Category Archives: Uncategorized

More Green in Greenland?

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Okay, I have to admit: a) I’m squeezing by with a mere five minutes to spare in the day, and I feel a need to post to maintain something near an “everyday” quota and b) it’s another global warming thing, but in fact, I think this is pretty interesting.

People have been observing Greenland’s ice layer for some time, and measurements suggest that it’s receding. The interesting thing about the image above (aside from the fact that it inverts the normal bluer-equals-cooler depiction) is that it conforms with predictions about the growth (inland) and decline (coastal) of Greenland’s ice sheets. And—you guessed it—it’s consistent with global warming.

There’s a tricky borderline between data and computational results, but the image above displays the intersection between the two.

Better Living through Chemistry

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Doctors attending the American College of Emergency Physicians recently announced a problem with a certain household cleaner: it looks good enough to drink. David A. Masneri, who conducted the study in question, commented, “When looking at a bottle of Fabuloso—especially the yellow Limon, green Fresco Aman, and blue Ocean Fresh varieties—anyone will easily see a resemblance to certain popular beverages.” According to the Texas Poison Center, 104 people ingested Fabuloso during the first four months of 2006; more 60% were under the age of six.

I’d describe my initial reaction as rather intrigued (which perhaps sounds a little callous, but there you have it). The idea that people respond to specific visual cues fits very well into my ideas about how we process imagery and how well-developed our sense of “visual language” really is. Basically, the shape and color of the above bottle says, “Drink me!” Even to the under-six crowd! That’s really kind of astonishing. (Similarly, my idea about how many science visualizatons fail to communicate their ideas well is that they often fail to remove the scientific vernacular embedded in imagery used to communicate between peers. Again, I have a PowerPoint online that describes my ideas about visualization (but you need to read the comments on each slide, or else you’re just looking at a bunch of pretty pictures).

Of course, then the really scary aspect of this sunk in… We humans are conditioning ourselves to drink brightly- and artificially-colored liquids! After generations growing up on Gatorade and Pepsi Blue, we don’t even hesitate to put this stuff up to our lips. I’m glad I stick to healthier natural beverages—beer, for example.

Hubble Déjà Vu

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When in doubt, look for a Hubble image! I’ve been trying to post once a day, but that means I have to find an image of interest each and every single day, and well, sometimes it’s simplest to fall back on what I know best. And that means astronomy. And that means Hubble.

What’s a little odd about the above picture is that I know I’ve seen something similar from Hubble before (even though the new images come from the Advanced Camera for Surveys, I know, I know). But much in the same way that the last time I mentioned the Hubble it was reproducing images that had been released back in April, there’s just a sense of déjà vu going on here.

Anyway, the up shot is that better resolution reveals useful data about star clusters in the super crazy high-resolution images. Which is important to understand what happens when two galaxies collide—namely, scads of stars are born.

ShakeMap!

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How can one resist clicking on something called a “ShakeMap”? The lovely, simple image above showed up on a quick search of United States Geological Survey (USGS) information about the recent earthquake in Hawai’i. I’m left curious about the little circles and triangles that dot the map—presumably they represent measurements of some sort, but I can find nothing to corroborate that hypothesis. Like any good netizen, I read the figure’s accompanying text, and although it told me quite a bit about the purpose of a “ShakeMap,” it didn’t reveal the purpose of the tiny icons. Furthermore, they seem to have shifted from when I looked at the map earlier in the day. Fascinating but opaque.

It’s also interesting to compare the “decorated” version with the “bare” version offered up on the site. The former includes a graphical scale in kilometers (nice enough) while the latter features latitude and longitude markings along the edges. A puzzlingly minute difference. But I find it heartening that both include some sense of scale! Seems like geologists are well ahead of planetary scientists on this count.

How Do You Like Them Apples?

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After reading an Associated press story about genetically-modified rice making its way into our food supply, I idly started wondering how to illustrate the underlying concepts of genetic engineering… So I googled “Bayer CropScience AG,” the German company that managed to introduce an experimental strain of pesticide-resistant rice into the ecosystem, in search of some images that might help me understand their processes (if not their irresponsibility).

