Actual explosions are more powerful than they are portrayed on television.

Explosions are a lot more powerful in real life than you see on television or in the movies. I was at home on Thursday, and I started to hear explosions. They came about once every thirty seconds or so, and they were rattling my windows, and I could feel the shockwave through the floor. I wondered, "What the hell is going on?" I went online and checked NextDoor. It turned out that the entire Salt Lake Valley from the point of the mountain all the way north to Davis county was feeling these explosions (that's about one hundred miles). The news had reported nothing at this point.

Eventually, the explosions stopped and the news finally reported that the explosions were the detonations of old equipment at the Tooele Army Depot on the other side of a mountain range called "The Ochre Mountains." Yes, you read that right. There's literally a mountain range in-between the Tooele Army Depot and the Salt Lake Valley. Additionally, my windows rattled where I live, and that's about fifty miles away from the Tooele Army Depot. Fifty miles!

My co-worker and friend, Leah, was flying into Salt Lake City and captured these photographs of the explosions that were shaking the ground.

You can kind of see the scale and the distance in these photographs. To me, these explosions look much smaller than anything "nuclear" that I've seen on television. They look smaller than that "mother of all bombs" or "MOAB" that Trump dropped on Afghanistan when he was president. Yet, they still shook my windows in a house a great many miles away and hiding behind actual mountains.

So, I guess I was kind of in awe of how powerful these explosions of weapons/munitions are. They are nothing like what you'd see on television. Real explosions are far deadlier and more destructive than the way in which they are portrayed, especially when you have people just slow walking away from an exploding structure behind them. There's literally no way that they could do that, and these explosions that were felt in the entire valley just validate my point.

I had no idea that Hawaiian rainbows were the most spectacular on Earth but there's science to explain why.

Having never been to Hawaii, I was fascinated to learn this weekend that the remote island chain produces the most spectacular and intense visible rainbows in the world. The scientific article went on to explain why. If you are curious, I'll explain what I learned.

First, and as a result of its isolation, Hawaii's remoteness means that the air is exceptionally clean and free of air pollution, continental dust, aerosols, and pollen. This doesn't just mean more rainbows, but it also means more rainbows with purer and more defined colors. Aerosols in the air in other locations of the Earth refract the color as the wavelengths approach the eye, diverting some of them and reflecting back only the color in the wavelength specific to the aerosol in question. This results in more muddled and less intense colors.

It can also work the opposite way with sunrises and sunsets, as aerosols can "filter" light already bending around the curvature of the earth to intensify one or two colors as they absorb the wavelengths from the white light and reflect sunset-y colors to the eye.

I also learned that rainbows are so important in Hawaii that their native language has different words to describe them. "Uakoko" means "earth-clinging" rainbows, "kāhili" means "standing rainbow shafts", "punakea" means "barely visible" rainbows, and "ānuenue kau pō" means "moonbows." These are just a few terms to describe the popular optical phenomenon.

A second reason for Hawaii's spectacular rainbows is that, being out in the middle of the ocean, its weather is heavily influenced by northeast trade winds. This causes frequent rain showers with clear skies appearing between those showers. Warm sea surface temperatures heat the air close to the surface of the ocean while the tops of clouds is cooled by the proximity to outer space, resulting in deeper rain showers in the morning that produce rainbows in time for breakfast.

A third reason is that Hawaii has big mountains which redirect trade winds to assist in cloud formation.

Now that I know all this, the big question is whether or not I will ever get over to Hawaii to actually see any of this. I'm not sure of that answer. I don't like to travel all that much, as mostly my mind sees a new place as just a change of scenery for things I do everyday, which is eat, go to the bathroom, entertain myself, and sleep. I've often found that I sleep much better in my own bed, than I do when traveling. So traveling really is just a change of scenery for things I do everyday but throw in "bad sleep," which means being tired all the time. I also enjoy reading. But I feel like if I went to a new place, and blew the money to do so comfortably, that reading a book would be a horrible way to experience it. 

So, anyway, the jury is still out on that question. However, if any of you have been to Hawaii (who are reading my post today), would you confirm please on whether the rainbows were the most spectacular you have ever seen? Inquiring minds (like mine) want to know.

Cosmos Possible Worlds starts on Monday and I can't wait to see it.

It's been a while since I've seen the first season of Cosmos (about six years). Oh how time flies. I was so impressed by it, that I asked Neil DeGrasse Tyson himself about whether or not they'd have a season two when I met him in 2014. You can read about that interaction HERE on my blog. Well, a lot of time has passed, and season two got completed a few years ago but got delayed due to an accusation levied at Mr. Tyson for sexual misconduct (Me Too everyone?). I'm not sure if anything ever came of that. What I am here to discuss is my excitement for Cosmos season two, even if it is appearing on the National Geographic Channel and not Fox (which is where the original aired).

I remember getting emotional watching Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Back in the day it was one of the first television shows I loved as a kid. The messages that were telescoped into my brain were something like, "humanity is capable of being so much more than what it is." 2014's Cosmos: A Space Odyssey is a worthy successor to the kind of STEM education that we saw in Sagan's original. In the very least, it should get people who watch it to look around our world and understand how it works, rather than just say, "God, therefore done." Without trying to provoke Christians who visit my blog, I just want to say, I respect your devotion and your faith, but please try and understand that the cost of blind faith is really quite high.

So here are my hopes for the second season of the series: two narrators (NDT and perhaps a woman?) That would be great for diversity, and NDT can sometimes get into a bit of melodrama. A second host may pull some of that back from the edge. I'd like better animations or live recreations. And I'd like fewer recaps following commercial breaks.

