Super Shrimp Eyes

My first experience with polarized light was when I borrowed my husband's sunglasses. The light bouncing off of the lake was suddenly gone and I could see the fish swimming up to his fishing bobber. It was all very exciting and turned what was a moderately fun passtime, watching my husband fish, into the more action packed experience of seeing when the fish were interested in the lure.

Polarized sunglasses work by eliminating all of the light coming through the lenses that is oriented in a particular way. If you look at your digital watch through them you sometimes can't see the display because the light coming from the watch is oriented the same way that light bouncing off of the surface of the lake is. There are lots of ways that light can be oriented. It can be oriented in a linear way, an eliptical way, or even circular. Or, it can be totally unpolarized, meaning that it is oriented in lots of different ways because it is coming from more than one place at a time.

DVD players have a mechanism in them that changes the polarization of light but it only works for a limited spectrum of colors. In studying this shrimp, scientists have found a better, simpler, more versatile way to do the same thing. It could change the way lots of devices are made in the future.

Links:

The abstract

An easy to understand article about it

How polarized sunglasses work

Word of the Day

Wave Plate: The doohickey in your DVD player that changes the polarization of the light going through it.

Swine Flu

We all remember how things got blown out of proportion last year and how a lot of schools closed down that really didn't need to, so it's easy to blow off the dangers associated with swine flu and ignore the recent headlines. I thought Microbiology Monday would be a good time to look into those headlines and see what's going on.

It's early in the year for a peak in flu activity but the swine flu numbers are about the same as the peak activity for regular flu. The CDC says that swine flu is widespread in 46 states and that deaths are up. Eleven children died of flu related illnesses last week. Nine of those were definitely swine flu. So, since it's still early, authorities are a little worried about what might happen later on.

Still, most people don't get that sick. Most people are sick for about a week and then get better, even without any treatment. It's not really understood why some people get really sick. The Pan-America Health Organization has found that anti-viral drugs do improve the chances of surviving a severe case of H1N1. People most likely to get a severe case of this disease are pregnant women, children under two-years-old, people with asthma or other lung diseases, and kids with neurological disorders. Secondary bacterial infections can occur that make things worse and increase the chances of death.

The best ways to protect yourself and others? It's noting we haven't already heard. Wash your hands and cover your mouth when coughing or sneezing. The Health Protection Agency in the UK recommends using a tissue to cover your mouth and then throwing it away right away. They also say that you should use a regular cleaning product to clean hard surfaces and give door handles as an example.

Links:

UK's Health Protection Agency... Advice for the public

CDC Swine Flu Update

World Health Organization

Clinical Features of H1N1

Word of the Day

Pandemic: a disease that covers a large area and a large proportion of the population.

Happy Birthday William

(image from pongmuseum.com)

Today is the birthday of William Higinbotham, who not only had a very fun last name to say but also created one of the very first video-style games. His goal was to make a display for a science exhibit that was fun and interactive and he created a tennis style game that was controlled with a knob and button and viewed on an oscilloscope.

Links:

All about early electronic games

All about Mr. Higinbotham's Game

Word of The Day

Oscilloscope: An instrument used to visualize electronic voltage.

New Cancer Drug?

Medicinal chemists think they might have found a new way to kill cancer cells.

The problem with cancer cells is that they don't die. Regular cells are programed to divide only so many times before they die but cancer cells just keep going and going. Two of the drugs used in chemotherapy are cisplatin and carboplatin. These molecules are combinations of platinum with other chemicals and they work by turning the cell death mechanism back on. Unfortunately, the platinum based chemicals are resisted by some kinds of cancer.

A group of scientists working at School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds have developed some new coumpounds with the metals Ruthenium and Osmium that seem to work very well against the kinds of cancer that the platinum based chemicals don't work for.

Links

The Abstract

The Science Daily Article: easier to understand than the abstract. I really like this website.

American Cancer Society's info page for cisplatin

How the platinum drugs were discovered. It's a neat story.

