Roses are Red, violets are blu...

Image Flickr Matt Denton

Have you ever wondered why most of us admire the beauty of flowers and even think they smell good? As a matter of fact some of us wear perfume made from the essence of flowers.

What makes this all so peculiar is that flowers and their scent's purpose is to attract insects-not humans.

Lookout-It's a Germ!

Image Flickr_Germ

TV commercials try to make us believe that the only good germ is a dead germ. According to them flesh eating, lung clogging, stomach churning germs are everywhere, on telephones, in kitchens, bathrooms and even on dogs, cats and canaries.

The facts are that 99.9% of germs, AKA bacteria, are harmless and without them life on Earth would not be possible. Nitrifying bacteria in the soil convert nitrogen into forms plants can absorb through their roots. Bacteria in our gut produce vitamins we need to stay alive. Harmless bacteria coat our skins crowding out bacteria that are harmful, to name just a few of the good deeds done by germs.

So take it easy with the antibiotic soaps, the sprays and cleansers hyped to sterilize everything in the house including the dog.

Large Hadron Collider

Drive along the two lane Route de Meyrin from Saint-Genes-Pouilly, France to Meyrin, Switzerland, just outside Genève, and you'll see a massive complex of buildings, looking out of place in the quiet pastureland and stands of trees, straddling the French-Swiss border (I haven’t actually be there: I Googled Earthed it). What you can’t see is the 27 kilometer circular tunnel buried deep below the complex. This is the site of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest machine built to discover the universe’s smallest particles and hopefully catch a glimpse of what the proto-universe looked like a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. Working at the LHC will be 7000 particle physicists, half the particle physicists in the world.

Construction

The sheer size of the LHC is staggering, as are the tolerances to which its gigantic components are assembled. Components the sizes of small apartment houses are built to vary less than a fraction of a millimeter from specifications.

The business end of the LHC consists of twin beam pipes buried inside a 3.8 meter concrete lined tunnel circling under the French Swiss border at depths of 100 to 300 meters. Surrounding the two beam pipes are 9300 magnets, some weighing several tons. The magnets are super-cooled to 300 C degrees below room temperature with thousands of kilos of liquid nitrogen and helium. Super-cooling makes the magnets superconductors allowing massive magnetic fields-100,000 times as strong as the Earth’s-to be generated without loss due to electrical resistance. The enormous magnetic fields bend and accelerate streams of protons or lead nuclei to a hairs breath below the speed of light. These particle streams make the 27 kilometer round trip 11245 times per second, in a curve precisely matching the curve of the beam pipes. To prevent the speeding particles from colliding with molecules of air, air is pumped out to create a vacuum like that in space. In addition to the magnets which bend the beam around the beam tubes are magnets which pinch and focus the streaming particles tightly so as to keep the beam from touching the sides of the tubes. The streams of particles are so energetic they can punch a hole through a 30 meter thick chunk of copper. If they were to touch the tubes the high energy particles would destroy them.

The two beam pipes allow for two separate beams to be accelerated in opposite directions. At four places along the circle the counter racing beams cross and it is here that head-on collisions of particles occurs and it is at these crossing points detectors are located to capture data from the shower of exotic particles created. The energy released by the particles smashing into each other will generate tiny areas 100,000 times the temperature of the sun for minute fractions of a second.

Tens of thousands of computers around the world are connected in a grid allowing scientists around the world access to the Everest sized mountains of data collected.

Results

Scientists will be looking for particles that will reveal the mystery of gravity, dark matter and why matter has mass. Among these exotic particles they hope to find the elusive Higgs Boson, a particle theorized to exist, but as yet undiscovered because particle accelerators so far have not accelerated particles to high enough energies to produce them. The discovery of the Higgs boson will help fill in the blanks as to why matter has mass and particles of light called photons, do not.

Scientists also believethe massively energetic collisions will produce particles that can explain why gravity is so weak. I don’t know about you but I have never thought of gravity as weak! But, compared to say magnetism it is. Try holding a refrigerator magnet over a pin and see which is stronger, the force of gravity or magnetic force.

It is also hoped that the nature of dark matter will be discovered. There is too much gravity in galaxies to be accounted for by the matter scientists can detect. So, scientists conclude that most matter in the universe is invisible or dark matter.

Another question the physicists will ask-Are there more than the four dimensions we are familiar with-depth, width, length and time?

This is an amazing time we live in, to have the opportunity to witness clues to the secrets of creation, and maybe of time itself.

Note

The LHC is expected to be re-started sometime in November of 2009. The LHC was shut down by an electrical problem late in 2008.

Bee Smart

Reading time about 30 seconds

A scientist studying honey bee behavior decided to see just how smart bees are at finding a source of food. To do this he placed some sugar water in a dish and set it near a hive. Of course, the bees found it right away. He just wanted to give them the idea. Each day the scientist moved the dish containing the sugar water 10 meters or about 30 feet farther away from the hive. The bees proved to be very clever at finding the dish taking little time to find it even though it had been moved 10 meters away from its last position.

The experiment ended when the next time the scientist moved the dish 10 meters he found the bees waiting for him.

Zero Gain or Net Gain?

Reading time about 50 seconds

There has been a lot of talk about carbon dioxide lately since it plays such a large part in climate change as a greenhouse gas.

We hear about net carbon gain and zero carbon gain as applied to the burning of fuels which are carbon based, meaning the burning of material that was once alive, whether it is coal, natural gas, biodiesel or corn based ethanol.

The business about carbon gain or net zero carbon gain is all about whether the fuel burned has been stored in the ground as say coal or petroleum or recently grown like corn or swithchgrass.

