Hey all,

I just posted a new episode to my Science Teaching Tips podcast… a bunch of fun activities having to do with taste, and debunking some common myths about taste. Check it out — Episode 41. It’s a matter of taste.
This activity is from the Exploratorium’s Human Body Explorations: http://explo.stores.yahoo.net/humbodex.html

The Nose Knows activity: www.exploratorium.edu/ti/human_body/nose.html

More activities by Karen Kalumuck: http://philo.exploratorium.edu/karenk

Image from Kyle Flood from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

For those do-it-yourselfers out there, here’s a pretty neat hack — make a USB fan out of two CD’s and a toilet paper tube (and a few wires).

Of course, as the comments suggests, it might take off an ear. But what’s an ear in the service of experimentation?

Or, as another commenter exclaims, ” grazie marcè!!!!” and ” WoW…! Fantastico…! ” or ” Buono se ti si rompe la ventola del processore”.

There are a lot of myths about the “Big Bang” — the theoretical rapid expansion of space giving rise to the universe as we know it. One of the biggest ones is that the universe expanded from a point, and thus has some edge. Many of us picture the Big Bang as an explosion, throwing matter outward from some point in space. But really, there was no “center” to the expansion of the universe, and matter didn’t get thrown out from some particular spot. The observable part of the universe was packed into a very tiny volume, yes, but that volume wasn’t surrounded by empty space. If the universe is infinite today, then it was infinite at the time of the big bang as well. So outside that tiny volume was more matter and energy — it just isn’t observable to us. So, the early universe was extremely dense, but not necessarily extremely small.

Note, too, that the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe. I specifically said that it’s the beginning of the universe as we know it. Before the Big Bang, the physical laws of the universe as we know them didn’t hold — no magnetism, gravity, none of that. Things were such a dense hot soup that we have very little idea of how things behaved at that time. The Big Bang assumes that space, time and energy already existed, but doesn’t tell us how the universe came to be dense and hot at that moment.

We know that space is expanding because distant galaxies are moving away from us. But they’re not just moving away from us (we’re not the center of the universe, much as we’d like to be), they’re moving away from every other galaxy. That said, they’re not actually moving… they’re just sitting there. Space itself is expanding, and as the space between galaxies expands it carries the galaxies further apart, like raisins in an expanding loaf of bread.

This was taken primarily from the “Brief Answers to Cosmic Questions” produced at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Check it out, they have some great stuff!

Here’s something for the K-12 educators out there (or just those who like to play around with large chunks of wood. I mean, who doesn’t?). I just posted a new episode for my Science Teaching Tips podcast. Check out the new episode – “Take it from the Top”. Don Rathjen was a K-12 science teacher for about 20 years, and then started working at the Exploratorium to bring great science activities to teachers. (I’ll give you more of his activities later, which include a working pendulum clock and a ticker-tape time… all marvelously clever contraptions. He has more patience than I do!). This one is an Exploratorium classic about center of gravity, an adaptation of an exhibit on our museum floor. Don seems to make a stack of blocks defy gravity in this one!

Take It from the Top activity

More of Don Rathjen’s activities

This is a follow-up to my original post on Margaret Wertheim and her hyperbolic coral project.

There’s also a little more about Margaret Wertheim’s hyperbolic crochet project from the Exploratorium, and a live webcast from the Exploratorium with her, to learn how to crochet coral critters (scroll down to July 2007).

Margaret Wertheim is a science writer, book author, and contributer to the New York Times.  The hyperbolic coral project uses crochet to visualize hyperbolic geometries that weren’t able to be easily crafted before.  She crochets the coral reef to try to bring attention to damage to coral reefs in her home country of Australia.

Photo credit: The full moon rising over Manchester, Maryland. Credit: Edmund E. Kasaitis.

I went hiking under the full moon last night, without even knowing that it was something special (other than a beautiful big pink full moon over the lights of Boulder). Last night was the solstice moon, as one of my fellow hikers tried to inform me. I say “try” because he was struggling to explain why it was that the moon looked abnormally large last night. It turns out that it’s just an exaggerated moon illusion. The moon illusion refers to the fact that the moon looks much larger at the horizon than it does overhead.

Back when I was studying psychology (gosh, in the early 1990′s, I feel *old*) the accepted explanation was that it was due to the Ponzo effect. That refers to the fact that we know that if something is far away, but still looks big, it must be *really* big. Like, if you see an ant lumbering on the horizon, but your depth cues tell you the ant is about a mile away, but it still looks big to you? Time to run, you’re in a bad B movie.

And when the moon is on the horizon, we have a lot of depth cues (like trees and such) that tell our brain the moon is really far away. And so since it still looks pretty big, our brains conclude that it must be really REALLY big — like the ant Godzilla above. And when the moon is overhead, there’s nothing to tell us that it’s far away, so we assume that (for its size) it’s just a puny regular sized moon.

But there’s a problem with that, since airline pilots still see the moon illusion when all they can see around them is clouds. Some people played around with atmospheric effects (there’s more atmosphere between you and the moon when you’re looking across the earth at the horizon instead of straight up into space) but that doesn’t explain it.

