BioVisions at Harvard University
it may be hard to believe, but lots of a cell’s internal processes are already traceable at the molecular level. sometimes it’s really just single molecule strands interacting with another, making a huge difference...
check out this very cool interactive animation from utah.edu: molecular effects of drugs
thanks to günther for the link!
apparently it’s old news, but someone recently told me about the "experiment" of lighting a candle aboard the ISS.
my first thought was: "where does the flame point?"
here on earth, flames have the shape of a teardrop. that’s because hot air is lighter (or less dense) and ascends, bringing more oxygen to the point of combustion.
take away the factor of gravity (for example, on a spacecraft) and there’s no "up" or "down". buoyant convection can’t happen, and diffusion is the only way for oxygen to get to the flame, which results in a blue, hemispherical flame.
i suppose by now, just about everybody has heard that pluto no longer has the status of a planet.
most reactions i found on the net were pretty disappointed ones.
and i can’t really see why: pluto’s orbit around the sun is nothing like the "real" planets’ - it’s tilted and elliptic. apart from that, its own moon (charon) is so big that many scientists consider the pair a double planet, and there are several other bodies in space that are far bigger than pluto!
in highschool, i was really annoyed that we also had to learn the "historic direction" of electric current (the positive charge flowing towards the negative pole).
it was wrong - maybe because it was just what somebody imagined it would be - and imho it doesn’t do any good to modern physics (or does it?). so why do they still teach that at schools?
as for pluto, i’m glad the "historic" criteria didn’t make it.
and regarding the mnemonic that can’t be used anymore, ze frank has found an alternative you should consider (though it’s not very kid friendly):
what kind of an argument is that in the first place?
we can’t change definitions, because we’d have to find a new mnemonic?
a scientific committee of more than 400 astronomers has agreed on new definitions for the term planet - and pluto keeps orbiting the sun anyways. why bother?
on a funny side note, a disney spokesman told reuters that "pluto is taking this news in stride, and we have no reason to believe he might bite an astronomer."
a few days late, i found out that last weekend was the great perseid meteor shower (german link) weekend.
what’s funny about the image that’s provided under this link (similar to this one), is that there are acuatlly only two meteors visible* - everything else is just the apparent "rotation of the stars" (due to the rotation of the earth).
to make it seem more spectacular, they just don’t answer questions that most people wouldn’t ask...
* there’s one meteor in the photo that i link to
this tuesday, i got a chance to peek at what some of innsbruck’s chemists are doing:
right now, there’s an ongoing experiment based on the miller-urey-experiment [wikipedia: de, en] at the university of innsbruck.
stanley miller and harold clayton urey proved in 1953(!), that aminoacids (the base of all life-forms that we know of) could develop naturally under early atmosphere conditions of the earth.
this process is called "chemical evolution".
nowadays, the composition of the early earth’s atmosphere is believed to be different than what miller and urey assumed, but the outcome is similar: organic molecules can (and will) form naturally, using very basic molecules (mainly water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen) and energy in the form of lightning.
here in innsbruck, scientists made a small modification to this setup: clay minerals (silicates) were added, because they have proven to influence the chemical evolution (and they were there, a few billion years ago).
after one month, they’re going to analyze what looks like green goo, and see what molecules are formed in this different setup...
when data about the atmosphere of titan was collected in january 2005, they also tried a similar experiment for titan conditions (different atmosphere, temperatures below freezing, ...), to see if life (in very simple forms) could have evolved there.
after all, it’s still unknown where all the methane comes from and why it’s still there.
from what we know now, it IS possible.
after contemplating for a long time, anton and i decided to go see what it’s all about.
last saturday, several of innsbruck’s universities and scientific centers put on a collective open day night, called lange nacht der forschung.
while the whole event was clearly targeted at laypersons, i still thought it was nice. two shuttle bus routes through innsbruck were frequented every 15 minutes or so, there was free food & drinks near many stations, and the presentations were quite interesting (although we already knew much of what was said there).
i especially liked the topic of nano technology, with interesting showcase items like ferrofluids (wikipedia: [de], [en]).
we could also take a glance at a quantum computer, watch some 3D-visualizations (using polarizing glasses and all that) in an astronomy presentation, and had our fun with a thermographic camera.
unfortunately, there was not enough time to attend the guided tour through a production facility for hearing-aid implants.
