Dracula Minnow

Recently I wrote about the vampire squid, and I argued that I really didn’t have to look any further for a more flashy, eye-grabbing title. I stand corrected. A group of scientists recently discovered a new minnow, and it has got a pair of choppers projecting from its jaws that earned it the name ‘dracula’. International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University recently named it one of the top 10 new species of 2010.

Measuring just 17 millimeters long when fully grown, this little minnow, while tiny, is a close relative of the common goldfish, the carp, and the other minnows you might have known from childhood. Many of your pet store variety fishes are in this group of carps and carp-like fishes. And, if you have looked closely at Goldy residing in your child’s fish bowl, you might have noticed Goldy has no teeth. This group of fishes has been around for a long time, and, in fact, lost anything even resembling true teeth nearly 50 million years ago. But, the dracula minnow has developed bony spurs on its jaws that project through the skin and look just like nasty fangs.

Just the male has these fangs. Why? It is completely unknown. This little fish is completely transparent. And, it is so small because its development was apparently truncated somehow. So, the adults look like they are still larval fishes. They possess at least forty fewer bones than other closely related adult fishes.

Other species on this list include an amazing carnivorous (yep, meat-eating) sponge, and bug-eating slug, an electric fish, a psychedelic frogfish, a tiny new mushroom with the scientific name Phallus (I’ll let you Google it to see why it earned this name, though you probably don’t have to think too hard to figure it out), a new species of yam from Madagascar, a giant orb-weaving spider in which the female is four times larger than the male (they managed to figure out the male and female were of the same species), a deep-sea worm that shoots glowing green blobs of goo at its predators, and a giant carnivorous pitcher-plant the size of a football.

How to mend a broken heart

Nope, this isn’t advice for the forlorn. I am referring to an actual physically broken heart. And, this represents cool science at its finest.

Researchers have long been interested in animals that can repair themselves. Lizards and salamanders can drop their tails if they are caught by a predator, and then re-grow them. Fish can repair damaged fins. But, we humans cannot re-grow a limb if lost. Can we figure out how these other animals do this and put it to work?

Recent work at the Salk Institute in San Diego purposely maimed the hearts of zebrafish (cute little aquarium fish you can find at your local pet store), and found they could regenerate up to 20% of that organ. That is a lot of heart to re-grow.

The heart is probably the most important organ in your body. I say probably because your brain is right up there in terms of keeping things going from minute to minute. If your heart is damaged, and you are losing blood, you’ve got only a few minutes left. But, zebrafish can stop the bleed, and then slowly, over days, repair the damage eventually producing a heart that was as good as the former.

How are they doing this? Science has long speculated that this is the work of stem cells. Stem cells are those cells that are not ‘determined’, meaning the kind of cell they are to become has not been decided yet by the body. They do not know yet what their job in life will be, be it bone cell or skin cell. Therefore, theoretically, we can use stem cells to initiate repairs.

Stem cell research has gotten a lot of attention lately, much of it controversial. The problem is, philosophically, where stem cells come from. We have some stem cells as adults, such as in our bone barrow; they don’t divide as well, cannot turn into as many things, and do not initiate repair as well as embryonic stem cells. Back in the 70’s scientists were able to make embryonic stem cells divide, meaning they can make more of them. Embryonic stem cells are completely undetermined, as opposed to adult stem cells, and most of our understanding of organ development and tissue repair has come from this line of work. Though, we have made breakthroughs in the last couple of years with adult stem cells. There is terrific coverage of this research and the controversy at the NIH website.

But, the amazing thing about this heart research is that it is not stem cells initiating the repair. Adult heart cells are doing the work. The adult heart cells initiate a repair response, much like a stem cell, and then divide rapidly to do the work. Other researchers tried this study in mice, to see if mammals could do what the fish could. They found out that the mammalian adult heart cells went back into a sort of stem cell like state and began to initiate repairs, but the cells did not proliferate, they did not divide. So, there were not enough of them to do the job. The trick now is getting them to proliferate. And, that is probably going to take some more research on stem cells to figure out how and why they proliferate, when the adult cells cannot.

