Category Archives: Science

“Gosh, I’ve worked on Cassini for almost an entire Saturn year.”

BBC News: ‘Our Saturn years’. Cassini’s epic journey to the ringed planet, told by the people who helped make it happen. By Paul Rincon.

““The Voyagers gave us a really wonderful impression of Saturn. It’s a beautiful gas giant,“ says Nasa’s director of planetary science Jim Green.

Prof Andrew Coates, from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey, UK, agrees:

“Saturn is the most spectacular planet in our Solar System. The incredible rings, visible even in binoculars or a small telescope, make it stand out compared to all the rest.“

In places, the rings are only about as tall as a telephone pole. Yet from end-to-end they are more than 20-times as wide as the Earth. “

Link via MetaFilter.

“The Double C-Word”

The New York Times: President Trump’s War on Science.

“The news was hard to digest until one realized it was part of a much larger and increasingly disturbing pattern in the Trump administration. On Aug. 18, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine received an order from the Interior Department that it stop work on what seemed a useful and overdue study of the health risks of mountaintop-removal coal mining.

The $1 million study had been requested by two West Virginia health agencies following multiple studies suggesting increased rates of birth defects, cancer and other health problems among people living near big surface coal-mining operations in Appalachia. The order to shut it down came just hours before the scientists were scheduled to meet with affected residents of Kentucky.

The Interior Department said the project was put on hold as a result of an agencywide budgetary review of grants and projects costing more than $100,000.”

But there’s more:

“Last week, Mr. Trump nominated David Zatezalo, a former coal company chief executive who has repeatedly clashed with federal mine safety regulators, as assistant secretary of labor for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. He nominated Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma with no science or space background, as NASA administrator. Sam Clovis, Mr. Trump’s nomination to be the Agriculture Department’s chief scientist, is not a scientist: He’s a former talk-radio host and incendiary blogger who has labeled climate research “junk science.“ “

Bildungsfernsehen

Some links for you science teachers out there:

ESA: Mission 1: Newton in Space (English). “While on board the ISS, Pedro Duque was filmed conducting demonstrations explaining Newton’s Three Laws of Motion”.

ESA: Mission 2: Body Space (English). “During the DELTA Mission, André Kuipers performed a number of physiology demonstrations showing the effects of weightlessness on the human body”.

ESA: Mission 3: Space Matters (English). “During the Eneide Mission in 2005, Roberto Vittori was filmed conducting demonstrations designed to explore the different structures, states and properties of matter”.

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Für die Physik-, Biologie- und Chemielehrer vor den Bildschirmen: Diese Filme der ESA wurden ursprünglich auf DVD herausgebracht, sind aber inzwischen auf YouTube angekommen.

ESA: Mission 1: Newton in Space (Deutsch). Pedro Duque führte auf der ISS Experimente durch, die Newtons drei Gesetze für Bewegungen verdeutlichen.

ESA: Mission 2: Body Space (Deutsch). Auf der DELTA-Mission führte André Kuipers einige physiologische Experimente durch, welche die Auswirkungen der Schwerelosigkeit auf den menschlichen Körper zeigen.

ESA: Mission 3: Space Matters (Deutsch). Während der Eneide-Mission 2005 wurde Roberto Vittori gefilmt, während er Versuche zum Aufbau von Materie, ihren Eigenschaften und den Aggregatzuständen durchführte.

(Den ersten Film habe ich schon oft im Mittelstufenunterricht eingesetzt. Die deutsche Synchronstimme ist zwar etwas nervig, ich warne meine Schüler immer vor.)

Communicating with the help of an fMRI

The Guardian Long Read: How science found a way to help coma patients communicate. “After suffering serious brain injuries, Scott Routley spent 12 years in a vegetative state. But his family were convinced that he was still aware – could a pioneering ‘mind-reading’ technique prove them right?” By Adrian Owen.

“In recent years, thanks to the invention of fMRI, we have made extraordinary breakthroughs in understanding the mental life of people trapped in the grey zone. We have discovered that 15% to 20% of people in the vegetative state, who are widely assumed to have no more awareness than a head of broccoli, are in fact fully conscious, even though they never respond to any form of external stimulation. They may open their eyes, grunt and groan, and occasionally utter isolated words. They appear to live entirely in their own world, devoid of thoughts or feelings. Many really are as oblivious and incapable of thought as their doctors believe. But a sizeable number are experiencing something quite different: intact minds adrift deep within damaged bodies and brains. We have even figured out how to communicate directly with such people.”

Link via MetaFilter.

See also the BBC Panorama documentary ‘The Mind Reader – Unlocking My Voice’ in which Prof. Adrian Owen communicates with several vegetative state patients using fMRI.

A friend I knew since kindergarten was in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for almost 15 years after a car accident. She passed away this spring.

BFFs

NPR: Having A Best Friend In Your Teenage Years Could Benefit You For Life.

“”[They were asked] how much trust there is, how good communication is and how alienated they feel in the relationship,” says Rachel Narr, the lead author on the study and a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Virginia. Each year, the original participants were also given questionnaires to assess levels of anxiety, depression and self-worth.
[…]
Those strong relationships are paying dividends in adulthood, the study found. When the researchers evaluated the participants at the conclusion of the study, the ones who had close, emotional links showed improvement in their levels of anxiety, depression and self-worth. In other words, they reported less depression and anxiety and more self-worth at 25 than they had at 15 and 16.”

I’m still friends with my best friend from kindergarten, 37 years later, and also a group of friends from highschool, most of which I’ve known for 30 years now. We live all over the country now, but try to get together at least once a year, and it’s always great to see them and catch up.