If we’re talking about coal or oil then we are talking about burning a carbon fuel that was alive some time ago and grew by removing carbon dioxide from the air and then storing it upon being buried under sediments. When it is burned it adds to the carbon dioxide content of the air because it releases back to the environment carbon that has been locked away in the ground, so there is a net gain over what was there before.

If we are talking about burning a fuel that grew using carbon dioxide recently and is burned soon after it is harvested then all that is happening is that it’s burning releases back to the environment what it recently took out to grow and the net gain to the atmosphere is zero. It releases back to the atmosphere what it just took out, not what had been locked away in the ground.

The Flu Pandemic of 1918

In light of the resurgence of the 'Swine Flu'; I thought I might repost this blog for folks who may have missed it.

The year is 1918. American troops have joined the allies fighting the war raging in Europe. By the end of The Great War over 100,000 American soldiers died. But it was not only bullets, bombs or poison gas that slaughtered them quickly and terribly by the tens of thousands. A ruthless killer too small to be seen by the most powerful microscopes of the age and too illusive to be known by the best scientific minds was responsible for the deaths of half of the U.S. troops killed in the European theater. The killer was influenza.The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more humans worldwide in one year than died in the four years of the Bubonic Plaque in the mid thirteen hundreds. Between the years 1918 and 1919, 20-40 million died of influenza. Twenty-eight per cent of Americans were infected, 675,000 of all classes died, the rich and the poor. The flu raced around the world along trade routes and shipping lanes infecting twenty per cent of the population of the planet. It was a true pandemic.So prevalent was the disease small children skipped rope to this grim rhyme.

I had a little bird,Its name was Enza.

I opened a window,And In-flu-enza.

The Centers for Disease Control, (CDC) and other government agencies were aggressive in their response to the so called ‘Swine Flu’ of 2009 partly because of what happened in 1918. The epidemic of 1918 was caused by a variant of flu virus that had not been seen before. As a result those exposed had little or no immunity to this novel virus. Because the Swine Flu virus is also a new strain, government agencies were afraid that millions worldwide could be infected and die just as they did in the early part of the 20th century.The flu of 1918, like the Swine Flu, first appeared in the spring and like the Swine Flu was mild. So mild it was called the ‘three day fever’. Few deaths were reported and most patients recovered in a few days. The following fall the 1918 flu returned with incredible virulence. Millions were infected and millions died. Many of the affected died within hours or days. People told of visiting a neighbor one day only to find the next day the person was dead.

The so-called Swine Flu is a variety of the Influenza A N1H1 strain similar to the one that caused the 1918 flu, but that does not mean it will be as virulent. Many factors affect the virulence of a flu virus and even though they are the same subtype, they can be very different.The N1H1 subtype is simply a description of two proteins found on the surface of most viruses and is used to differentiate between different strains of Influenza, such as Influenza A, one of the viruses responsible for seasonal Flu. The H refers to a protein called Hemagglutinin (He-ma-glue-tin-in). The Hemagglutinin helps the virus particle stick to the cell it will infect. There are 16 types. The N refers to an enzyme called Neuramidase (Nur-am-eeh-daze). There are 9 types. The Neuramidase helps the newly formed virus particles release from the surface of the infected cell. This enzyme is inhibited by anti-flu medications such as Relenza and Tamiflu. If the new virus particles stay stuck to the infected cell they can’t go out and infect more cells.

In light of the loss of life in 1918-19, the government was cautious in its approach to this latest novel virus. This is not to say that the Swine Flu will be just like the Flu of 1918 just because there are similarities, such as both being a strain of Influenza A H1N1 and starting out mild in the Spring.Luckily, unlike the victims of the 1918 Flu, we have effective antiviral drugs, better public health and communication abilities, as well as the capability of producing a vaccine.

Unfortunately these were not available to the millions who died in the 1918 pandemic.

Our Ancestors the Bacteria

Reading time about 90 seconds

Scientists are not yet sure as to where life on Earth first appeared or how it began. The closer they get to the time, some 3-4 Billion years ago, when the first organization of organic molecules became something we would recognize as being alive, the more difficult it is to understand.

The one thing they do know is that our ancestors were single celled organisms best described as primitive bacteria. Yes I said bacteria. I know that a lot of folks argue that we humans are not descended from apes, they're right we aren’t, but the truth for those folks is probably worse. All of us, every living thing on Earth whether plant; animal or insect share a common bacterial ancestor which appeared at least 3.5 billion years ago. They know that because these early bacteria left chemical signs in rocks that old.

These bacteria solved most of the problems of cell chemistry and developed the mechanisms of heredity long before multicellular organisms evolved. By the time they did most of the hard work of living had been done. How did they do it? Well, by trial and error. The things that worked were preserved and the things that didn’t perished. This process did not happen quickly or easily. Countless billions and billions of experiments were made by those primitive bacteria over billions of years. The reason so many tries could be accomplished is because of the rapid rate of reproduction by such simple creatures. Today a bacterium under ideal conditions can produce a new generation every 20 minutes, three each hour, 72 new generations per day and 25,632 per year. Can you imagine how many generations can be produced in 2 billion years? How many experiments can be tried?

So how did these experiments come about? Well, through a thing called mutation. Every time a bacteria or a modern cell divides it copies its DNA and passes along a copy to the new cell or bacteria. Sometimes an error in copying happens and that is passed to the new cell. If this error results in the new cell being better able to survive to reproduce, then it is preserved and passed along to its offspring. If it harms the organism’s chances to live to reproduce then it probably won’t be preserved in the population.

