Lungs

The manipulated image is a top-down view of human lungs with the cosmic clouds represented by the blanket over the person's body on the right and the CT table cushion on the left. Fung digitally removed the rest.

Via Physics Buzz.

Early history of the odometer

Until a couple weeks ago I had assumed that odometers were first developed in conjunction with the automobile.  Then I read about Tycho Brahe's odometer, and decided to research the topic a bit further.  The precursors to mechanical odometers were "bematists" [from the Greek word for a "single pace"] who counted their steps:

Bematists accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaign in Asia. Their measurements of the distances traveled by Alexander's army show a high degree of precision to the point that it had been suggested that they must have used an odometer, although there is no direct mentioning of such a device.

The earliest-recorded mechanical odometers were in Rome and China:

The odometer of Vitruvius was based on chariot wheels... For each revolution a pin on the axle engaged a 400 tooth cogwheel... This engaged another gear with holes along the circumference, where pebbles (calculus) were located, that were to drop one by one into a box. The distance travelled would thus be given simply by counting the number of pebbles...

Chinese texts of the 3rd century tell of the mechanical carriage's functions, and as one li is traversed, a mechanical-driven wooden figure strikes a drum, and when ten li is traversed, another wooden figure would strike a gong or a bell with its mechanical-operated arm...

The Sun Tzu Suan Ching (Master Sun's Mathematical Manual), dated from the 3rd century to 5th century, presented a mathematical problem for students involving the odometer. It involved a given distance between two cities, the small distance needed for one rotation of the carriage's wheel, and the posed question of how many rotations the wheels would have in all if the carriage was to travel between point A and B...

By the nineteenth century, precise odometers such as the one shown at left were being crafted by George Adams of Fleet Street, instrument maker for King George III.

I've not been able to find a link describing the form of odometers in the 16th century, when Brahe was reported to have one on his carriage.

RFID chips and "Electronic pickpocketing"

It was almost two years ago that I wrote a post linking to an Engadget article that showed how someone could remotely access drivers' licenses and passports that are embedded with RFID chips.  The featured video is at Engadget or here.

Embedded above is an even scarier video from a Memphis, Tennessee television channel, demonstrating how, with easily obtainable technology, someone can access credit card information in your wallet without touching you.

To know if your credit card is susceptible, look for the symbol at the left.

Addendum:  Some advice from Z. Constantine: "If you hold your RFID-enabled cards at an angle in bright light, you will be able to see a rectangular shape (approximately 3x6mm) opposite the signature line on the back: this is your RFID chip. Take a finishing nail and a hammer and put the nail through the chip. Done. Your card is still perfectly valid for transactions when swiped, but your RFID chip is disabled so the only swiping you need to worry about is the kind you're used to."

Retrieving radiosondes and rawinsondes

This morning I learned the proper name for a weather balloon:

Q: How are temperatures in the higher atmosphere measured?

A: Meteorologists monitor the atmosphere above the surface by using a radio-equipped meteorological instrument package - called radiosondes - carried aloft by a helium-filled weather balloon. The radiosondes measure vertical profiles of air temperature, relative humidity and pressure from the ground all the way up to about 19 miles. Temperature and relative humidity are measured electronically; a small aneroid barometer measures pressure.

Wind speed and direction can also be determined by tracking the position of the balloon. When winds are also measured, the observation is called a rawinsonde.

Even more interesting was a question I'd always wondered about:  How do meteorolosits get all that equipment back?

At low air pressures in the stratosphere, the balloon expands so much that it explodes and the radiosonde drifts back to the ground underneath a small parachute.

You learn something every day.

("Sonde" is French for "probe.")  Text from the Wisconsin State Journal.  Image credit NOAA.

Domesticating foxes - an epic Russian experiment

A very interesting article at Scientific American details a multi-year experiment conducted in Russia which gives insight into how early humans domesticated dogs:

Belyaev and other Soviet-era biologists looked around at domesticated dogs, a species they knew had descended from wolves, and were puzzled. They could not figure out what mechanism could account for the differences in anatomy, physiology, and behavior... Belyaev hypothesized that the anatomical and physiological changes seen in domesticated animals could have been the result of selection on the basis of behavioral traits. More specifically, he believed that tameness was the critical factor...

Starting at one month of age, and continuing every month throughout infancy, the foxes were tested for their reactions to an experimenter. The experimenter would attempt to pet and handle the fox while offering it food. In addition, the experimenters noted whether the foxes preferred to hang out with other foxes, or with humans.

