Science Flash: Oil and Water Finally Mix! Gingerbread Men Aren't Worth Chasing!

I felt rather idle, so I looked for the most random articles I could find- and here they are!

How to mix oil and water

http://sciencenews.org./view/generic/id/50019/title/How_to_mix_oil_and_water

Whoever said water and oil don't mix? If you take a drop of water coated in oil and bounce it long enough, then they'll mix together. (That's basically the entire article.) Apparently, scientists in Belgium got the idea (from where is what I'd like to ask) to see what would happen if you bounced an oil coated water droplet for longer than it usually does. They took a drop of soapy water and covered it in oil, and the droplet hung on a wire. Then, they took a (shallow) container of oil, if my interpretation of the video is correct, and bounced the droplet up and down. As it bounced, the outer layer broke up into little globs and went into the water droplet, creating an oil-and-water droplet. They call it the "mayonnaise droplet," a very (cough) official sounding name. Anyway, silliness aside, the significance of this is to try to understand the concepts behind the mayonnaise droplet so they can apply it to other areas like pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

My first questions were how and why. Bouncing little droplets of makeup probably won't be cheap, so the practical applications of this isn't very high. However, research is research, and perhaps they will find something revolutionary based on this concept. Who knows? Also, while I understand the basic way that they did it, I still don't quite understand how the drop "bounced" instead of splattered. Would it simply be because of surface tension or other factors as well? The video was amusing to watch, and explained the experiment much more clearly than the article. Overall, this was definitely an interesting little article.

Case of the toxic gingerbread man

http://sciencenews.org./view/generic/id/49897/title/Case_of_the_toxic_gingerbread_man

This was a pretty long article compared to the oil and water one. To cut to the chase, there are people out there that try to keep levels of toxic chemicals in the air and water, well, nontoxic. However, there was one stubborn chemical that wouldn't go down: the DCA compound. Basically, what they did was they went into a house (in Utah) and tested every room for the concentrations of this chemical. The hotspot was the basement. Of course, that could be anything: the carpet, walls, paint, the stuff in the basement, and things that go in a basement. Therefore, they took all of the stuff from the basement and put it into the garage. The basement's levels of DCA went down dramactically, and the garage's concentration spiked. A lot. The culprit: a plastic gingerbread man ornament along with some other ornaments. They tested the gingerman's paint, but found little. So, they cut off its legs, and bingo! The chemical is in the plastic. Sadly, ornaments aren't the only culprits. The team who were looking into this also found quite a few other decorative objects that had the exact same problem. On the bright side, the Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission is looking into this, so hopefully it won't get too out of hand.

Personally, I don't really find any reason to panic or throw out all of our Christmas ornaments from reading this. We can't really tell what it is made of, so there's not much really we can do that is practical. Plus, I don't think polyresin is the only material that is emitting toxic fumes into our environment, and trying to rid ourselves of all of those toxins would be nearly impossible. Rather, probably a more rational approach would be to buy new ornaments with care, and perhaps avoid the ones made in China stuffed away in the corner of a dollar store. This material is a cheap plastic, so I'm guessing that cheaper ornaments and decorative stuff would be more likely to be dangerous than the more expensive ones. Overall though, it was an interesting article and nicely written.

Got Science?

I'm a little tired of science articles (there's so many!) so I'm going to take a break from that stuff this week and talk about science and things like that in general. First off, if you do need an article, just click the little label called "Article of the Week" and you'll find enough to satisfy your two-current events minimum. Second, Happy December everyone! Already I can see that this will be a very busy and happy month. I hope that every has had a good Thanksgiving and is doing well.