At 3 generations per day for 2 billion years you can see where a lot of errors can be passed along even if the rate at which an error in copying is made happens say once every million generations. That sounds pretty iffy at only one error per million generations, I know. But, we are not just dealing with one bacterium multiplying over the span of 2 billion years, but untold trillions of billons of trillions of bacteria dividing and subject to an error. You can see how over deep time there were many opportunities for copying errors and many, many experiments.

Maybe the lowly bacteria deserves a bit more respect.

Baby Steps on the Moon

Reading time about 30 seconds


Forty years ago today the human race reached another world. Neil Armstrong stepped off the Eagle’s landing pad into history. I remember watching the fuzzy, ghostly image while waiting to ship out for Vietnam. Even though my thoughts were primarily about where I was going, and how much I didn’t want to go, that image griped my attention and jammed everything but it to the back of my mind.

What an achievement for a species that a little over a century ago dreamed of powered flight. The landing on the moon will be remembered as one of the greatest achievements of the human race. It has been pointed out to me that 200 years from now people will speak of it with the same reverence given to Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus, and the Wright brothers, maybe more so.

It is truly an amazing time to be alive. To have witnessed our landing on the Moon is like being present for the discovery of the New World.

Sea Ice and Climate Change

Reading time about 40 seconds

Why are scientists so worried about melting of sea ice at or near the poles?

Well, aside from the fact that it's melting is a pretty good indication that the planet is warming, it’s scary because of a thing called ‘positive feedback’, which despite sounding so upbeat is in the case of global warming a potential catastrophe.

An example of Positive Feedback is when an event such as warming of the oceans creates more warming of the oceans. So, how does sea ice come into this? We all know that a dark object absorbs more heat from the sun than a white one does. As the sea warms and melts more white sea ice there is less ice to reflect heat and more dark sea surface to absorb it, the sea warms melting more ice exposing more sea surface to absorb heat, etc. The dangerous part is that this vicious cycle increases in speed until it is at a ‘tipping point’ beyond which there is no going back.

And that’s why scientists are worried.

Happy Light Year?

Reading time about 90 seconds

A light year isn’t a measure of time, like ‘Happy New Light Year!’ or ‘That’s not gonna happen this Light Year’.

A light year is a way to measure distance. Astronomers deal with such large distances it is more convenient to use light years when talking about how far away astronomical bodies are. It is defined as the distance light travels in one Earth year. The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second or about 186,000 miles per second. At that speed light can cover about 9,500,000,000,000 (9 1/2 trillion) kilometers or about 6,000,000,000,000 (6 trillion) miles in one year.

Astronomers sometimes speak of light seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months as well.

If we want to get technical a light year is the distance light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year, which is 365 ¼ days. That ¼ is the reason we add a day every four years -- Leap Year. It keeps the calendar right. The reason for measuring the speed of light in a vacuum is that the speed of light can vary depending on what it is passing through. For instance, the speed of light through water is 225,000 kilometers per second (140,000 miles/sec) and in glass about 200,000 kilometers per second (124, 000 miles per second).

So how do we use light years to describe the distance of astronomical bodies? Well, we can say the Earth is 26,000 light years from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is 100,000 light years across. The nearest star, Proxima Centuri, is 4.22 light years from us. We can also use light minutes to describe the distance to our sun as 8 light minutes. Our Moon is 1 ¼ light seconds away. The visible edge of the universe is around 13 billion light years away.

Another way to look at light years or light minutes is as a way of looking into the past. For example, if it takes light 8 minutes to get to our eyes from the sun, that means we are seeing the sun as it WAS 8 minutes ago. So, if the sun were to explode right now, it would be 8 minutes before we knew it and no sooner, no way, no how.

Skylab

Reading time about 70 seconds


The International Space Station is the second U.S. space station
to orbit the Earth. Before the ISS was Skylab, launched by NASA after a string of successful Apollo Moon missions.

Launched in May of 1973, it was occupied by three successive crews of three astronauts using an Apollo capsule staged on a Saturn V.

The 100 ton Skylab launched as a 'dry' third stage of NASA's mighty workhorse the Saturn V. It was an aluminum cylinder 118 feet long and 22 feet wide orbiting at an altitude of about 270 miles. Skylab was divided into two compartments with a workstation on the 'top' floor and living, sleeping and kitchen facilities on the 'lower'.

One of Skylab's solar panels was lost on launch and another held tightly against Skylab's thin skin by a troublesome retaining strap preventing it from unfurling and leaving the Lab with a severe power shortage. That and the overheating of the Lab from sunlight led to a harrowing space walk by two Skylab astronauts to jerry rig a sun shade and cut the strap keeping the solar panel from unfurling. The sun shade was rigged successfully and the solar panel was freed and deployed saving the mission.

Skylab was just what it's name implied, it was a lab in the sky. A telescope was used to study the sun and celestial objects while an Earth Resources Experimental Package or EREP was used to study forestation, crops, meteorology and conduct a search for mineral deposits. Skylab's crew's also established that man can live and work in a weightless and space environment for extended periods of time.

Skylab's final mission ended with the return to Earth of the last crew in February of 1974. Skylab reentered the Earth's atmosphere on July 11th 1979. Most of it burned up, but some of the bigger bits landed in Australia where lucky Aussies collected some remarkable souvenirs of Phase One of NASA's space program.

Water, Water Everywhere

Reading time approximately 90 seconds


In Mrs. Irksums English class, I learned some lines from the poem The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Our old sailor laments, 'Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink'. He was surrounded by a salty ocean and developed not only a mighty thirst, but an appreciation for that vital liquid.

We should all have an appreciation for this remarkable compound which, due to its oddness, makes life possible on Earth.