In the meantime, try to keep your heart intact for a little while longer. We don’t have the fix quite yet.

What is the Meaning of This?

Today we will chat about words; their history, their common usage, and their evolution within language. This is the science of etymology. My inspiration from this comes from my eldest, dearest darling of a child (insert whatever brand of personal sarcasm you prefer here), the young Mr. Think Science, Jr.

Each Monday TS Jr. comes home with a list of spelling/vocabulary words that he is meant to write several times, and then look up in the dictionary and define. Now this dictionary that we use at home is rather sentimental, as dictionaries go. It was my mother’s in college, and she gave it to me in high school. It is huge, and heavy, and literally fifty years old. The fact that it is huge and heavy causes some complaining when it must be dragged to the kitchen table, and I am secretly convinced that it gains at least twenty pounds in weight whenever touched by my dear child, or so you would think based upon how he carries on about having to drag this hulking beast from his room. Personally, I think this is ‘character building’, and I think he should have to carry this dictionary in his backpack to school, walking uphill both ways, like I did as a child…in the snow…in Arizona…but I digress. I may have to change my stance on this.

I recently learned the limitations of a 50-year old dictionary. For one, it does not have words in it that were invented in the modern age, such as ‘unfriend.’ You might recall from previous posts that this was The Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2009. The second limitation is really the same limitation, and that is that this dictionary was written in a different era.

At little background is needed about now - I have been harping on TS Jr. to choose the first definition given for each word, since that is usually the most common definition. He, of course, chooses whichever definition is the shortest. Therefore, many words on his list, prior to my scrutiny, have simple, but not inaccurate, definitions such as ‘noun.’

The word of the moment, whose true and detailed meaning we were anxiously waiting to reveal, was ‘chartreuse.’ And, in my 50-year-old dictionary, the definition for chartreuse is ‘a green or yellow aromatic liqueur’ (insert dramatic pause here to simulate new conundrum for mostly politically correct parental unit, aka me). I did not even know there was a liqueur called Chartreuse.

Darling TS Jr. subsequently won the battle that ensued about changing the definition to a more ‘school-appropriate’ definition, since, as he aptly pointed out, that WAS the first definition. So, that is the definition on his homework. I believe this is what they call ‘eating your words’ and TS Jr. skipped all the way to class, backpack sans giant dictionary, with the revelation that never again would he be held to the first definition of a word and might yet be able to get away with such concise and profoundly accurate definitions as ‘noun.’

Chartreuse is a French liqueur that contains 132 herbal extracts. Produced by monks, the alcohol gets its name from their home, the Grande Chartreuse monastery located in the Chartreuse Mountains. Chartreuse was originally thought to be an elixir of long life, stemming from a recipe obtained by the monks in 1605, and was 71% alcohol. The more modern Green and Yellow varieties, which tend more towards green and yellow coloration respectively, range from 55 to 40%. Sadly, the monks were expelled from France in 1903 when the French government attempted to take over both the monastery and the highly profitable Chartreuse production business. The monks simply moved to Spain and kept on making Chartreuse under a slightly different label. Attempts to reproduce the monk’s secret recipe failed miserably, the company went bankrupt, and the monks were allowed to return in 1927. The monastery was destroyed by a mudslide in 1935 and production was moved to nearby Voiron where it continues today. Thank you, Wikipedia. None of that information was in any of the dictionaries that I consulted.

The color that we refer to as ‘chartreuse’ comes from the color of the original alcohol, a very bright color between green and yellow. Today we might refer to this color as fluorescent green. The greenish color comes from the chlorophyll in those 132 herbs. And chlorophyll, does, in fact, fluoresce. Recall from your basic biology that chlorophyll is the green pigment that plants use to absorb light for photosynthesis, which is the process by which they produce new tissue and grow - you just knew I’d slip the science there somehow.