Anyone else planning on watching Cosmos: Possible Worlds?

Behold the actual size of a Woolly Mammoth.

I knew Woolly Mammoths were prehistoric creatures and that they were big. I know elephants are big, because I saw them in the now extinct Ringling Brother's Circus before it was not okay to have elephants in circuses anymore. And, yes, I've seen them in a zoo too. But the circus elephants left more of an impression on me because people were always crawling all over them and doing things.

So the above picture is a photo of "life-sized" sculptures of mammoths located in the Siberian town of Khanty-Mansiisk. I found it while reading scientific opinions written by mostly scientists on the ethical implications of bringing back Woolly Mammoths from extinction via cloning. Folks, that person posing with the trunk looks tiny in comparison. There's no mention of how tiny that person is, but I'm guessing maybe 5-foot six-inches or thereabout. Anyway...I'm a little in awe of how big these creatures actually were. I can't imagine how much a thing like that needed to eat, but I'm sure it was a lot. Honestly, it's kind of amazing how big some creatures get on our planet.

On a side note, did you watch the Oscars last night? I'll be blogging about the Academy Awards on Wednesday.

This 3D zoetrope of jumping frogs blew my mind.

The title says it all. Click on the video and watch it come to life. It's seriously awesome, and I imagine it works similar to the way that motion pictures work. When it finally reaches the correct speed, all sorts of magic happens. Have a good weekend, and I'll see you Monday.

I want to talk about the black hole the world saw this week.

When I saw the black hole image that scientists finally pieced together using brain power that I cannot even comprehend, I felt a moment of awe. It reminded me (briefly) of the one in Interstellar, and it also made me think about just how puny I am in the overall scope of our universe. It's also terrifying. Terrifying to comprehend its existence. Terrifying to think about this thing, which is apparently pretty common in the universe, and which the human race will probably never have the capacity to understand (as all physics kind of break down beyond the event horizon).

My co-worker summed it up pretty well when he looked at the picture of it. He said, "I wonder where it goes?" At first, I thought that I knew the answer to that question. My brain raced to think that it's just this huge conglomeration of matter where gravity is so powerful that even light can't escape it. But then I realized that this is only the beginning of describing what it is. It could very well "go somewhere." From people much smarter than me, apparently (if you could survive the blistering conditions present at the event horizon), you could survive the gravity there rather easily. It's only after you cross the point of no return that you begin to spaghettify...and where time (apparently) bends to a point where it completely stops. If time can be bent like this, why can't space itself? I guess they are one and the same thing? So my co-worker saying, "I wonder where it goes?" is probably voicing a reasonable question. It may go nowhere...or it could go to an entirely different universe. Or it could just kill you, like a lot of other things do in this universe. Contemplating what a black hole is seems to be like trying to wrap your head around the question: what happens to us when we die?

In the picture above, the dark spot in the middle I guess is filled with light, but it's light that has checked out of our universe. It's taken the permanent exit and gone somewhere else because of something called a singularity that exists at the middle and possesses infinite density. I guess Einstein experienced fear of a sort when his equations led him to posit the existence of these things. He was a really smart guy, which is something I think about when I experience fear as well.

It's incredible I got to see something like this in my lifetime.

How about you? Did any of you feel anything when you saw the image for the first time?

This bee is huge.

I've gotten stung by bees quite a bit in my life. My dad used to keep bees, because he was a farmer, and he liked the insects to be around to pollinate his crops. As a result we always had honey. Sometimes it was blue in color and tasted really exotic. The color of the honey is dependent on what flowers are used to make the honey (a lot of people don't know that).

The Wallace Bee is a rare bee I heard about on the way to work on Thursday. Scientists (at first) didn't know it actually existed, but they'd heard rumors. Well they tracked one specimen down in Indonesia and above is a picture that contrasts it with a regular honeybee.

The thing is huge. It's like the kaiju of bees, having somehow survived the prehistoric era to make it into our polluted, modern world. It's also apparently peaceful, having no stinger, and those jaws are basically like small salad tongs which it uses to carry stuff back to its nest.

It's nice to have some good news now and then, especially having just learned that we are only five generations from the apocalypse.

This photograph of a single Strontium atom is really neat.

This is a picture of a Strontium atom, which won the UK Science photography prize from over 100 different entries. It has been excited by a laser, which made this whole image possible.

Strontium has an atomic radius of 215 picometers, and people cannot see things whose size is smaller than the wavelength of light reflected back at you from "an object." The shortest wavelength of light humans can see is much larger than this atom (around 400 nanometers).

This atom in this picture is always giving off light, but as I've explained above, there's no way you could ever resolve that light with the human eye. It would be just like when you go outside at night and look up at the stars. When you do this, you can see a single point of light because it is so far away that its angular size is essentially zero. So how does something smaller than the wavelength of visible light, emit light that we can see?

Well, what's going on with this clever photography is that the photons its emitting have been excited. A little science here: electrons relax by emitting photons. We usually get lots of photons from across the surface of an object with appreciable size. But in the case of the Strontium atom, we're getting a bunch of photons from just one source (a single point) making it something that we could see with the naked eye.

I expect Pat Dilloway to say, "Neat" in the comments. But it is neat. At least, I think so.

While you were distracted by the looming November election scientists in Tennessee discovered how to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol with great efficiency.