Then, upon reaching sexual maturity (seven to eight months), they had their final test and assigned an overall tameness score. They rated each fox's tendency to approach an experimenter standing at the front of its home pen, as well as each fox's tendency to bite the experimenters when they tried to touch it. Only those foxes that were least fearful and least aggressive were chosen for breeding...

The result of this breeding program conducted over more than 40 generations of silver foxes was a group of friendly, domesticated foxes. These domesticated foxes, which were bred on the basis of a single selection criteria, displayed behavioral, physiological, and anatomical characteristics that were not found in the wild population, or were found in wild foxes but with much lower frequency...

The domesticated foxes were more eager to hang out with humans, whimpered to attract attention, and sniffed and licked their caretakers. They wagged their tails when they were happy or excited...

More than 50 years have passed since Belyaev began his silver fox breeding program, and research with these foxes continues to uncover the genetic changes that occur with consequences for physiology, anatomy, behavior, and cognition, as a result of the process of domestication, though on a smaller scale. In 1996, the breeding population contained 700 individuals, but by 1999, it was down to 100. Because of the realities of the Russian economy and the shortage of funding for science, in order to maintain the research, some foxes had to be sold for fur, and some are now being sold as pets...

And as a bonus, this interesting tidbit:

Darwin noted, in On the Origin of Species, that “not a single domestic animal can be named which has not, in some country, drooping ears.” Drooping ears is a feature that does not ever occur in the wild, except for in elephants...

Upright ears being presumably more suited for the hazardous life in the wild.  Many of the domesticated foxes developed drooping ears.

Via Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Sun halo

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day:

As water freezes in the upper atmosphere, small, flat, six-sided, ice crystals might be formed. As these crystals flutter to the ground, much time is spent with their faces flat, parallel to the ground. An observer may pass through the same plane as many of the falling ice crystals near sunrise or sunset. During this alignment, each crystal can act like a miniature lens, refracting sunlight into our view and creating phenomena like parhelia, the technical term for sundogs. The above image was taken last year in Stockholm, Sweden. Visible in the image center is the Sun, while two bright sundogs glow prominently from both the left and the right. Also visible is the bright 22 degree halo -- as well as the rarer and much fainter 46 degree halo -- also created by sunlight reflecting off of atmospheric ice crystals.

Approaching Lake Vostok

Ever since I learned the Russians were drilling into Lake Vostok, I've had a vague sense of unease that the procedure would be screwed up and the lake would be contaminated in the process.  I am now a little more reassured after reading an account cited at Wired about the precautions being taken:

Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit.

The lake, which lies four kilometres below the icy surface of Antarctica, is unique in that it's been completely isolated from the other 150 subglacial lakes on the continent for such a long time. It's also oligotropic, meaning that it's supersaturated with oxygen -- levels of the element are 50 times higher than those found in most typical freshwater lakes.

"Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.

The drill bit currently sits less than 100 metres above the lake. Once it reaches 20-30 metres, the mechanical drill bit will be replaced with a thermal lance that's equipped with a camera...

The conditions in Lake Vostok are very similar to the conditions on Europa and Enceladus, so could also strengthen the case for extraterrestrial life.

More at the link and at New Scientist.  I have a family member who studies extremophiles and will be most interested in the results of the probe, but personally I like this Reddit comment: "What's 14 million years of divergent evolution in a lightless, freezing, high oxygen environment going to look like? I don't know, but I kinda hope it eats people."

Image from the images page of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research's Subglacial Antarctic Lake Environments website (lots more information there).

"Heavenly Intrigue" - Did Kepler murder Brahe?

Relevant background information in this post last month.  As promised, here are my comments on the book.

The authors are unequivocal in their conclusion, which is presented in the preface: "...recent forensic analysis of remnants of [Brahe's] hair reveals that he was murdered, systematically poisoned.  And all the answers as to motive, means, and opportunity point directly to one suspect: Johannes Kepler." 

The book provides a detailed presentation of Brahe's life and work, and the relevant aspects of Kepler's.  I won't reiterate the evidence here, but I will instead insert a few of the "things I learned" from the book.

