Great satirical article in the Onion (which I love). A quote:
Frustrated by continued demands from viewers for more awesome and extreme programming, Science Channel president Clark Bunting told reporters Tuesday that his cable network was "completely incapable" of watering down science any further than it already had.
Read it here.
TV, like public education, consistently caters to the lowest common denominator. Even worse, many of the science and nature channels now air shows about bigfoot, UFOs, Mayan "prophesies", ghost hunting, etc.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Picture of the Week - Brachipods underfoot
This is a picture of my foot standing on a local outcrop.
The outcrop is located on the north side of Route 209/199 in Kingston just west of the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge across the Hudson. There are four limestone formations present at this location - the Manlius, Coeymans, Kalkberg, and New Scotland Formations. These fossils are in the New Scotland limestone (named after a town near Albany where this limestone was first studied).
The New Scotland limestone formed from shallow seafloor sediments deposited during the Early Devonian Period of geologic time some 400 million years ago. Fossils of over 300 marine invertebrates have been recovered from this rock unit. I'm standing on an ancient seafloor (now tilted about 30 degrees from horizontal).
If you looked at this rock bed close up, you would see that it's composed almost entirely of shell fossils. These animals belong to a group called brachiopods. They may superficially look like modern bivalves (clams, oysters, mussels, etc) but belong to an entirely different phyla - kingdom animalia, phylum brachiopoda for these fossils vs. kingdom animalia, phylum mollusca for the modern bivalves we're all famiar with from the seashoor or our dinner plates. Brachiopods are still around, but relatively rare. Back during the Devonian Period, however, they were incredibly abundant and diverse.
It's easy to transport yourself back to the Devonian Period in your imagination. Floating in a shallow sea miles from land (called the Helderberg Sea by modern geologists). On the sunlit seafloor, garden of brachipods floated in the currents attached to the seafloor with a fleshy stalk. Shells agape, the filter fed from the plankton-rich waters. Echinoderms and snails slithered through the sediments while trilobites swam above them. The seas were warm and subtropical as New York was about 30 degrees south of the equator at the time. Strange looking fish swam in these seas. In some areas on Earth, life had started coming out onto land - primitive plants and insects with the earliest amphibians soon to evolve.
That's the neat thing about being a geologist. For most people, it's just a gray rock on the side of the road that thousands of people drive by each day without giving it a second thought. When geologists crawl around on that rock, however, we can read a story there and transport ourselves back in time.
The outcrop is located on the north side of Route 209/199 in Kingston just west of the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge across the Hudson. There are four limestone formations present at this location - the Manlius, Coeymans, Kalkberg, and New Scotland Formations. These fossils are in the New Scotland limestone (named after a town near Albany where this limestone was first studied).
The New Scotland limestone formed from shallow seafloor sediments deposited during the Early Devonian Period of geologic time some 400 million years ago. Fossils of over 300 marine invertebrates have been recovered from this rock unit. I'm standing on an ancient seafloor (now tilted about 30 degrees from horizontal).
If you looked at this rock bed close up, you would see that it's composed almost entirely of shell fossils. These animals belong to a group called brachiopods. They may superficially look like modern bivalves (clams, oysters, mussels, etc) but belong to an entirely different phyla - kingdom animalia, phylum brachiopoda for these fossils vs. kingdom animalia, phylum mollusca for the modern bivalves we're all famiar with from the seashoor or our dinner plates. Brachiopods are still around, but relatively rare. Back during the Devonian Period, however, they were incredibly abundant and diverse.
It's easy to transport yourself back to the Devonian Period in your imagination. Floating in a shallow sea miles from land (called the Helderberg Sea by modern geologists). On the sunlit seafloor, garden of brachipods floated in the currents attached to the seafloor with a fleshy stalk. Shells agape, the filter fed from the plankton-rich waters. Echinoderms and snails slithered through the sediments while trilobites swam above them. The seas were warm and subtropical as New York was about 30 degrees south of the equator at the time. Strange looking fish swam in these seas. In some areas on Earth, life had started coming out onto land - primitive plants and insects with the earliest amphibians soon to evolve.