My note to the teacher along with the homework - Please don't suspend my child. I will buy a new dictionary this weekend.

Viral Video

Science, Twitter, and YouTube? Seems like one of these things is not like the others (remember the old Sesame Street song?). But, sure enough, internet tools like Twitter and YouTube are being used to convey science to the world, and not just scientists.

Two recent, and most fabulous, examples hit my e-mail inbox today, and could not demonstrate the phenomenon more aptly.

The first came in the form of a message from a friend and colleague, with a link to his colleague’s blog post. These two colleagues co-teach a course. My friend showed a neat video as part of his lecture, to demonstrate a fascinating bit of evolution, about the sling-jaw wrasse. Like the name implies, the sling-jaw wrasse has developed a series of hinges and joints in the head that allows it to literally throw its jaws at its prey. This is what I do for a living – study how animals work. I was sent the message because I had worked a little bit on this particular species (but I was not the one to discover the most amazing biological feat I just told you about). Check it out. Or, just do a search for “Epibulus” in Youtube.

The sling-jaw wrasse is amazing. What I find more amazing is that the colleague posted a twitter feed that went something like this “My co-instructor showed this crazy sling-jaw wrasse video in our class today” with the link above. A few folks tweeted back. It hit a couple of blogs, including Discover Magazine….then web news sites, then the London Telegraph (a newspaper), and a week later there had been 165,000 views of the YouTube video.

The second example hit my inbox just one hour and twenty-six minutes earlier, courtesy of ScienceNow. This is about bone worms. You know with a name like bone worms, these have got to be cool animals. Researchers right here in Monterey Bay, from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, have been studying these worms that show up at food falls in the deep sea. Whales die, sink, and become an important source of nutrition for the next several years for species like bone worms. These worms arrive at the carcass as larvae, and metamorphose into adult females. Additional larvae that arrive after that point settle on the females and become males, living in a sort of harem serving the female (there is just something quite fabulous about that). Researchers have been sinking carcasses that wash up on the beach for the last few years and tracking who shows up. Turns about there are at least 15 species of these worms in Monterey Bay, most of them new to science. Check out the bone worms in action. Or, just search for “MBARI bone worms” in YouTube.

Moving Time and Space

This past week I had the pleasure of experiencing Washington DC with my extended family and my children. I lived in the greater DC area for several years as a child, and have fond memories of the National Museum of Natural History and the gigantic whale suspended from the ceiling. Though I have had many opportunities to return to DC for work, I have been waiting until I thought my own children would be old enough to remember the trip to take them. This week, with MPUSD in recess, was it.

We did the requisite trips to see the memorials and monuments. The Washington Monument reflecting on the water is still incredible, and the Lincoln Memorial still takes my breath away. The sight of the White House, lit at night, is a truly patriotic thing no matter what political party you belong to. I’ve stood there with Democrats and Republicans in power, and the effect is still the same, pure awe and respect. The National Museum of Natural History is still amazing. Fully assembled dinosaur bones, full-sized African elephants, whales suspended from the ceiling, and all. That particular museum, and my childhood memories, combined with my more recent trips as a researcher relegated to the collections stored in the catacombs in the basement of this fine institution, was my main motivation for the trip.

But, this time, with my kids, the site I found most moving was standing beneath the space shuttle Endeavor in the Air and Space Museum. The Endeavor never actually went into space, it was set up as a training shuttle. But, the sheer intensity of this actual ship literally inches from my face was almost heart-stopping. The strides we have made in this particular area of science are truly awesome. The mistakes…devastating. I remember sitting in my classroom in elementary school as the first civilian went into space, a teacher no less. This was to be a momentous day! There was a television brought into every classroom. We were glued to the broadcast. And, then, the worst possible thing happened. The spacecraft exploded, as we all watched. I knew it was awful, but I was too young to comprehend that the unimaginable had just happened. My teachers openly wept. I thought of this as I looked at the Endeavor.