I found the above image on a webpage for the Hungarian branch of the company. I can’t understand any of the accompanying text (and Babelfish doesn’t translate Hungarian), but the word-free image tells a fairly comprehensible story: we seem to have a moth with a larval stage that does a bit of damage to the apple’s edibility, that much is clear. Plus, the illustrations have a quality that never fails to charm me, even when I’m witnessing crop damage.

That said, the image suffers from a few, um, narrative issues, shall we say? Basically, if it weren’t for the (barely evident) numbering, it would be impossible to follow the chain of events depicted. The arrows help, but the sequence zig-zags across the picture like Johnny Appleseed drunk on hard cider. It seems that a primary motivation was to create an aesthetic balance between the cut-away apple interior on the left and the obviously damaged exterior view on the right—symmetry also echoed in the matching bark samples at the bottom, the trio of eggs near the top, and the moth presiding over everything. Aesthetically pleasing, but at what cost in terms of clarity?

Speaking of modern farming and apples, how long till we see the end of the apple monoculture as we know it, what with our increasing dependence on pesticides? With any luck, that won’t shift to a dependence on genetic modification&hellp; Perhaps we can rely on genetic diversity instead? (Check out Michael Pollan’s brilliant Botany of Desire if you get a chance.)

Chemistry’s Last Judgment

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The brilliant blues in Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment, which covers the western wall of the Sistine Chapel, come from ultramarine. The once rare and precious pigment has appeared on Western canvases since the 13th Century. The name comes from the Italian for “beyond the seas,” and the pigment itself is derived from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli. And as it turns out, ultramarine fades over time.

A new collaborative study among the NYU Chemistry Department, the Pratt Institute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has established the chemical mechanism for the pigment’s slow change in color. Using nuclear magnetic resonance, the researchers found that ultramarine’s blueness comes from sulfur atoms trapped inside a lattice of aluminum and silicon; when the sulfur siggles free, ultramarine loses its blue. Armed with this knowledge, conservationists can now begin to develop means for preserving works.

On the visualziation side of things, I have to admit that I’d like to see a cartoon or rendering that shows the aluminum-silicon structure and how the sulfur atoms fit in. But if I have to settle for Michaelangelo (an image similar to the above appeared with the NYU press release), so be it.

In case this all sounds intriguing… Victoria Finlay’s brilliant book, Color: A Natural History of the Palette, has a chapter about blue that includes many intriguing details. The story of pigments used in art—and how those pigments and other chemicals interact and change over time—contains many fascinating twists and turns. Also, a couple of years ago, the American Folk Art Museum ran an exhibit about “blue” that examined some of the science behind pigmentation; I seem to recaall a catalog, but I can’t find any evidence for one.

Before There Were Sponges

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I lifted the above image from an article in today’s issue of Science, which you probably can’t read unless you’re logged in from a subscribing institution. That’s okay: take a look at the Reuters article instead, although it doesn’t have any accompanying pictures.

Which is too bad, because however abstract, I think the above image (depicting results of x-ray tomography on the specimen) communicates its ideas fairly clearly.

The caption in the Science article reads as follows… “Aberrant embryos. (A) Reflected-light photomicrograph of a 3-cell embryo (specimen DOU-25). (B) Exterior isosurface model. (C) Volume rendered and extracted cell models, with the left cell rendered transparent to show the only subcellular structure (shaded green) in this embryo.” Admittedly, you might want to rewrite that before putting it in a press release: “(A) Here’s a photo. (B) We can reconstruct what’s inside. (C) We can even figure out its constituent parts—going so far as to see inside the fossilized cells to see their interior structure.” Something like that.

Of further interest is a punchline that appears in the scientific publication but not in the popular re-interpretation. The very last sentence reads, “the combined observations suggest that the Doushantuo embryos are probably stem-group metazoans.” Which, translated from biologiese, means that these cells are precursors to metazoans—i.e., further down the trunk of the family tree that led to us. Such humble beginnings…

Little Day-Glo Orange Spot

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The above Hubble image, released back in April, is in the news again because the origin of the so-called “Little Red Spot” seems to be “the only survivor among three white-colored storms that merged together” in the last decade, resulting in a ruddy storm with wind speeds that rival its Great Red Sibling.