That's the neat thing about being a geologist. For most people, it's just a gray rock on the side of the road that thousands of people drive by each day without giving it a second thought. When geologists crawl around on that rock, however, we can read a story there and transport ourselves back in time.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Satellite Spotting
Friday night, my whole family went out onto the back deck to watch the incredibly bright International Space Station (ISS) zip overhead passing close to the 1st quarter moon (to be honest, my kids were complaining because we ripped them away from a Nintendo DS game, but too bad, my wife and I enjoyed watching it).
It's easy to get satellite flyover predictions if you know where to look. I use a website called Heaven's Above.
On the web site, you have to choose your location (the default is 0 latitude, 0 longitude - a location off the west coast of Africa). You don't need to know your latitude or longitude, however. Let's suppose you live in Stone Ridge, Ulster County, NY. Under Configuration, click Select from database and you'll get a list of countries. Select United States and then it asks you to enter your town name. Enter Stone Ridge (do not enter the state). The database will return a list of three Stone Ridges, two in New York and one in Tennessee. Choose the one in Ulster County, NY (latitude 41.853, longitude -74.139 which translates to roughly 42 N, 074 W).
When you select your location, you go back to the main Heaven's Above website with data custom tailored for your backyard. Let's see when the ISS will be passing over. Under Satellites, click the 10 day prediction for the ISS. Here's what I received for Stone Ridge, NY on January 24, 2010.
Sometimes you'll get a long list, sometimes a short one (like this), and sometimes nothing. It all has to do with the orbital characteristics of the ISS. I'll explain why this is so in a bit. First note the header material at top. One important piece of information is tht the times are all local time (Eastern Standard Time - EST) which makes things easy. Note that today, January 24, the ISS will be visible starting at 5:08 (17:08:22 is 17 hours, 8 minutes, 22 seconds where 17 hours is 5 pm in 24-hour format). The maximum altitude of the ISS will be at 5:11 pm, and it will disappear at 5:14 pm. So the flyby will last about 6 minutes total.
Alt and Az refer to where the ISS will be at those various times. Alt is altitude above the horizon where the horizon is 0 degrees and the zenith (the point directly over your head) is 90 degrees. So, at its maximum altitude, the ISS will be 80 degrees up which is nice and high overhead. Azimuth is simply the compass direction. The ISS will initially appear in the west-northwest (WNW) and disappear in the southeast (SE). So you do need to know some basic directions in your backyard to know where to look (this time of year, the sun sets in the southwest).
Also, note the Mag. column which reads -3.2 for today. That's magnitude which refers to how bright astronomical objects appear in the sky. The system dates back to the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus and the lower the number, the brighter the object. Magnitude 6 is for barely visible stars (it's about the limit of naked-eye seeing), the north star is 2 (kind of average), Vega is 0, and Sirius, the brightest star we can see, is around -1.5 (negative magnitudes are brighter than positive ones). Venus can reach magnitude -4.4 and the full Moon is around -12.7. So, when the ISS is -3.2, it means it's brighter than the brightest star (Sirius) but not quite as bright as Venus at its closest - that's pretty bright!
Another neat thing about this ISS prediction is that if you click on the date, which is a link, you get a star chart with the ISS path on it (note how it passes close to the Moon again).
If your familiar with some of the constellations, this can help you spot the ISS as it moves overhead. Try it sometime, it's a fun thing to get the prediction, go outside, and then actually spot the ISS (there's people up there in that tin can!). The Heaven's Above website also gives other satellite predictions so even if the ISS isn't visible there is always something you can look for (although they won't be as bright). It's neat to see a satellite and tell people that it's SeaSat 1, an ocean observation satellite launched back in 1978.
