photo by Daniel Evanson

Daniel Evanson shot this photo of a cute school project that attempted to determine what type of music cats like, fast or slow. Unfortunately their hypothesis was proven incorrect by the uninterested cats.

via Neatorama

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Wonderfest 2009, The San Francisco Bay Area Festival of Science, takes place on November 7th at Stanford’s Hewlett Teaching Center and on November 8th at UC Berkeley’s Stanley Hall. Admission is free, here’s how to register.

Through public discourse about provocative scientific questions, Wonderfest aspires to stimulate curiosity, promote careful reasoning, challenge unexamined beliefs, and encourage life-long learning. Wonderfest achieves these ends by presenting series of scientific events to the general public. At most of these events, pairs of articulate and accomplished researchers discuss and debate compelling questions at the edge of scientific understanding.

via Susie

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National Geographic takes a look at scientists who create 3D brain maps of people taking psychedelic trips on LSD, recording imagery their hallucinogenic experiences.

Psychedelics over-stimulate serotonin receptors in the brain, resulting in a blissful experience or a horrifying one.

via Huffington Post

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Hine Mizushima created a wonderful stop-motion animated music video for “Why Does the Sun Shine?” by They Might Be Giants, from their new children’s album and DVD “Here Comes Science”.

TMBG are currently on tour and are playing at the Fillmore in San Francisco on November 13th.

Oh and at long last theymightbegiants.com has launched a new website design and tmbg.com now redirects to the main site, where previously they had two websites.

UPDATE: Wired’s Underwire recently did an interview with TMBG’s John Flansburgh.

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xkcd takes a mathematical approach to help reduce Urinal Protocol Vulnerability and prevent awkwardness while peeing in public restrooms.

When a guy goes into the bathroom, which urinal does he pick? Most guys are familiar with the International Choice of Urinal Protocol. It’s discussed at length elsewhere, but the basic premise is that the first guy picks an end urinal, and every subsequent guy chooses the urinal which puts him furthest from anyone else peeing. At least one buffer urinal is required between any two guys or Awkwardness ensues.

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photo by BNPS

At a dig in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, paleontologists discovered a 150 million year-old fossilized squid (Belemnotheutis antiquus) that was so well preserved they were able to use its ink to draw a image of the pre-historic squid-like creature.

via Neatorama

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As a stunt for the BBC One science show “Bang Goes The Theory”, inventor Jem Stansfield climbed the 120′ BBC White City building in west London using a pair of special vacuum gloves that he built, powered by a vacuum cleaner on his back.

via Neatorama

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photo by Morbid Anatomy

Morbid Anatomy shot some fantastic photos of the marvelous medicine, anatomy and science collections on display at Museum Boerhaave located in Leiden, Netherlands.

via Colin Fahrion

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The latest episode of Boing Boing Video features Omega Recoil, an art collective that performs “Electricity Theater” using giant Tesla Coils. They are one of the presenters at this Saturday’s Dorkbot SF 7 Year Anniversary Party.

Omega Recoil is a performance art project combining modern theater, film, science and engineering concepts. We use extreme voltage to make you laugh and make you think.

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Make and Craft present Maker Faire 2009, the world’s largest DIY festival, which is returns to the San Mateo County Expo Center for its 4th year next weekend, Saturday, May 30th and Sunday, May 31st.

Following on President Obama’s call to “begin again the work of remaking America”, Maker Faire 2009 will be organized around the theme of Re-Make America. Held in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 30-31, Maker Faire celebrates what President Obama called “the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things.” The fourth annual Maker Faire will showcase individual creativity and grassroots innovation in the largest festival devoted to DIY culture and technology in the country.

Here are my photos from Maker Faire Bay Area 2008.

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guest post by Burstein!

photo by Pedro Moura Pinheiro

The words “nuclear meltdown” and “Chernobyl” normally summon images of a toxic wasteland where no life can exist. This is, however, rather far from the truth. Instead of mutants out of Total Recall, the land surrounding the Chernobyl reactor is flourishing. Nature has been doing a rather fine job of reclaiming what used to be a sizable city.

In an attempt to find out how, Martin Hajduch of the Slovak Academy of Sciences planted soybeans just 5 kilometers from the epicenter of the meltdown – well within the 30 kilometer exclusion zone. Despite radiation levels ranging from 10 to 100 times background levels and the presence of uber-nasty chemicals like cesium-137 , soybeans actually grew!