While everyone was busy being disgusted at their fellow citizen's behavior as a result of the looming November election, something wonderful in the science world happened. And by wonderful, I mean it was one of the rare "happy accidents" that resulted in something that I think could be "game-changing" and give a lot of hope to a human race struggling with the inevitability of climate change.

According to the journal ChemistrySelect, scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee discovered a chemical reaction that turns carbon dioxide into ethanol. The process can happen at room temperature (so doesn't require hardly any energy), and it can be started and stopped easily and with little cost. When combined with the electricity grid, it could take advantage of times when there is abundant electricity by using it to create ethanol for long-term energy storage (during times when there isn't enough electricity).

Then there's the whole fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, so this process could potentially take some of the CO2 out of the air and turn it into energy to power all kinds of things. No matter where you stand on climate change (or if you believe it's a conspiracy invented by democrats), I think everyone can agree that turning carbon dioxide into ethanol is a win win for the entire human race.

Don't you think that's exciting? I'm excited. Science! 

New Horizons reached Pluto and all mankind should stand up and celebrate because this is an incredible achievement.

Fran Bagenal demonstrates how we should all feel about New Horizons and
seeing Pluto up close and personal for the first time in history.

A lot can happen in nine years. When the New Horizons spacecraft launched, Pluto was still a planet. However, it was relegated to dwarf planet status by the International Astronomical Union in October 2006. It went from being this thing we all learned as the ninth planet to "a celestial snowball with a surface of methane ice 3.6 billion miles from the sun." But like all good stories, the story of Pluto does not end there.

New Horizons didn't actually have to travel the whole 3.6 billion miles. It got to travel just over 3.26 billion miles because Pluto is one of those strange astronomical things that every once in a while, invades Neptune's orbit like the rogue it is. And when NASA switched New Horizons into data gathering mode for the encounter which took place yesterday, it started to receive images like the one below that you may have seen on NASA's instagram:

Pluto has a heart shape on it almost as if it were welcoming New Horizons to its special corner of the universe. This also isn't a picture that was snapped at its closest approach. So more images are to come which will probably be mind-blowing-ly awesome.

Pluto has several satellites. One is a moon called Charon (750 miles in diameter) which if you know anything about Greek mythology actually makes sense as Charon was the boatman to the River Styx while Pluto was the Lord of the Underworld. As you can see below, the distance between Pluto and its moon is so wide, you could fit one whole Earth between them. I like how there's a disclaimer of (Earth just for scale, it's not really there). I guess some people might have been confused because...science. It's other moons are Hydra, Kerberos, Nix, and Styx.

Some of the tidbits that NASA has shared with us are:

1) Pluto has a much younger surface than it's battered moon Charon. This makes scientists think that there could possibly be tectonic activity on this distant dwarf planet.

2) New Horizons has gathered so much data on Pluto that it will take 16 months to receive it all.

3) New Horizons is powered by plutonium, which is actually named after Pluto. The nuclear battery transforms heat into electricity, and will keep the probe in power until sometime in the 2030's. Until then, it will just keep sending back information.

4) It has a methane and nitrogen ice cap on its north pole (at -223 to -233 degrees Celsius). It's so cold that the ice wouldn't even be slippery.

5) NASA knows its awesome: yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the first image sent back from Mars.

6) It's surprisingly bright on Pluto which should give you new respect for the power of the Sun. You can actually go to this website for Pluto time so you can go outside at the time of day when it would be the equivalent of high noon on Pluto (Hint: It's not dark). My mind is blown thinking of how a ball of fire could light up something so completely from so incredibly far away. Then again, on one hundred degree days I've often thought of how immense and powerful the sun is to make it that unbearable from 93 million miles away--that's one hell of a heater.

People, we are living in amazing times. Mankind is finally beginning to chip away at the vastness of space. We've discovered thousands of planets out there, billions of galaxies, and I just recently heard that NASA is going to Europa because they think there's a liquid ocean on Jupiter's famous moon, and they want to find out if that's true. I think we should all take a pause from our latest outrage (choose your flavor of the week: Confederate Flag, Iran Deal, Greece Bailout, Serena Williams has been body shamed, Atticus Finch is a racist, Donald Trump thinks all Mexicans are rapists) go out after dark, and just turn our eyes upward at the stars and think about how much we have to learn and how far we have come. Maybe if everyone did this, we could develop a sense of community as a species and manage to treat one another decently for a little while and stop ruining our planet.

I can't stop staring at this chicken because I wish my body moved like that.

The science behind it is talked about in this article. Now I'm off to stare at the chicken some more.

Have a great Monday!

Technology is hard to define and sometimes a little frightening

I don't even know what technology is anymore, and that's weird given that my career is being a Technical Support Specialist. I guess I should clarify my statement. I know an iPad is technology. I also know that a computer is technology. But I failed to recognize Tesla as a technology company. I thought it was a car company. I have been corrected on this though. Tesla is a "tech" stock and not an "auto" stock like Ford or GM. Who knew?

Tesla Model S cockpit. It's not a car. It's technology.

Then their's Under Armour. Under Armour is not an apparel stock like Nike, even though Nike is the one it gets compared to most often. Nope, Under Armor is also a "technology" stock.