Since we accept a heliocentric solar system, it's sometimes hard to understand how pre-Copernican scholars could have been so accepting of a geocentric model, but this analogy from the book is quite informative in that regard:

"It's important to understand in all of this that, visually and mathematically speaking, there is no differnce between a moving earth revolving around a stationary sun and a moving sun revolving around a stationary earth... a demonstration is provided by those battery-powered models of the solar system sold at planetariums and most toy stores.  Pick it up by the sun and hold that stationary, and all the planets will revolve as they are supposed to.  But if you hold the mechanism up by the earth and hold that stationary, all the planets and now the sun, too will continue to revolve, in exactly the same relation to one another as before." (pp. 83-4)

This sentence startled me: 

"Apparently, Rudolf [Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II] had been peeking through his window as Brahe approached in his carriage, and -- fascinated as he was by all things mechanical -- was especially interested in an odometer he saw affixed by the wheel.  Brahe had it brought to him, and after examining it carefully, Rudolf said he would have one made by his artisans according to the same pattern." (p. 137)

Odometers in the 16th century??  Who knew?  Topic bookmarked for a future separate post.  Here's more about Rudolf:

"More a collector than a connoisseur, with tastes that were less eclectic than simply promiscuous, Rudolf sent his agents across Europe to purchase items that might excite his fancy.  Some brought back Durers and Breugels, while others transported back objects by the thousands whose major organizing theme seems to have been their oddity.  All were placed in his famous Kunstkammer - the private rooms in which he would increasingly shut himself off - which contained what was perhaps the largest private collection up until that time.

There, housed in myriad cabinets and displayed along tabletopes, lay thousands of disparate artifacts: beautiful porcelain cameos along with the shells of tortoises, crabs, and other sea creatures; the horn of a unicorn (which probably came from a narwhal) and rhinoceros horns mounted in gold; priceless gems; drawersful of gold, silver, and copper antique medals; as well as the dagger with which Caesar's wife was said to have been murdered and a knife swallowed by a Prague peasant.  Mechanical objects were a special fascination: among the many clocks, globes, and astrolabes, records mention a mechanical peacock that walked, turned around, and fanned its featuers and a windup spider that could scurry across a table..." (p. 143)

There is a painting of Rudolf and a diagram of his family tree in the post below this one. 

Chapter 15 of the book is particularly good in explaining the strained relations between the two scientists and the consequent motivation for murder.  Chapter 22 details the use of mercury as a medication and the formulations of it that the (al)chemists of the time created, which were of quite varying potency and toxicity.  In explaining why Brahe's acute renal failure was probably not due to a bladder stone, the authors point to the absence of any attempts at catheterization, which would have been attempted had anuria been accompanied by a distended bladder:

Jessenius, one of the leading medical authorities of his time, wrote in some detail about urinary problems and their cures.  He clearly had considerable experience in the area and recommended in one of his numerous publications "the small tubes, conceived by Venetian wound doctors, which are made of horn and made flexible by soaking them in warm water," rather than the "slim wax light used by Fabricius Aquapente (which he warms up and then inserts  coated with almond oil)," as the latter were "not strong enough to overcome the resistance of the bladder opening or a bladder stone." (p. 213)

A surprising sophistication in knowledge of urinary catheters - before the invention of plastic or the discovery of rubber.  Since Brahe had access not only to physicians but to the physicians of the royal family, the fact that catheterization was not considered is prima facie evidence that the physicians attending him considered the acute renal failure to be nonobstructive in nature (or at least above the bladder).  That, along with the mercury in the forensic analysis of his hair, constitutes the principal evidence of murder by poisoning.

Genetic map of the Habsburg Jaw

The jaw, as seen in Rudolph II -

And the genetic map of the trait -

Interesting how it becomes more common as the generations continue to inbreed.  More details in this prior post.

Painting: Joseph Heintz the Elder: Emperor Rudolf II, c. 1592 © Kunsthistorisches Museum /Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.

Myoglobin

"This plasticine model, made by Sir John Kendrew, was the first ever model to be made of a protein molecule. Myoglobin is a protein containing iron that carries and stores oxygen in muscle cells. In 1957 John Kendrew (1917-1977) and Max Perutz (1914-2002) were able to produce a model of its 3-dimensional structure, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1962."

Found at Science Museum, via A London Salamagundi.

The frequency of heavy snowfall

The annual average number of snowstorms with a 6 inch (15.2 cm) or greater accumulation, from the years 1901 - 2001. A value of 0.1 means an average of one 6+ inch snowstorm every ten years. Image credit: Changnon, S.A., D. Changnon, and T.R. Karl, 2006, Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States, J. Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 45, 8, pp. 1141-1155, DOI: 10.1175/JAM2395.1.

It's interesting to see how many of the big snowfalls are mediated by lake effect and of course by altitude.

Via Wunderblog and Paul Douglas On Weather.

Aristotle's classical four elements

Via Palahniuk & Chocolate.

"Don't ever tell me I'm wrong..."

Via Reddit.

