Bulldogs, Bosons, & Biomes

I'm a STEM Librarian sharing stories, studies, & discoveries related to STEM and science in general. Find me @bookowl on Twitter.

[wetheurban]

The Milky Way Reflected Onto The Largest Salt Flat In The World

In a bid to find a perfectly dark sky, Russian photographer Daniel Kordan made a trip to the Altiplano region located in the west central South America.

Hailing 12,300 feet above the sea level, Kordan was able to utilize the Uyuni salt flat using the special astrophotography camera he had. This type of camera unlocks the colors found in the sky, opening up the barriers between earth and space and casting the Milky Way onto the reflective flats.

Instagram.com/wetheurban

[currentsinbiology]

A southern three-banded armadillo (Tolypeutes matacus) at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo. Source

[librarianbyday]

Health literacy is the ability to obtain, access and understand health information and use services to make appropriate health decisions. In the United States, 77 million adults have basic or below health literacy manifesting in difficulty with tasks such as following prescription drug labels or reading a medical pamphlet to know how often one should complete a preventative screening such as a colonoscopy or mammography. Low health literacy is not at all uncommon, but it is costly. Low levels of health literacy contribute to mistakes in taking medication, worsened glycemic control among patients with diabetes, greater use of health care services including emergency room visits, and poor self-reported health.

Health illiteracy is costly and can be deadly - Crossroads Today (via librarianbyday)

[stemowl-blog]

There has been a long theoretical debate among biologists as to whether or not species are driven to extinction before genetic factors have time to play a role. The two snapshots of the woolly mammoth genome, one while it flourished and the other near extinction, support the idea that there is genomic meltdown in small populations that contributes to extinction.

“This is probably the best evidence I can think of for the rapid genomic decay of island populations,” said Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University.

The discovery that individual genes were deleted in the Wrangel mammoth’s genome is a “very novel result,” and if confirmed, “will have very important implications for conservation biology,” Dr. Dalen said.

(via The Woolly Mammoth’s Last Stand - The New York Times)

[stemowl-blog]

By harvesting and sequencing that DNA, Weyrich has shown that there was no such thing as a typical Neanderthal diet. One individual from Spy cave in Belgium mostly ate meat like woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep, as well as some edible mushrooms. But two individuals who lived in El Sidrón cave in Spain seemed to be entirely vegetarian. The team couldn’t find any traces of meat in their diet, which consisted of mushrooms, pine nuts, tree bark, and moss. The Belgian Neanderthals hunted; the Spanish ones foraged.

Neanderthal Dental Plaque Shows What a Paleo Diet Really Looks Like - The Atlantic

[stemowl-blog]

There are essentially two ways of studying a non-star object in space. “There are the dynamicists, who are interested in motions, orbits, and classes of objects based on mass,” says Owen Gingerich, astronomer emeritus at Harvard University. “And then there are geophysicists who are very keen to look at planets as actual, physical bodies.” Gingerich was chairman of the planet committee at the 2006 Prague meeting, where a small but feisty group of dynamicists worked in the wording that a planet should be massive enough to clean all the debris out from its orbit. He didn’t expect the debate to be so vociferous, and had in fact bought tickets to fly home from Prague two days before the final vote occurred. He says he’s not enthusiastic about how the whole ordeal turned out. “Since then I have taken a view that the IAU didn’t really have any right to define the word planet,” he says.

(via Pluto’s Defenders Prepare to Fight for Its Planethood (Again) | WIRED)

[stemowl-blog]

Look at this awesome #STEM program in eastern #Iowa

(via Program for Eastern Iowa girls teaches hundreds about STEM careers | The Gazette)

[stemowl-blog]

But as described by Jason Wang, an astronomy graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers think that the four planets may well be in resonance with each other.

In this case it’s a one-two-four-eight resonance, meaning that each planet has an orbital period in nearly precise ratio with the others in the system.

The black circle in the center of the image is part of the observing and analyzing effort to block the blinding light of the star, and thus make the planets visible.

(via A Four Planet System in Orbit, Directly Imaged and Remarkable | News | Astrobiology)

[stemowl-blog]

Recent studies paint a mixed picture of how U.S. students – not just high school seniors – are faring in science. Fourth- and eighth-graders, for example, have made gains since 2009, but test scores among 12th-graders have remained flat, according to the NAEP. And while some racial and ethnic performance gaps have narrowed over time, black and Hispanic students still score considerably lower than their Asian and Pacific Islander and white peers, regardless of grade level.

In recent years, there has been attention paid to racial and gender disparities in jobs tied to the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Several industries, such as technology and medicine, are openly looking for ways to diversify their ranks.

Some experts have traced the relatively low share of blacks and Hispanics working in STEM professions to differences that emerge at an early age, and NAEP’s figures suggest that racial and ethnic differences in wanting a career in science may emerge at the high school level or earlier. For example, just over a third (37%) of black eighth-graders agree they would like a job that involves science, compared with 44% of whites and 55% of students of Asian and Pacific Islander descent.