Word(s) of the Day

(These definitions are quoted word for word from Wikipedia, which I don't usually do... I didn't think I had anything to add and also, it being chemistry, I thought it was more likely to be correct.)

Ruthenium (pronounced /ruːˈθiːniəm/ roo-THEE-nee-əm) is a chemical element that has the symbol Ru and atomic number 44. A rare transition metal of the platinum group of the periodic table, ruthenium is found associated with platinum ores and used as a catalyst in some platinum alloys.

Osmium (pronounced /ˈɒzmiəm/, OZ-mee-əm) is a chemical element that has the symbol Os and atomic number 76. Osmium is a hard, brittle, blue-gray or blue-black transition metal in the platinum family, and is the densest natural element. The density of osmium is 22.61 g/cm³, slightly greater than that of iridium, the second densest element. Osmium is found in nature as an alloy, mostly in platinum ores. Osmium is also used in alloys, with platinum, iridium and other platinum group metals. Those alloys are employed in fountain pen tips, electrical contacts and in other applications where extreme durability and hardness are needed.

Arctic Ice

(Image from This National Geographic Article... there's a cool video there too. I can't help but think my husband should have been an field scientist in the arctic.)

I'm writing this about two days before you'll read it and it's snowing here, so when I started thinking about environmental science, the arctic came to mind. I wondered how things are going up there. Well, it turns out about like I thought, things aren't going all that well for the arctic and it's ice.

How do we know? Two ways, really. First we have all the satellite images taken over time and they tell a story of the ice growing and shrinking every year. Some years it's more than others but the overall trend is that the ice is shrinking a lot more than it's growing. Second, people actually go there and drill holes in the ice and check its thickness. All the scientific predictions seem to point to ice free summers up there in the not too distant future. Predictions vary quite a bit and nobody knows exactly when this might happen but some say it could be as soon as twenty years from now... and that hasn't happened for more than five thousand years.

Not everybody is all that upset about the ice going away. Shipping companies look forward to an ice free north and cheaper routes from Asia to Europe. While it's still not routine, one shipping company has managed to make the journey, battling the ice that's still there along the way. Remember that northwest passage we learned about in early American History? Someday there will probably be one that's regularly used.

Links:

Want to know how the arctic ice is doing right now? This is the place.

Curious about ice all over the world? This is the place.

NY Times article about the shipping company that made the NE passage.

The shipping company's story at their own web site.

Word of the Day

Cryosphere: All of the ice (aside from in people's freezers) on the planet.

Chandrayaan

(image from the Scientific American article about the launch)

A year ago today the first Indian moon mission was launched, and so I thought today might be a good day to talk about some of the results of that mission. The Chandrayaan's job was to go to the moon, orbit it, and take measurements of it using a wide variety of instruments. I've found a couple of interesting things that came out of that mission.

First, some NASA instruments included on the Chandrayaan found water at the poles. They also took some pretty nifty pictures of the earth, including some showing the shadow of the moon during an eclipse. Check out the links section to see pictures and get the full story.

Second, there seems to be some interesting stuff going on with hydrogen and the moon. SARA was one of the instruments included on the mission. It originated from the European Science Agency and measured atoms reflected from the surface. It turns out that hydrogen protons traveling from the sun hit the moon and it was expected that they would all be absorbed by the surface, but for some reason one in every five of them bounce off. This is important because of the way hydrogen atoms move in straight lines without being moved around by magnetic fields. This could give scientists a new way to take pictures of the surface of the moon.

Links:

All about the SARA findings from the ESA

NASA's Mineralogy mapper

Word of the Day

Proton: A hydrogen ion has a positive charge and is sometimes just called a proton. This is because it is just a proton, all by itself, but it is also the positively charged subatomic particle
found in the center of other kinds of atoms.

Immunization Fever

(Image from the Mid America Immunization Coalition)

Almost thirteen years ago I took my baby girl to get her immunized and the nurse told me that if she got a fever I could give her some children's Tylenol. I don't remember if she got that fever or not but I've heard other moms complain about it. Why would something that's supposed to keep my baby healthy make her sick?