So I guess I shouldn't be confused about biological technology either. I read in Nature (the international weekly journal of science) about a semi-synthetic organism with an expanded genetic alphabet. If you're confused, here's a quote from the article that you can locate HERE:

"Organisms are defined by the information encoded in their genomes, and since the origin of life this information has been encoded using a two-base-pair genetic alphabet (A–T and G–C). In vitro, the alphabet has been expanded to include several unnatural base pairs (UBPs). We have developed a class of UBPs formed between nucleotides bearing hydrophobic nucleobases, exemplified by the pair formed between d5SICS and dNaM (d5SICS–dNaM), which is efficiently PCR-amplified and transcribed in vitro, and whose unique mechanism of replication has been characterized. However, expansion of an organism’s genetic alphabet presents new and unprecedented challenges: the unnatural nucleoside triphosphates must be available inside the cell; endogenous polymerases must be able to use the unnatural triphosphates to faithfully replicate DNA containing the UBP within the complex cellular milieu; and finally, the UBP must be stable in the presence of pathways that maintain the integrity of DNA."

To make a long story short, scientists have taken a plasmid and given it three base pairs. In nature, there are only two base pairs made of adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G). Let me make this clear: everything in the world...the entire "tree of life" that Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about on Cosmos...is born out of information encoded on differing arrangements of those "building block" bases. And science has just introduced two "new" bases and made pairs with them.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is technology. I seriously feel like quoting Steve Jobs right now. I know, I know, I've been on a Steve Jobs tear lately but the man had so many good things to say. So indulge me. Here's the quote: "Older people sit down and ask, 'What is it?" but the boy asks, 'What can I do with it?"

I feel like an old man here because not only am I asking "what is it?" but I'm a little afraid of the answer. And there's no part of me that wants to ask, "What can I do with it?" These third base pairs don't have any information on them. They are a blank slate waiting for scientists to encode whatever they would like to encode on them. Sure, scientists claim that by expanding the genetic alphabet, more data can lead to the development of new drugs, diagnostic tools, vaccines, and nanomaterials. And science fiction is replete with examples of fictional characters making claims like this. But from reading science fiction, we also know that something like this could also lead to weapons. Seriously, it's literally a tired old trope to have the military show up in some scientific lab and pose the question, "How can this be weaponized?"

I am reminded of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist and man who is known as the father of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer speaking in a 1965 television broadcast about the moments following the Trinity atomic bomb test said, "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." You should watch this video because you can feel that he's not exactly happy about this. That's probably because he knew what he'd just done: ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

When the United States dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima on the morning of August 6th, 1945, the Japanese had no idea what had happened. All communication with that city just ended. The fate of Hiroshima was a complete mystery until they had someone fly over there in an airplane to look out a window and tell them what they saw. Remember Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park? "Yeah. Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

In an article on io9 about this invention, author George Dvorsky said that the unnatural DNA has a built-in safety mechanism; the modified plasmid can only survive if it's fed artificial nucleotides required to replicate the DNA. My skepticism rears its ugly head in this gif:

I admit that my knowledge of genetics is puny. But some kinds of technology scare me because I don't understand them. That (and to be honest) there's a part of me that's learned to distrust humanity in general. Best intentions often go awry, and the world does not have a shortage of psychopaths the last time I checked.

The Deacon alien from "Prometheus", a biologically engineered weapon.

I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson live at the University of Utah and he made me dream about tomorrow

Dr. Tyson exudes personality on stage. I was impressed by how entertaining,
informative, and humorous he was. And I loved it when he read from "The Book
of Carl", i.e., an honorary nod to Carl Sagan who was so important in my life
that I quote from him in my novel, Oculus (it's no coincidence that the story
takes place at Ivy League school Cornell University, Sagan's Alma Mater.

Wednesday night at around seven o'clock mountain time, Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City took the stage at Kingsbury Hall here at the University of Utah to thunderous applause. He immediately started talking about Pluto and how he "drove the car" that got it reclassified as a dwarf planet and how hate mail (see below) has poured into his office ever since. "I didn't fire the gun, I just drove the car." Maybe the New York Times started it all by taking the reclassification of such notable scientists as Tyson and making an eye-catching front page headline "Pluto's Not a Planet? Only in New York."

If you take the time to read the piece I'm talking about by following the embedded link, it's kind of humorous. Also, here's the letter that Tyson displayed behind him, and it had me laughing my ass off. In my opinion, if you're going to get hate mail, this is the best kind to get.

You gotta love any child that starts a letter in earnest with "Dear Scientist" and then goes on to be concerned about science books not being "right" and concerned about the possible people who may live there who won't exist if Pluto ceases to be a planet. I'm also fairly sure that Dr. Tyson responded to this little girl by handwritten letter (and I'd love to read that). I say this because it's simply too cute to ignore.

Tyson went on to give a summary of scientific observations about the night sky that many of us never notice (probably because we live in cities that drown out the light of the stars). For example, Uranus was originally discovered by a Brit who named the planet "George" after the English King. Really?

Thinking about the order of the planets in that way, i.e. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, ... and George makes me chuckle. Later it was renamed by Britain to a more suitable roman god with one concession: the moons of Uranus would be named for Greek characters that appear in Shakespearean plays (or in a poem by Alexander Pope). That's how we get Titania and Oberon (A Midsummer Night's Dream), Ariel (The Tempest), Umbriel (The Rape of the Lock), Miranda (The Tempest), Cupid (Timon of Athens), and Mab (Romeo and Juliet). You see, people that discover scientific things get naming rights, and this was a more fascinating topic than I thought it would be. Allow me to elaborate.

Ancient Baghdad as depicted by an artist. Perhaps this might have been
a scene during the Golden Age of Islam.

People have been looking up at the sky for a long time, and Dr. Tyson focused his lecture on a 300 year span in history known as the Golden Age of Islam. According to Dr. Tyson, Baghdad (during this era) arose as a cultural epicenter of all things scientific and wonderful.