The radiation zone beans looked odd even before the protein analysis. They weighed half as much and took up water more slowly than their low-radiation counterparts. And on a molecular level, the beans were even stranger, the researchers report in the June Journal of Proteome Research. When compared with normal plants, beans from the high-radiation area had three times more cysteine synthase, a protein known to protect plants by binding heavy metals. They also had 32% more betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase, a compound found to reduce chromosomal abnormalities in human blood exposed to radiation. Seed storage proteins, which provide nitrogen for germinating seeds, also showed up in different concentrations–some higher, some lower–than in regular soy.

The researchers are still investigating these bizarre beans, but it is nice to know that when the nuclear apocalypse comes, we will still have tofu.

via ScienceNOW

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photo by Thierry Legault

That photo is way more than lovely photo of our big glowing star in the sky. See that little speck in the lower left quadrant? That is the only image ever taken of a Space Shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope in front of the sun!

photo by Thierry Legault

Thierry Legault took this amazing picture in the south of Florida at 12:17pm local time, which was just a few minutes before Atlantis connected with the Hubble for repairs. He used a Canon 5D Mark II with 100 ISO film at an exposure of 1/8000s.

This was not some lucky shot. Thierry has a a pantsload of amazing space photography. Spend some time poking around his site. You will not be disappointed.

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illustration by The Bad Astronomer

With the Star Trek reboot and the paranoia around the Large Hadron Collider, there has been a lot of talk about manufacturing black holes and even a lawsuit [PDF]. Star Trek technology is clearly a while away, but there are a few credible theories out there that suggest that the LHC could bang out a few mini-black holes. Not to fear. They would evaporate quickly into nothingness, but were they to break the laws of physics (as we understand them at least) and become stable…. they would still harmless according to New Scientist.

“First, he pointed out that we’d have plenty of time to act – the amount of energy produced in one of the LHC’s collisions would create a black hole with a gravitational pull no more scary than that of an orange – not enough to suck any appreciable matter towards it, so it would grow extremely slowly.

“Second, black holes can carry a charge, depending on the particles they gobble up. So physicists could give the rogue hole a negative charge by firing electrons at it from a cathode ray tube. Then they could trap it within a box lined with negatively charged metal plates – the negatively-charged black hole would be repelled by the negatively-charged walls, leaving it suspended inside. Making sure the box otherwise contained a vacuum would stop the black hole from eating any particles and getting any bigger. Then you could just load the box onto a rocket, and shoot it out of the solar system.”

The idea of having a paperweight that happened to have a mini-black hole in it gives me no end of joy. It also raises some interesting questions. What would happen if someone fired that rocket with a black hole box into a rather massive object, like a star? Well, according to a couple of physicists, mini-black holes theoretically could swallow a star – and in fact did so frequently in the early days of the universe!

So, the question to all the physicists out there… presuming that a stable mini-black hole was, in fact, produced by the LHC, could a super-villain steal said black hole and credibly ransom the world by launching it on a rocket to the sun?

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guest post by mikl-em

Texas has a fire ant problem. A fire ant is not an ant that is on fire. It’s a kind of ant. And they are bad news

The University of Texas and Texas A&M University scientists have studied the South American predators of the fire ant, and have found one called the phorid fly, which they are pinning their hopes on.

Their plan is to release phorid flies, which will lay eggs on the ants. The eggs become maggots which BURROW INTO THE BRAINS OF THE ANTS. yikes.

Oh, and then they EAT THEIR BRAINS!!!! They really do.

The ants, with maggots for brains, then become zombie ants. Zombie ants are ants that are zombies. Duh. They walk around without brains for like a month. Then their heads fall off.

Isn’t nature wonderful”?

photo by TexasBagLady

That’s not the only cause of zombie ants. This National Geographic segment explains the weirdness of the aptly named Liver Flukes (a type of tape worm) that embed themselves in ants’ brains and then control their actions, steering them into suicidal situations, so that both ant and worm will be consumed by a larger mammal and thus the fluke upgrades to its next victim.

Austin’s KXAN reports that this is not unique in the annals of natural history.

Fire ants are not the only things in nature that are affected by mind-controlling parasites. Snails and rats also get parasites that give them suicidal tendencies. The snails, specifically, grow large tentacles which attract birds. The bird rips off the snail’s tentacles which cannot be withdrawn because of the sporocystes tubes inside. Inside the bird’s digestive tract the cercaries change into the parasite’s adult stage, which then reproduces sexually and lays eggs. Those are distributed by the bird to infect further snails, which closes the generation cycle.

