Bison Science

A blog dedicated to the awesomeness of science - brought to you by the students of Bucknell University.

[bisonscience]

And the Noble Price goes to!

Big news everybody!

The 2013 Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and medicine have been announced!

The Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to Martin Karplus of the University of Strasbourg, France, and Harvard University; Michael Levitt of the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They were awarded the Nobel Prize for developing computer models that predict complex chemical reactions.

The Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Peter Higgs of Britain and Francois Englert of Belgium, for a theory about how subatomic particles get their mass. If you look back a few days in our posts you can see a cool link Beth posted about the Higgs Boson particle.

The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine was awarded to James Rothman of Yale, Randy Schekman of the University of California Berkeley, and Thomas Sudhof of the Stanford University School of Medicine for important breakthroughs in understanding the mechanisms of transporting substances within cells, with vesicles! 

Wouldn’t it be cool to see a Bucknellian win a Nobel Prize in the future?

http://www.newsdaily.com/article/eb49557b0e0f4f268d64dcd0c9ac1b53/your-guide-to-the-2013-nobel-prizes

Sophia Reeder '16

[bisonscience]

The Power of Binary

“There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

– The most overused binary joke in existence.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, computers use the binary system (base 2) to store data in the form of numerical values. Alone, a single bit, or binary digit, can only store two values. When combined, each additional bit adds a power of two, and therefore many additional values that can be represented. Though you may not think it at first, any decimal number (base 10) may be represented in binary.

Here’s a binary number. To convert it to decimal, use the following pattern with powers of two starting with the least significant digit (convert from right to left):

1001101

2^0 * 1 = 1

2^1 * 0 = 0

2^2 * 1 = 4

2^3 * 1 = 9

2^4 * 0 = 0

2^5 * 0 = 0

2^6 * 1 = 64

TOTAL = 78

To convert a decimal number to binary, divide the number by two. The remainder is the least significant digit. Continue the pattern using the result of the integer division until the quotient equals 0:

62

62 / 2 = 31 R0

31 / 2 = 15 R1

15 / 2 = 7 R1

7 / 2 = 3 R1

3 / 2 = 1 R1

1 / 2 = 0 R1

RESULT = 111110

An astute observer might say, “But what about negative numbers? I can have negatives in my Excel spreadsheet.” Well, Sherlock, there’s something out there called two’s compliment that resolves your conundrum; two’s compliment trades the most significant digit’s numeric representation ability for a flag to represent a negative number:

11111110

If you use the rules above, you may expect this value to be 254, but with two’s complement, it represents -2. Values that are assigned the two’s compliment property are known as signed integers, and those that use the additional bit for values are known as unsigned integers respectively.

For all of the aspiring programmers out there, here are the minimum and maximum values for each standardized data type, unsigned and signed:

Byte (8 bits): 0 to 255 / -128 to 127

Short (16 bits): 0 to 65,535 / -32,768 to 32,767

Integer (32 bits): 0 to 4,294,967,295 / -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647

Long (64 bits): 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 / -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807

Also, people don’t actually code in binary. That would take about ~011110100001001000000 years.

Chase Garner ‘16

(image source: pcmerch.com)

[bisonscience]

Counting Calories

Calories are a measure the amount of heat required to heat 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius. When we talk about calories in relation to food, we simply mean the amount of energy that a specific food gives our body. The amount of calories in a given food is determined by breaking down the food into it’s basic elements-fats provide us with 9 calories/gram, carbs and proteins provide 4 calories/gram, and fiber provides 2 calories/gram, due to the fact that fiber is composed mostly of indigestible material. The calorie counts that we go by, however, have been around for hundreds of years, and today, nutrition scientists are discovering that many more factors influence the amount of calories in a given food than we previously thought. These factors include how the food is cooked, the amount of energy the body needs to break down different kinds of food, and even the activity of the bacteria residing in human intestines.

