Hey all you bio-babes (and bio-boys) out there, wanna give us some feedback? A good friend of mine is a biologist and science writer, and is starting a new blog. No, you can’t read it yet, it hasn’t begun, but she’s searching for the “killer app” of a name. She’s got some ideas, below, and I thought perhaps some readers here might have some feedback or ideas!
She says:
I want my blog to mostly be a humorous look at unusual/interesting/beautiful living organisms, but also to include biology and science in general, with a sprinkling of psychology, archaeology, linguistics and popular culture. “A blog about the weird wonderfulness of life” is my working tag line (or should it be the wonderful weirdness of life?).
Here are some title ideas. Love ‘em? Hate ‘em? Of course, we can’t dare to compete with the lovely simplicity of Bioephemera, but we can aspire to some lower level on the nomenclature food chain.
The Artful Amoeba (reference to “The Artful Dodger”, cleverness of amoeboid slime molds, and how beautiful they, and by extension, a lot of other organisms, are)
Angry Amoeba (.com taken, inexplicably, by a web development company)
Neon Centipede
Neon Crawling Slime
Bashful Brittlestar
The Inquiring Tentacle
Goodly Creatures (Reference to The Tempest: Miranda:”O Wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!”)
Wild Kingdoms (.com taken — reference to Mutual of Omaha and Linean taxonomy)
Kingdoms Gone Wild
Witty Water Strider
The Well Cultured Amoeba
The Well Cultured Bacterium
Linean Explosion (from Carolus Lineaus, one of my science heroes and inventor of binomial nomenclature, and Cambrian Explosion)
Thanks in advance for any suggestions or feedback on favorites!
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
OK, I wouldn’t let it run quite as long as these bored college students did, but it DOES look REALLY cool (and it’s a great use of those annoying AOL CD’s, or the romantic mixes that your old boyfriend made for you):
And another really pretty one (gotta love the Darth Vader-esque breathing in the background), with an extra bonus: aluminum foil!
You can play around to see if it matters if there are images on the CD, if it looks different printed side up or shiny side up, etc. This site claims that it works best label-side up, and that the less ink on them, the less they smoke.
As you know, it’s not supposed to be good to microwave metal. That’s because the microwaves can push the electrons around in the metal. (Electrons in non-metal, or non-conductive material are kind of glued in place, so they can’t be pushed around). That can make the metal heat up (just like a metal wire will heat up when it’s conducting a current) and do all sorts of bad things to your microwave. You can read more about microwaves and what they do to metals here.
So, CD-ROM’s have a thin aluminum layer. And the microwaves push the electrons around in the aluminum, making big currents, which heat up the aluminum so much that it vaporizes (turns into steam)! The electric current is still there, though, so it jumps across the vaporized aluminum (making a pretty light show) to get to another section of aluminum. There is a little bit of similar science between this and the Microwave a Grape activity I posted earlier, in that you’re seeing air glow as electrons jump through it (a phenomenon called arcing). You’ll see a bunch of little paths burned into the aluminum after a while. An interesting observation from this site:
Some of the islands will be shaped so that they make very good microwave antennas. These spots will focus the microwave energy, and get very hot. Now you will see just a few bright spots spewing a lot of smoke. The good part of the light show is over, turn off the oven.
Here is a lovely image of a CD post-microwave, showing beautiful fractal trees where the electrical arc made its way across the aluminum.
I’m still a little confused as to why the patterns burned in the CD follow these circumferential patterns. I imagine that the CD data is originally etched in circumferential patterns, making the aluminum thinner in these regions, and thus channeling the electricity in these circles.
For extra fun, if you happen to have a Tesla Coil lying around, here is what happens when you place the microwaved CD on top of the Tesla coil. I got this from ElectricStuff.co.uk, which has even more pictures.
I believe what’s happening is that the electric current from the Tesla is flowing just through the parts of the CD that still have aluminum on it, generating high heat and arcing in lovely patterns.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
In this week’s episode of Science Teaching Tips, we look at my favorite thing — light. Light, like, rulez. Dude. And so does my old mentor, Paul Doherty, who will tell you one of his best stories from the history of science about how the spectrum came to be the spectrum. I mean, what the heck is indigo anyway? The answer turns out to be, like all good history of science stories, steeped in mysticism and superstition. Give it a listen, it’s a good story!
I’m surprised at the number of people who haven’t seen this one, but then again, neither had I until I went to the Exploratorium (where they’ll stick anything in a microwave).
Put a bar of Ivory Soap (no substitutes!) on a paper towel in the middle of the microwave. Press go. About 2 minutes should do it. Here’s what happens:
And this video will show you what it looks like when you take it out afterwards
What’s going on? Well, the reason that Ivory Soap floats (try it) is that it’s puffed full of air (here’s some history of why that is). There are tons of tiny bubbles whipped into it, sort of like when you make whipped cream. It’s an emulsion of soap and air. The bubbles of air have water vapor in it. When you microwave it, that water vapor creates pressure on the air bubbles making them expand and puff up. The air bubbles themselves expand as they heat since the volume of a gas increases with temperature (Charles’ Law). And the soap softens, which allows the whole thing to expand into a big puffy pile. And when you stop heating it? The soap’s no longer soft, so it gets rigid and hard, but stays its expanded puffy self. You can use it like soap now, though it’ll be a little weird!