Water is a very simple molecule made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. This simple combination allows unique chemical and physical properties without which we simply wouldn't be here.

So what makes water so different?

Well for one thing, unlike other liquids, when it freezes, it floats. If ice sank, ponds and oceans would freeze from the bottom up making most life impossible in water. Instead it stays on top forming an insulating layer keeping the water under it from freezing.

Not only that but, unlike other substances, it absorbs a huge amount of heat before it gets hot and releases that heat slowly. Water also conducts heat easily. Heat moves easily in water from hot spots to cold spots reducing extremes in temperature. These two properties allow water to move heat around moderating the Earth's temperature and letting organisms more easily control their tissue temperatures.

One really amazing property of liquid water, putting it in a class by itself, is its ability to act as a universal solvent. It can dissolve just about anything-even gold- better than anything else. It is estimated that about 20 million tons of gold are dissolved in the oceans. Only problem is that it costs more to extract it than it is worth. Darn. This ability to dissolve nearly everything, along with its ability to flow, allows water to carry and move all sorts of things around. Plants, for instance, find this useful when water dissolves nutrients from minerals in the soil and carries them to their roots.

But, as the guy on TV selling the slicer and dicer says, “That’s not all folks.” Liquid water is a great place for chemical processes to take place. It provides a physical and chemical medium which facilitates many vital processes within cells as well as supplying hydrogen for such things as photosynthesis. The oxygen we breathe is what is leftover after green plants split a water molecule to get hydrogen. The very air we breathe comes from water.

As a famous naturalist once said, “There is magic in water.”

Water and Life on Mars

Of all the planets one has inspired emotions and inflamed the imagination like no other. The ancient Egyptians called it the Red One, the Babylonians the Star of Death, to the Greeks it was the Fiery One, the Romans called it Mars.

Humans have speculated about the possibility of life on mars for a long time. One of NASA's stated missions is to find out whether or not life exists or has existed on Mars. A Viking Lander in the 1970’s directly sampled the soil of Mars for microbial life, but found none. So NASA decided to take a different approach and took as a theme “Follow the Water.” If life as we know it does or has existed on Mars then there had to be water. This is not a new idea. Water has played an important role in the search for life on Mars for over a hundred years.

In the fall of 1877 an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, saw through his small telescope fine lines that appeared and disappeared as he strained to see detail on the Martian surface through our atmosphere’s dancing air. He called the fine lines he thought he saw canali, channels or canals in Italian. An English translator chose canal as the meaning of canali implying a construction by intelligent beings.

In 1894 a Boston businessman, Percival Lowell, built an observatory outside Flagstaff Arizona dedicated to the study of his all consuming passion, the planet Mars. Lowell believed that the canals Schiaparelli saw were built by intelligent creatures to bring precious water from the planet’s ice caps to irrigate the desserts of their arid and dying planet. He spent his life trying to prove it.

The writer H.G. Wells further fired the public’s imagination about intelligent life on Mars with his story, War of the Worlds, where Martians in giant machines come to conquer the Earth.

To answer the question of water on Mars NASA took several approaches. They looked for the geological signs such as those found on Earth associated with water. After all they reasoned, the effects of oceans or rivers would most likely leave the same marks on the rocks and soil of Mars as they did on Earth. Probes were launched to photograph and remotely study in detail the surface.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) launched in 2005 employed high resolution photography to photograph the surface for physical features similar to those found on Earth caused by liquid running water such as gullies and river beds. (See Photo - Mars) Ground penetrating radar equipment aboard the MRO probed up to a half mile deep searching for signs of ice and finding it near one of the Martian poles. Another instrument package aboard the Orbiter detected chemical signs of water in the form of carbonates. The scientists at NASA believe the carbonates were formed by the action of water on rocks in the Martian soil. Strong evidence of water ice had been found but more proof was needed.

Finally in 2008 the Phoenix Lander found the proof NASA needed It scraped a small trench in the red soil of Mars and found water ice. The case for life on Mars was now strong.

Following the discovery of water ice on Mars NASA plans to launch the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) in 2011. MSL is a roving chemical laboratory that can drive around Mars similar to the two current rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, but much more sophisticated. One of its objectives is to determine if conditions on Mars now or in the past has or has ever supported life.

Percival Lowell would be pleased.

Swine Flu and the Pandemic of 1918

The year is 1918. American troops have joined the allies fighting the war raging in Europe. By the end of The Great War over 100,000 American soldiers died. But it was not only bullets, bombs or poison gas that slaughtered them quickly and terribly by the tens of thousands. A ruthless killer too small to be seen by the most powerful microscopes of the age and too illusive to be known by the best scientific minds was responsible for the deaths of half of the U.S. troops killed in the European theater. The killer was influenza.

The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more humans worldwide in one year than died in the four years of the Bubonic Plaque in the mid thirteen hundreds. Between the years 1918 and 1919, 20-40 million died of influenza. Twenty-eight per cent of Americans were infected, 675,000 of all classes died, the rich and the poor. The flu raced around the world along trade routes and shipping lanes infecting twenty per cent of the population of the planet. It was a true pandemic.

So prevalent was the disease small children skipped rope to this grim rhyme.

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened a window,
And In-flu-enza.

The Centers for Disease Control, (CDC) and other government agencies were aggressive in their response to the so called ‘Swine Flu’ of 2009 partly because of what happened in 1918. The epidemic of 1918 was caused by a variant of flu virus that had not been seen before. As a result those exposed had little or no immunity to this novel virus. Because the Swine Flu virus is also a new strain, government agencies were afraid that millions worldwide could be infected and die just as they did in the early part of the 20th century.