So why can we see satellites? They don't have lights on them like planes do but instead they are orbiting so high up that for an hour or so after the sun sets and an hour or so before it rises in the morning, the satellite is up in bright daylight while we're in darkness on the ground. Light reflects off the metallic surfaces of the satellite making it visible to us. The ISS orbits the Earth every 90 minutes or so but we can only see it when it passes overhead during those windows of time. If it's overhead in the middle of the night, we simply won't see it because it's in darkness too.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Seahorses
Just read an interesting book about seahorses – Poseiden’s Steed: The Story of Seahorses, from Myth to Reality by Dr. Helen Scales – a marine biologist from Cambridge who obviously loves them.
Well worth reading if you want to know more about seahorses – everything from how difficult they are to classify taxonomically to how they’re used in traditional Chinese medicine to how images of them appear as the Rainbow Serpent in 6,000 year old Australian Aboriginal images.
One of the interesting things I learned in the book had to do with seahorse reproduction. I knew male seahorses carried the babies in a special pouch but didn’t know how it worked (scientists didn’t really know, in detail, until recently either).
During the courtship dance, the female seahorse inserts her ovipositor into the male’s brood pouch and inserts some eggs. The male seahorse then ejaculates sperm into the water which must then find its way into the brood pouch to fertilize the eggs. The male then carries the fertilized eggs until they develop into baby seahorses (the only male in the animal kingdom that truly gets pregnant and gives birth to young).
The interesting thing about this is how inefficient this process is. It would be a much better design to have the male release the sperm directly into the brood pouch with the eggs (because the sperm are exposed to the open water, they’re also exposed to pollutants in the water these days). But nature isn’t designed (intelligently or otherwise). This process is the product of its evolutionary history. Seahorses and their pipefish relatives evolved from fish like sticklebacks (or, more correctly, sticklebacks and seahorses had a common ancestor).
Seahorses release sperm into the water because that’s what their ancestors did when fertilizing fish eggs laid outside the body. It’s an evolutionary holdover from its past. Just another of a million examples of evidence for evolution we see in the natural world (read Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.4 billion year history of the Human Body by Neil Shubin for many more).
Another interesting fact – seahorses are monogamous. Probably due to the fact that they’re poor swimmers, not very common, and spend most of their life attached by their tails to a piece of seagrass. Once you find a mate, it makes sense not to wander off since it’s hard to find another.
Interesting little critters.
Well worth reading if you want to know more about seahorses – everything from how difficult they are to classify taxonomically to how they’re used in traditional Chinese medicine to how images of them appear as the Rainbow Serpent in 6,000 year old Australian Aboriginal images.
One of the interesting things I learned in the book had to do with seahorse reproduction. I knew male seahorses carried the babies in a special pouch but didn’t know how it worked (scientists didn’t really know, in detail, until recently either).
During the courtship dance, the female seahorse inserts her ovipositor into the male’s brood pouch and inserts some eggs. The male seahorse then ejaculates sperm into the water which must then find its way into the brood pouch to fertilize the eggs. The male then carries the fertilized eggs until they develop into baby seahorses (the only male in the animal kingdom that truly gets pregnant and gives birth to young).
Grotesquely pregnant seahorse from Wikipedia
The interesting thing about this is how inefficient this process is. It would be a much better design to have the male release the sperm directly into the brood pouch with the eggs (because the sperm are exposed to the open water, they’re also exposed to pollutants in the water these days). But nature isn’t designed (intelligently or otherwise). This process is the product of its evolutionary history. Seahorses and their pipefish relatives evolved from fish like sticklebacks (or, more correctly, sticklebacks and seahorses had a common ancestor).
Seahorses release sperm into the water because that’s what their ancestors did when fertilizing fish eggs laid outside the body. It’s an evolutionary holdover from its past. Just another of a million examples of evidence for evolution we see in the natural world (read Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.4 billion year history of the Human Body by Neil Shubin for many more).
Another interesting fact – seahorses are monogamous. Probably due to the fact that they’re poor swimmers, not very common, and spend most of their life attached by their tails to a piece of seagrass. Once you find a mate, it makes sense not to wander off since it’s hard to find another.
Interesting little critters.
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