Tara Polar Station

Tara Polar Station

Tara Polar Station is a French drifting scientific base aimed for Arctic Ocean expeditions and operated by the Tara Oceans Foundation and its collaborators. - Wikipedia

All the stories about this thing talk about Global Warming. Can't say as I blame them, that's how you get idiots to cough up the dough to fund this project.

Putting the global warming nonsense aside, it's a heck of a project. Imagine being stuck on this boat for 6 to 9 months with a dozen other people. It's almost as bad as being in a nuclear submarine. You can go outside, but in the middle of winter it is going to be completely black outside. It will be interesting to see how well they survive.

Tara Polar Station Cross Section

Entomology

A sculpture by artist Pete Beeman depicts a Megarhyssa "stump stabber" wasp atop a microscope, symbolizing the entomology labs at the North Valley Complex facility. Photo by Samantha Swindler.

The North Valley Complex is in Wilsonville, Oregon, about 15 miles south of Portland.

This Discovery Just Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

This Discovery Just Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Cleo Abram

Machine Learning sounds a lot like Artificial Intelligence, so maybe AI does have some uses.

Jargon

Heard a couple new-to-me expressions this weekend. We were talking about why a radiologist might be needed at 2AM, and we were thinking, well, trauma in the Emergency Room. But then dutiful daughter mentions:

Decompensation - In medicine, decompensation is the functional deterioration of a structure or system that had been previously working with the help of compensation.

I suspect in everyday conversation you would call it 'taking a turn for the worse'. And yeah, if someone decompensated in the middle of the night, you might very well need a radiologist.

The other one I heard from a friend at happy hour:

Index of Refraction and Coefficient of Extinction are the real and complex portions of light.

Okay, there's a lot crammed into that sentence. I've heard of Index of Refraction, it just tells you how much light is bent, but Coefficient of Extinction is new to me. Wikipedia gives us this:

Extinction coefficient refers to several different measures of the absorption of light in a medium:

• Attenuation coefficient, sometimes called "extinction coefficient" in meteorology or climatology
• Mass extinction coefficient, how strongly a substance absorbs light at a given wavelength, per mass density
• Molar extinction coefficient, how strongly a substance absorbs light at a given wavelength, per molar concentration
• Optical extinction coefficient, the imaginary part of the complex index of refraction

I think the last one, Optical, is what we want, though what you would use it for is beyond me.

Calculating Empires - A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500

Snapshot of Calculating Empires

Calculating Empires - A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 is a ginormous diagram of science and technology. The screen shot is like 0.3% of the whole image.

I'm panning over this drawing and most of it is drawings of devices along with descriptions, but then I come across this section with a whole bunch of vertical lines and no pictures, so I investigate and find these little tidbits:

• In 1925, when the British Empire was at its peak, they controlled 24% of the land on Earth.
• In 1960, when the USSR was at its peak, they controlled 17% of the land on Earth.

Via Indiana Thomas

Cool Water

How small does water get?
The Slow Mo Guys

Iceland Spar: the Mineral That Changed Science

Previous posts about the solar compass.

Earthquake

GMV for mww 7.8 TURKEY

Acronyms:

• GMV stands for Ground Motion Visualization
• mww is a subtype of the moment magnitude scale (mw) derived from a centroid moment tensor inversion of the W-phase.

I don't understand exactly the description for mww, just that they are doing some number crunching on the data.

Via The Feral Irishman

Femtograms

How To Measure The Tiniest Forces In The Universe
Veritasium

How low can you go? Lower than I even imagined.

The Velocity of Honey

Amazing Honey Coiling High Speed Video! - Smarter Every Day 53
I just finished The Velocity of Honey by Jay Ingram. I wanted a picture to headline this post and then I thought 'let's go see what YouTube has', and bingo!

Each chapter in the book is about some everyday thing that confounds people. Some are physical, like the honey (above). Several have to do with the way people perceive time and those had a couple of unique perspectives. One he didn't touch on, and one that bedevils me is why sometimes when I am driving on the freeway I am in a big stinking hurry and other times I am content to just motor along.