The flu of 1918, like the Swine Flu, first appeared in the spring and like the Swine Flu was mild. So mild it was called the ‘three day fever’. Few deaths were reported and most patients recovered in a few days. The following fall the 1918 flu returned with incredible virulence. Millions were infected and millions died. Many of the affected died within hours or days. People told of visiting a neighbor one day only to find the next day the person was dead.

The so-called Swine Flu is a variety of the Influenza A N1H1 strain similar to the one that caused the 1918 flu, but that does not mean it will be as virulent. Many factors affect the virulence of a flu virus and even though they are the same subtype, they can be very different.

The N1H1 subtype is simply a description of two proteins found on the surface of most viruses and is used to differentiate between different strains of Influenza, such as Influenza A, one of the viruses responsible for seasonal Flu. The H refers to a protein called Hemagglutinin (He-ma-glue-tin-in). The Hemagglutinin helps the virus particle stick to the cell it will infect. There are 16 types. The N refers to an enzyme called Neuramidase (Nur-am-eeh-daze). There are 9 types. The Neuramidase helps the newly formed virus particles release from the surface of the infected cell. This enzyme is inhibited by anti-flu medications such as Relenza and Tamiflu. If the new virus particles stay stuck to the infected cell they can’t go out and infect more cells.

In light of the loss of life in 1918-19, the government was cautious in its approach to this latest novel virus. This is not to say that the Swine Flu will be just like the Flu of 1918 just because there are similarities, such as both being a strain of Influenza A H1N1 and starting out mild in the Spring.

Luckily, unlike the victims of the 1918 Flu, we have effective antiviral drugs, better public health and communication abilities, as well as the capability of producing a vaccine.

Unfortunately these were not available to the millions who died in the 1918 pandemic.

Moving to Friday

I am going to move this post to Fridays. Oh, if there is a science subject of particular interest to you let me know via comment and I'll see what I can find.

lyle

Robert Malthus and the Irish Potato

In 1798 Robert Malthus published a book entitled, An Essay on the Principle of Population.

As I understood it, the principle stated populations of humans grew in number until food became too scarce to sustain further growth. At this point people were able to stay alive, but just barely. Anything that reduced food production caused starvation until the population dropped to the level the amount of food available could sustain, again just barely. Making the problem worse, he maintained, was that the food supply can only increase arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4…) while populations grow geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16…).

In everyday terms, Malthus’s Theory states that the population rises to the level of sustainability. Increase the amount of food the population rises, decrease the amount of food and the numbers of people drops.

An example is the potato famine in Ireland.

Around 1590 the potato was introduced to Ireland. By the 1800’s the potato had become the staple crop of the poor with approximately 3 million subsisting on it alone. This was possible because the potato is rich in protein, carbohydrate, minerals, and vitamins including vitamin C. So, while a boring diet, it was nevertheless a healthy one. The Irish poor subsisting on the potato were healthier than the British poor living mainly on bread. The danger for the Irish poor was that the potato increased the food supply and as a result the population doubled from 4 million to 8 million. A large segment of the Irish population was now dependent on a reliable potato crop. This dependency resulted in a disaster of colossal proportions.

In the year 1835, a disease struck the potato crop wiping it out entirely by 1837. Nearly one million starved. The Irish population dropped by 25% due to starvation, disease caused by malnutrition and by emigration, many to America where the food supply was more than adequate for the growing number of people.

This tragedy had been predicted by Malthus. The population had grown as the result of an increased food supply and when that food supply disappeared the population shrunk back to a number that could be sustained by the available food supply.

There is a lesson to be learned here for our rapidly growing world population. Feeding people is not the way to save lives, as the more you feed the more you have to feed until you simply cannot feed them all. Of course, we cannot let people starve as a way of helping them, but we must come up with some means of stabilizing our population. To my mind it is the greatest threat our planet faces. Nearly all the problems we face, energy shortages, food shortages, disease, war, pollution, and destruction of habitat are made worse by our rapidly growing population.

And despite what many say, this is not a problem technology can solve. Eventually old Robert is right.

Swine Flu

Take it from me; a guy who worked with dangerous viruses for many years, a good way to avoid the Swine Flu is to KEEP YOUR HANDS AWAY FROM YOUR FACE.

Pardon me for shouting, but it’s important. Washing your hands is important too, but does little good if you subsequently touch a contaminated surface and then rub an eye, nose or an ear. Even if your hands were covered with flu virus it would be tough to infect yourself if you didn’t transport the bugs to your face. Flu germs do not infect you through your skin.

So, try to remember while in public to keep your hands away from your face.

By the way, this helps in preventing colds as well.

Health Disclaimer

This above is provided in an informational and educational manner only, with information that is general in nature and that is not specific to you, the reader. The contents of this site are intended to assist you and other readers in your personal wellness efforts. Consult your physician regarding the applicability of any information provided to you.

Three Questions

I found an interesting survey conducted by the California Academy for Sciences.

The results of a survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences reveals that Americans don't know a whole lot about science.
- Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
- Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
- Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water.*
- Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.

I don’t know what significance can be attached to the results reproduced above. People are busy trying to stay whole in a universe that sometimes seems bent on destroying them.If you asked me three science questions there’s a good chance I might not know all three. Maybe the point they were trying to make is that in a world coming to be dominated by science, we need to do a better job teaching science.

Here are the answers I found with a little research.

The Earth takes 365.25 days to revolve once around the Sun, the extra quarter of a day is dealt with every fours years by adding a day to February—leap year. I wonder if you had to know about the quarter of a day to get the answer right?