(via High school seniors' interest in science varies by race, ethnicity | Pew Research Center)

[stemowl-blog]

“Seager’s discovery will be fate-altering if it comes, but it will also be quiet, a few pixels on a screen. It will obey the laws of physics. It will be a probability equation: What are the chances? We won’t discover that there is life on other planets the way we’ve been taught that we’ll learn. There won’t be some great mother ship descending from the sky over Johannesburg or a bizarre lightning storm that monsters will ride to New Jersey. What Seager will have is a photograph from a space telescope of a distant solar system, with its star eclipsed by her starshade, and with a familiar blue dot some safe and survivable distance away from it. That’s all the evidence she will have that we’re not alone, and that will be all the evidence she will need. Her proof of life will be a small light where there wasn’t one before.”

Read the whole piece.

[stemowl-blog]

“The mobilization of great minds, national laboratories, and private companies in pursuit of well-defined objectives is therefore not a quixotic quest. The lessons of the Manhattan Project were taken up after World War II in many important areas of national security, public health, new technologies, and general science. From the birth of modern computing, to the polio vaccine and the space age, to the human genome and the Internet, directed technological change has repeatedly shaped and advanced the US economy and the modern world.”

Read more here.

[stemowl-blog]

“In a paper published today in Science Advances, Surendra Adhikari and Erik Ivins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, researched how the movement of water around the world contributes to Earth's rotational wobbles. Earlier studies have pinpointed many connections between processes on Earth's surface or interior and our planet's wandering ways. For example, Earth's mantle is still readjusting to the loss of ice on North America after the last ice age, and the reduced mass beneath that continent pulls the spin axis toward Canada at the rate of a few inches each year. But some motions are still puzzling.”

Read the whole piece: NASA Study Solves Two Mysteries About Wobbling Earth

[stemowl-blog]

“But in the latest issue of Maya Archaeology, Stephen Houston of Brown University revisits the codex and determines that it’s real. The calendar discrepancies, he says, can be explained by regional or temporal variations in mythology of Venus, the movements of which this 104-year-long calendar predicts. In addition, no modern pigments are displayed on the codex, and the sharp cuts appear to be breaks in gypsum plaster—not markers of modern carpentry.The codex was also found alongside other items that have been verified as authentic, and the format doesn’t differ from sketch and grid lines seen in Mayan murals. Lastly, the some of the images in the codex are of deities unknown to modern scientists at the time of its discovery—making it impossible for anyone to have fabricated it. All signs point to its legitimacy.”

Read the whole piece: The Oldest Book Written in the Americas is a Mayan Guide to Astronomy by Allison Eck. 

[stemowl-blog]

By using more modern, next-generation sequencing techniques that amplify certain target strands of DNA, the team was able to identify the species associated with each piece of clothing.

Ötzi's leather overcoat was made of a grab bag of at least four different individual animals from two species—sheep and goat—while his lighter coat was made of sheep. His leggings were made of goatskin, perhaps because that type of animal skin provided the suppleness needed for walking, the researchers hypothesized in the paper. To top off the wardrobe, his leather shoes were stuffed with grass, and he sported shoelaces derived from wild cow, or auroch, the researchers found.

This outfit would have been quite toasty in the chilly Alpine region, as most of the clothing would have been stuffed with grass or other filling to add extra warmth, O'Sullivan said.

Read the whole piece: Ötzi the Iceman’s Wild Wardrobe Revealed by Tia Ghose

[stemowl-blog]

The strength of the magnetic field around a magnetar completely boggles the imagination. The magnetic field of the Earth’s core is about 25 gauss, and here on the surface, we experience less than half a gauss. A regular bar magnet is about 100 gauss. Just a regular neutron star has a magnetic field of a trillion gauss.  Magnetars are 1,000 times more powerful than that, with a magnetic field of a quadrillion gauss.

Read the whole piece: What are Magnetars? by Fraser Cain

[stemowl-blog]

Eventually, a picture of the past came into focus. Thousands of years ago, a huge earthquake shook the region, toppling the homes at Lajia. Radiocarbon dates of children's bones from the site timed the disaster to 1922 B.C., give or take 28 years. Upstream, in the mountains to the west, an avalanche tumbled into the mouth of the Jishi Gorge, creating an artificial dam that prevented the river from flowing through. Backed-up water began to fill the gorge, rising higher with each passing month.

The people living downstream would have seen the Yellow River slow to a trickle, then stop. It's not clear whether they would have been aware of the disaster that was looming.

About nine months later, the lake spilled over the top of the dam.

Read the whole piece: Legends say China began in a great flood. Scientists just found evidence that the flood was real. By Sarah Kaplan.

[sciencealert]

Astronomers just discovered a strange void near the centre of the Milky Way

This thing is huge.

An international team of astronomers has discovered a ‘stellar void’ near the centre of our Milky Way galaxy that’s completely devoid of young stars known as Cepheids.

The find suggests that, although there are Cepheids inside the Milky Way’s 'heart’, there are no young stars in the surrounding Extreme Inner Disk region - an area that stretches roughly 8,000 light-years out from the galactic centre.

“We already found some while ago that there are Cepheids in the central heart of our Milky Way (in a region about 150 light-years in radius),” said team member Noriyuki Matsunaga, from the University of Tokyo. “Now we find that outside this there is a huge Cepheid desert extending out to 8,000 light-years from the centre.”

Read more…