The answer lies with the way the immune system works and the way a vaccine works. When you get sick your immune system fights the illness and keeps a record of it so that the next time you are exposed to that illness it can fight it better, and maybe even keep you from getting sick at all. This record is really a recognition of the outside coating of the organism that made you sick. One way to keep people from getting dangerous viral diseases is to give them injections of the outside coating part of the disease causing microbe. The immune system can then recognize the intruder and make its record without the person having to be really ill.

So what about that fever? Does this mean there were some live organisms that made it into the injection? Not at all. Fever is caused by the immune response. The high temperatures are part of the body's mechanism for fighting off intruders. When you get an immunization your body doesn't know that the microbes are dead. All it knows is that it found some foreign stuff in your blood, so it starts the process of fighting the intruder off.

Knowing how uncomfortable the fever makes babies, and how scary that is for their families, some scientists in the Czech republic were wondering if it would be okay to just give all of the infants some Tylenol when they got their immunizations. It turns out that the Tylenol made the babies' immune systems not work quite so well. This means that nurses will probably keep giving the same advice and some babies will keep getting the fever and will then need to be given medicine for it. It's still a lot safer than not giving them their immunization.

Links:

A summary of the article from The Lancet

A more in depth description of how vaccines work

Word of The Day

Antigen: a chemical on the outside of cells and viruses that the body can recognize and use to determine if the cell or virus came from outside of the body.

Itsy Bitsy Black Hole?

(image from NASA)

A couple of scientists in China made a little black hole in the lab and their entire laboratory immediately disappeared along with several top government officials who subsequently declined to comment; having been reduced to their molecular components and all... Okay not really.

A black hole is defined as an area having so much gravity that light can't escape it. These guys were looking at the problem from the light angle, ignoring the gravity thing, so their "miniature black hole," didn't pose the same danger that a regular black hole might pose. What's more, they didn't use visible light, they used microwaves, which are easier to work with because they have a longer wavelength.

Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui were using meta material, which has been billed as being capable of making actual invisibility cloaks. Meta material is engineered on a scale so small that it can be made to behave in unusual ways where light is concerned. In this case they used layers of tiny circuit boards in concentric rings. When they aimed microwaves at the rings none came back out. Instead the microwaves were converted into heat... so rather than thinking of it as a black hole, you might think of it more like a fancy microwave oven.

That might seem a little underwhelming until you consider that they figure they can do the same with visible light. Which might, if I understand it correctly, mean that you could turn off the light in a room for real, even during the day. Or maybe there would be solar applications for heating your home or creating more electricity than we can right now?

Links:

Why meta-material doesn't really make a very good invisibility cloak, yet.

The Abstract : arXiv:0910.2159v1 [physics.optics]

An easy to understand article all about it.

All about black holes, including what would happen if you fell into one.

Word(s) of the Day

Visible light: The stuff we can see... its wavelength measures between 400 and 700 nm more or less. We see the different wavelengths as different colors. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet (which I learned as ROY G. BIV, which is what I'll name my third son). They are arranged from longest wavelength (red) to shortest (violet). Somehow light acts like a wave sometimes and a particle (called a photon) other times.

Hot Blooded

(image from this article about a new way of fighting fungal infections)

When I get sick I usually ask myself if I think it's a bacteria or a virus making me ill. Most of the time it really doesn't matter. I'll end up feeling rotten for a while and then I'll get better. If I needed a doctor it's more important because I know antibiotics won't help with a viral infection.
However, I almost never ask myself if I'm sick because a fungus. That's because people don't get that many different kinds of fungal diseases. The ones they do get happen most often because of some kind of compromise of the immune system.

There's a scientist who thinks he has an explanation for this. Arturo Casadevall, M.D., Ph.D. says that it's the high body temperatures of mammals that keep fungus from growing. Other kinds of organisms like frogs, lizards, and plants, all get more fungal diseases than mammals do. He even hypothesizes that the dinosaur extinction had something to do with fungus.