Humans came along around 65 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The extinction event is believed to have been caused by the impact of an asteroid six miles across in the vicinity of the Mexican Yucatan peninsula.

The Earth’s oceans cover approximately 75 percent of the Earth’s surface. We are really a water planet.

A Miss is as good as a Mile?

Between the paths around the sun (orbits) of Mars and Jupiter lies the asteroid belt, a swarm of debris left over from the formation of the inner planets- Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars- some 4.6 billion years ago. Occasionally the planet Jupiter’s gravity nudges some of this debris toward Earth.

Asteroids nudged so that they pass within 121 million miles of the sun are called Near Earth Asteroids(NEA). The ones that get our attention are those that cross the path of the Earth.

In 1908 a NEA about 300 feet across exploded over Siberia leveling over 500,000 acres of forest. About 65 million years before that a really big one, maybe over six miles across, hit near the current location of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and is implicated in the extinction of the dinosaurs. So, these NEA’s not only cross Earth’s orbit around the sun, but sometimes get there at the same time we do.

The nearest most recent approaches of NEA’s was in 1998 when one about 1500 feet across came within 64,000 miles of Earth, and in 2002 when another came within 74,000 miles. The Moon is about 240,000 miles from us, so they passed relatively close. Luckily close only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades, but the fact remains, these things do hit us.

In order to detect NEA’s that may be of significant danger, the U.S. Air Force, NASA and others are running surveys to detect and plot the orbits of NEA’s. So far a few thousand have been surveyed; luckily none of these is given much of a chance to hit us. But, as in most things, it is not what you know, but what you don’t know that can get you. A few thousand have been found, but we haven’t found all of them.

In addition to detecting possible impact NEA’s, scientists are researching ways to intercept and destroy or change the course of an asteroid that is heading for a rendezvous with Earth. Several robot spacecraft have been sent to determine just what these things are made of, such as the NEAR Shoemaker mission. The spacecraft flew by and photographed the NEA Eros in 1998 (see image) and landed a probe on its surface in 2001.

Should we worry about getting clobbered by a NEA? I don’t think so, but just to be safe I think it would be a good idea for Earth to keep looking over her shoulder.

It's All Stars!

On an average clear night you can see a few thousand stars. Every one of them belongs to our galaxy, the Milky Way---which by the way, was thought as late as the 1950’s to be the entire universe.

The Milky Way Galaxy has more than a few thousand stars in it. It is estimated to contain approximately 100-200 billion stars. The one’s we see with our naked eye happen to be close enough or bright enough to be seen. Even a modest pair of binoculars will show you thousands more.

So, how many stars do you think you could see if you could see them all?

Well, the astronomers tell us that they estimate there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe each with at least 100 billion stars. That’s 100 billion times 100 billion which equals—a lot.

This sort of begs the question--- if there are so many stars—are we alone?

Re-Cycle

Once we establish a colony on the Moon we will be dealing with the same problems of human input and output as the ISS. We eat and drink and then as a result we have--output. The ISS is already trying out a urine recycler, still a source of controversy among the spacies. One has been know to remark he didn’t mind drinking his own purified urine; he just didn’t want to drink some other guys.

I got to wondering what kind of quantities we’re dealing with and found these data in a book titled ‘The Moon’.

Input in pounds

Oxygen 1.84
Food 1.36
Water in Food 1.10
Food Prep Water 1.58
Drinking Water 4.09

Wash Water 12.5

Total 24.47

Output in Pounds

Carbon Dioxide 2.20
Respiration & Persperation Water 4.02
Urine 3.31
Feces Water 0.20
Sweat & Urine Solids 0.17
Feces Solids 0.07
Hygiene Water 12.00

Total 24.47

So, about 25 pounds in and out per day. Looks like a lot of that stuff out can be recycled or used for plant fertilizer-the Chinese have been using ‘Black Gold’ in rice patties for centuries.

But, ya know, I keep wondering about the guy who didn't want to drink his buddie's recycled urine. Wonder how he'd feel about his buddie's, uh-you know.

How do plant stems know to grow toward the sun?

They don't, it's built in.

Stems grow toward the sun because that is how the leaves they bear get the energy to produce the sugars they need for food. If they grew the other way they’d be roots. Important, yes, but not what we’re up to today.

Plants contain hormones (special cells release chemicals-hormones-which travel to another part of the organism to cause an effect). Light causes the plant hormone-auxin-to travel to the shadier side of a stem. Only blue, white or ultraviolet light will do, green, yellow or red don’t work. Obviously a pigment is involved to absorb those particular colors.

The auxin causes the plant cells on the shady side to grow somewhat longer. If the cells on the shady side of the stem grow longer while those on the sunny side don’t, then the stem is forced over toward the sun.

Many chemical weed sprays are actually synthetic auxins. When they are sprayed on growing plants they accelerate the growth to the point where the plants grow too fast and die.

Ooopppsss!

Thanks for your comment, Patrick, and thanks for reading. Unfortunately when I tried to publish your comment--it vanished. Again, my apologies.

Lyle

Sorry

I've got a deadline for an article I'm writing and won't make my Wed blog deadline. I'll try to have something on what makes plants grow toward the sun by Friday.

Lyle

Deadly Air

About two billion years ago, a deadly case of air pollution threatened to wipe out most life on Earth. The poison gas was released into the atmosphere by photosynthetic single-celled life forms like those in the picture---cyanobacteria. (Photosynthesis is the name of the process some single celled creatures and all plants use to turn sunlight into a form of energy they can use… carbohydrates for instance).

The deadly gas has a familiar name--- OXYGEN.