And, what brought tears to my eyes, holding my son’s hand in the same museum, was standing under the Enola Gay and explaining to him the significance of that particular airplane, which, I am proud to say, I remembered without reading the elegantly framed placard in front of me. The payload of the Enola Gay represented the single most significant scientific accomplishment of the day. An accomplishment that was simultaneously the most devastating known to man, and subsequently brought an end to a World War.

The Air and Space Museum was always my father’s favorite museum. He is an engineer. I thought it made sense given his career. Now, however, I understand it from the perspective of a parent. The Air and Space Museum, like no other, represents the amazing strides we have made as a human race, and all that we hope will come to be in our children’s lifetimes, and their children’s lifetimes. We hope the science will be used for good; to find a cure for cancer, to end world hunger, to create world peace. Science can be also devastating. I lived in fear of a nuclear holocaust as a child. Global warming now haunts my children. And global warming is, in fact, the product of science run amok.

For better or for worse, science holds the key to the future. When I was a child I think we trusted that science would always make life better. Or at least I saw the world that way, through the eyes of a child. Now, I can only hope that science holds the promise of a great life for our children and grandchildren. We have seen the devastation that can be wrought. Yet, we hope that humanity will prevail and rational minds will guide science so that life for our children is better than we have now. That is all we ever want as parents.

Viral Fear

With the school year upon us, it is probably time for another installment of Swine Flu 101. My kids have already had the flu, or some sort of viral bug, this year, and I cough and sputter as I write this. Feels like I have had this bug for a month or more already.

This year’s flu season is looking to be pretty rough. On a day when I called my son in sick from school, 7 other kids were absent from his class, and 5 from from my daughter’s including the teacher. Does this mean I should panic? No. But, should I use some common sense? Yes. Sick kids need to stay home. Because sick kids get other kids sick, and then they all miss school, and that is no good for anyone’s education.

Is this a challenge in that I have to miss work when I am home with a sick kid? You bet. Two working parents on furlough and with no local family who can help makes sick kid days tough. Are my kids ever sick on furlough days? Of course not. Are they sick on a day when I have meetings scheduled back to back and incredibly important, career-limiting deadlines, of course. But, a sick kid is a sick kid and they have to stay home.

If you don’t already have a plan for how you are going to handle your child’s illness this year, it is a good idea to make one. Chances are you are going to have a sick kid. Chances are that when your kid is sick, you are carrying the germs and just not showing the symptoms, making you a prime vector for whatever the disease of the moment is. Viruses are typically most transmissible (ie contagious), before you show symptoms. That is the evolution at work. A successful virus is really good at spreading itself before you know it is there, and can fight it. That is how it ensures its survival. Having you home too, with your kid, is just not a bad idea.

In the meantime, should we panic? Definitely not. H1N1 is out there, in our population, right now. It has pretty much made it into the mainstream at this point. Doctors appear to be just assuming their patients have it now, and not sending every patient out to be tested. You should view this as a good thing. If doctors are not so panicked that they feel they need to test every suspect case, then the cases are mild, and the flu is doing what it is supposed to do in an evolutionary biology sense. It is becoming less virulent. Another hallmark of a successful virus is that it does not kill its host, as a live host means it can be spread to more and more people.

Dr. Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University estimates that we are now down to a Stage 1 pandemic. Stage 1 is the lowest level. Yes, people are going to contract this. Category 1 is equivalent to a moderate (not mild, but not severe) seasonal flu. Like seasonal flu, he predicts this is going to tend to affect the elderly and the immune compromised the worst. Because this effect is being added to the usual seasonal flu effect, it is going to be noticed. But, it is predictable.