In general, foods that are more easily digested will provide the body with more net calories than foods that are harder to digest, because the body will expend more calories digesting more difficult foods. The vast differences between foods of the same subgroup, such as “carbohydrates” or “plants,” however, are not accounted for on food labels. Some plants differ greatly in the “toughness” of their cell walls, and sometimes the stems and leaves of the same plans have different levels of digestibility, depending on what parts we eat. How we prepare these plants affect their calorie counts are well. Cooking will rupture the plant’s cell walls, requiring our body to spend less energy breaking them down, and does this more easily in some plants, such as spinach and zucchini, than in others, such as Chinese water chestnut. In addition, plants have adapted differently depending on whether or not they wanted to avoid digestion by animals. Fruits, for example, have evolved to be easily digested so their seeds would be scattered. Nuts and seeds, on the other hand, have evolved to be more difficult to digest, so they would pass through animals intact. It is for this reason that some researchers think that nuts give us less calories than their composition of carbs, proteins and fats would lead us to think. In fact, new study by the USDA suggests that a serving of almonds may only be 130 calories, instead of the reported 170 calories. This difference may not seem significant, but it shows the potential for variability in these calorie counts.

Food labels also do not account of the varying amounts of energy required to digest different kinds of foods. For example, new research suggests that proteins could require 5 times the amount of energy to digest than fats, because our digestive enzymes have to work hard to unravel the tightly wound strings of amino acids that make up proteins. Other foods, such as honey, require almost no digestion and can quickly and easily make their way into the bloodstream. Finally, people vary greatly in the function of their digestive system. Some have longer colons, some have higher or lower amounts of different enzymes (think varying levels of the enzyme lactase and lactose intolerance, for example), and some have different amounts of bacteria in their gut, which take certain amounts of food for themselves, and aid in digestion in varying levels of others. The moral of the story is that while calories can be a rough guide to how much you are eating throughout the day, the wide array of factors that go into determining calorie counts qualify them as from an exact measure of what you are putting into your body, and obsessively counting calories may not be the best way to a healthy diet.

Megan Ritchie '16

References: 

Dunn, Rob. "Everything You Know About Calories Is Wrong." Scientific American. Sept. 2013: 57-59. Print.

(Image source: scientificamerican.com)

[bisonscience]

It's more than a map, dummy!

Last night I was sitting at my laptop staring at this figure very frustrated, and a little terrified. You see, I had just had a paper rejected with one of the reasons being "old fashioned" statistical analyses. So there I was, late into the evening, attempting to learn a new method for quantifying the connections between locations when the topography of the land is uneven and not all maps have been created equal. In fact, it turns out that the best map for me was based on "dummy" coordinates, where I told my laptop that nothing could swim across the land mass between two streams. 

Now, if you are still reading, I hope I haven't scared (or bored) you too much yet, because I have a point for telling you about my very exciting Friday night (which, believe it or not, really IS exciting when you go to grad school). You see, I realized last night that the best mathematical tool a biologist can learn is not a statistic, it's how to be a mathematician! No program I ran would have understood why or how some critters can crawl across land, others have to swim, and still others will fly where they please - but that's what I needed to do. Just like a carpenter can not blame their tools for a poor product, no biologist should blame the statistics for not teasing apart a pattern they are looking for (that is, as long as the pattern really exists). Yes I am an ecologist, and yes we seem to have a tendency to dive into complex mathematics more often than other biological disciplines, but that does not mean my advice is irrelevant to the rest of you. For all the pre-med students out there, even if you never publish a scientific article, you will need to interpret their results for the rest of your careers. There is more often than not a more complex story to a treatment's effectiveness than a p-value, and it is that story that will help you understand which treatment is going to be best. And, I hate to break it to you, but that complex story is often told with tables and figures based in statistics.  You see, our world is far too complex for us to understand. One of the best ways we have come up with for boiling down those complex connections of the universe is through mathematical tools. And if you understand those tools, you might get a little closer to understand the complexities of the world around us! So, my absolute best advice to all the Budding Bucknell Bison Biologists reading this? Take as many math courses as you can! And make them statistics, calculus, and whatever other math subdisciplines you can get your hands on. It may seem grueling and painful now, but those classes will pay off more than you can imagine in the decades to come, regardless of the field you find yourself in.  Oh and by the way, that method I was looking at last night has applications for phylogenetics and even understanding how  contagions spread. Like I said, ecologists may have an insane eagerness for diving into complex mathematics, but that does not mean the rest of the world doesn't need them from time to time!  And if you don't believe my advice is worth heeding, at least believe an article in this little journal called Science: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6077/12.summary

Matt Wilson, Bucknell Graduate Student

That scary figure I started this post with can be found in:

Blanchet, F. G., Legendre, P., & Borcard, D. (2008). Modelling directional spatial processes in ecological data.Ecological Modelling, 215(4), 325-336.