Oxygen? We need that stuff don’t we? Yes we do and so does most life. Without it we would perish in minutes. So how did oxygen go from a killer gas to a life sustaining one?

First, why was oxygen so dangerous and is it still dangerous? Yes it is because it can produce things called free radicals. Free radicals of oxygen are very aggressive, ripping up molecules used by cells for food, enzymes which cells need to do their work, vitamins, fats and a bunch of other molecules cells need to work properly.

(Free radicals may sound familiar because they have been mentioned a lot in news stories about nutrition along with anti-oxidants. Anti-oxidants are found in many foods, blueberries for instance. They neutralize some of these free radicals before they can do any harm.)

Something had to be done to combat this toxic threat. Fortunately nature is remarkable able to adapt. Billions of years ago, a mutation occurred in a cell’s photosynthesis genes, an error was made yielding two copies of that same gene when the cell divided.

Duplication of a gene is something a cell can exploit. It already has a working copy, so if one of the twins mutates further the cell is probably going to be OK and the new mutation may even be useful. One of the pair mutated further to produce a second kind of photosynthesis. This new process depended on the toxic gas and used up much of the oxygen before it could harm the cell. Talk about a lucky break. Life on the planet would be very different without those fortunate mutations. There are also structures in cells that neutralize oxygen photosynthesis doesn’t need.

This second kind of photosynthesis did not replace the first method, instead they work together. The older method produces the toxic oxygen in a process that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. (Plants combine carbon from carbon dioxide in the air with the hydrogen to form carbohydrates).

If you are wondering why an organism would produce a toxic gas that could kill it in the first place, here’s the deal. Photosynthetic cells need lots of hydrogen to make carbohydrates and billions of years ago Earth was running out of easily available hydrogen. Photosynthesizing cells solved the problem by splitting a molecule of water, using light energy from the sun, into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen was discarded as a waste product into the atmosphere. Minerals in the Earth’s crust combined with the oxygen for a long time, but eventually it could absorb no more and oxygen levels in the air grew to a toxic level. Fortunately the concentration of oxygen grew slowly enough for some organisms to adapt by way of those fortunate mutations.

(There are still many types of bacteria that are killed by exposure to oxygen. You’ve probably used hydrogen peroxide on a wound. Hydrogen peroxide breaks down into water and oxygen. The bubbly stuff you get when you pour it on a cut is you’re right--- oxygen.)

This second kind of photosynthesis not only uses up a dangerously toxic gas, the process using oxygen is also very, very efficient at producing energy. The new and improved cells really took off eventually covering the Earth. Is this lemons into lemonade or what?

Animals also have a process for using up oxygen before it can be harmful as well as tapping into a more efficient means of producing energy. The process is called cellular respiration, not to be confused with breathing. We animals are descended from cells that could exploit oxygen.

So, the next time you take a breath, think about that deadly gas your inhaling and the amazing way life on Earth adapted to —OXYGEN.

Fit to Drink?

I promise this will be the last of the fresh water blogs and I’ll make it short.

Some facts:

40 % US rivers are too polluted for fishing or swimming or aquatic life

46% of US lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming or aquatic life

Every year approximately 1,200,000,000,000 gallons of untreated sewage, storm water and industrial waste are discharged into US waters.

Each year 250,000,000 people become sick from water related diseases worldwide

Each year about 5,000,000 to 10,000,000 people die of water borne diseases worldwide

Remember we are talking about water, a substance that no living thing can live without. Given that, we should be more careful how we manage it. Fresh water is not only in short supply, but we are making a large percentage of it unusable.

Doesn’t seem like a good idea.

If you would like more information try this link http://www.flowthefilm.com/ a really great documentary on the world of water.

Hold the Salt--Just Water, Please.

Last week I gave the example that if ten full glasses represented all the water on Earth, the fresh water portion would only be about one-third of one of the glasses. And keep in mind we share that with every living thing from bacteria to sequoia trees, plus a good portion of the fresh water we have is frozen at the poles or cruising around in icebergs or flowing along in glaciers. In countries that receive little rain like Sub-Sharan Africa or in states like Nevada or in Southern California, which are really desserts with loads more people than the local water supply can accommodate, at some point the taps will run dry unless a way is found to make fresh water.

Nature does it for us by evaporating water from the oceans. The water vapor goes up the salt stays behind, and eventually the water vapor turns to clouds and fresh water fall from the sky, free.

That worked pretty well until there were too many of us using billions of gallons of fresh water for watering golf courses, lawns, filling swimming pools and billions and billions of gallons a day making stuff, like cars and ironically water bottles.

So what do we do now that we are literally running out of fresh water? Well, we can make fresh water out of sea water just like nature does, but the catch is that it is expensive. Right now the Middle East and Saudi Arabia make up to 70 % of their fresh water from sea water, but then the Saudi’s have plenty of money and lots of cheap oil to run the de-salting plants. (Wonder how they got so rich? A few decades ago the Saudis lived in tents barely making ends meet selling stuff to tourists on the way to Mecca.)

Anyway, there are two main ways water is de-salted---by evaporation or by a process called reverse-osmosis.

The evaporation method is pretty straight forward, you heat sea water, collect the water vapor, cool it and you have liquid fresh water and a really salty brine to get rid of, probably by dumping it back into the ocean, hopefully not on marine organisms that will be injured by high salt concentrations.

The other way is reverse osmosis which is pretty simple too. Basically you have a tank divided by a membrane, a membrane in this case is something that lets water through but not salt, put about 1200 pounds per square inch on the side with the salt water and collect the de-salted water on the other side of the membrane. That requires pumps to provide the pressure and they use energy.

