Mad. Beautiful. Science.

A blog dedicated to science and the awesome people who study and love it.

[compoundchem]

How well do you know your chemistry glassware? Test yourself with this quiz based on the Guide to Glassware earlier in the week! http://wp.me/P4aPLT-12L

Find the glassware graphic here (but no cheating!): http://wp.me/p4aPLT-12e

[skunkbear]

How loud is the U. S.*? Researchers from the National Park Service, led by Kurt Fristrup, shared these sound maps at a conference on Monday. Ten years ago, Fristrup set out to measure an important natural resource - the amount of silence in national parks. He eventually realized it would take forever to actually make recordings throughout all the parks, so he used a computer program to model loudness across the country. He uploaded all the audio he already had (over a million hours of sound from 546 recording sites) along with environmental data - proximity to roads, the type of vegetation, any nearby topographical features that might act as sound barriers etc. The computer “learned” how all these factors interacted to create a specific sound level, and then predicted loudness everywhere. The map of all sound roughly follows population density, though there are many uninhabited places that are still loud because they are near major roads or airplane routes. Far more interesting to me is the map of natural sounds. What happens when you subtract all of humanity’s noise? You are left with rushing rivers, crashing waves, wind in trees … and in the mountain desert, near silence. A lot of natural soundscapes have been severely degraded, but Fristrup told me there is a more important takeaway from this kind of research: there are lots of things we can do to decrease noise pollution in nature and in our communities. Images: Dan Mennitt, Kurt Fristrup - National Park Service *with apologies to Alaska and Hawaii

[women-in-science-blog]

What do you wear to receive a Nobel Prize? Norwegian neuroscientist May-Britt Moser wore her work, in the form of an elegant dress with a glittering neuron pattern.

The designer, Matthew Hubble, says the design may inspire future collections and currently has a scarf with the neuron pattern for sale.  "When you actually start looking around, a lot of scientists are into fashion," he said. "They like to wear lipstick, they like to wear heels and pretty dresses. It’s quite frustrating when you hear people saying, ‘You shouldn’t be like that if you’re going to be a scientist.’ It’s OK to be a girlie girl and do science as well."

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/neurons-inspire-nobel-laureate-may-britt-mosers-dress-n265866

[compoundchem]

The first in a series of posts on poisons takes a look at white arsenic, the poison nicknamed ‘inheritance powder’: http://wp.me/s4aPLT-arsenic

[theweekmagazine]

This is what will happen to your body in 2015

[currentsinbiology]

Brings new meaning to “busybody”.

[aspiringdoctors-blog]

Bodies are cool.

[itsokaytobesmart]

From the coldest cold to the hottest hot, here’s all the universe’s temperatures.

(from BBC Future)

Bonus question: What is hotter, a boiling tea kettle or an iceberg?

[ri-science]

Make your mark on metal with this etching trick.

This is the final instalment from our Things To Do With Stuff series. For all 24 tidbits designed to get you thinking about and tinkering with the things around you, click here!

Merry Christmas Tumblr!

[ucresearch]

Wealth & the empathy deficit

The social interaction lab at Berkeley, led by psychologist Dacher Keltner, is interested in studying how our bodies are wired to care about other people. For awhile now, they’ve been looking at the vagus nerve — the longest bundle of nerves in the human body (vagus is Latin for “wandering”). It starts at the top of the spinal cord, continues to the heart and on down to the spleen and liver. 

This makes the vagus nerve one of the great mind-body nexuses in the nervous system. Every time you take a deep breath, your heart rate slows down. The vagus nerve controls that relationship, between the breathing and the calming.

In his lab, Dacher Keltner shows participants photos of suffering and distress and finds that these images activate the vagus nerve. They’ve also found that if somebody tells you about a sad experience—of, say, their grandparent dying—your vagus nerve fires. The more you feel compassion, the stronger the vagus nerve response.

Dacher Keltner and his colleagues, Michael Kraus and Paul Piff, have done 12 different studies to measure empathy and how it’s effected by social class. In one study, they found that if they show lower class individuals images of suffering, they had a much stronger vagus nerve response.  There was a literal compassion deficit produced by having more wealth.

But why would wealth and status decrease our feelings of compassion for others? After all, it seems more likely that having few resources would lead to selfishness. They suspect that the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. This leads us towards being more self-focused.

Watch “We are built to be kind” →

[skunkbear]

That’s right! This picture was created at night by looking through the earth at the sun.

It wasn’t made with light though — the image visualizes the flux of neutrinos coming from the sun. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles created in the nuclear furnace of the sun, and they can pass through nearly anything. Billions of neutrinos shoot through our bodies every second, and they fly with ease through the rocky bulk of the earth.

Scientists have built a giant neutrino observatory in an abandoned mine shaft 3,000 ft below Mount Kamioka in Japan. It’s called the Super-Kamiokande - and it’s essentially a 13 million gallon tank of ultra-pure water, rigged with sensors that can detect the extremely weak interaction of neutrinos with other matter. This picture shows the tank when it is empty and undergoing renovations.