[bisonscience]

In honor of François Englert and Peter Higgs being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the Higgs Boson, I wanted to share this interactive graphic from the New York Times that explains the basic principle of what the Higgs does ... 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/08/science/the-higgs-boson.html?_r=0#/?g=true

Cool, huh? It's amazing how a good analogy can make a difficult concept so much easier to comprehend. 

The existence of the Higgs Boson was confirmed last year by the European particle physics laboratory at CERN in Switzerland, which solidified the pair's theories explaining how an invisible, universal field can impart mass to certain particles. 

Beth Rogers '16 

(Author's note: I understand very little about particle physics, which is why this post is so sad and short. That being said ... if you go to Bucknell and want to write about physics-related topics so I can stop embarrassing myself, email us at [email protected]!) 

[bisonscience]

The Magic of Passwords

It's been 120 days, and you know what that means! It's time to change your password.

Who doesn't love coming up with a new password? After all, using a minimum of three symbols and numbers and at least eight characters is very natural to us humans. We're so good a remembering passwords that most of us use only one of them for all of our authenticated services to avoid coming off as conceited.

But honestly, have you ever wondered how a simple text string can be used to protect all of your highly sensitive information?

When you sign up for a service, your chosen password is sent to a server and is properly salted and finely hashed. No joke! Salting is the process of adding a unique text extension to your password that only the server knows; this increases password security. Once the salt is appended, the password is run through a hashing algorithm, which guarantees a unique output for a unique input. Secure system do not store your password as text, only as a hash. When you login later, the server uses rehashes your password and checks it with the saved hash. If they match, you're in! (Some other cookie-based magic keeps you logged in, but I'll save that for another day.)

So what's all of the nonsense about "secure passwords?" The goal is a password that neither another human nor a computer could guess. Turns out, using a password that's at least eight characters with a number and a symbol is not the best way to go; computers are very good at guessing these types of passwords. No matter how complex "x75qr]J" looks to use humans, standard computers can now generate billions of random character combinations per second. If someone really wanted to brute force your short password, they could probably find a way to do it. Passwords like these are also a nightmare to remember.

The secret to a secure password is length. Something like "nyb*@mHvCxwH{hnZsaH:r6dJgJCF8yQsJ2P3dvVVHr]DR4qBHp" would be excellent, but the key to making your life better is a memorable phrase of your own creation (don't use well known phrases!). Let's say that your Uncle Bob is kind of sketchy. A password that you'd remember like, "UncleBobMakesMeUncomfortable" is much more secure than "X7qpl&31ac" because it is considerably longer. It's also better for you because you'll never forget that (unfortunately)! The more personal or clever the phrase, the better, and if you happen to include a number and a symbol or two, it will likely never be cracked by a computer. Ever.

A quick security tip: even if you have the world's best passwords, keep in mind that your stuff is only as secure as your electronics. If a friend has ever posted to your Facebook using your phone, you know what I mean.

Here's some password related fun for you. You've earned it!

Worst passwords: http://www.splashdata.com/press/PR121023.htm

Test your password’s security: https://howsecureismypassword.net

xkcd on passwords: http://xkcd.com/936/

Chase Garner '16

(image source: dduane.tumblr.com)

[bisonscience]

Eating well while studying

We’ve all been there-compensating for the stress of studying by consoling ourselves with unhealthy food. The temptation seems to get worse as the hours get later into the night (midnight Dominos, anyone?) What you choose to eat and how you choose to eat it, however, can have significant effects on your productivity and performance.

No matter what study snack you choose, the first thing to keep in mind is portion size. It’s easy to get distracted by your work and end up eating way more than you intended to. So, before you start eating, measure out a reasonable portion of whatever you’re eating and put the rest away. Studies show that eating full meals will keep your energy up better than snacks, so it may be helpful to divide up your meals and create study breaks for yourself to keep your energy replenished. Eating a full meal will also decrease the likelihood that you will keep snacking later, and having a plan for what you are going to eat will help you avoid mindless eating.