Links

Read more about Casadevall's idea here

See what else his lab's working on here

This is a scientific article about how opportunistic fungal infections have increased over the last two decades. It describes several different species that don't ussually make you sick, but can if your immune system isn't working very well.

Word of the Day

Opportunistic: This refers to an organism that doesn't normally make you sick but will if it has the opportunity. This is used a lot for the kinds of illnesses that cancer patients might get during chemotherapy or AIDS patients might get. Just because it's opportunistic doesn't mean it won't kill you. Lots of people die of these kinds of infections.

The Martian Chronicles

(image from Wikepedia's article about The Great Moon Hoax)
(I know the moon isn't Mars, but it's such a cool picture... and gee, if the public
was so easily convinced that there was life on the moon...?)

When I was in college I took an English class that required I read an excerpt from The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, which of course I had already read; Ray Bradbury being one of my childhood's beloved heroes. So when, in class discussion, a middle-aged student took issue with the story it made me mad. He told me that giving Mars a breathable atmosphere and actual martians was unforgivable and that the story was, "tripe". I tried to explain to him that we haven't know all that long what Mars is really like, but he would have none of it and I left that class so boiling mad that it still makes me angry to think about.

Now, in retrospect, it doesn't matter to me quite so much if Ray got his science just right or not. It's still a great read, written as nobody but Mr. Bradbury could have written it. Still, who was right in that argument? When did we know that Mars doesn't have a breathable atmosphere?

It seems like people have been speculating about life on Mars since telescopes were invented.

In the 1600's the light and dark spots were observed on the surface of the planet, along with white spots at the poles... it was assumed that the color variation was land and water and the white spots were polar ice caps. The day was calculated to be about the same length as ours. We have life... a planet like ours probably does too? It was the obvious assumption to make.

In the 1800 an Italian astronomer notices some lines on the surface and the Italian word for groove sounds an awful lot like the English word canal. The popular myth that these were canals built by Martians sprang up and proved to be persistent.

In 1907 a guy named Alfred Russel Wallace measured light coming from the surface of the planet and used it to determine that the temperature was negative 35 degrees F... way to cold for liquid water. (A bummer for my argument, because Bradbury's story had liquid water on the surface.)

Still, the book was published in 1950 and the atmosphere wasn't discovered to be made up of mostly CO2 till 1952, and the canal theory wasn't totally debunked until we got a probe close to the planet in 1964.

So, who was right in that long ago argument? I guess the other guy wins, sort of, but fiction, even science fiction, isn't measured entirely by its scientific veracity.

Links

Nasa's chronology of Mars Exploration

An Observational History of Mars: Going back to before it was even called Mars.

The abstract of a scientific paper that mentions blue clearing

Word(s) of the Day

Blue Clearing: also violet clearing. If you use a blue or violet lens to look at the surface of Mars, usually you don't see much, but during one of these blue clearing events certain details become very visible. It seems to have something to do with ice clouds and the refraction of light.

Barnacle Glue

(image from thinkquest.org)

You've probably heard of barnacles but if you live in the middle of a large land mass like I do, you probably haven't thought much about them. They are small shelled creatures that stick themselves onto boats, rocks, and whales. They feed by sticking out filamentous "fingers" and filtering stuff from seawater.

A couple of scientists were wondering how barnacles glue can possible work underwater. You know, regular glue would not work because it wouldn't be able to set up. So they asked themselves what kind of stuff is already well understood to set up like that under water. The answer turns out to be blood and as it turns out, barnacles use a chemical process very similar to blood clotting in order to get their glue to work under water.

Blood clots when the platelets are changed chemically by specific proteins in the blood that are activated when you cut yourself. The scientists found these same kinds of proteins in the barnacle glue and when they added a chemical to inactivate the protein, the glue wouldn't work. Knowing this, they hope they can figure out how to keep the barnacles off of boats and save all kinds of money in the shipping industry.

Links

Here's a link to the full story on Science Daily

How blood clots

Word of the day

Trypsin: A protease... which means it's an enzyme that breaks down proteins.