Baghdad welcomed people from far and wide who had differing views and observations of the natural world. Arabs invented algebra and trigonometry and gave us the concept of zero (which even the Romans had no clue). They gave us words like algorithm and a numeral system we still use today. Because of the golden age of Islam humans explored biology, medicine (hospitals were open 24-hours and a system requiring medical diplomas to license doctors was put into place), and they gave us some of the most fantastic architecture and engineering the world has ever seen. And of course some people turned their eyes to the heavens to begin what would become the field of astronomy.

Ibn al-Haytham was an Arab scientist,
mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher
who made significant contributions to the
principles of optics, astronomy, and the
scientific method. Before him, people used
to think we were able to see because beams
of energy emerged from our eyes. Picture
Superman and his x-ray vision and you get
the idea behind "emission theory," which
proved to be completely wrong.

This is why most of the brightest stars in the sky have Arabic names. Betelgeuse (in the constellation of Orion) and Pollux are just two examples. But all of that scientific advancement ended after 300 years because there was a cultural shift in the Islamic population away from scientific questioning and observation.

Tyson gave an example of this by pretending to knock something off of his podium. Instead of pursuing why something falls to the earth and looking for a reason, the people in the region explained the event as simply being "Allah's will."

Tyson says you can't go through a day in the Muslim-centric area of the world without hearing someone make a reference to "Allah willing, the weather will be good tomorrow" or some other such nonsense. They've completely stopped their participation in forward and advanced scientific exploration and fall back upon the idea that "god did this" for all things they don't understand or don't want to understand. Religion has basically become the ultimate excuse to stop learning.

Dr. Tyson says this is a tragedy because the Muslim world comprises 1.4 billion people; that's 1.4 billion people that have washed themselves of all responsibility to make the human race better. "There have only been 2.5 Nobel Prize winners in the realm of SCIENCE that have come from Islamic backgrounds. I say .5 because one was in economics."

Imam Al Ghazali

When Dr. Tyson frames the conversation like this, it's sobering. Literally one-sixth of the world could care less about science. So how did all of this start? He put up a picture of an Imam named Al Ghazali. A religious reformer and mystic who (in Tyson's words) is one of the people responsible for the decline of science and civilization in Muslim culture with works like Mathematics is the work of the Devil, Al Ghazali essentially started a movement to get people to accept the following: all events had to be caused by the divine instead of being the product of some external force.

In other words, Al Ghazali killed curiosity and Tyson insists that this is going on in America today. It saddens me to agree so wholeheartedly with Dr. Tyson. Here's how I identify the problem at hand: we now have an entire population of self-absorbed scientifically unmotivated adults, and it hurts all of us because adults are in charge. Think about it. Adults wield resources and create or destroy opportunities. In my own state of Utah, assault on education from the Eagle Forum is continuous. For example, these backward thinking conservatives want to remove sex education of any kind from the classrooms to just teach one thing: abstinence.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview--not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. We live in a world where we see headlines like "Eighty percent of the passengers who survived had studied the locations of the exit doors on takeoff." This headline doesn't provide any real information. It's not like we can ask the dead people if they studied the locations of the exit doors. And what about a congressman who (Dr. Tyson points out) said, "I've changed my views 360 degrees on that subject!" The guy that said this makes a huge salary, yet remains scientifically and mathematically ignorant (either that or diabolically evil). We live in a world where elevators don't have a 13th floor because superstition is so powerful that people actually fear a number. And we live in a world that's afraid to use negative numbers to indicate basements. Instead we get "B" for "Basement" and "SB" for "Sub-Basement." Dr. Tyson says, "We have a perfectly established numeric system that can eliminate the need to buy a vowel."

"I don't recognize America today," Dr. Tyson said over and over. He emphasized that his reboot of Sagan's Cosmos is an attempt to reignite America's curiosity about science. "It's to remind you of how science works." As a viewer and fan of Dr. Tyson, I have to say that Cosmos is pretty darn amazing. Hearing him talk about future episodes of the show was exciting. But he also went on to show the audience how insignificant we really are by telling a story from his own life.

Cosmos is a reboot of Sagan's mini-series filmed a
generation ago. Sadly, it will have only 13 episodes like
the original. I got the answer straight from Dr. Tyson
himself in the Q&A period (see below).

Here's how it went down. Dr. Tyson was invited to speak before a crowd of very bright and young science and mathematics scholars who had all won awards and were headed to the colleges of their choice (boy wouldn't that be nice?).

One young man wore a Harvard tie and Dr. Tyson took the tie away from this man and asked him, "Why are you wearing this tie? Is it because you want the respect of others who recognize the pedigree of an education from Harvard?"

The young man admitted that this is exactly why he wore the tie and this is how Dr. Tyson responded: "The reason you want this is because people that went to that institution before you went out into the world and accomplished great things. After they did these great things, the institution claimed them as one of their students." Tyson eluded in his tale that many people focus on the wrong thing: an educational pedigree. "Accomplish great things and no one will care about your educational background. Does anyone here know what school Einstein went to? Do we care? Nope. He won the Nobel Prize in Science because his achievements exceeded that prize." For those of you that may be concerned about the young man's tie, Dr. Tyson said he intends to return it to him soon and follow-up on the guy's ambitions and projects now that he's graduated.