The book will give you something to think about besides your everyday concerns, so it's kind of like taking your mind to the park. Does anyone go to parks anymore? I suppose they must. I don't. I used to every once in a while, usually because of some kind of event. I think it's because I never felt like I could really relax, which is probably because of this train I'm driving.

A while back we were watching Season 3 of Ozark and our hero gets kidnapped by his employer who wants to know "what do you want?". Marty replied: "I don't understand the question". Several weeks later I think I finally know what Marty is talking about.

When I was younger, I was at loose ends for several years. I worked various construction jobs, usually as a mechanic, that usually made me enough to keep me in beer and gasoline, which was good enough for me. But as I got older, I started focusing and I picked out a goal. I don't know what it was exactly, just that it consumed more of my attention than anything else. The older I got, the more focused I became. I think it finally reached a peak when my kids were about ten years old. After that is was kind of steady state until a few years ago and then it started broadening again.

So Marty is in that totally focused phase. What he wants is irrelevant, he has a goal in mind, that is where he is headed. What he wants doesn't even enter the picture. He has chosen his path and that's where he's going. The question of what he wants doesn't even exist in his universe. Oh maybe, if you put him under hypnosis, you might get him to drag up a memory from when he was a kid of wanting something, but that's as close as you are going to get.

Science

Science Immunology

The Windy Pundit is talking about science and the road it follows to get to you and me:

. . . the accuracy of understanding of scientific information tends to drop off as we get further and further from the source, and in the worst case can get pretty bad.

• The scientists who actually performed the study usually have a good grasp of its limitations.

• The big-shot scientist whose name is first on the paper might overstate the importance a bit.

• The university or corporate press release will probably get the basic idea right, but they’ll overstate the importance of the result and ignore the nuances and limitations.

• The press will focus on the most sensational aspects of the press release.

• Pundits and politicians will use the press accounts to support their prior beliefs and policies.

• Fringe bloggers and tweeters and political hacks on social media will take the resulting nonsense and pile more nonsense on top.

Mark's post is about the models used to predict how bad this pandemic is going to get. I don't really care about the predictions or the models. In my book, all of the available information is suspect. It:

• could be because the organization producing it has a political agenda they are trying to promote, 
• or it could be that the model they are using to generate their data is wrong, 
• or the way they are classifying their data is either suspect or wrong. 

It doesn't matter. Either what we do will be enough to keep us from dying, or it won't, and because we haven't been here before, nobody knows what will happen. Basically, it's like we are on the starship Enterprise, boldly going where no man has gone before. Okay, some of us are a little more bold than others, and some are cowering in their corners, but we are all going into the future, like it or not.

I am afraid the COVID-19 shutdown is going to have severe economic repercussions. I don't know what that is going to look like. Perhaps we should start setting up refugee camps.

I haven't noticed much change in my life. There are more pedestrians out walking around. Cashiers at the few businesses I visit all have sneeze guards. The traffic on the freeways has been noticeably lighter, which was pretty nice, but it seems to have picked up a bit in the last week or so.

On the other hand, there are some really nasty diseases out there, so maybe learning how to exist without mingling with a thousand people every day is something we should learn how to do. The next pandemic might be a really vicious one.

Bosch Season 6

Bell 412 Helicopter equipped with ARDIMS Radiation Detection Pod - U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Matt Davis

We watched season 6 of Bosch last weekend. One of the stories involved the theft of some radioactive cesium from a hospital. This got everyone understandably excited - there have been a couple of ugly incidents involving this stuff. I remember hearing about the one in Brazil, that one gave me a very bad impression of Latin American Bureaucracies.

In the show, a whole alphabet soup of government agencies descend onto Los Angeles. One concrete action they did was to make an aerial survey of the city using helicopters carrying radiation detection equipment, very much like the photo above.

Polimaster Radiation Detector

Jerry Edgar, played by a notorious gangster from The Wire, buys a personal radiation detector (similar to the one pictured above) that ends up being pretty useful. Interesting thing is that no one mentioned either of these detection devices by name, but somehow it was pretty clear what was going on.

