Geology students most satisfied; photography and cinema studiers not so much
Picture of a rock: Ripple marks from the Jurassic-aged Sundance Sea.Courtesy Mark RyanI'm not sure why this showed up on Facebook today, but it's kind of interesting. It's an old story from 2008 about a poll taken of 220,000 university students in Great Britain concerning just how satisfied they were with their courses. The results surprised everyone because geology students came out as most happy with their coursework than other students, especially those poor kids slogging through photography and cinema courses. You'd think taking pictures or watching movies or reading about taking pictures or about movies you've watched would be more fun than looking at rocks. Outside. In the rain. With bugs. And wet socks. But I guess that isn't the case. You can read the story, if you want, to find out why that is. I have neither a degree in geology nor in photography but love both subjects, and really like taking pictures of rocks, so I don't care.
SOURCE
Guardian story
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Pinatubo spewing ash in 1991Courtesy Public domain from USGS via WikipediaIf you have nothing else to do this weekend, why not spend some time monitoring volcanic eruptions? Erik Klemetti at Wired Science has updated his compilation of a whole bunch of links to webcams trained on various volcanoes around the world. Some, like Hawaii's Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa weren't doing much when I looked at them, but others, like Mexico's Popocatépetl and Japan's Aso were showing some activity.
The Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT organized a flash mob, where MIT scientists, local students, and community members acted out the targeted delivery of therapeutics to a cancer cell using nano particles. Pretty cool.
Pine Needles cabinCourtesy Dave BrandonMany people don't realize that the Science Museum of Minnesota features a world class water and environmental research station 40 minutes outside the cities on the Saint Croix river. Even fewer know about their long standing artist in residence program at the Pine Needles cabin. This year's crop of artists have just been announced. Having just made a trip out to this lovely neck of the woods myself, I'm excited to see what they come up with.
Walleye take things so literallyCourtesy USFWSWell, to be fair, the walleye are not all dead, nor are they in imminent danger of totally dying off.
But I think we can all agree that things just ain’t like they used to be.
I mean, you used to be able to marry your horse, if it was a good horse. Can’t do that anymore.
Music used to be more fearsome, with bass so impressive it would permanently damage your eyeballs. Now it’s used in romantic comedies and elevators, and bass is so unimpressive that one often finds baby mice asleep in one’s subwoofer.
The trees didn’t used to be so sassy.
And the lakes stayed icier longer back in the day.
That last one is real. They’re all real, of course, on some level. But the last one is something we can document.
See, for the last 30 years, the ice has been melting from Minnesota lakes earlier and earlier each year. There have almost certainly been exceptions, but that’s the general trend; climate in the state (and around the world) has been changing, and one of the implications of that is that spring is coming earlier to lakes.
What does that mean? Well, for me, it means that I can start dumping trash into the lakes earlier, which is good for me. It tends to build up to dangerously high levels in my house over the winter, and the earlier I can get it out, the better.
And it means a lot for the ecosystems of the lakes, and for people who are into those ecosystems. Because certain kinds of fish thrive or struggle in certain lake conditions, the kinds of fish we can expect to see in the state will change. Tullibee and lake trout prefer colder water, so they will likely become scarce in most of the state. Pike and walleye (bringing it back to the title!) may do better in some cases, with a longer growing season, but that will probably be limited to the northern part of the state. In central and southern lakes, overall warmer water will lead to stress on the fish, and de-icing before the lakes have warmed up will hurt the walleye population (which can hatch before their food supplies become abundant in such cases.)
It’s interesting, because this isn’t an “If you don’t stop doing ____, then _____ will happen.” _____ is already happening (climate change), so it’s just a matter of getting used to the idea of the world being a different place. Eventually, “normal” may go back to what was normal fifty years ago, but climate is a long game, and trends suggest that you’ll be fishing for different stuff at different times in the year in different places.
Hopefully that’s cool with you, because it doesn’t matter if it is or not. Like how music just used to be more fearsome, and trees used to be more polite, things have changed, and they ain’t changing back any time soon.
Man, there has been a ton of obesity-related news this week (no pun intended).
Weight problem: This will be almost half of us by 2030 if we don't shape up.Courtesy FatM1ke
Mothers of overweight toddlers believe their children are smaller than they actually are.
Bans on school junk food pay off in California.
The US obesity rate could hit 42% by 2030. (How accurate are those predictions, anyway?)
Prepregnancy obesity could lead to lower child test scores.
(Also, Meow, a literal "fat cat," has died from complications related to his morbid obesity. This kitty weighed in at a whopping 39 pounds! And, yes, I realize that this one is a little off-topic.)
