SciencePunk

The incessant hum of the insect heart

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:25:16 -0700

If you could press your ear to a ladybird's chest, what would you hear? Not the steady thump thump of a human heart, but something quite different. Discovery News reports on work carried out by Igor Sokolov and his team at Clarkson University, who used an atomic force microscope to listen to the faint sounds emanating from inside living insects.

Listen to a ladybird

The researchers used this atomic stethoscope to record the internal sounds of other insects including a fly and a mosquito, which you can listen to here.

The work is published in Applied Physics Letters.

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SciencePunk on the Pulse Project Podcast

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:07:20 -0700

Last week I joined Brendon Connelly and Colin Murphy of the Pulse Project Podcast to discuss some of the week's science stories and chat about zombies, blogging and the origins of SciencePunk. Among the highlights are the sheer PR audacity of teaching an dolphin to communicate using an iPad and a guy who takes x-ray images of big things and alters them to fit the way we think the world should look in the x-ray spectrum. Safe to say it's an aural geekout!

You can follow the Pulse Project on Twitter and join them on Facebook. The organisation aims to "reflect and inform debates amongst academics, students, and the wider public alike".

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Giant mayfly swarm caught on radar

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:26:39 -0700

Nature is big. Really big! The US National Weather Service revealed this image taken last Saturday showing a massive swarm of newly-hatched mayflies erupting from the Mississippi River near La Crosse, Wisconsin.

The swarm was captured using doppler radar, which is used to track the direction and velocity of distant objects (it's the same type of technology used by traffic police in speed guns). The National Weather Service says:

The bugs are showing up as bright pink, purple, and white colors along the Mississippi River mainly south of La Crosse, WI. After the bugs hatch off the water and river areas, they are caught in the south-southeast winds while airborne for about 10-20 minutes.

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Video: Ben Goldacre talks bad science and barbie detox

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:47:53 -0700

Last year I visited Ben Goldacre in his secret offshore nerdbase to talk about science. While there we set up the famous Barbie Detox experiment as described in his book Bad Science. In this short video Ben talks about why the bogus idea of detox is harmful not just for our bodies, but our understanding of health. Says Ben: "The answer, from the future king of England, to your health problems is a fucking magic potion. It's like something out of a fairy tale!"

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Researchers install window on shark egg

Mon, 31 May 2010 05:22:25 -0700

Treehugger reports on the work of marine scientists at Brazil's Guaruja Aquarium, who have added a plastic window onto a shark egg so they can watch the fish develop.

In the photo above you can see the fetal bamboo shark attached to a large yolk sac. The video below gives a better view.

After noting that the unborn shark was unaffected by the window on its neonatal world, researchers removed the entire animal from its purse and allowed it to grow inside a perspex container. The work will help shed more light on how young sharks develop, an understanding of which is crucial to the conservation of threatened shark species.

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Why I left Facebook, and then went back

Mon, 24 May 2010 02:50:40 -0700

It's rare that I blog off topic - there's so much cool science in the world that I don't have much time for anything else. But my departure from Facebook has co-incided with something of a global trend, so I thought I may as well explore what people thought.

In case you've been wrapped in roofing felt for the last few weeks, here's the scoop. After a series of embarrassing security flaws and anger over the company's attitude toward privacy, Facebook users are leaving in droves. Or at least, that's the claim - the reality is that there's no viable alternative yet, although some bright young things are working on a solution to that, playfully called Diaspora. The excommunication of oneself from Facebook is no new thing, and there are even applications developed exclusively to assist with your online suicide, like virtual Thanatrons.

But here's the rub: although my departure has coincided with an en masse evacuation of the social networking site, I just happened to be by the door when the alarms went off.

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Man as Industrial Palace, Animated

Wed, 19 May 2010 05:08:30 -0700

In 1926 German illustrator Fritz Kahn drew Der Mensch als Industriepalast, part of a series of artworks reinterpreting the body as a mechanical factory. Now fellow countryman and artist Henning Lederer has updated the the famous image, turning it into an interactive animation.

He says:

The visual crossover between industrialization and science in Fritz Kahn's artwork demonstrates surprisingly accurately how human nature became culturally encoded by placing the knowledge in an industrial modernity of machine analogues. He produced lots of illustrations that drew a direct functional analogy between human physiology and the operation of contemporary technologies. Therefore, by illustrating the body as a factory, Kahn was able to relate the body's complex organic interior to the industrialized space so common in society during that period of time.

Via fellow scienceblogger Mo Costandi's unparalleled Twitter feed.

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Play with your scrotum anywhere

Mon, 17 May 2010 07:39:37 -0700

From the Department of Sensible Things That Are Still Quite Funny comes these life size testicles, made with BIOLIKE™ synthetic tissue. Now you can fondle your balls in public without fear of prosecution! Yours for just $115.

One happy customer reports:

One of the best purchases that I've ever made! Several of my co-workers have thanked me for bring them in and sharing. I'm so glad to have them, then one model is attached to the rear view mirror on my VW Beetle. All I can say is stop playing around and get this real deal!