While carb-based snacks may be the most convenient to reach for, protein is an essential element of the study diet. The neurotransmitters in your brain are built from the amino acids you ingest when you eat protein, so getting enough protein is important for brain function. Protein also keeps you fuller longer than foods like chips, cookies, and popcorn. Additionally, the amino acids tryptophan and tyrosine are constantly competing for entry into the brain, past the blood-brain barrier. While carbohydrates promote tryptophan transport, which has a calming, sedative effect on the brain, proteins promote tyrosine transport, which has more of an activating and energizing effect on the brain. Protein can also improve memory function. High protein choices include greek yogurt, eggs, smoothies with protein powder, and fruit or veggies with peanut butter or hummus. Protein bars can also be a good option, but watch out for high levels of saturated fat, added sugars, and processed ingredients.

Staying hydrated while studying is also important for energy levels. Dehydration can lead to tiredness and loss of focus, so be sure to drink plenty of water, even if you don’t actually feel thirsty.

Finally, while sugars should usually be avoided, fruit can be a great study snack by providing a burst of energy along with other healthy nutrients and good amount of fiber to aid in digestion. If you’re craving something sweet, head for the fruit instead of the cookies, especially late at night. Refined sugars and carbohydrates will be absorbed quickly on an empty stomach, leading to a spike in blood sugar that can increase the amount of fat your body stores, and can later result in a greater depletion of energy.

Megan Ritchie '16

Read more here: http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/foods-eat-studying-5250.html

(image source: hercampus.com)

[bisonscience]

GUYS! So I don’t always geek out about science (haha just kidding I pretty much always do) but this is SO COOL. So there were these movies that came out a while back which you may or may not have heard of ... does Star Wars ring a bell? Oh you have heard of them? Good! The light sabers wielded by Jedi warriors always seemed pretty out of reach, did they not?Well NOT ANYMORE!

Scientists at the Harvard-MIT center for Ultracold Atoms have recently made a discovery that contradicts decades of beliefs about the behavior of light.  Photons have long been thought to be massless particles that don’t interact with each other, and for the most part that’s what they are, unless they are under a very specific set of conditions.  When in this specific medium, the photons interact so strongly that they start to act as though they have mass and bind together to form molecules.  The physics of how these molecules interact isn’t too far off from what we see in the movies. How did researchers convince the photons to behave in this way?  First they pumped rubidium atoms into a vacuum, and then they used lasers to cool the atoms to just a few degrees above absolute zero (brrr).  They then shot a photon through the chamber.  As the photon moves through the cloud of super cold atoms, it passes some of its energy to them, slowing itself down dramatically.  When the photon exits the cloud of rubidium atoms, its identity is preserved, similar to the refraction of light through water.

What’s really interesting is what happened when two photons were fired into the cloud- they exited together, as if they were a single molecule. WHY??? The Rydberg blockade! The Rydberg Blockade states that when an atom is excited, the atoms around it cannot be excited to the same degree.  Practically, this means that the two photons push and pull each other through the cloud, which makes the two photons behave like a single molecule. This is undeniably AWESOME, but the more practically minded of you may be wondering, “why?”  Unfortunately, its not to engineer light sabers. You could build a quantum computer, you could enhance classical computation, you could even build a complex three dimensional structure entirely out of light.  Please don’t be deceived by the lowercase letters because I’m freaking out as I'm typing this. It is so cool. Seriously, I’m speechless at the awesome. 

Sophia Reeder '16

Read more here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130925132323.htm

(image source: theactionelite.com)

[bisonscience]

How They Work: Websites

You're on one right now, and they pretty much dominate your life, so I once again ask the question, do you even know what they actually are?

As you may know, computers are unmatched at transferring data. On the internet, a majority files are transferred via the HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, as you probably know it. There is one huge problem with only transferring ordinary files. How do you just navigate through files without knowing their exact names? Where are the connections in the vast network of the internet?

To resolve this problem, the website was born! A website is a standardized format for displaying data from and sending data to remote computers, or servers, in a human readable format. This scheme in which sites are constructed is known as HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Despite the name, HTML is not a programming language, it is a structured set of syntax and rules to show text, images, links to other content, and other digital content in one page. If you want to see what it looks like, find the "View Source" option in your browser. (If you do decide to look at the awesomeness that is the actual source HTML of the Bison Science site, note that the browser does not actually show the HTML directives, just the content within tags (<>) that are defined to be visible to the user.)

I should also mention that HTML is only a skeleton used for structural purposes. By itself, this is what a page of only HTML looks like.