Here’s a brief video about the Zombie Snails which are truly freaky

I learned about this zombie ant thing via The Rachel Maddow Show (after a story about the nation of Uruguay, which recently made it legal for gays to serve in the military).

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guest post by Burstein!

photo by Dave Bullock

What do you do if you have the world’s largest and highest-energy laser? Surprisingly, the lasses and lads at Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) chose not to hold a city ransom or even strap it to a friggin’ shark, but rather to create the first world’s first controlled thermonuclear reaction. That is to say that they are making the stuff of science fiction (or you could think of it as a very, very, very small star).

NIF’s 192 giant lasers, housed in a ten-story building the size of three football fields, will deliver at least 60 times more energy than any previous laser system. When all of its beams are fully operational, NIF will focus nearly two million joules of ultraviolet laser energy on a tiny target in the center of its target chamber – creating conditions similar to those that exist only in the cores of stars and giant planets and inside a nuclear weapon. The resulting fusion reaction will release many times more energy than the laser energy required to initiate the reaction.

photo by Dave Bullock

The laser itself is not scheduled to go online until 2010, but in the meantime our friend Dave Bullock was able to take a tour of the laser’s guts to shoot some stunning photos for Wired. Check it out an learn how to transform a cheap solid state laser into an Anti-Death Star!

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Science comedian Brian Malow gave a great talk about “A Tale of Two Elements: Hydrogen & Helium” at the recent Ignite SF during Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009.

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The name Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Texas at Austin makes me just think of the type of place that Dr. Manhattan would hang out. What is happening in this video of vibrating cornstarch solution is not that the Faraday waves retain or cause the holes. No, no! The really interesting thing is a phenomenon called “shear thickening.” I’ll let Wikipedia take over from here, with a little editing for clarity:

[Teh Awesome occurs] when closely packed particles [the cornstarch] are combined with enough liquid [good old water] to fill the gaps between them. At low velocities, the liquid acts as a lubricant, and the dilatant [cornstarch] flows easily. At higher velocities, the liquid is unable to fill the gaps created between particles [cornstarch], and friction greatly increases, causing an increase in viscosity.

Because viscosity increases, the cornstarch sticks together more. This means that it will not collapse and can resist the force of the water pushing in to collapse the hole. Neat!

Besides playing with corn starch, what else does Center for Nonlinear Dynamics do you ask?

Problems currently being examined include instabilities at fluid interfaces, dynamics of fluidized beds, spatial patterns and shock waves in granular flows, pattern formation in chemical reaction-diffusion systems, crack propagation in crystalline and amorphous materials, quantum chaos with ultra-cold atoms, nonlinear dynamics of bose condensates, general methods of laser cooling, viscoelasticity of actin networks, elastic properties of normal and pathological biological cells, and enhancement of neuronal growth.

Or, in layman terms, “Fucking Science, bitches!!“[PDF] Speaking of which, here is an remix of the above video that just makes everything seem so much more cool.

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University of Wisconsin School of Biomedical Engineering have developed a device that lets you tweet by the power of thought alone!!!. Putting aside the obvious jokes on “thinking before twittering” for the moment, this is exceptionally neat stuff.

The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. “The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually,” says Williams. “And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity.”

Practically speaking, technology like this is exceptionally useful for persons with locked-in syndrome or spinal cord injuries. Between this and the Nerve-tapping Neckband, I look forward to not talking to any of you again.

via Wired Science & New Scientist

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From Carlos Labs comes a fun little applet that gives you Godlike power to nuke anywhere on earth, like the Marina for example, and see the blast radius. You can choose from a 15kt “Little Boy” all the way up to a asteroid impact. Makes me want to grab my cowboy hat a ride into oblivion!

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photo by Dana Maltby

With CERN firing up the Large Hadron Collider in a few months, assuming all goes well in the repairs, you and I both know that Higgs Bosons are going to be popping up everywhere (and giving mass to all sorts of random crap).   It really could be a massive, no pun intended, pain in the neck – especially if you happen to eat one.

Thankfully, the folks over at The Morning News have provided us with “10 steps of concrete advice to consider” if and when you ingest the Higgs Boson.

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