Because I work in the public sector, this uncomfortable truth from Tyson really struck a nerve. In government, education is valued over skill (at least in the agency I work for). It has to do with justifying the expenditure of tax payer money. In order to do that, people have to have letters after their names. In the private sector, companies like Google and Facebook could care less about your education. If you have the gravitas and ability to demonstrate incredible skill in the field of software engineering, you can go to work for Silicon Valley right out of high school and make a six-figure salary. My point? Skill is prized above education.

Dr. Tyson touched on how people and their tremendous "Egos" have damaged scientific discovery. For example, many cultures raise us to believe that we are special in this universe or that we were created to rule all other things. In his opinion, this is far from the truth (as disparaging as it may be). But he went on to say that there's something deeply spiritual about being connected by DNA to all living things. I tend to agree. As an example, Dr. Tyson told the audience that there are more bacteria in your colon right now than all the people born on this world even if you go back to the very beginning of time. And every once in a while, those bacteria will remind you of who's in charge.

One of the slides Dr. Tyson showed the audience was a phylogenetic cross-section of a "Tree of Life" showing the relationship between species whose genomes have been sequenced as of 2006. The very center represents the last universal ancestor of all life on earth:

Click to EMBIGGEN

Click on this sentence for an even bigger picture of the above so that you can see all the names going around the outside.

Homo sapiens occupies one small line in this list of species at about the eleven o'clock position. If that doesn't make you feel insignificant, then he followed up with a picture of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft (Saturn was gorgeous by the way) that shows a pale blue dot called Earth. Then he read from Carl Sagan's own book Pale Blue Dot: A vision of the Human Future in Space:

"Consider that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity--in all this vastness--there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

"The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." -- Carl Sagan

Dr. Tyson showed us how America used to dream about tomorrow by putting up an image from the 1950's. I don't have a copy of the exact image Dr. Tyson used in his presentation, but it looked something like "Tomorrowland" as seen below:

He said that we no longer have these visions; that it basically ended when America stopped going to the moon. "We don't even have the ability to visit our own space station. We have to rely on Russia, which is one of the reasons why we don't want to make them too angry with sanctions over their invasion of Crimea." Again, he reiterated the theme of "I don't recognize this country." He put up a map that showed nations distorted on purpose to reflect scientific growth. You'll notice that the United States is now smaller in contribution than Japan, Europe, and China. This is a result of people electing representatives who do not value science and the thing it inoculates us from (here's looking at you Michelle Bachmann, Ted Cruz, and insane Senator Mike Lee from my own state of Utah--I hang my head in shame).

The world map of scientific growth by country.

Notice Africa. It's non-existent. An entire area of the world that rejects science in favor of something else. Europe is huge because the United States walked away from the super collider project in the 1990's (that could have discovered the Higgs Boson not to mention made thousands of jobs for people in Texas), and we allowed the Europeans to achieve that milestone. Brazil is growing because of aerospace and Japan remains huge as it has been during the entirety of the post World War 2 generation. Tyson does not want the United States to go the way of the Golden Age of Islam.

So why should America be worried about the decline of science? Well for one, "Science inoculates you from cult leaders by giving you the tools to question their authority." He described how the Heaven's Gate cultists all committed suicide because they believed a spaceship was traveling behind the comet Hale-Bopp and that (through dying) they'd arrive on the spaceship wearing their shoes and carrying their backpacks. In every generation there are people who claim the world is ending and they base it on some lie that has no evidence. Science gives you the ability to question these claims. "Oh you say there's a spaceship? Can you show it to me?"

The vest he's wearing was bought right here at the planetarium in Salt
Lake City. He said there were no more on the shelves and the guy
working the register had one on and offered to sell it to him. It remains
one of the most favorite of his vests to wear.

In the question and answer session, I actually got to ask Dr. Tyson a question. Boy was that fun. I said, "Dr. Tyson, will there be a second season of Cosmos?" He reacted with a huge smile and capered about the stage comically. "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HARD IT WAS TO GET THE FIRST SEASON to television!? Holy cow. I don't know. It's up to Fox, but as much as I love it someone else needs to do it. I'M A SCIENTIST. I want to be in my lab and watching my kids grow up." He shook his head to many affectionate "awhh's" coming from the audience (including my own) and replied, "Folks, that's how it works. Someone else gets to take over. We pass the baton to someone new."

Well I asked a question and got an answer. I love Cosmos, but it appears there will be only thirteen episodes just like Sagan's mini-series that was on PBS a generation ago. I guess I will have to savor them. TL;DR: I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson live at the University of Utah and he made me dream about tomorrow. It's a dream I haven't had in some time, and I'm glad it's back.

Do you think the United States can turn itself around, get a hold of education, and instill the love of science in the next generation? Do you think the first man on Mars will be an American? I'd like to think so, but Neil DeGrasse Tyson is right. Only science will show us the way.

Cosmos blew my mind and Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the perfect man for the job

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one of my favorite people. I was really surprised to see that he was coming to Kingsbury Hall here at the University of Utah (on the hill) this March and even more surprised when I scored some tickets to the event for free! So naturally, as a fan, I tuned into the premiere episode of Cosmos last night and I was not disappointed.

For those of you who don't know Tyson, he's a celebrity astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. The guy is pretty amazing, having been influenced by a man I have profound respect for: Cornell's own Carl Sagan (sadly he left us before the turn of the century).

Cosmos is a reboot of Sagan's successful series that last saw television more than a generation ago. Last night's episode had us flying around the universe in a really cool ship that struck me as an all chrome version of the one that delivered the huge angry robot in "The Incredibles" during that movie's finale. Impressively, Tyson boiled down the many epochs of the universe's birth from the Big Bang to present day by representing it all on a twelve month calendar. All of recorded history on this calendar took place on the last day of the last month in the last sixteen seconds. That puts so much into scale. We are literally a blip that emerged during the last hour of the last day of the last month of the cosmic calendar and so much has come before us that the amount to study is literally immeasurable.