Radiation Dosimeter Ring

The victim was wearing a radiation dosimeter ring, similar to the picture above. I knew people working with radioactive materials wore dosimeter badges, but the rings were new to me. They make sense though for people who are actually handling radioactive materials. How dangerous radiation is depends on time and distance. We are constantly exposed to very low levels of radiation, but how  close you are to 'hot' radioactive material can make a big difference to how much danger you are in. You can stand a couple of feet away from a low level source for a few minutes and be in no danger, but if you are actually handling it, your hands are going to get a much higher dose.

Nobel retractions

Nobel Prize

Stolen entire from Peter Attia

Frances Arnold, a chemical engineer at Caltech, was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Arnold received the Nobel Prize for the directed evolution of enzymes, a method used in protein engineering to mimic (and speed up) the process of natural selection to manipulate, identify, and design proteins that have broad implications and can be used for a variety of applications. Her seminal  paper , which first demonstrated this method, was published in 1993 and was a culmination of work at Caltech which started in the late 1980s, 30 years prior to receiving the Nobel Prize. 

On January 2nd, Arnold made headlines again after announcing on Twitter that she and her co-authors  retracted  a  paper  that was published in the prestigious journal  Science  in May of 2019, 7 months after winning the Nobel Prize. “For my first work-related tweet of 2020, I am totally bummed to announce that we have retracted last year's paper on enzymatic synthesis of beta-lactams,” she  wrote . “The work has not been reproducible.”

Retracting a published scientific article means the author(s) made a mistake and the article shouldn’t have been published. Some people may be thinking,  Geez, I bet the Nobel Committee wishes they can take that Prize back and give it to someone who doesn’t make these kinds of mistakes.

But think again. If I were part of the committee, I’d be saying the exact opposite:  Thank god we picked such a credible recipient of highest honor in the field!  Making mistakes and being wrong is part of the process in science. The problem is when you make mistakes and you either don’t know you’re making mistakes or you don’t admit mistakes once you realize them or when they have been pointed out. While the irony isn’t lost on me that Arnold’s mistake was due to  admittedly  being distracted by “all the Nobel Prize hoopla,” she later realized the error in her lab and was proactive in reporting it. Bad work slipping through the cracks is not a good thing, but Arnold’s admission and retraction is the right thing to do, and hopefully inspires others to report errors. (This particular case may be a coauthor’s scientific misconduct rather than an honest mistake. Fooling yourself and being wrong is a natural phenomenon in science. Fooling others and acting in a way that willfully compromises the integrity of scientific research is not.)

Even the best scientists make mistakes. Arnold is not the first Nobel Laureate to retract a paper. There are  several others  who issued retractions. The best scientists are the best scientists in large part because of their openness to admit and share all of the errors they’re discovering along the way. Open failure is a path to progress. The merit of a scientist is not perfection, it’s the integrity you display when confronted with errors. Arnold herself may have put it better in a follow-up  Tweet  to her retraction announcement: “My motto, shared for 29 years with my three children:  ‘I'm not perfect, but I'm good enough.’ Works for me. Seems to work for a lot of us.”

Keep this in mind, please, when you consume scientific information. Unlike politics, where changing your mind or admitting mistakes is tantamount to career suicide—a sign of weakness—in science, it’s actually a sign of integrity and high-level thinking. Keep the retractions coming.

- Peter

There have been a couple of times in the last few years when I thought I had solved a difficult problem. It wasn't just a thought, it was a feeling that I really had found a solution. It turned out, days or weeks later, that I hadn't, but for a while there I was convinced that I had found the answer.

Where did this feeling come from? I don't know, but I suspect it was the same feeling I got when I solved a math problem in school. We started with addition, worked our way through basic arithmetic, algegra, geometry and eventually calculus. When I had solved a problem, I knew I had found the answer.

However, difficulties will arise when you feel you have the correct answer, but your answer is actually wrong. I hate it when that happens.