Pretty ugly, right? And not very readable. That's why some lovely person invented web styles. In a few words, styles are everything about how different elements of a webpage look. They are stored in external files called Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) for easy reuse, and the number of style attributes are seemingly endless. Computers can determine the types of data by the the HTML itself, but humans require styles on the skeleton to differentiate the data.

So, now you have a pretty looking website, but one problem still remains. It can't do anything yet. As I mentioned, HTML is not an actual programming language, so it really can't perform dynamic operations. Without code, the web would just be a glorified array of billboards, and not the magical place that we all know and love with Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, Bison Science, and all of the rest. Server-side languages like PHP, Ruby, and Python along with databases like MySQL allow things like dynamic collections of music, videos, pictures, memes, and text to "happen" when you login and send data to a website. Client-side JavaScript enhances the web experience by allowing the underlying HTML on the page to change without reloading the page. Could you imagine still having to click "next" to get to another page of tweets or not getting questionable autocompletes from Google?

So from the beginning...

Your internet browser sends an HTTP request to the server to retrieve the contents of bisonscience.tumblr.com, and the server resolves, either statically or dynamically, what data to send to the browser. From the retrieved HTML, the browser sends additional HTTP requests to retrieve the page's styles, images, JavaScript, and other external resources. The browsers then constructs the full page, applying the styles, scaling and viewing the images, executing JavaScript, etc. Your browser may also cache this information for faster reload times in the future.

Last thought of the day: Even if a website has a little lock icon next to it (encrypted HTTP), if it looks sketchy, it still is. Inform your gullible overly-trusting relatives. It’ll give you something to talk about this Thanksgiving if you need it.

Chase Garner '16

[bisonscience]

Goodbye Earth ... Hello Mars?

I guess it's true what they say - all good things must end. According to a study published earlier this month, Earth is due to become inhabitable in a mere 1.75 billion years. We all knew it was bound to happen eventually. 

This model predicts an accelerated end to life on Earth, with the discovery that our planet is closer to the inner edge of the sun's habitable zone than previously thought. The habitable zone of a star, which describes the area in which liquid water can exist on the surface of orbiting planets, is pushed farther away the hotter it gets. The inner edge of the sun's habitable zone has been found to move outward at a rate of 1 meter every year. With this new data, researchers predict that the total lifetime of habitable earth is only 6.3 - 7.8 billion years, meaning that our beloved planet may be nearing the end of its run. 

But there is another solution. Just as the Earth leaves the sun's habitable zone and becomes too hot to support life, Mars will be entering it. If by some miracle humans are still in existence a billion years from now, it's very likely that our species will have already jumped ship. And it could happen a lot sooner than you may think. The people behind the Mars One foundation are planning a one-way mission to the red planet in 2023 to establish the beginnings of a permanent human settlement. How legitimate this mission is, I couldn't tell you. But in 1.75 billion years, it may actually be our reality. 

Beth Rogers '16

Read more here: http://www.nature.com/news/earth-s-days-are-numbered-1.13788

(Image source: nationalgeographic.com) 

[bisonscience]

The fungal menace

Fungi are ever-present in our world.  From eating mushrooms to fighting athlete’s foot, every human has encountered fungi in some capacity.  However, for other animals, interactions with fungi can be far more deadly.  Many of you may know that one of the biology labs on our campus studies White Nose Syndrome, a fungal disease that affects bats in the Northeastern United States.  Some of you may also know about the fungus that has been attacking amphibians for years now, a type of chytrid fungus. Unfortunately, scientists have discovered a new, particularly vicious type of fungi that has reduced the population of fire salamanders in the Netherlands to 4% of their original numbers. It’s a new type of chytrid fungus, one so cruel it eats away the skin of the salamanders until scientists must use a microscope to find remnants of skin.  How to cure it?  Treatments have been effective in labs, but moving them out into the wild is a different story. You can’t exactly spread strong anti-fungal treatments all throughout the Netherlands- you’d kill every fungi, not just the one targeting the fire salamanders.  Hopefully researchers will find a way to save these fire salamanders, or keep the fungi from spreading to other populations… time will tell. 

Sophia Reeder '16

Read the full story here: www.sciencenews.org

(Image source: treknature.com)

[bisonscience]

From Mom or Dad?

