Risk Bites

Bite sized insights into the science of risk

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Are green potato chips bad for you? We've all wondered at some point. This week's Risk Bites dives in and explores the strange and fascinating truth behind those greenish crisps!

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Is "New and Different" the same as "Dangerous?" Andrew tackles the question in this week's Risk Bite: "Do Novel Materials Present Novel Risk?"

Featuring not one, but at least TWO Shakespeare jokes! 

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Using lasers and magnetic fields, the fastest thing in the universe, light, has been halted for a minute – the time it takes to make 20 round-trips

GUYS GUYS GUYS

THEY FIGURED OUT HOW TO STOP FLIPPIN' LIGHT.

HOLY

FLIP.

No word yet on whether they've found a way to halt the inevitability of student loan repayments....

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Cicadas with antibacterial nanomaterials on their wings! The little nano-sized pillars can destroy bacteria by tearing apart their membranes. Incredible!

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The Internet is the key to an education treasure trove. The ability to connect with learners anytime, anywhere and on anything is a powerful way for education institutions, or anyone who is considered an expert to share knowledge and engage

OH HAY

It's an article about Risk Bites, Mad/Bad SCIENCE!, ExSciEd, and the people who make the episodes :)

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Brand new Risk Bites! What makes advanced materials dangerous? Can we predict their toxicity? Does "advanced" material cause "advanced" disease? FIND OUT

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24 feet tall and three feet wide, these giant spires dotted the ancient landscape

All Hail the Fungus Empires! 

[doctorcalledmesickisaidtru-deac]

sottile come un baobab

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Our love of science is outstripped only by our obsession with puns.

[galaxyclusters]

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Water Bears belong to a lesser known phylum of invertebrate animals, the Tardigrada. The first tardigrades were discovered by Goetz in 1773. Over 400 species have been described since that time.

Tardigrades grow only to a size of about 1mm, but they can easily be seen with a microscope. Tardigrade bodies are short, plump, and contain four pairs of lobopodial limbs (poorly articulated limbs which are typical of soft bodied animals). Each limb terminates in four to eight claws or discs. They lumber about in a slow bear-like gait over sand grains or pieces of plant material.

Tardigrade facts.

TARDIGRADES

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Poisonous Birds? Seriously?

Toxins: they're not just for snakes and spiders! Here's a quartet of toxic avians.

Made all the more confusing because I ACTUALLY OWNED A QUAIL FOR LIKE 4 YEARS.

Little did I know that he was poisonous the whole time.....

[itsokaytobesmart]

Acoustic Chemistry

Levitation is not only the domain of swamis and wizards. Science, too, can make objects float, like the electrical fields that levitate frogs or the magnets responsible for the epic phenomoenon known as quantum locking.

Sound, too, can be used to suspend objects in space, via acoustic levitation. We’ve seen this before, in this video, but now it’s been taken to the next level.

Acoustic levitation works because high frequency sound waves will interfere and form standing waves. Small objects can then be suspended at the “nodes" of those waves. Dimos Poulikakos has developed a way to guide those nodes toward each other, letting them initiate floating chemistry without a single human touch.

Here we see the violent reaction between sodium metal and water, captured in levitating glory.

More at New Scientist.

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Acoustic levitation! From now on, we'll use this as an excuse to listen to music at work - we're conducting experiments! 

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Sure, advanced materials - like nano gold and silver particles - are cool and super useful, but are they safe? 

[discoverynews]

Behold! The World’s Tiniest 3-D Jigsaw Puzzle

Puzzle pieces the size of sand grains have debuted at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. These puzzle pieces haven’t been designed to frustrated jigsaw puzzle lovers, but to demonstrate a new process for reducing the size of injection molds. It may sound esoteric, but it’s a precise process used on making things from jet engine parts to Lego bricks. Read more

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*Drools*

[joshbyard]

University of Michigan Researchers Create Tabletop Antimatter “Gun"

At the University of Michigan, an international team of physicists has begun experimenting with its tabletop-sized super laser, modding it into an antimatter “gun."

…Up until now, machines capable of creating positrons — coupled with electrons, they comprise the energy similar to what’s emitted by black holes and pulsars — have needed to be as large as they are expensive.

Creating these antimatter beams on a small scale will hopefully give astrophysicists greater insight into the “enigmatic features" of gamma ray bursts that are “virtually impossible to address by relying on direct observations," according to a paper published at arXiv.

While the blasts only last fractions of a second each, the researchers report each firing produces a particle-density output level comparable to the accelerator at CERN.

(via University of Michigan activates antimatter ‘gun,’ cartoon supervillians twirl moustaches anew)

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Hooray for top-notch science at the University of Michigan!

Furthermore: Tabletop antimatter guns? When did the future arrive, and how long until hoverboards?

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New ExSciEd! When you can learn the basics of cell biology using LEGOs, why learn any other way?

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Who's Got The Biggest Genome? The Results May Surprise You!

Who's got more DNA? An elephant, or a mouse? In terms of volume, it's probably the elephant by a long shot. But the more interesting question might be: who's got a longer genome? Who's got more A's, T's, C's, and G's? It's still the elephant, but not by the margin that you'd expect:

Mus musculus - 2.5 billion base pairs (bp)

Loxodonta africana - 3.2 billion bp 

If you were judging solely by the size of the animal, it probably wouldn't surprise you that an elephant has a larger genome than a mouse. What might surprise you, is that the elephant genome is dwarfed by the genome of the common european toad, Bufo bufo, which clocks in at a whopping 6.9 billion bp!

It's easy to associate size with complexity, but in the field of biology, bigger does not always mean better (or more complicated). The human genome contains a respectable 3 billion or so base pairs, which is way more than any virus (between 2000 and 1.2 million bp) or fruit fly (120 million bp), and larger than the genomes of boa constrictors (2.1 million bp) or bats (1.9 million bp). 

But that paltry 3 billion bases is nothing compared to the incredible 290 million bp genome of Amoeba proteus or the downright unbelievable 670 million bp genome of Amoeba dubia. Of course, the size of the genome has little to do with the number of genes that are encoded in it, so what's the deal with all that DNA? Why on earth do some of the smallest critters around have such massive lengths of nucleic acid? It's still not entirely clear, but unravelling the mysteries of genome organization and function will provide us with tremendous insight into the countless aspects of human health and disease.

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Under Pressure: Scientists develop new type of battery using ultra-high pressures

By compressing xenon diflouride with around one million times the Earth's atmospheric pressure, researchers at Washington State University were able to coax the compound into forming a metallic solid capable of storing tremendous amounts of energy.

More here: http://bit.ly/9Pv4H7