Iapetus, a fascinating moon of Saturn - updated

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is returning awesome photos of Saturn, its rings, and its moons, many of them assembled at Boston.com's Big Picture.

I was especially interested to see a closeup of Iapetus, the eighth moon, which has a circumferential ridge around its equator. The top photo is from NASA in 2007. The photo below that comes from what I'm sure everyone would consider a "wacko" website that suggests that Iapetus is an artificial (i.e. manufactured) moon. Certainly the comparison with a Deathstar is striking.

Whether or not the Iapetus stuff interests you, the rest of the photos from Cassini are truly impressive.

Update: When I originally posted this is May of 2009, that equatorial ridge around Iapetus was unexplained.  A new hypothesis suggests that this ridge comes not from deformational stresses within the moon, as previously postulated, but rather that it is the remnant of a collapsed ring of debris:

...we propose intact capture or accretion from a debris disk of a "sub-satellite" (possibly more than one) around Iapetus... Such a sub-satellite would be tidally drawn towards Iapetus, once Iapetus is sufficiently despun by tidal interaction with Saturn... Once deep inside the Roche limit, tides would then tear the sub-satellite apart. The resulting debris would collisionally evolve to the equatorial plane, dissipating orbital energy and ultimately raining down on the equator (deorbiting) at subsonic speeds... Assuming the density of ice and a high porosity, rubble-pile structure, all the mass in the ridge can be supplied by a sub-satellite ~100 km in radius, a size relative to Iapetus far smaller than the relative sizes of the Moon to the Earth or Charon to Pluto...

That's from the abstract at the American Geophysical Union meeting.  A BBC summary is here.

Rusticles

That's what those things on the Titanic's bow are called.  Discovery News reports that the ship is being "eaten by bacteria."

Working at a depth of over two miles, a never-before-seen bacterial species is devouring the hull of the so-called "unsinkable ship...".

Named Halomonas titanicae, the bacterium was isolated from samples of so-called rusticles present on the wreck. These dark orange structures look like icicles but are made up of rust.

More at the link. Photo via Atlantic Online.

Geminid meteor shower coming

The Geminid meteor shower, which peaks this year on Dec. 13th and 14th, is the most intense meteor shower of the year. It lasts for days, is rich in fireballs, and can be seen from almost any point on Earth...

This month Earth will pass through the Geminid debris stream, producing as many as 120 meteors per hour over dark-sky sites. The best time to look is probably between local midnight [Dec 13th] and sunrise on Tuesday, Dec. 14th, when the Moon is low and the constellation Gemini is high overhead, spitting bright Geminids across a sparkling starry sky.

For best viewing, seek a location with minimal light pollution. Based on satellite imagery, an excellent place would be North Korea:

Photo via A London Salamagundi.

New life form discovered... and questioned

There's been much speculation about today's news release by NASA.  Gizmodo has an early report that a new form of life has been found, and that it was discovered on Earth:

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic...

We knew that there were bacteria that processed arsenic, but this bacteria—discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California—is actually made of arsenic. The phosphorus is absent from its DNA. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth...

That was December 2.

Update Dec 10:  Since the publication of the study of the arsenic-based organism, a flurry of objections have been raised in the scientific community, several of them summarized in a column at Slate:

None of the scientists I spoke to ruled out the possibility that such weird bacteria might exist. Indeed, some of them were co-authors of a 2007 report for the National Academies of Sciences on alien life that called for research into, among other things, arsenic-based biology. But almost to a person, they felt that the NASA team had failed to take some basic precautions to avoid misleading results...

Some scientists are left wondering why NASA made such a big deal over a paper with so many flaws. "I suspect that NASA may be so desperate for a positive story that they didn't look for any serious advice from DNA or even microbiology people," says John Roth of UC-Davis.

More at the link for those interested.

Update Dec 11:  Just found this column at The Guardian, with links to multiple sources of discussion of this topic.

World population demographics

A brief, but very informative video from The Economist explaining why the world's population is approaching an asymptote at the top of its curve, and why total population may level off (at nine billion!!).  "It will be a more crowded, but a more stable, world."

A followup on the death and exhumation of Tycho Brahe

It was almost a year ago that I wrote a post entitled "Was Tycho Brahe murdered?  Many people have doubted that uremia secondary to urinary retention could have killed him, and have speculated that he was poisoned with mercury.

The following week, in More thoughts re Tycho Brahe and ... Hamlet, I reviewed the connection between the Danish astronomer and the famous (fictional) Danish prince, with a comment that Tycho's supernova of 1572 melds nicely with the theory that Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the real author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.