In an earlier post, I described the cross between a tiger and a lion, and how the resulting offspring depended on which was the mother. As promised, this post will talk about a similar phenomenon that happens in humans!

Angelman’s syndrome is characterized by severe mental retardation, with the patient only ever being able to walk. They also tend to have a very happy disposition and smile a great deal, although they will never even talk. Patients with Prader-Willi, on the other hand, suffer an insatiable hunger for their entire life.

These two syndromes seem so different, don’t they? Yet, the crazy thing is, they are caused by the SAME defective gene! So how do you get one syndrome over the other? Is it just luck? Nope! It turns out it works just like the tigon vs. liger issue...it depends on which parent you inherited it from! If your defective gene is from your mom, you will get Angelman’s syndrome, but if it is from your dad, you will get Prader-Willi syndrome. Come on, how crazy is that?

Rebecca LeShay '14

(image source: sciencedirect.com) 

[bisonscience]

How it actually works: The Science of Computer Hacking We see it all of the time in movies. There are people out there who are just so good with computers that they can gain full access to absolutely any system in about twenty seconds. The process itself is simply captivating: there’s always some witty banter involved in the race against time, and, of course, no good hack is complete without random letters and numbers scrolling wildly across the screen! Wait...wait......hacking? Sorry. Totally misunderstood you there. The truth is, real hacking is nothing like what is portrayed in any movie or TV show that you’ve ever seen. Why? Because the process could take weeks, it requires an deep understanding of how computers work, and it generally does not look interesting enough for Hollywood. So what exactly is hacking, and how does one hack? Much like horrible, manipulative people, hackers exploit computer programs by taking advantage of their vulnerabilities, or programming oversights. They spend an inordinate amount of time scrutinizing every aspect of a program looking for a way to break it. Once they find a hole, they inject their own malicious code into the program to do their bidding. One classic method of hacking is the buffer overflow exploit. Computers store related data in a collection of bytes known as a buffer (or an array, if you prefer). Buffers have a fixed length, but if data longer than the buffer is written to it, other unrelated program data is overwritten. Some programming languages (like C) do not feature automatic buffer overrun protection, so programmers must manually insert size checks to prevent this. If there is no check and too much data is inserted, program integrity is compromised, and, more often than not, the program crashes and returns to the parent process. By injecting carefully crafted data into the buffer, hackers can hijack this return point and run their own malicious code with (likely) elevated privileges. In simpler terms, an important program with a buffer overflow vulnerability could allow hackers to gain full access to your computer or device, which means that hackers could make your device do anything that it is capable of. Thankfully, there are many modern protections that greatly reduce and often times prevent the damage that these exploits can cause. Countless attacks are the result of this careless programming oversight. Many closed platforms were opened in this manner too. For example, the first popular jailbreak for the iPhone was the result of a buffer overflow that occurred when loading a corrupted TIFF image file. The Nintendo Wii was opened to homebrew in a similar manner. Another popular hack is known as an SQL injection. These types of hacks don’t require a system to crash, just some trickery on the hacker’s part. SQL is a specialized language that allows records in a database to be accessed and modified. When SQL statements are not constructed properly internally, hackers can inject unauthorized SQL commands into the queries to access or delete database data. Through methods like these, attackers can steal user information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other confidential information. Once again, programmers can prevent all of this if they’re not lazy and learn how to code secure systems the correct way. I’ve barely scratched the surface on hacking, but to sum it up, all types of hacking are pro knowledge combined with trickery and way too much free time. Oh yeah, one last thing: going onto someone’s Facebook while they’re not looking isn’t hacking. Take it easy, script kiddies. Chase Garner ’16

[bisonscience]

The mystery of magnetoreception

Have you ever wondered how certain animals, such as migratory birds and butterflies, are able to sense direction?

Well it turns out that such animals have the ability to navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. Magnetism-sensing animals are able to perceive the change in the inclination of magnetic field lines as they're flying, allowing them to not only orient themselves with regard to north or south, but to gauge their approximate distance between the magnetic equator and the nearest magnetic pole.

Exactly how these animals employ magnetoreception is still a mystery. In 2012, two neuroscientists from Baylor College successfully identified magnetically sensitive neurons in the brains of homing pigeons. Another group of scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign focused on radical pairs (molecules with unpaired electrons that form when electrons start jumping between neighboring molecules ... it's all very much over my head) because the amount of time the unpaired electrons spend in either a parallel or antiparallel spin state is influenced by magnetic fields. The two electron spin states enable different chemical reactions to occur, and scientists hypothesize that fluctuations in the reactions could be detected by sensory neurons.