The observatory looks down — through the earth itself — to collect data from solar neutrinos. This image is the result of about 18 months of data collection.

(Why does the observatory need to be underground? The rock shelters the observatory from the noise of cosmic rays.)

Sun image: Robert Svoboda and K. Gordan

Super-K image: courtesy of Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institue for Cosmic Ray Research), The University of Tokyo

[popmech]

Elusive Black Seadevil Anglerfish Has Been Captured on Video for the First Time

Hey there, beautiful

[ucresearch]

MBARI Senior Scientist (and former UCSB researcher) Bruce Robinson came across this fish at a depth of about 1900ft. He explains:

This is the first time we’ve captured this fish on video in its habitat. Anglerfish, like this Melanocetus, are among the most rarely seen of all deep-sea fishes. The shining spot at the tip of the ‘fishing pole’ projecting from the fish’s head is a glowing lure. The anglerfish uses its light to attract prey in its deep, dark habitat.

[madbeautifulscience-blog]

I'm attending SfN 2014 this weekend. If any of you are there, I'll see you around!

[skunkbear]

I asked for some pictures of science-themed jack-o’-lanterns and I’ve already received some amazing ones! Submit MORE #sciencepumpkin pics to [email protected].

And check out our Pumpkin Facts video. (Did you know pumpkin beer dates back to the 17th century?)

The pumpkin-carvers are:

Allen Boudreaux with a stunning portrait of Neil Degrasse Tyson.

Ilana Gilg with Emiliania huxleyi: “a globally abundant species of phytoplankton known collectively as coccolithophores which are very important constituents in marine food webs.”

John Pavicic with a brain and Heath Gibson with the ebola virus.

Risa Mueller and Raymond Randol with the ever popular pumpkin pi.

Ilana’s son Alden admires her Enterobacteria phage T4 pumpkin.

[itsokaytobesmart]

If you want to make a pumpkin pie from scratch, you must first invent a spooky universe…

[ucresearch]

UC researchers have found that using a silvery plastic sheet as a replacement for mulch in pumpkin patches can keep bugs away. The light reflected off the plastic repels insects, keeping them from infecting the plants. So you end up with a much better pumpkin for Halloween!

Read more about what other crops UC has helped improve

[biocanvas]

Pumpkin stem

Weighing in at over 1.5 billion pounds each year, pumpkins are one of the most popular crops in the United States. Giant pumpkins normally weigh over 100 pounds each and belong to the species Cucurbita maxima, one of the most diverse domesticated species with more cultivated varieties than any other crop. The current North American record for the largest pumpkin was achieved by John Hawkley, who recently grew a 2,058 pound gourd. Though hardy, pumpkins require moist soil for proper growth, where they pull water up from the ground through roots and transport it throughout the plant via microscopic drinking straws called xylem (large circles in this image).

Image captured and submitted by Changbin Chen, University of Minnesota.

[skunkbear]

What was going on in 1984 that made so many women give up on computer science? This week’s Planet Money tries to unravel the mystery.

Data source: National Science Foundation, American Bar Association, American Association of Medical Colleges

Graph credit: Quoctrung Bui/NPR

[scienceyoucanlove-deactivated20]

As a 19-year-old sophomore at Stanford, Elizabeth Holmes decided to transform diagnostic medicine so she dropped out of college and used her tuition money to start her own company, Theranos. Ten years later, Holmes, pictured here holding a micro-vial, is on the cutting edge of medical technology — her new blood testing method allows hundreds of tests to be run using only a few drops of blood. And, Holmes’ methods are cheaper, faster, more accurate, and less invasive than conventional methods which often require a separate vial of blood for every test. As Holmes told Wired.com earlier this year, “I started this company because I wanted to spend my life changing our health care system. When someone you love gets really sick, most of the time when you find out, it’s too late to be able to do something about it. It’s heartbreaking… We wanted to make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere at the time it matters most. That means two things: being able to detect conditions in time to do something about them and providing access to information that can empower people to improve their lives.”

read more from A Mighty Girl

[thejunglenook]

Reasons you should adore Elizabeth Holmes:

She is featured as Forbes’ youngest self-made woman billionaire.

Her tests will revolutionize the public health world as we know it; Making diagnostic testing accessible and affordable for more people (and potentially saving Medicare and Medicaid ~$100 billion each over the next decade). (x)

She is a coauthor on 82 US and 189 foreign patent applications. (x)

Her fear of needles served as a motivator for launching Theranos. (x)

[npr]

Schizophrenia typically starts in the late teens or early 20s. But if you could stop that first psychotic break, could you stop the mental illness in its tracks? Some doctors think so.

Halting Schizophrenia Before It Starts

Caption: Meghan, 23, began experiencing hallucinations at 19. “Driving home, cars’ headlights turned into eyes. The grills on the cars turned into mouths and none of them looked happy. It would scare the crap out of me,” Meghan says.

Photo Credit: Marvi Lacar for NPR