March 14, as every good nerd knows, is Pi Day, when math-o-philes rejoice over the many lovely characteristics of the number pi, often with a slice of pie in hand.
This year, Pi Day is especially celebration-worthy because, for the only time this century, the date—3/14/15—represents pi (3.1415…) to four places after the decimal instead of just two.
Pi, for those a little rusty on their math, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. So, for example, we know a circle’s circumference is a little more than three times as long as the distance across the circle. The familiarity of circles in our world may be one reason so many folks celebrate Pi Day.
“One of the simplest things you can do is draw a circle,” said Jonathan Wise, faculty advisor of CU-Boulder’s Math Club. “Once you start thinking about circles, you realize there are two lengths: You can draw a line across it or you can traverse around it. Then you start to notice the relationship between the two is pretty close to three.”
In celebration of Pi Day, here are six tasty tidbits about the number:
Humans have known about pi for a long, long time: People have approximated the value of pi for thousands of years. The Egyptians used 3.162 as their value for pi, and the Mesopotamians estimated it at 3.125. An approximation of pi is even found in a biblical passage: “And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about.” (1 Kings 7:23)
Pi goes on and on: The number pi has an infinite amount of numbers to the right of its decimal place, and those numbers never repeat in any discernible pattern.
Pi is transcendental: Pi cannot be expressed as an algebraic equation. For example, you can’t write pi as a fraction, and you can’t take a square root of any number and get pi, either. “All these simple ways of constructing a number don’t work for pi,” Wise said. “It defies pattern in that way.”
Pi pops up in unexpected places: Aside from using pi to figure out the circumference or the area of a circle, pi also frequently pops up in other mathematical equations, including those related to probability.
π is the symbol for pi: The Greek letter π was chosen to stand for “perimeter.” The symbol for pi was first used in 1706.
There are still unknowns: There are a lot of things we still don’t know about pi, for example, whether each digit occurs infinitely often or whether there’s a place in the decimal expansion of pi where a thousand consecutive digits are all zeros.
CU-Boulder alum harnesses adventurers for the good of science
What do you do if you’re a scientist who wants snow samples from some of the highest peaks in the Himalayas? You could learn the mountaineering ropes yourself (risky) or you could find someone already skilled in the art of high-altitude climbing to get them for you.
That’s where CU-Boulder alum Gregg Treinish comes in. Treinish, founder of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, works to teach adventurers how to take useful scientific data. In this film clip, Treinish talks about teaming up with snowboarder Jeremy Jones to get samples from the Himalayas.
Chowing on crickets is good for the world. But how do they taste?
Perhaps you've heard by now that eating insects is an enivornmentally friendly alternative to meat for packing protein into your diet. But how do they actually taste? Popular Science asked its staff--including CU-Boulder alumna and assistant editor Breanna Draxler--to do a blind taste test of protein bars baked with ground crickets. Watch the video to see what Breanna, former graduate assistant at CU-Boulder's Center for Environmental Journalism, thinks of the snacks. Read more over at Popular Science.
Too much of a good thing? Why your high-dose antioxidants may do more harm than good
We've heard it over and over: Antioxidants are good for you. They buffer free radicals in our bodies, preventing something called "oxidative stress," which is associated with everything from cancer to aging.
But like most things, it's not so simple. As scientists are beginning to learn, taking high doses of one kind of antioxidant--vitamin C, for example--may actually do more harm than good, even counteracting some of the positive effects of exercise.
Scientific American asked CU-Boulder biologist Barbara Demmig-Adams about this phenomenon in a recently published story:
I think it’s a really important realization that the much-maligned radicals have a job to do in our bodies and that single high-dose supplements can do more harm than good. . . Our review on antioxidants and exercise is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a real paradigm shift . . . in the biomedical research area that is causing pioneers to ask, "could 50 years of research be wrong?"
Read the full story, which does a great job explaining how antioxidants actually work, here.
CU-Boulder researcher Jim White says that question, to a climate scientist, is "rather strange, even bizarre."
It's a not a question of belief; It's a question of physics, White says. Read White's full editorial in the Daily Camera along with the piece by fellow senior climate scientist Giff Miller.
Ancient settlements and modern cities may be more alike than different in fundamental ways. The "science" of cities, in fact, appears to have been as valid a few thousand years ago as it is now.
CU-Boulder researcher Scott Ortman discusses the thread connecting the past to the future with The Atlantic's CityLab project.
Does your gut see race differently than your brain?
In the second part of a series exploring how police may respond differently to people depending on the color of their skin, This American Life chats with Joshua Correll, a psychology prof at CU-Boulder. Hear what he has to say about implicit bias... and about whether or not police are more likely to shoot a black suspect compared to a white one. Correll comes in at about minute 40.
