Month: September 2005

Science Fair Projects – Egg in a Bottle

The University of Illinois provides visitors to its website with various science fair projects, including the perennial favourite – “Can air pressure alone cause an egg to be pushed into a bottle?”. Of course, it can. To make it work you’ll need an egg, a bottle, and a couple of matches. It’s all to do with air pressure differences.

But, the procedure Illinois suggests students to follow begins with “Step 1 – Peel the shells off the eggs”.

Not until further down the page (below the fold in fact) does it mention a crucial preparatory step. Can you guess what it is? Or, would you end up with egg on your face, and all over your hands?

You can watch a video of this kind of egg in a bottle experiment here.

Hello Vera

According to the latest news release from the Am Chem Soc, aloe vera gel, which is best known for its therapeutic effect on burned or irritated skin, could soon form part of a healthy balanced diet. Spanish researchers claim to have developed a new product from the tropical plant to use as an edible coating for improving the shelf-life of fresh produce. They report their results in the current issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

One thing that I’m curious to know, given aloe vera’s purported character as an all-round panacea, will those pyramid marketing schemes that sell the AV concept adopt this new property as their own and so add yet another “use” for the material to their enormous lists of supposed benefits? I think so.

Space Objects

Isn’t it about time astronomers abandoned the word “planet”? It’s become almost meaningless in the light of recent discoveries.

Pluto has been relegated to “small planet-like thing” while objects beyond the classical solar system turn out to be more planety than some of the actual planets, and most recently a moon, is now being touted as a planet. Add those really big asteroids and planetisimals to the equation and it makes you wonder whether our lexicographical feet will ever feel terra firma again.

Science and Art

An interesting preprint popped up on my physics eprints page this morning: “Fractal Dimensions in Perceptual Color Space: A Comparison Study Using Jackson Pollock’s Art.” by J. R. Mureika. Apparently, the standard RGB colour system used across the imaging industry from graphic design and photography to computer monitors and TV screens is not up to the job of representing fractal images and does not reveal the nuances of colour in perceptually different colours. Best avoid Pollock desktop wallpaper then!

Retronyms

Blair Bolles discussed the Sunday Times Acrostic puzzle recently on one of the NASW discussion groups. Apparently, he was rather intrigued by a “new” word – retronym. As examples, he cites “silent movies” and “acoustic guitar” all retronymic phrases – i.e. the qualifier was added after the original word lost its original meaning.

Another example he gives is “special relativity”. Einstein talked of his “theory of relativity” but then he came up with another “theory of relativity” so the first one was retronymically referred to as “special”.

Puzzlingly, Blair says Google only lists one page carrying the word retronym – a google whack blatt, in other words. But, I see more than 20,000 hits when I search…

This article ties in quite neatly with a more recent item I wrote on redundancy in phrases such as male semen, as if there could be any other kind.

Leukencephalopathy

An unusual keyword to say the least, but someone surfing the net found sciencebase with it. So, here’s a quick definition:

Progressive multifocal leukencephalopathy (PML) is rare but debilitating. It is an inflammatory response to viral infection observed in immunocompromised patients, such as AIDS sufferers. The inflammation leads to loss of the myelin that insulates nerves within the white matter of the brain. Visual defects, headaches, and speech/language problems result.

There is no dedicated treatment but AIDS patients undergoing therapy with highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) often improve significantly.

Science Fair Project Ideas

My science fair project ideas page, featuring inexpensive, downloadable 24h science projecs started getting more traffic than usual recently. It was only when I spotted a typo – sceince, instead of science in the title that I realised why. Lots of students searching MSN.com with the “word” sceince, were finding this page on the first of that particular search engine’s results pages! Wouldn’t make sense to fix it would it? But, apologies to my regular readers who can spell.

Squirt George Bank Nuisance

Researchers have completed a survey of the invasive sea squirt colony on the Georges Bank. A wider area was searched for the sea squirt in 2005, and it was mapped over about twice the area observed in 2004. Results show that the species is present in two adjacent areas totaling 88 square miles in US waters near the US-Canada boundary. The very large mat-like colonies observed in 2004 have been replaced by fewer smaller ones. The Georges Bank occurrence is the largest known infestation of colonial sea squirts in a major offshore fishing ground.

And, doesn’t it lend itself to an oddly apt sounding GWB headline?

Three-parent embryo

Is it squeamishness or superstition that makes the announcement from Newcastle University of plans to create a “three-parent” embryo controversial? I cannot see a profound difference between this kind of “non-natural” method of conception and any of the plethora of IVF and related treatments. They’re all non-natural when compared to the conventional approach to conception, after all.

However, the potential benefits of this new approach could be immense, when considered from the perspective of mitochondrial disease, which it seeks to prevent. So, what’s it to be non-natural and healthy or natural and not?

Ferrets

A neighbour approached a stranger who knocked on our front door three days in a row while we were on vacation. Apparently, my ferret had been sighted in the grounds of the local school! I was so relieved…except that I don’t own a ferret. I can only asusme that there was some transient overlap with the parallel universe in which I do own a ferret…either that or the world’s gone mad (more likely).