Other brands of soap tend to just melt.
Here’s a nice explanation, as well as how to use this as a classroom lesson on density, from Steve Spangler Science. And some more classroom suggestions from About.com.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
Here’s what you do — slice a grape in half, but keep the halves connected by a little “hinge” of grape skin. Some suggest drying off the grape halves a little. Some suggest using a green grape in particular, and some say to cut it in quarters. Put the two halves next to each other, face up, in the microwave. It’s best to place it slightly off-center, as microwaves have hot-spots and “nodes” and the center is a “node” of radiation. Press go. Here’s what happens:
So, what’s going on?
Microwaves are just one form of radiation — like x-rays or visible light — of a particular frequency. The reason they chose microwave frequencies for ovens is that this frequency is more readily absorbed by water. When microwaves hit water molecules, it makes them vibrate. That vibration gets turned into heat. Grapes are watery, so any grape will heat up when put in a microwave.
It just so happens that grapes are about the size of the wavelength of microwaves, which is important. And grapes also have sugars, which make them into dielectrics. (There are other fun things you can do with grapes because of this). Both of those together make the coupled grape halves into a dielectric dipole antenna, which is just a fancy way of saying that the microwaves that hit one side of the cut grape will pass to the other side, in a very concentrated way. The result is that there is a huge voltage generated between the two sides of the cut grape. That voltage causes electricity to jump from one grape half to the other (“arcing”). This is what happens when you rub your socks on the carpet and touch the doorknob — that spark is electricity jumping from your hand to the doorknob. The difference in this case is that there is a HUGE voltage generated (3000 volts by one website), and that is enough to ignite the steam from the grapes into a plasma state (a glowing ionized gas, where the electrons have been ripped from the gas molecules by the high temperatures). You can capture this plasma in a glass, as in the video above (wow!)
So, in other words, the grapes concentrate the electric fields in the region between them, strongly enough to ignite the air and make a plasma.
Here is a nice detailed write up about this (which also includes some safety cautions if you’re concerned about ruining your microwave) and another less nerdy explanation that I think might have some inaccuracies in its attempt to put this into everyday language.
I’ve been wanting to do a series of posts on Fun Things To Do with a Microwave, and I’m just going to get off my butt and DO it! For some of these to work well, you need to know where your microwave hot spots are.
What do we mean by hot spots? Microwaves are just one form of radiation — like x-rays or visible light — of a particular frequency. The reason they chose microwave frequencies for ovens is that this frequency is more readily absorbed by water. The microwaves are pretty long (about the size of a grape, as you’ll see in the next post), so you get a regular pattern of peaks and troughs (or hot and cold) as the waves add and subtract (it’s a checkerboard, like two-slit interference). You may have noticed that food cooks slower at the center of a microwave and faster at certain other places (that’s why those rotating plates are handy).
You can find the hottest parts of your microwave by placing custard cups or small bowls filled with water all around the oven. Heat for 1 to 2 minutes, checking every 30 seconds. The ones that boil first are in the hot spots.
Method 2: FAX PAPER gives a more permanent map (from Barnesos.com)
Take a damp paper towel and place it on top of 5-10 other paper towels in the bottom of your microwave. On top of it, place a sheet of themally sensitive fax paper, the kind that old crappy fax machines use. Credit card recipts also work, but they’d be harder to tile the bottom of your microwave with. The extra towels at the bottom provide some insulation. Turn the microwave on for a while. The first areas on the paper to turn dark are the hot spots.
Method 3: MARSHMALLOWS (or chocolate chips)
Or a tasty way is to place marshmallows all over the bottom of the oven (might want to put a paper towel down first). Greater pixel resolution with the tiny marshmallows (more Marshmallows Per Inch!)
In keeping with my previous post on the International Year of Astronomy, this week’s 5-minute Science Teaching Tips podcast is about our perception and the size of the moon. What coin would just barely cover the full moon? You may be surprised. TI director (and recovering astrophysicist) Linda Shore explains how our brains distort the actual size of the moon. Listen to the full podcast — When the Moon Hits Your Eye.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
Happy New Year! It’s yet another year that’s been designated the International Year of Some Great Big Science Topic (last year was polar year). This year it’s the International Year of Astronomy, and there are quite a few fun-packed astronomical events for the whole family. See a whole list of astronomical events for 2009 here. And here is a nicely formatted document (PDF) with astronomical events (some particular for viewing in the Denver area) for the year. Note that you can Ask An Astronomer (DU Prof Robert Stencil at rstencel AT du DOT edu) your questions about the sky. (And don’t forget my friend Tom’s Skyguy video blog of astronomy questions for kids!)
For those of you in the Denver area, note the monthly gatherings at the Historic Chamberlin Observatory near the DU campus for the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the old 22-foot telescope. The DU press guy tells me that this would be “a great place for a high school student interested in astronomy to meet up with a professor or two in a casual environment.”
I am a physicist, writer, podcaster, and educator in Boulder, CO. On this blog I get to wax on about science stuff I think is cool (like weird science, or stuff we think is true but isn't), K-16 science education, hands-on science activities, teaching pedagogy, and how to communicate science. Geek on. 8-)
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