In February of this year, the Copenhagen Post noted that Tycho Brahe was to be exhumed for a forensic study.

A group of Danish and Czech experts will therefore soon be able to carry out detailed analyses of the astronomer’s bone, hair and clothing remains to find the answer to a centuries-old mystery as to whether he was murdered.

The leader of the Danish research team comes from the  University of Aarhus’ wonderfully-named Department of Medieval and Renaissance Archaeology (!).

In May the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark  and the Prague Post announced that the exhumation would be conducted in November.  This month the preliminary results of the exhumation were made public.

It's a bit complicated.  From the Prague Post last week:

"We expected we would find the remains of Tycho Brahe and his wife in the grave. But after we opened it, we found remains of several other persons as well, which meant the team's archeologists had to keep working until last night to find out more about the identity of those bodies," said Petr Velemínský, head of the National Museum's anthropological depository. "We found remains of eight other individuals, five of whom were children, and that was certainly a surprise."

Conspiracy theorists claim a jealous Kepler poisoned Brahe before buying the astronomer's research from his unsuspecting widow and using it for his own ends. The story goes that Kepler used mercury to kill his former collaborator, but more skeptical voices say the tale is unlikely, calling the traces of mercury previously found in Brahe's corpse during an earlier exhumation a sign of nothing more than his penchant for alchemy, a common hobby of scientists at the time who sought to convert various elements into gold.

"When we examine the hair samples in Sweden and in Prague, and we have about 8 centimeters of his beard, we will be able to find information on what substances he administered in the last three months of his life," Vellev said. "And the bone samples will give us even further-reaching information on the last 15 years of his life."

These excerpts from the New York Times:

Brahe, who sported a distinctive gold and silver prosthetic nose — having lost the bridge of his real nose in a duel — was long thought to have died after his bladder burst. Legend has it that 11 days before his death he attended the banquet of a nobleman and was too polite to leave the table to go to the toilet.

Medical experts have exploded this theory, noting that bladder ruptures are highly unusual and that Brahe probably died from kidney failure. But even today, when Czechs excuse themselves from the table to go to the bathroom, they have been known to say, “Pardon me, I don’t want to end up like Tycho Brahe.”

Others contend that Brahe was killed by his cousin Eric Brahe on the orders of the Danish king, Christian IV, enraged over rumors that Brahe, a father of eight, was having an affair with the king’s mother. The cousin supposedly slipped some mercury into Brahe’s glass, causing him to die in delirious pain...

Legend has it that, at age 20, he damaged his nose in a duel with a fellow member of the Danish gentry, Manderup Parsbjerg, not over a woman, but over some fine point of mathematics...

A second NYT article focuses more on the Kepler-Tycho connection, with a reference to a scholarly book on the subject:

Those findings inspired “Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History’s Greatest Scientific Discoveries,” a 2004 book by a pair of married journalists, Joshua Gilder and Anne-Lee Gilder. They argue that the evidence from the hairs [from a previous, incomplete exhumation and autopsy] points to two incidents of mercury poisoning, one at the time of the banquet and the other just before death, and that Kepler is the prime suspect because he had the means, the motive and the opportunity...

A devoutly religious scholar may not sound like a good candidate for murderer, but the Gilders argue that Kepler was an unhappy, temperamental zealot. In an astrological self-analysis, he described his “eagerness for trickery” and his plots against his “enemies,” and said he was under the influence of Mars's “rage-provoking force.”

Kepler resented Tycho’s higher status and, above all, his refusal to allow access to the full log of observations, including the records of Mars’s movements that Kepler considered essential to demonstrate the validity of his own model of the universe. Kepler tried several schemes to see Tycho’s data — to sneakily “wrest his riches away,” as Kepler put it — but Tycho resisted and forced Kepler to keep working on calculations aimed at supporting the Tychonic cosmology...

The results of the forensic studies will not be available until later this year.  In the meantime, I've requested the Heavenly Intrigue book from our library.  Stay tuned.

Photo by Jacob Christensen Ravn/Aarhus University, via European Pressphoto Agency

Temperatures below absolute zero

Absolute zero sounds like an unbreachable limit beyond which it is impossible to explore. In fact there is a weird realm of negative temperatures that not only exists in theory, but has also proved accessible in practice. An improved way of getting there, outlined last week, could reveal new states of matter...

Creating negative-temperature systems to see what other "bizarro world" properties they might have is tricky. It is certainly not done by cooling an object down to absolute zero. It is, however, possible to leap straight from positive to negative absolute temperatures.

There's more at New Scientist, but I don't understand any of it, so you'll need to explore it on your own.