One of the problems I thought I had solved was the Eternity II puzzle. Another was a design for a vastly more efficient steam engine. There may have been others, but those are the only ones that I recall at the moment.

Via Iaman

Cosmic Clock

Incoming: The Chicxulub Impactor By Stephanie Osborn

By way of promoting Incoming: The Chicxulub Impactor By Stephanie Osborn, Sarah A. Hoyt has posted a timeline of how the disaster unfolded.

I recently connected the rotation of our galaxy to the ages of long ago events. If you look at the galaxy as a clock face, each hour of galactic time consumes about 19 million Earth years, so this event, that happened 66 million year ago happened about 5:30 this morning, galactic time, assuming the current galactic time is the same as my local time.

Gravity anomaly map of the Chicxulub impact structure. The coastline is shown as a white line. A striking series of concentric features reveals the location of the crater. White dots represent water-filled sinkholes (solution-collapse features common in the limestone rocks of the region) called cenotes after the Maya word dzonot. A dramatic ring of cenotes is associated with the largest peripheral gravity-gradient feature. The origin of the cenote ring remains uncertain, although the link to the underlying buried crater seems clear. - Wikipedia

Northwest portion of the Yucatan Penninsula, site of Chicxulub impactor
Not much evidence of the event on the satellite map, though you there seem to be some semi-circular swaths of clear areas surrounding Merida, which is pert near the center of the impact.

The New Religion

Roman Emperor Constantine

Borepatch puts up a post about music, science and logic and it got me to thinking. Remember when the destruction of the ozone layer was the big boogeyman? Now we have climate change and we're all going to die. How do these ideas become political movements? It occurs to me they start with a scientist who becomes enthusiastic about an idea and he starts telling people about it and one of the people he tells is a politician who is impressed with this scientist's enthusiasm and becomes convinced that "something needs to be done", and it grows from there.

Western Civilization is inexorably entwined with the Christian Religion, but the Christian religion has been been flagging lately, partly due to the whole mystical nonsense bit. The Ten Commandments were a good start, but somehow we got this whole celestial fantasy with angels and devils and heaven and hell and all that is having a hard time with our evidence based science.

Some (most?) people seem to need to believe in something outside of their miserable little lives, and if their religion doesn't pass the smell test anymore, well, they'll look around for something else, and hey, what do we have here? Looks like Global Warming might be the new religion. For some people anyway. For some people it might be cricket.*

* Apologies to Brian for implying that his affection for cricket might be a form of insanity, but his post on the subject warmed my heart.

Greenland

AIRBUS A380 F-HPJ Greenland Fan Hub Recovery by GEUS / BEA (June 2019)
A couple of years ago an airliner engine disintegrated while it was flying over the North Atlantic Ocean. The airliner landed with all passengers and crew safe in Goose Bay, Newfoundland, Canada. The airline people, pagans that they are, were unwilling to accept that an act of God caused the engine to fail. They wanted to examine the pieces of engine and apply their godless scientific acumen to try and figure out what happened. In order to do that though they needed to locate the pieces that fell off.

Map of flight path with altitudes

Being as the aircraft was over Greenland and they knew exactly where it was when this happened, if should be easy enough to find them. And they did find some of the pieces right off. But then it started snowing, winter came and they were stymied. Come the following spring they resumed their search, but now everything is covered with snow. And while they knew where some parts had fallen, other parts might be miles away. The airliner was flying along at 500 knots at an altitude of 35,000 feet when the engine exploded. Predicting where anything jettisoned from that altitude at that speed, not to mention rotating at several thousand RPM, will land is going to be guess work at best.

The Falcon 20 F-GPAA with SETHI. The two containers that it carries under the wings are part of the system - BEA via Austin Lines (Polar Research Equipment) and Thue Bording (Aarhus HGG)

But the science guys persisted. They got out their ground penetrating radar, attached it an airplane, flew a search pattern over the suspect area and got some hits.