More recently, scientists have discovered a photoreceptor protein in the retinal tissues of several migratory birds that produces free radicals when exposed to light. Since the discovery, researches have produced enough experimental evidence to suggest that the cyptochrome in question is indeed involved in magnetoreception. But many questions still remain; such as how cyptochrome, radical-pair reactions, retinal neurons, and the animals' behavior is all connected.

For me, this is the most exciting kind of research; puzzles that combine pretty much every scientific field. Neuroscience, physics, chemistry, animal behavior ... no wonder this mystery has proved so difficult to uncover. The secret of magnetoreception may be a discovery destined for the distant future, but scientists continue to make (extremely exciting) progress.

Beth Rogers '16

Read more here: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/36722/title/A-Sense-of-Mystery/

(image sources: theguardian.com, the-scientist.com)

[bisonscience]

There's something in the mirror ... 

Have you ever been in the bathroom, and gotten scared by something you thought you saw in the mirror?  It turns out, your brain just got tired of processing the humdrum ordinary world, and created a monster instead! You know, just to mix things up ... keep life interesting and all that. 

It’s called the Troxler Effect.  It’s a visual phenomenon.  When you stare at a fixed point for more than 20 seconds, things away from that fixed point, in your peripheral vision, will fade away. You can find endless optical illusions based on this principle (I definitely did not waste 30 minutes looking at all of them while writing this post…).  But what can be amusing in the form of a whimsical optical illusion can be downright terrifying in the wrong situation. For example, when you are looking in a mirror.  When looking in a mirror, the Troxler effect fades out the features you are not looking at, and subs in something else.  For example, a nose could be subbed in for an eye.  When you look into a mirror for two long, the Troxler effect wanders over your features, massively distorting them.  The brain then often turns these images into something it can recognize, even if it is terrifying.  So the next time you think you see a mirror monster, take a deep breath and scold your brain - it's just playing tricks on you!

Sophia Reeder '16

Read the full story here:http://io9.com/5906432/an-optical-illusion-that-explains-the-origins-of-imaginary-monsters

(Image source: omg-facts.com)

[bisonscience]

If you don't like veggies, blame genetics!

It’s a classic dinnertime scenario.  “But MOM I’m morally opposed to Brussels sprouts.” “And I’m morally opposed to doing your laundry, but somehow I always do it anyways, now eat your vegetables!” Fear not! Science is on your side! Brussels sprouts do in fact taste horribly bitter; it’s from a chemical they produce. “Nonsense!” Aunt Hilda says, “They are delicious and nutritious”.  Well then Aunt Hilda must have the gene and isn’t that just fine and dandy for her. There is a mutated gene in about half of the population that makes them incapable of tasting that bitter Brussels sprouts taste. Lucky ducks. Try explaining this the next time you are being coerced into eating them (You’ll sound smart, even if we both know you won’t win that dinner table battle).   However I do recommend eating them, even if you lack the gene (I flinched while I wrote that, I’m so sorry) because they have some pretty potent anti-cancer properties. Eat up!

Sophia Reeder '16

Read the full story here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/25/hating-brussels-sprouts-dna_n_1169195.html

Image source:http://www.omg-facts.com/category/7/Science

[bisonscience]

Lucy in the sky with candle flames

Diamonds have held a fascination for mankind for pretty much as long as we have been around ... honestly, we are like magpies with shiny things. That being said, diamonds are highly valued, and are often used as a source of comparison for things of beauty. “Her eyes shone like diamonds.”  Romantic right?  How about, “Her eyes shone like candle flames.”  That phrase evokes more of a vengeful demon than anything else… but it turns out that candle flames are composed of diamond particles! Actually, they are composed of all four known types of carbon: diamond nanoparticles, fullerenic carbon, graphite, and amorphous carbon.  The diamond particles are burned away and converted to carbon dioxide, but this discovery certainly changed the way we view candles.  We’ve always thought that candles can make a room “sparkle”, and now we know why!

Sophia Reeder '16

Read more here:  http://phys.org/news/2011-08-candle-flames-millions-tiny-diamonds.html