But most profound to me was Tyson's claim regarding the scientific method. "It's so powerful," he says, "that in just four hundred years it's taken us from learning about our planet's place in the solar system to making footprints on the moon." That's incredible, and I agree. We need to question everything, keep learning, and pass the torch to the next generation of scientists so that they can unravel more of life's mysteries.

Not long ago, I'd read that Tyson believed we should stop calling dark matter and dark energy by those names. Instead we should refer to them as "Fred" and "Wilma." This alone made me think that Tyson was perfect for this job: to create a show that would incite the imaginations of so many young people to use science as a way to explain our universe. And if you don't get the reference of "Fred" and "Wilma," it's because Tyson believed that the terms "dark matter" and "dark energy" were misleading. For one, science doesn't know what dark matter is. It should be called "dark gravity." And for another, just having the word "dark" makes people think that the two might be related, but they're not. So yeah..."Fred" and "Wilma" works beautifully.

Mr. Tyson, you blew my mind in your show last night. But in this case, blowing my mind is a lot of fun, and I hope you continue to do so as long as the show is on the air. Who knew learning could be so much fun?

Randomly I ask how does an egg get its shell? The answer is kind of surprising.

Diagram of the egg factory that is a chicken.

So the other day, I was standing at the stove making scrambled eggs when I wondered, how does a chicken get its shell? It seemed odd to me that a chicken could lay one of these large things every single day and that it could come out in its own package. So I asked Google and found a video that explains it. But here are some facts I also discovered about hens that I find kind of cool.

1) A hen's ovary contains all of the ova it will ever have when its hatched.
2) The ovary begins to convert ova to egg yolks when she is mature.
3) You need the right lighting conditions to get hormones to stimulate ova to develop into yolks.
4) Yolks are released from the ovary into the oviduct when they reach the right size and travel down the oviduct to acquire their whites, membranes, color, and shell.

Anyway, below is a short video that explains how the actual shell takes shape. I thought I'd share it in case any of you out there also wondered how an egg got its shell. If you are one of these curious people, watch and learn. :) It's actually pretty interesting.

Have a great Tuesday.

Find out what's at the center of a black hole with an animation explaining some of Stephen Hawking's big ideas

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has a new book out. I read his last one called The Grand Design and liked how it explored the dual slit experiment. It provided some inspiration for one of my stories. Sometimes though, his ideas can be difficult to grasp. I love this cartoon that boils them down and provides answers to some of the hardest questions like:

1) What's at the center of a black hole?
2) What happens at the edge of a black hole?
3) Why is Stephen Hawking our most famous living scientist?

In the least, it's the cutest portrayal of Hawking radiation ever even though some old Disney fans might miss this guy:

I sincerely hope I'm not the only one who gets this picture. That will only confirm how truly old I am. Have a great Thursday.

A supercell thunderstorm that will leave you in awe of its majesty and power

Below is a video of the formation of a supercell thunderstorm that will leave you in awe of its majesty and power.

This time-lapse video by photographer Mike Olbinski is a work of art. He does a lot of these kind of videos and managed to capture this one near Booker, Texas on June 3rd, 2013 (it took him four years to find just the right one to record). I urge you to watch it, and I promise that you'll not regret what you see. I personally think the footage is spellbinding. Note the houses (they are little bumps on the horizon) to give the thing a truly awesome scale.

A supercell near Booker, Texas from Mike Olbinski on Vimeo.

Is there real world science that could make Marvel's Banshee fly?

Caleb Landry Jones was the actor who played Banshee
in the Marvel comic movie X-Men: First Class.

As some of you may know, Banshee is a Marvel Universe character that possesses a sonic scream capable of harming enemies, causing physical vibrations, and flying (as shown in the movie X-Men: First Class). I'm ambivalent in my feelings toward this character, however, I was wondering if sound really could make someone fly. It's one of those things that kind of hung in the back of my mind. I know the writers of comic books sometimes go to great efforts to explain superpowers as best as they can using scientific principles to lure the audience into a suspension of disbelief. The same thoughts also go into magic systems, which are all the rage these days in fantasy fiction. So here's the question of the day: is there real world science that could make Marvel's Banshee fly? It turns out that the answer is yes.

Sound by itself may not allow someone to fly around at incredible speed, but it can be used to defy gravity. I guess once you accomplish this perhaps all that's needed is a propulsion system, right? Allow me to introduce you to a phenomenon called acoustic levitation.

Below is a video that demonstrates how sound waves can be used to levitate individual droplets of solutions containing different pharmaceuticals. The machine featured is called (simply enough) an acoustic levitator and was originally developed for NASA to simulate microgravity conditions. It uses two small speakers to generate sound waves at frequencies slightly above the audible range--roughly 22 kilohertz. When the top and bottom speakers are precisely aligned, they create two sets of sound waves that perfectly interfere with each other, setting up a phenomenon known as a standing wave.

At certain points along a standing wave, known as nodes, there is no net transfer of energy. Because the acoustic pressure from the sound waves is sufficient to cancel the effect of gravity, light objects are able to levitate when placed at the nodes. Simple enough concept to grasp, right? I think this video is incredibly cool and you should watch it :) It's not magic, it's science. Have a great Tuesday and don't forget the IWSG tomorrow!