I could go on. There are also a lot of "fixes" out there for the obesity epidemic--everything from national policies to questionable medical devices and weight-loss pills or "cleanses" to "personal responsibility." Ultimately, though, the individual solution to a weight problem means balancing calories in vs. calories out. And it's almost summer here in Minnesota, so get out there and do something. Take a walk over lunch. Ride your bike to and from work. Use the stairs instead of the elevator. It turns out that you only need 20 minutes of moving around to get most of the benefits of exercise and that 100 fewer calories a day can have a major effect: 10 pounds in a year. And dropping 500 calories per day can mean a weight loss of almost a pound a week.
I thought this BMI visualizer was pretty cool. Give it a try. It will probably inspire you to go jogging or something...
World's smallest giraffe: Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image depicting a baby giraffeCourtesy Image courtesy of the Materials Research Society Science as Art Competition and Shaahin Amini and Reza Abbaschian, University of California RiversideMaterials science is the study of the relationship between the structure of materials at the atomic or molecular scales and their properties at the macroscale. Materials scientists do a lot of monkeying around at super small scales, and the Materials Research Society (the organization that brings together materials scientists from academia, industry, and government) has given them a creative outlet. At each of their annual meetings, MRS includes a Science as Art competition, where any registered meeting attendee can enter an image they have created. The images are pretty amazing in their own right, but when you think about the methods, medium, and scale used to create them, it's truly mind-boggling! Here are some of the best entries from past meetings, and some video versions of selected works as well.
MISTER Tyrannosaurus rex to you!Courtesy Mark RyanAccording to a story on NPR, some genius in Nebraska has legally changed his name to Tyrannosaurus rex because he said it's a much cooler name than the one he was christened with at birth, and will be more recognizable for future business ventures. A bold move, don't you think? I wonder how the glam rock band T.rex feels about this?
Carbon dioxide, you light up my life. Or you could, anyway, if this weirdo has his way. Said weirdo is biochemist Pierre Calleja, who has developed a light that can run on carbon dioxide rather than electricity. His secret: green algae that produce energy when they consume CO2.
The mucklight powerhouse: Gross.Courtesy Jim Conrad
One large lamp he installed in a parking garage consumes up to one ton of CO2 per year. While that's just a drop in the air--the US alone emits almost 5.5 thousand metric tons per year--just think how much these lamps could consume if we replaced all the streetlamps, parking ramp lights, and other environmental lamps with them. It sounds like a pretty great idea when you consider that CO2 is a major driver of global-scale changes in our climate. Whoda thunk we could tackle our warming climate by turning on the lights?
Brontosaurs-a-chomping: The constant eating by herds of sauropods like these no doubt produced a constant flow of methane into the atmosphere.Courtesy Public domainImagine you’ve been transported back in time to the Late Jurassic and you’re sitting on a gently sloping hillside watching a large herd of the gigantic sauropod dinosaurs chowing down on tons of vegetation in the valley below. What’s the one thing you might need to worry about? The herd of sauropods suddenly stampeding the hillside? A truck-sized carnivore eyeing you from the shadows? Tiny burrowing mammals gnawing at your ankles? While all these scenarios would have been possible, the most likely worry would probably be (if you’re downwind anyway) getting inundated by a warm blast of dinosaur farts.
That’s right, dinosaur flatulence - tons of it - wafting over you like a huge, stinky old blanket. Ewww.
Researchers from Liverpool John Moore's University, the University of London, and the University of Glasgow have calculated that herds of sauropods, those tiny-headed ,long-necked, long-tailed herbivorous dinosaurs that populated the Jurassic landscape about 150 million years ago, would have been eating a lot of vegetation during their lifetimes and in the process releasing a tremendous amount of methane gas from their guts and into the Earth’s atmosphere. That's a lot of cheese-cutting.
In fact, writing in the journal Current Biology, Dr. David Wilkinson and his colleagues claimed that the amount of emission of methane just from the herbivorous dinosaur gassers would have been about the same amount being emitted from all sources today - 500-520 million tons each year. Methane is a greenhouse gas that can absorb the sun’s infrared energy, and heat up the atmosphere. The producers of methane today range from ruminant species such as cows, goats, and sheep, and from human activities such as natural gas drilling, but the effects on the environment could be similar – a warming of the atmosphere. Back in the Mesozoic, average temperatures were about 18 °F higher than today. Wilkinson and his colleagues suggest the dinosaur backfires could have been a big factor in the warming of the prehistoric environment, but admit it wouldn't have been the only source of the gas back then.
"There were other sources of methane in the Mesozoic so total methane level would probably have been much higher than now," Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson’s research interest lays not so much in the sauropods themselves but in the microscopic bacteria that once lined their guts. It was these microbes that converted the vegetable matter into energy and waste, including methane. Could that vast SBD Mesozoic methane source, as the researchers suggest, have been a big contributor to the warmer temperatures back then? Possibly. Or maybe it's just a lot of hot air.
SOURCE
BBC Nature News
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