What to do in the meantime? Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, stay home when you are ill, and do the same for your kids. What to do about all the others around you coughing and sneezing and not following this advice? A little hand-washing goes a long way. Do help yourself to the Purell and other sources provided to you to clean those items you touch that are out there being touched by everyone. But also remember, viruses are not biotic. Antibiotic wipes and gels won’t work against viruses, and there is lots of evidence that these contribute to the breeding of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains. Antibiotic soaps and the like are not allowed in my home. Alcohol-based products like the hand-sanitizers are antiseptic, meaning they kill just about everything and kill it good. These, so far, are not linked to generating antibiotic resistance, are recommended by my personal doctor, and are allowed in my home.

The Science of Volunteering

Many of us volunteer, and we do it for many different reasons. Lots of us got started because we say a need, perhaps for our own children or family members, and decided to fill that need – and it grew from there. Nearly all of us would be resistant to admit that we also gain something from this seemingly selfless donation of our time and efforts. However, we most certainly do gain.

It is the very volunteering of the act that makes it so rewarding - by volunteering we learn how to help others, and in doing so help ourselves as well. Volunteering may also allow you to explore (new) career and personal interests, enrich your education, build your resume, gain marketable skills, and earn valuable recommendations. You will develop leadership skills and gain leadership opportunities. You will almost surely make a difference for an individual or in your larger community, which in an incredible ‘feel good’ opportunity. You just might even have fun and make new friends!

But, believe it or not, the act of giving your time or effort to others is actually shown, scientifically, to improve your overall health. Volunteering is often recommended by mental health professionals as an activity to increase your own personal self-esteem and to overcome shyness or loneliness. A recent report compiled by the Corporation for National and Community Service (sponsors of the AmeriCorps program) and the USA Freedom Corps shows that there are solid studies by social and medical scientists to support this, and more, claims (http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/volunteering/benefits.asp). The 30 scientifically-controlled studies included in the report collectively found that volunteering leads to improved mental and physical health. The volunteers that were tracked in these studies experienced higher functional ability, greater longevity, and lower rates of depression.

Volunteering is also thought to increase people’s perceptions of their quality of life, increase people’s satisfaction with their own life, increase people’s activity levels and physical and mental fitness, and helps people to feel that they ‘belong’. According to PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), that’s the secret of volunteering. People who become volunteers usually lead richer, happier, and more satisfying lives than those who don’t volunteer.

PBS has a wonderful website aimed at kids, called It’s My Life (http://pbskids.org/itsmylife/). We could learn a lot from those kids. My favorite quote is this one:

Michele, 12, says: “It teaches humbleness, something I could use. Also, it teaches you how many people need help around the world. You want to help more and more people. It gets kind of addicting.”

Smart kid! These children are tomorrow’s leaders, and we can help them out today with our skills, talent, and time. Every act, no matter how small, can help. So, help yourself, and help your community at the same time. Go Volunteer!

The life and death of a planet

Scientists have discovered a new planet, and it is spiraling to its doom, or so the predictions go. WASP-18b, so named because it was discovered by the United Kingdom’s ‘Wide Angle Search for Planets’ program, is destined to crash into its parent star, aptly named WASP-18. Fortunately for us, this planet is not in our solar system and its parent star is not our sun. But still…wow.

WASP-18b, described in the August 27 issue of the international journal Nature, is not an insignificant planet. It is ten times the mass of our Jupiter.

The trouble for poor WASP-18b is that it orbits way too close to WASP-18, a mere 1.4 million miles away. Ok, 1.4 million miles seems pretty far. But, WASP-18b is so close to WASP-18 that it can complete its orbit in just over 22 hours. It takes the Earth 8760 hours, or 365 of our so-called days (a.k.a. 1 year), to orbit our sun. The concept of a ‘day’ depends on how fast we are spinning on our Earth axis; our day is 24 hours. It takes 24 hours for us to see the sun, spin all the way around, and see the sun in the same position again. A day on WASP-18b is going to be remarkably different, because it spins on its axis slower than it traverses its orbit. So, a ‘day’ lasts longer than a ‘year’. Too bad, since ‘daytime’ temperatures on WASP-18b reach a broiling 3,800°F.