The more recent explanation, which I kind of like, says that we actually have different conceptions of the horizon versus the sky overhead. We think of the horizon as far away (as far as the eye can see!) and the sky overhead as being just about as tall as the clouds. So, it’s not so much that the depth cues at the horizon tell us that the moon is far away, but that we just have this erroneous impression that the sky overhead is really close by.

It’s amazing the ways our eyes and brains can trick us. That’s why it’s important to recognize how our perceptual systems work when trying to understand what we see, especially when trying to evaluate what seem like outlandish scientific claims (like faces on mars for example!)

Photo credit: The full moon rising over Manchester, Maryland. Credit: Edmund E. Kasaitis.

Here’s a totally cool output from my old “alma mater”: the Exploratorium Digital Library Afterschool Project. This website has fantastically simple videos on how to do a selection of cool activities that the creative folks at the Exploratorium have come up with over the years. The point of this particular website is to promote activities to be done after school, but really, these activities can be used for a variety of different purposes. And they’re just really neat.

This is part of the Exploratorium’s Digital Library, a collection of digital resources from the Exploratorium for use by educators. This is a fantastic service, if you’re an educator or not!

Another neat resource for educators is the National Science Digital Library’s Content Clips – which lets educators build their own collection of digital resources for use in the classroom. Here’s what the NSDL says about it:

Content Clips is a free, interactive web environment that features compelling online resources for K-12 teachers, including images, sounds, and video clips to help build student understanding of science concepts and the natural world. It offers easy-to-use tools (no programming required), a growing multimedia collection, an “add-your-own-clip” feature, and a simple way to combine and arrange online content from multiple sources into customized presentations or learning activities. The interactive fossil sort, used as part of an assessment probe activity and the electronic storybooks in the most recent issue of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears magazine, illustrate how teachers can use Content Clips to create their own classroom interactives. Note that Content Clips requires Adobe Flash.

A fantastic play on the “it’s all physics anyway” mantra, posted from xkcd webcomic.

Thanks to Dave at Damn Lefties for posting a link to this.

I was pleased to see a post on Framing Science outlining an upcoming workshop that he’s teaching to postdocs and grad students on how to communicate their work to the public. This post is cross-posted there.

I’m a scientist-turned-journalist who has given several talks on this subject to other scientists, and really appreciate hearing that you’re doing much of the same. Scientists are used to simply presenting facts and letting their audience make sense of it. That is not how PR or the media works. Working with them to frame their message can be nothing but useful. If you let your audience frame the issue for you, you’ve lost much of the power of your message.

Because some of my background is in radio, I’ve found it very useful to play some audio clips of scientists talking about their work on the radio. That lets the scientists I’m talking to hear their compatriots talking in their own words . This is particularly effective in showing how powerful metaphor and story can be when trying to communicate to someone who knows nothing about your work. I try to play clips about, say, biology, to physicists, so they’re put in the role of the novice.

I’m also curious what you or anyone else thought of the “Scientists Guide to Talking to the Media” book, in the reading list in the post, from Union of Concerned Scientists.
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Note that there was also an interesting post from Mary Miller at the Exploratorium about the backlash to Matt Nisbetts (the Framing Science guy) perspective on communicating science to the public. She wrote:

There’s been a backlash though from some bloggers and science communicators that accuse Matt of distorting science, of advocating manipulative tactics similar to that of political operatives. One online comment in a piece by The Scientist (you must register for free access) says that under no circumstances should anyone “spin” science which is how he interprets framing. The poster, Earl Holland of Ohio State, goes on to say that scientists should stick to their work, running experiments and distilling the facts, and leave the communication to the professionals. I think this shortchanges the abilities of many scientists to tell compelling stories about their work and make it understandable and relevant to everyday people. Science is multi-dimensional and the implications of the enterprise go well beyond ”the facts” and into realms of politics, policy, culture, education, the economy, and everyday life. Wading into these realms may make some scientists uncomfortable, but it is the right of citizens in a democracy to know what their tax money is supporting and its relevance to their lives and interests. The Exploratorium has a long tradition, beginning with our founder Frank Oppenheimer, of working with scientists fully capable of explaining their work to public audiences and discussing its implications and context in a larger world. The more scientists there are who embrace this more public role, the better we are as a society.

Note that graduate students are trained to do science, but generally not how to teach it or to write or talk about it. Regardless of how you feel about the framing issue (whether it’s “spinning” or not), the simple act of talking to future scientists about how to communicate their message can have nothing but positive impact.

Here are some fantastic photos from the New Scientist website — accidentally captured the clearest picture of a woman’s ovary in the process of ovulation.

Pictures and articles here

I guess it’s pretty hard to get pictures of an event that happens for just a few minutes at one poorly determined time each month. They just happened to have this woman already cut open at the time (she was getting a partial hysterectomy). What luck. Apparently the main scientific result of the images is that the process happened much slower than previously thought — it took about 15 minutes for the egg to emerge.

I was actually just as interested to see the ovary and the follicle themselves (the follicle is *huge*!) as the emergence of the egg.

Hmm, a funny post for Father’s Day, I realize!

And, congratulations to me, I turn 100 today!  This is my 100th post…