Both methods are expensive, but if you or your industries are thirsty enough you’ll pay what you have to pay.

As of today there are 1200 de-salting plants in the United States with more in the planning stages. What water makers would really like to do is hook up de-salting plants with Nuclear Reactors to supply power. But, the problem here is, that safe as they claim the plants may be, nobody can agree where to store the thousands of tons of radioactive waste for thousands of years.

Not in my backyard, dude.

Water--Cool, Clear, Water

An alien race looking at the Earth from space would classify our Earth as a water planet, nearly 70% of its surface is covered by water and we human inhabitants are 60% water. Unfortunately for thirsty Earthlings, all but 0.3% is too salty to use. To put that in a way I can understand, if ten glasses of water represented all the water on Earth, only one-third of one of the glasses would represent all the fresh water we have. Considering there are now over six billion humans and counting, each of us shares fewer and fewer amounts of drinkable water.

So what kinda numbers are we talking about? Well, there are about two billion cubic miles of fresh water, mostly in lakes, rivers and ground water. Ground water is water that is underground and usually available by wells or springs.

If we distribute the fresh water equally among the six billion or so people alive today it comes out to about 330 million gallons each. Of course, a lot of the fresh water is used by industry, washing cars, taking showers and all the stuff we use fresh water for besides drinking.

The World Health Organization states that each person needs 264,000 gallons per year or about 700 gallons per day for basic human needs. That comes out to 1,500,000,000,000 gallons per year or one and a half trillion gallons.

In the U.S each of us personally uses twice the world average and we use 408 billion gallons each DAY for all purposes. Over one- fourth of that amount is used by only three states, California, Florida and Texas.

So, it is pretty obvious that somebody is going get pretty thirsty, by 2025 it is estimated that 48 countries, 22 of them sub-Saharan, will be critically short of fresh water.

Next week we'll talk about how fresh water gets recycled and how we can make more of 'the new liquid gold'.

The Spheres of the Atmo-sphere

This week I'm going to write about the spheres of the atmosphere, but only four of the more important ones---the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and the thermosphere.

The sphere we spend most of our time in and where most of the weather happens is the troposphere. This is the lowest layer of the atmosphere and extends up from 5 to 10 miles. This sphere is characterized by a decrease in temperature as you go higher and is the layer where most of the atmosphere’s water vapor is found. So, it’s not surprising that most of the clouds are found here.

The layer just above the troposphere is the stratosphere which is characterized by an increase in temperature as you go higher. Passenger jets like to fly as near to this layer as they can get as it is above most of the weather in the troposphere. The stratosphere extends from the upper boundary of the troposphere to an altitude of about 31 miles. It is in this layer that most of the ozone in the atmosphere is found. You’ve probably heard about the ‘depletion of the ozone layer’. The stratosphere is where most of this endangered molecule, ozone, is found. The importance of ozone is that it absorbs ultraviolet light before it reaches the Earth’s surface where it can do mischief to living things—like you and me.

Above the stratosphere is the mesosphere. This layer stretches between 31 and 50 miles and again you find a temperature decrease as you go higher. It is in this sphere that most meteors burn up, the ‘shooting stars’.

The next layer is the thermosphere. This layer begins about 50 miles up to around 435 miles. Somewhere in here is, I think, where the old ionosphere used to be, but I guess they don’t call it that any more. As the old name implied this layer has in it ionized gases .They get that way because radiation from the sun knocks loose one or more electrons from atoms of gas. These ionized atoms have an electric charge and can therefore reflect radio waves of certain frequencies allowing, for instance short wave radio waves, to travel thousands of miles. This was obviously more important before the days of communication satellites.

Nature doesn’t care what we call these various parts of the atmosphere; they are just names we give things so we all know what we are all talking about. And just because you know the name of something doesn’t mean you know anything about it. Hopefully now the names mean more and the next time your on an airplane and the pilot tells you that you’re flying at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet you’ll know you may be in the lower reaches of the stratosphere and probably won’t have to worry about bumpy air until you descend into the troposphere.

Why is the Earth Still Hot?

According to the folks who know a lot about such things, the Earth is over four and a half billion years old. So, it does make you wonder why it is still so hot. There are still many places where volcanoes shoot up molten rock and geysers of boiling water erupt. Some countries like Iceland even use this heat for heating and power.

If you go down into a deep mine, you will find that the temperature increases about one degree Fahrenheit for every 60 feet you descend. If you do the arithmetic that would make the core of the Earth one hundred thousand degrees F., which it is not, your thermometer will read only around eleven thousand degrees. So, the degree of heating must slow down at a level much deeper than we can dig. But, that is still hotter than the surface of the sun which comes in around ten thousand degrees F. Where does that heat come from?

The major source of heat is from the decay of the radioactive isotopes of Thorium, Uranium and Phosphorus occurring naturally in the Earth’s mantle, an 1800 mile thick layer lying under the Earth’s crust—the part we live on.

An isotope is another form of the same element differing only in the number of neutrons. Chemically they behave the same, but the additional neutrons can make the nucleus of some elements unstable. This instability results in the emitting of rays or particles in an attempt to become more stable. Nature doesn’t like instability.

When the radioactive isotopes of Uranium, Thorium and Phosphorus decay they release heat in the same way as the Uranium isotopes do in a nuclear reactor.

This heating will not go on forever. In a few billion years the isotopes heating the mantle will all have decayed and the planet will cool and become as cold as the moon, but by that time the sun will have become a red giant, its surface extending well beyond Earth’s orbit.

That will heat things up again and if we’re still around we had better have moved out of the neighborhood.