WASP-18b will be pulled to its doom, and relatively soon by planetary terms, by the gravitational forces that exist between the two bodies. These are the same sorts of gravitational forces that exist between the Earth and our Moon, and subsequently cause the tides. However, our moon orbits the Earth much more slowly than the Earth itself is rotating, thusly our moon is actually moving ever so slowly away from us. At the blinding speed of 0.2 seconds a century (so don’t lose sleep over this).

However, WASP-18b is spiraling inward, and its spin is speeding up. Because of the distance between WASP-18b and WASP-18, WASP-18b experiences gravitational forces so strong that there is huge a bulge at its equator literally dragging behind the planet. Thus, the real mystery is why it has not been sucked into the center of WASP-18 already.

Scientists admit that there is another alternative for the outcome of WASP-18b – it could be shredded to bits by gravitational pull, creating rings of gas and debris not unlike the rings of Saturn.

The really cool thing about the discovery of WASP-18b is that scientists will know if their predictions will be borne out in the next 5 to 10 years. No, the crash is not that eminent. But, the change in trajectory of WASP-18b will be.

So, how often are new planets discovered? Well, 30 more were discovered just in 2009. WASP-18b is number 374 on the list maintained by the Paris Observatory. WASP-17b was discovered on August 11 of this year. It is twice the size of Jupiter, but has only half the mass, earning it the truly adorable designation of ‘puffy planet’.

Science is Never Out of Style

Check out the new Science Nation feature

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/about.jsp

Into the Swing of Things

A baseball is a 3-inch diameter sphere traveling at upwards of 100 miles an hour, at least in the pro leagues. It is 9 inches in circumference, and 5 ounces in weight. And, it is darn hard to make contact with it. It is in fact so hard to hit this ball that hitting it 3 out of 10 times is considered really quite good. If you were in one of my courses and got 30% correct on an exam I gave, I would ask you to seriously reconsider your career choices.

It is so hard to hit that little white ball that batting in baseball is a metaphor for life. If you push yourself to take on something really challenging you ‘step up to the plate’, if you are working really hard and aren’t giving up you ‘keep on swinging’, if you failed entirely you ‘struck out’, and if you pulled it off beautifully you ‘hit a home run’.

According to the Baseball Almanac, the best batting average in a single season, ever, is by Tip O’Neil. A 0.485. He earned this in 1887 playing for the St. Louis Browns. Of course, in 1887, they counted walks towards your batting average. But, that is not the case for several other 400 hitters on the list. In the first part of the 1900’s Ty Cobb made the list 10 times, and he is Number One on the list of all time leaders, with a lifetime average of 0.366. It is getting harder and harder to make the list, and those 400 hitters are a thing of the past. On the list of the top 100 batting averages in a single season, there are only three who played the game during years when I was alive. Ranked number 53 is George Brett of the KC Royals with a 0.390 earned in 1980. Rod Carew of the Twins batted a 0.388 in 1977, giving him the 61st spot. And Larry Walker of the Rockies batted a 0.379 in 1999, earning him the 94th spot. If you look at any of these sorts of lists, you’ll see the batting averages steadily trending downwards over time.

What is interesting, from a physics standpoint, is that those 400 scores were achieved during what was known as the dead-ball era. This is an era in baseball where the balls themselves were rarely replaced during the game, and thus they literally wore out and died over the course of the game. The dead-ball behaved unpredictably – it was not firm or smooth anymore, and therefore its trajectory was atypical. And, of course, this was hastened along during the game by the pitcher’s liberal application of spit, grease, sand-paper, and emery boards, all of which are now illegal. It seems odd that the batting averages should be higher during a time when hitting the ball was arguably harder.

