kevin got his ellipticals, and since then Galaxy Zoo blossomed like fireworks.  In three years, 250,000 zooites in over 100 countries have classified 60 million objects.  The zooites have found new kinds of galaxies and are seriously learning astronomy.  They do it because they want to contribute, because they want to look at galaxies never seen before; they do it for free and for love. Continue reading →

New Potato News

By: | May 31, 2010
Potatoes

Ian McEwan’s entertaining new novel, Solar, contains one of the best descriptions of a bag of potato chips (or “crisps” to the Brits) that I have ever read:

“It was a plastic foil bag of finely sliced potatoes boiled in oil and dusted in salt, industrialized powdered foodstuffs, preservatives, enhancers, hydrolizing and raising agents, acidity regulators, and coloring. Salt- and vinegar-flavored crisps.”

The novel is actually about a sleazy Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, Michael Beard, who steals a student’s plan to create artificial photosynthesis after the student slips on a polar-bear rug, smashes his head on the side of a glass table, and dies. Anyway, it got me thinking about potatoes, or more specifically one of my favorite scientific papers of all time, “Stages in potato consumption in different stages of life in Norway,” published in 2001 in the journal Appetite by Margareta Wandel and her colleagues at the National Institute for Consumer Research in Oslo.

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Every Dot Is a Galaxy

By: | May 28, 2010

This is the kind of image editors tell me is not interesting, but editors in this case are as wrong as wrong can be.  This is a picture by the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory.  It’s of the universe clear back, close to its beginning.  The Herschel looked in far infrared wavelengths at a bare (to us) part of the universe called the Lockman Hole.  Every single one of those nearly invisible dots is a galaxy.  The red ones are the most distant.  I’m close to fainting just at the very sight.

Click to enlarge.  Then faint.

Photo credit:  ESA/SPIRE and HerMES consortia

Science Metaphors (cont.): Violent Relaxation

By: | May 25, 2010

Science is not normally in the metaphor business, but occasionally when it crosses the cultural divide between it and the rest of us, it does so via metaphors.  Maybe the most common one is black holes.  To scientists, black holes are singularities so dense, so gravitationally powerful, that nothing falling into them can return.  To the rest of us, black holes are metaphors for closets, the economy, and the end-of-season position of the Baltimore Orioles.  I’d like to offer another metaphor not currently in use:  violent relaxation. Continue reading →

Flesh-Eating Algae

By: | May 20, 2010
Bladderwrack

When I’m thirsty, I often fancy a cool drink of green algae, filled with Spirulina, a vitamin-and protein-packed beverage resembling pond scum that’s promoted as an immune-boosting elixir. I think of algae as benign or beneficial: clinging to a damp tree trunk, like the primitive one-celled Protococcus; as a source of biodiesel, aka oilgae; or scattered over the sea shore, like bladderwrack, a rubbery species that I seem to recall dragging home as a souvenir from seaside holidays in Brighton lo these many years ago. (That’s the English Brighton, where the beaches are covered in pebbles, the climate is typically overcast, and the locals spend chilly summer afternoons burrowed in their beach huts, or “chalets” imbibing tea and admiring each others’ poodles.)

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