But I find this image slightly disturbing. The almost radioactive, day-glo red of the two spots (and excessive blue of the normally white bands) deserves greater attention than it receives in the picture’s caption. All we learn is that “two filters are shown in red/orange (F892N, near-IR strong methane band) and blue/cyan (F502N continuum/cyan light),” which I find less than satisfying. Is that “red/orange” and “blue/cyan” on top of a “true-color” image? I take it to be the case, but the verbiage leaves me guessing. (Certainly when you compare the above to another Hubble image of the same part of Jupiter, taken around the same time, the colors are quite different.)

This is a good place to spend a little time, in my opinion, explaining a bit of process. Mention something about “particular wavelengths of light” or “enhanced color” or something. Make it clear that we’re not seeing Jupiter as it would appear were one to put one’s eye up to Hubble’s eyepiece.

(Um, just in case… That last line was a joke. Hubble has no eyepiece. It’s in space. For more info on how Hubble images are made, please read the lovely “Behind the Pictures” page at the Hubble website.)

Bird Bucks Trend

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More critters today, albeit slightly larger than yesterday…

A Reuters story today tells the story of the Yariguies Brush-Finch, newly determined to be a new species residing “ in a Colombian cloud forest accessible only by helicopter.” The results were reported in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club.

Interestingly, the above photo seems to be the only one readily available, courtesy of The National Ledger. In the Yahoo version of this story, the same image appears, albeit blown up and blobby. It’s the only image that crops up when one googles “Yariguies Brush-Finch” at the moment.

Now, this is all well and good, but for context, allow me to present the (complete) table of contents from the latest Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club:

  • “Recent Avian Extinctions”
  • “New Zealand’s extinct giant eagle”
  • “Going or gone: defining ‘Possibly Extinct’ species to give a truer picture of recent extinctions”
  • “The rise and fall of wildfowl of the western Indian Ocean and Australasia”
  • “Recent avian extinctions on Réunion (Mascarene Islands) from paleontological and historical sources”
  • “Unpublished drawings of the Dodo Raphus cucullatus and notes on Dodo skin relics”
  • “How confident are we that a species is extinct? Quantitative inference of extinction from biological records”

    Seems like we’re missing part of the story here—i.e., discovering a new species bucks a bit of a trend in the biz. Didn’t this merit a line in the story? I can imagine one of the scientists saying, “In an era when we mostly report on the extinction of species, it gladdens one’s heart to discover a hitherto unknown species before it, too, goes the way of the dodo.” Soon photos (perhaps only low-quality versions from the web) are all we have left of such creatures.

    Hmmm. I think my inner eco-freak is showing.

    • Photocopier Art

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    An article in today’s Science Times (n.b. that you’ll have to pay to see it if you look after 17 October) describes Thomas Eisner’s use of a color photocopier to create compositions based in his admiration of natural forms.

    The image above appears in conjunction with the Science Times piece, even though it dates to an era before Eisner began using the photocopier as a means of expression. Instead, it represents an innovation in preserving specimens and then using a scanning electron microscope to create aesthetically interesting and highly informative images of the microscopic world. Eisner published an entire book’s worth of similar images (albeit mostly in color), although in fact he’s known in scientific circles for his seminal work in chemical ecology.

    Physically disabled by the onset of Parkinson’s disease, Eisner has started using photocopiers for artistic expression, now interpreting the natural world in a more subjective way. He claims that a color copier “can serve for the inventive generation of imagery, for composition of novel pictorial arrangements, and in that capacity find use in the expression of fantasy.”

    Eisner’s statements speak to the deeply aesthetic motivation that underlies many scientists’ work. The orientation toward imagery occurs particularly in astronomy and biology, it seems, but the underlying intellectual aesthetic pervades most disciplines. (Cf. the new collection of Carl Sagan’s “Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology” to be released next month.