Material that's metallic and glass-like but made from cement is NOT science fiction at Argonne National Laboratory

I read about this HERE in an article by Tona Kunz.

Science, you so crazy. Transparent aluminum sounded cool when I was a kid. Who
knew the stuff was actually real? After reading the article posted as a news release
on Argonne's site, I think I just crapped my pants. And for those of you too young to
know, this is a screen capture from Star Trek IV. That's Scotty on the left and Bones on
the right. Scotty is talking into a computer mouse, because he's not used to such
primitive technology. After all, he's the chief engineer of the Enterprise.

To paraphrase Tony's article, scientists have only this month unraveled a formula for turning liquid cement into liquid metal. I know, this sounds ridiculous, and I'm trying to wrap my head around this even as I jot this down for my blog. But I can't help but think of that scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when Scotty gives the secret to making transparent aluminum to a man in a Plexiglas plant. Best line from that movie (for the record) is: "THERE BE WHALES HERE!"

The process the scientists at Argonne discovered makes cement into a semi-conductor. If you're like me, you might ask "What does this mean?" and "How soon will I be able to take a transporter to and from work?" Well (unfortunately for us) there's no transporter applications yet. However, you're going to see it show up in your consumer electronics as thin films, protective coatings, and in the manufacture of computer chips. Here's a diagram of how thin films work in solar cells so you can better understand how your "cement" is going to look in the very near future:

Or if you aren't into solar panels, then how about a thin film laptop computer? Here's one in development from Cymbet Corporation using thin-film battery technology that's far superior to the clunky batteries in today's laptops. This laptop can be recharged thousands of times without ever seeing a depreciation in the time it stays charged (nice eh?), will retain its charge way better than the batteries you are using right now, will charge super fast, and doesn't have toxic chemicals to damage the environment. Imagine writing your next masterpiece on this baby.

This thing is a battery. Yeah, you read that right.

Computer chips made from cement? Yeah, it's happening. But why is it happening? Well, there's a need for materials that have resistance to corrosion (traditional metal is rather poor at resisting corrosion), that is less brittle than traditional glass (you'll be able to see through this cement), yet has conductivity, low energy loss in magnetic fields, and fluidity for ease of processing and molding. Cement can do all of this by a process called electron trapping. DISCLAIMER: I'm not going to go into what electron trapping is because, quite frankly, I can only barely grasp the concept myself.

Also, to make this stuff, they had to blast levitated cement with lasers until it melted and turned into liquid metal. You should read that last line again. THEY LEVITATED CEMENT AND BLASTED IT WITH LASERS UNTIL IT MELTED AND TURNED INTO LIQUID METAL. My reaction:

We don't just live in interesting times. We live in AMAZING times. Talk about all the fuel us science-fiction writers now have in our toolbox for genuine HARD science fiction stories...I'm truly blown away. Here's hoping that science somehow inspires you in your endeavors. Have a great Wednesday.

Who could have predicted that Sweet Home Alabama would make fiction writers obsess over fulgurite for more than a decade

"Sweet Home Alabama" (the movie) came out in 2002 and remains one of my favorite romantic comedies of all time. I just love the story and everyone is just absolutely perfect in it. But one of the best scenes in the movie is when the whole thing comes full circle, and Reese realizes that the one love of her life is now a successful glass blower selling fulgurite sculptures in his shop. What is fulgurite you might ask? It's what happens when lightning strikes sand. At the beginning of the movie, two kids are kissing on the beach, and lightning strikes a metal rod that sticks out of the sand, creating a breathtakingly beautiful glass sculpture.

Now, fulgurite is never as pretty as it is in the movie "Sweet Home Alabama." But that hasn't stopped it from cropping up in the popular CW show "Supernatural" as an ingredient to summon "Death" or from new age hippies finding it on beaches to make cheap jewelry that they purport is infused with "magical energy." It's even in the horrible Hillary Swank movie "The Reaping" as fulgurite wind chimes.

Who could have predicted that "Sweet Home Alabama" would make fiction writers obsess over fulgurite for more than a decade?

Sometimes I think there's this collective unconscious of fiction writers out there who are so driven to be "original" that they all go in search of something weird that supposedly "no one" has used before and it all channels down to one thing that everyone IN FACT uses. In this situation, I think fulgurite has been picked over for ten years in just about anything that has to do with paranormal stuff.

Fulgurite in Sweet Home Alabama

Real Fulgurite

I mean...fulgurite is one of those things that logically, I should know nothing about. Yet I'm completely informed about it because it's in basically every show that I've watched because paranormal fiction is so hot (and has been hot for about a decade). Like you don't even need to explain what it is to me anymore (and I'm thankful that I saw "Sweet Home Alabama" years ago because that explanation is part of the love story).

If someone name drops "fulgurite" I'd be like "Oh yeah...the Winchesters used it to summon 'Death' in this one episode and then in last week's episode, Dean learned he could get 'fulgurite' in a new age shop and oh Hilary Swank had it in 'The Reaping' but it isn't as pretty as the one that was in 'Sweet Home Alabama'...I TOTALLY know what fulgurite is girlfriend..." and I'm sure that the person I was talking to might be mortified because I just took something that they thought was original and showed them...no...it's been done to death and you really should think of something else :(

I sorry. Anyway, now you too know what fulgurite is. May you find some on the beach and remember the words from "Sweet Home Alabama", the show that gave us the best version of fulgurite:

"[T]hat's what happens when lightning strikes..."

And in a love story, a lightning strike is the most important thing. Have a great weekend.