The only downside is that there are two synthetic tumours embedded in each testicle, making them a great tool for teaching self-examination but seriously undercutting the warm, reassuring feeling that comes with juggling ones balls.

Bonus related product: this triple-breast model, which makes it look as though you have that woman from Total Recall hiding inside your partition wall.

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A gibbon is your 1 millionth cousin, 400,000 times removed

Thu, 13 May 2010 05:50:56 -0700

Over at Evolutionary Genealogy, Leonard Eisenberg has been thinking about how we're related to other animals. Not so much in the evolutionary sense, but in the familial sense. After all, if your cousin is simply the offspring of your parent's sibling, why not continue that logic back a few hundred millennia or so?

To make a rough estimate of the cousin and removal relationship between you and any other living thing, all one needs to do is count up the generations back to the common ancestor. This sounds easy in theory but is complicated in practice. First, make an estimate of the number of generations along the human line back to the common ancestor. Second, calculate the number of generations along the non-human branch back in time to a common ancestor with humans.

Evolutionary biologists and other nerds can argue the details of Eisenberg's number crunching here, as he's mindful of the flaws and has posted his raw data to encourage discussion. But if you just want to find out who should be invited to your mega-family reunion, take a look at the chart below!

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Bee creates nest out of flower petals

Mon, 10 May 2010 03:35:29 -0700

NPR reports on the discovery of a bee that builds tiny, multi-coloured nests out of flower petals. The rare solitary bee Osmia avoseta creates the cocoons out of a mixture of mud, flower petals and nectar. Each case holds a single egg.

The discovery by a group of scientists in Turkey co-incided with that of another team in Iran; the two groups published their findings together in the American Museum Novitae. More pictures and info on NPR.org.

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Building an airplane in two and a half minutes

Thu, 06 May 2010 02:00:30 -0700

Simple timelapse joy!

via The Litter Box

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Death at sea: the tragedy of Texas Tower 4

Sun, 02 May 2010 13:58:38 -0700

On January 15, 1961, the US coastguard raced through the darkness toward a tiny point 84 miles southeast of New York City. There, 28 crew members of Texas Tower 4 were waiting desperately to be evacuated from their station. As huge swells and high winds pounded the hull of the ship, their radios picked up a frantic transmission from the tower: "We're breaking up". And with that, Texas Tower 4 and all of its occupants were pulled beneath the waves.

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Non-Stop Bullet Train Concept

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 01:55:53 -0700

Board the train that never stops!

Light shed on bee-tricking orchid

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:41:37 -0700

Scientists give bee orchid a new perfume

Tracks left by two-metre prehistoric 'sea scorpion' found

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:40:59 -0700

Soviet animations of American sci-fi stories

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:28:21 -0700

Rhizome has a cache of incredible 1980s-era Soviet animations of American science fiction stories. Quite fittingly for Earth Day, here is Ray Bradbury's "Here There Be Tygers" as imagined by Russian animators. The hyper-synth music is especially awesome. неимоверно!

More wonderful animations of stories by the likes of Stephen King and Robert Silverberg can be found at Rhizome.

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Zooey Deschanel to play Ada Lovelace?

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:20:17 -0700

Setting nerdy hearts a-flutter across the internet is current rumour that Zooey Deschanel will play Ada Lovelace in an upcoming film about the world's first programmer.

Gizmodo has the scoop:

The casting of Zooey Deschanel isn't completely confirmed, with Production Weekly tweeting she's "in talks to play Ada Lovelace in "Enchantress Of Numbers," Bruce Beresford plans to direct the period drama this fall"

Which is as good an excuse as any to take a few minutes and bask in the sublime wonder of this video:

Hat tip: @carmenego

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Michael Specter: The Danger of Science Denial

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 06:06:51 -0700

Journalist Michael Specter makes a erudite and impassioned plea for reason and critical thinking in this video from TED. It's a fantastic speech, and huge tracts could have sprung from my own lips (and probably have done on one occassion or another). He even paraphrases a favourite bon mot of mine: "science is a process not a pronoun". Check it out:

Hat tip: Brian

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Love is blind

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:50:33 -0800

So mosquitoes find a partner who can sing in perfect harmony

Sniffing out books in trouble

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:47:36 -0800

Measuring the smell of old books to find candidates for preservation

Self Healing Bio-concrete

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:54:50 -0800

That is all.

The Astronaut's Cookbook

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:43:28 -0800

Recipes from the space race

First film of a 'giant' stingray

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:08:33 -0800

Incredible & beautiful phantom of the ocean

Mice Levitated in Lab

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 01:36:03 -0700

Anti-gravity machine tackles mammals for the first time

Bad Designs

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:25:56 -0700

A catalogue of failure made before #fail even became a meme

13 more things that don't make sense

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:43:09 -0700

From the big bang to the big bloop

Pfizer fined $2.3bn

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:37:02 -0700

The joys of regulation

DIY cameraphone macro lens

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:07:21 -0700

Requires one old DVD player, zero tech savvy

Unfortunate paper title:

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:06:54 -0700

"Pediatric firearm injuries: time to target a growing population"

T. Rex "Mostly Ate Babies"

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:27:19 -0700

This dinosaur needs a PR agent, fast