In a story about how new FAA draft rules for drones may impact agriculture, NPR chats with Eric Frew, director of CU-Boulder's unmanned aerial vehicles program. Frew comes in at 2:40 with:
These small drones, that are almost priced to be expensive toys, are not reliable, and that's a concern of the FAA ... When these systems work, they work fantastically. When they don't work, they don't work.
Should we mimic a volcanic eruption to cool the Earth?
The idea of injecting aerosols into the atmosphere--mimicking a volcanic eruption--to cool the Earth is not new. But the possibility that something could go wrong doing this kind of "geoengineering" has kept it from moving toward a reality.
But now a panel of scientists convened by the National Research Council, including CU-Boulder's Waleed Abdalati, are calling for more research into geoengineering so that the possible consequences are better understood.
Abdalati told the Huffington Post:
You are talking about changing climate and weather. You don't want to do that without as good an understanding as you possibly can.
Happy Valentine's Day (+ snakes are good for your heart)
This Valentine's Day, once you're done snarfing chocolate, we invite you take a moment to think about heart health.
Some researchers at CU-Boulder spend a lot of time thinking about how to prevent cardiovascular disease. And they may have uncovered one secret for heart health from our wriggly, scaly, slinky brethren: snakes. Burmese pythons, more specifically.
CU-Boulder scientists have shown that huge amounts of fatty acids circulating in the bloodstreams of feeding pythons promote healthy heart growth, results that may have implications for treating human heart disease. Read more here.
If nothing else, that simply means that we’re going to see the average summer is going to be as hot as pretty much the hottest summers that we’ve seen.
CIRES researcher Eric Gordon discussing Colorado's vulnerability to climate change with Colorado Public Radio.
Too many people think learning to code is boring and difficult. It doesn't have to be that way. Computer scientists at CU-Boulder teach kids to code by letting them build video games, which equals fun and exciting. And if you listen to the kids in this video, it's not too hard, either.
The Scalable Game Design project at CU has just won an award from Google, and here's a video they made about the program for the occasion. Watch it, or try building a video game yourself.
The fizzle out of the snowstorm expected to wreak havoc in New York this week has sparked an online debate about whether or not winters are actually getting snowier in the Northern Hemisphere. At first glance, it looks like winters in the last decade have been snowier... until you take into account what's happened during the spring.
The LA Times takes a deep dive into the question today, and they ask CIRES' Klaus Wolter what he thinks:
Wolter has studied trends in extreme storms and concluded in research he published in 2013 that there were no significant trends for snowstorms over the last century. "If you look at the last 50 years, it looks like that last half century is snowier than the earlier one, but there's still reasonable doubt about the quality of snow measurements before the 1950s," Wolter said.
It's sunny and 70 in Boulder, but the Northeast is preparing for a winter storm pounding from snowpocalypse (or is it snowmageddon?) 2015. In a few days, as people begin to dig out, the question on everyone's mind will be, "How much did it snow?"
Turns out, the answer isn't so straightforward. You could just stick your ruler in the snow, if you had one that was long enough, but where you stick it will have a big impact on the answer you get. Snow that falls on warm pavement may melt before it begins to pile up, unlike the flakes that fall on cold lawn furniture. And in some places there are drifts; in other spots, the wind has scoured the snow away.
Scientists at CU-Boulder have been working on a novel way to measure snow depth that can potentially give a more accurate picture of snowpack over large swaths of land, which is critical in the arid West, where freshwater is stored in snow for much of the year.
Engineer Kristine Larson has figured out a way to use the "noise" in the signals of GPS gadgets--which are often already deployed out in the world--to get a measure of snow depth. Put your ruler away and read more about it here.
When this mysterious depression in the Antarctic ice sheet was discovered in December, some scientists proposed that the frozen crater was caused by a meteorite.
But now researchers, including glaciologist Allen Pope, who works at CU-Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center, believe it may be a doline. A what? If you don't know, you're not alone. Pope calls it a "pretty obscure term" that may not be familiar to all glaciologists either.
So WHAT is it? Here's how it's described by a story on NBC:
Glaciologists who pored over the newly discovered feature think the crater resembles an ice doline — a sinkhole-type pit that appears when meltwater lakes suddenly drain from their bottoms.
FANNY PACK DANCE! (And what CU-Boulder’s biz researchers know about Super Bowl ads)
The Super Bowl is less than two weeks away, and the buzz about ads during the game is starting to build. There’s been a lot of chatter about Loctite Super Glue, which is spending nearly its entire annual advertising budget on one 30-second spot.
Crazy? Or savvy? CU-Boulder professor Meg Campbell’s past research finds that companies who are new to airing ads in the Super Bowl do see a bump in their stock prices, but only if they’re new to the game. Super Bowl regulars, like Budweiser, see no such increase.