It has been suggested that the live-ball baseball (where the balls are replaced at the first sign of wear) favors the hitter. Therefore, many a baseball analyst has tried to explain why batting averages have not increased over time. Enter the science of statistics and the laws of probability, another love of the science-y types. Explanations range from new pitching styles that don’t favor putting runners on the bases, to hitters that favor hitting home runs and new parks that don’t favor homeruns by design. More night games make it harder to see and hit the ball, and more relief players give batters less familiarity with individual pitching styles and reduce the chance of a hit. There has also, arguably, been an overall increase in the skill of all baseball players over time. This means that a great batter is far more likely to encounter a great pitcher, and therefore success at bat is likely to be lower than for great batter in the past. In the past great batters were rare, but great pitchers were even rarer. These all seem to contribute to a trend of increasing strike-outs or walks, and less hits relative to at-bats.

And so, they keep on swinging.

The Science of Baseball

Ah, it is nearly Spring, and springtime means baseball! The pros are at their spring training camps in the warmer parts of the United States like Florida and Arizona. And, 300+ youths in our fair city are at Los Arboles and Preston parks swinging away with at least as much enthusiasm if not more.

Scientists love baseball. I cannot explain exactly why this is. But, this is a sport that unites geeks and jocks from coast to coast. And, in fact, the President of our city's Pony Baseball and Softball league is a geek-jock himself, scientist by day, baseball empresario by night, weekend, and most school holidays from December to July (that’d be Mr. Dr. SwimsWithFishes again).

Perhaps this is because baseball, unlike life, conforms so well to the laws of physics, where things are predictable, orderly, and behave utterly sensibly. Now, this does not mean baseball players and umpires behave so sensibly. But, ball, interacting with bat, behaves quite predictably. You can calculate, quite reliably, exactly how to hit a ball so that you will get a home run every time at bat. You can draw it on paper; determine forces, angles, and trajectories; form and solve the equations.

The sport comes in figuring out how to get a pitcher to pitch that ball to you, and how to get your body to hit that ball, just like on paper. It is the interaction between the players, and trying to figure out how to achieve a known outcome, that drives our passion for the sport. This interaction is like a dance. Even as spectators, we watch the dance with the same anxiety and emotion, fear and adrenaline as we felt back in the age of innocence at our first school dance and the boy/girl of our dreams was watching us from across the room (and all we hoped for then was that we might get to ‘first base’ with Dream Boy/Girl).

The science of a baseball home run is all in the angles. Line drives, that travel with no arc, no change in height off the ground as they leave the bat, are darn fast, but they don’t travel far. This is because of our old constant friend, gravity. The ball leaves the bat with some inertia, or some force, imparted by the swing of the bat. The magnitude of that inertial force depends on how hard the bat hits the ball. Harder hits impart greater velocities and therefore greater inertia. But, the ball is experiencing friction as it travels through the air. As it slows, eventually the force of gravity, pulling the ball down, will be larger than the inertial force and the ball will begin to fall.

Now imagine the ball is hit with the same speed but with a slight upward arc. At the time when inertial forces begin to weaken, and gravitational forces start to take over, the ball will be higher in the sky. The increased distance to the ground, and the trajectory of the arc, ensure that the ball travels farther before actually contacting the ground. Intuitively, we know this. Line drives rarely hit the home run fence. Home runs are big arcing hits that soar into the grandstands.

It is actually more difficult to hit a ball fast with an upward trajectory than with a straight one. Line drives are fast and pitchers hit with these balls get hurt, badly. However, even if the force imparted onto the ball is lower, a sufficient arc will take the ball farther. A little arc goes a long way, and you can get too much of a good thing. Obviously, a ball hit straight up goes nowhere at all except up. The science is in finding the just right arc. In baseball, as in life.

Which Way the Wind Blows

With the Wind Festival right around the corner, I thought it was a fine time to talk about the science behind how and why the fair city in which I live is so darn windy. Most of the cities in our region have a token produce item that they celebrate annually. But, what makes our city unique? It is the wind, no doubt. I love that we have a festival dedicated to that oceanographic feature that so defines our fair city.

That’s right, I called the wind an oceanographic feature, and it is not just that I am a marine scientist that makes me view the wind in this way.