Ground Penetrating Radar Set on Sled

Then the put their radar on a sled and dragged it back and forth over the snow until they had a pretty good idea where they might find something, and then they started digging.

The Bureau d'Enquetes et a'Analyses has a full report available (pdf).

Neutron Stars

First Ever Light & Gravitational Wave Cosmic Event!
Okay, maybe there really are gravity waves and neutron stars. Neutron stars were staple of Larry Niven's science fiction stories, and now we have some (more?) evidence that they really exist. I'm not sure any of this is going to do us any good, not with our propensity for killing each other. Maybe we'll eventually develop a faster-than-light method of travel which will allow us to spread the disease of life to other places in our galaxy. More likely any practical developments will be subverted by the military-industrial complex and lead to something like bobbles (as found in The Peace War) or anti-bobbles (as found in The Gone Away World).

Update a week later. Tracked down the bobble book.

Bees and Neonicotinoids

Neonicotinoids: What We Know - OklahomaGardening
Detroit Steve sends us a couple of links:

I thought Slate was on the up and up,  I now wonder.
Nature article points out that all but Germany had declines.

A giant study costing zillions of dollars, but what exactly did it measure? I have no idea. I wonder if anyone else does.

Let me just say this about that:

• Bees are having problems. Of course, bees are wild animals and wild animals have all kinds of problems. Are their current problems worse than usual? Some people seem to think so.
• Neonicotinoids are new. The did not used to exist, at least I don't think they did. I got it in my head that this chemical was invented in a lab somewhere, but that might not be the case. It might be an extract from a common plant, or from a Peruvian sea slug's gall bladder, I have no idea.
• One thing I read said that 'if the chemical was applied according to directions, it would have no effect on bees'. Well, that's nice, but I somehow doubt whether everyone is following directions. I can easily imagine someone along the distribution chain getting it wrong by a factor of ten or even a hundred. Normally, I would consider this unlikely. Chemicals cost money, farming is a marginal business, so in order to minimize costs you don't want to use any more of that chemical than you need to. On the other hand, if you have a particular nasty problem, you might think it worthwhile to spend a little extra and increase the dose by maybe half or even double to be sure that it takes care of the problem. You don't want to have to come back and do it again, that costs more money, and any delay can mean more damage to the crop. Depending, of course, on just what you are spraying for.

Take those three together and my conclusion is that this new chemical is causing the problem with the bees and the new study is a smokescreen.

Lastly, the new stuff for controlling fleas on cats and dogs uses the same chemical and it's really expensive, like $20 a dose. It's also a little scary, but it seems to work and I ain't dead yet.

Lastly plus one, I looked for a picture and came up with the above video, which kind of slants it the other way. So it might be a case of the know-nothings hollering because that's all they can do. Previous posts here, here and, if you want more, here.

Testosterone & Science

The Benefits of Optimal Testosterone

Men and women are different. Who knew? The American Life has done a story about testosterone and al fin next level has done a blog post with a bunch of links. Curious stuff.

Do not confuse physical and mental abilities with political rights. And while men get awards and accolades for their accomplishments, not one single man has ever produced a child.

Twisting DNA

Why Women Are Stripey
They (women) aren't actually stripey, at least they don't look that way because we don't have chromosome vision.  I liked the animation, and the bit about the cellualar level fight between the two X-chromosomes was interesting. Makes me wonder if the same thing is going with all the other normally paired chromosomes.

The part that isn't explained here, and which I haven't seen anywhere, is how DNA gets untwisted enough that it can be read. Because DNA isn't just twisted like a rope, it's curled up, and then recurled, and then curled some more, as this video shows.


✔ DNA Replication Animation - Super EASY
(www.freesciencelectures.com, shown on the bottom of the video doesn't exist, though there is a YouTube channel with that name.)

It might be that the DNA does get completely untwisted when only a short segment needs to get copied. In that case perhaps only a short segment gets untwisted, kind of like when you are trying to splice a rope or cable.


Fastest loadsling splicer...1 1/8" X 28' .in 3min 20sec (greasy rope).DCR (www.chainandrigging.com)