Wind is formed by a pretty basic principle - hot air rises. When hot air rises, the cooler air rushes in to take its place, and viola, you’ve got wind. That basic principle explains global wind patterns, as the air is warmer at the equator than at the poles, and local wind patterns, such as the off-shore winds that surfers use to predict how good the surf will be. The ocean is a strong factor in determining which way the wind blows, as ocean temperatures drive the giant conveyor belt of air that winds its way around the globe, interrupted by the land masses that form a mere 30% of the earth’s surface.

Spring, Wind Festival time, is probably the consistently windiest time of year here. This is because the ocean off our coast is at its coolest temperature, thanks to spring upwelling. Upwelling is the movement of cool deep waters up to the ocean surface. They are brought to the surface because of global winds, winds blowing towards the equator. Air at the equator is hot and rising, cooler polar air masses are moving in to replace it. As these winds blow down past our coast, the rotation of the earth causes the surface water to be pulled by the winds the to west, or out to sea. As the surface water is pulled away from our coast, the cool deeper water rises up to take its place. Thusly, as any surfer knows, the water off our coast is the coldest in the spring.

Cooler ocean temperatures mean cooler air temperatures sitting on top of that water. As the inland air gets warmer and rises, the cool coastal air is sucked inland to replace it. This temperature differential is probably the greatest in the spring, and particularly in the afternoon in the spring. That means lots of wind.

Land heats and cools faster than the ocean. The ocean actually changes temperature by only a few degrees. This means we typically get offshore winds when the inland areas are cool, like in winter (off shore winds are good for surf, along with big swells brought by winter storms generated far away). We get on-shore winds when the inland areas are warm, such as during the upwelling periods described above. We might get on-shore and offshore winds in the same day depending on the temperature change inland. In our city, we know this well, as we spend our summers watching the fog “burn off” in the late morning and get pushed out to sea (as the heat reduces the moisture content in the air), only to get sucked back on land in the late afternoon.

Science Education and Science Literacy

A recent article in the Washington Post reports that the United States is stagnating in terms of Science education. Recent test scores that compared the United Stated with other countries showed that our 4th and 8th-graders were improving in math, but that our science scores were the same as a decade ago. For the 8th grade, the countries that scored higher than the United States were Singapore, China, Japan, South Korea, England, Hungary and Russia.

Why is this important? Educating our youth in science (and math), boys and girls, is going to be increasingly important for the US to remain competitive in a global economy, an economy that is driven by technology. Look at your own life, for example. We are positively drenched in various forms of technology. But, it goes even deeper than the economy of a nation and future employment opportunities for the individual.

An understanding of the basic principles of science, rooted in skills such as critical thinking, the ability to separate of fact from opinion, and problem solving is essential for decision-making. As adults, we are increasingly faced with decisions about how to live our lives, what kind of footprint we want to leave on this planet, and how we want to vote on policies that will affect that footprint for generations to come. We face issues such as meeting the world’s food and water demands, global warming, energy production, waste reduction, and homeland security. No matter what opinion you hold on these issues, they are, at their core, science-based. A science education will be essential for evaluating the options and making an informed decision at the polls.

I'll take my fruit flies french, please...

Palin recently (Oct 24 speech, Pittsburgh, PA) condemned federal earmarks and in particular federally-funded fruit fly research that is being conducted in France, suggesting it was frivolous. Lots of you out there are aware of this. The scientific community was quick to respond (Science Magazine, 28 Oct), pointing out that those little fruit flies are an invasive species in California, and they cause a huge economic problem for the olive industry. The result is that the flies are controlled by insecticides, so the economic problem becomes the environment's problem. Research is being conducted in France because this is the fly's natural range - only here can researchers learn about what makes it thrive, or not, and what its natural enemies are. This was an unfortunate choice of examples on Palin's part because this research is vital to California's agriculture industry and overall economy. And, it demonstrated how little she understands about which she speaks.