Now, to the best part: Science! I apologize in advance if I'm a little random, but I'm just saying what comes to mind. I found a great, um, simile to magma bubbling away underneath the earth's crust: freshly baked and bubbling apple pie! What's your favorite biome? I did my project on temperate rain forest, but my personal favorite is marine. There's so much life in the ocean, especially coral reefs. If I had to choose a biome to live in, though, it would probably be in the temperate rain forest (Oregon/Northern California/Washington State) region. I visited the general (not the forest) area once on vacation, and it's really nice and cool. I know some would prefer a hotter climate like Southern California, but I prefer a mild cool that doesn't get too cold. The reason why that area doesn't experience extremes in temperature is because the mountains shelter the region from extremes in temperatures. The mountains also trap moist air masses from the ocean, thus the temperate rain forest. Okay, so I just read an article about anger. Apparently, certain people experience anger more than others. Here's a link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091130131326.htm. Here's another about loneliness (I knew I spelled it wrong, but it's fixed now): http://www.livescience.com/culture/091201-loneliness-spreads-friends.html How many people here like science? Just out of curiosity. And why? We're studying genetics soon, and I'm really excited. I have to wonder, though, when we are studying physics. Hmm.... Anyway, here's a random fact, courtesy of http://www.funology.com/ : Your brain is 80% water. Isn't that comforting to know? Oh well. And that's about it for today!

Science Flash: A "Black Hole" for Light

I actually learned about this first from my dad, who was reading in an article in Chinese. He said that some Chinese scientists actually made a black hole. Honestly, after reading about "mini black holes" that pop in and out of existence, I wasn't that concerned- until he said that it wasn't super small, like I suggested. That made me (literally) jump out of my seat (well, the couch) because any black hole made on earth that's visible to the naked eye would be really, really bad- rather, we wouldn't be here if it was a true, cosmic, suck-everything-up black hole. To my dad's credit, I must mention that he said it was for light. Still, it's not quite a black hole! To get the real scoop, I yahooed it (with no results) and googled it, to get this article. At least it's in English now.

First black hole for light created on Earth

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17980-first-black-hole-for-light-created-on-earth.html

First, before we start talking about the article, I want to point out what the "black hole" I had in mind was. A black hole occurs when you take something- anything, really,- and squish it down until it's really, really, really (really) small. For instance, I might be wrong, but I believe if you wanted to squish yourself that small, you'd have to be as small as a molecule- which is really small. Once it collapses down to a certain radius (there's a name for it, but I don't know how to spell or say it), it becomes so dense that it's gravity is really strong- so strong that light cannot escape the pull of it. Let's take an example that is almost certainly wrong, but gets the general gist of it. Let's say that I have a very big sheet of unbreakable fabric, which would be the space-time continuum. Now, put a school-bus on it. It creates a sag in the fabric, right? The sag is the gravity (according to Einstein) because if you were a marble on it, you'd roll down, or be "attracted to" the school bus. Next, you have to put on some muscle and compress the entire school bus into a tiny ball the size of a pinhead- no, not taking a little piece, but actually stuffing all that matter into a little ball. Put that little ball on the fabric, and voila! you see that it creates a "hole" that your marble self would just roll into and never come out again. That is a black hole. Such a thing on earth that, even it was a size of an atom, would suck us all up into oblivion if I have it correct, although the good thing would be that we wouldn't even know it (people were worrying about that when they launched the LHC Collider, which smashes atoms to find things like evaporating mini black holes and weird elementary particles. Complicated stuff). Anyway, it's fascinating to think about, but not a good thing to have.

The article is says they have made a "black hole for light." Is it a black hole that will suck us all up? No!! It's almost completely different than what a cosmic black hole is. It is meant to trap electromagnetic radiation (light, microwaves, etc.), not people, so rest easy. It is supposed to work on the principle of black holes in the sense that light spirals towards the center. I think of it more like a labyrinth that forces you to go a certain way. Back to the article- when they do start talking about the device, they say, "The key to making light curve inwards is to make the shell's permittivity – which affects the electric component of an electromagnetic wave – increase smoothly from the outer to the inner surface." If you are having one of those What's that? faces, then you know what I'm thinking. Permittivity, according to to dictionary.com, is "A measure of the ability of a material to resist the formation of an electric field within it." So, I'm guessing that that the outside attracts the light or microwave and the inside, well, keeps it inside- although it all transitions smoothly, of course. Two scientists, Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at the Southeast University of Nanjing made one of these "black holes" for microwaves (the radiation used to heat up your hot cocoa) with 60 round strips made out of a special material called "meta-materials." Meta-material's acclaim to fame, so to speak, is that they are used to make things invisible. (Quick lesson on invisibility: you bend the rays around the object you want to make invisible so the rays don't bounce off and go into your eye, making you "see" it. Don't count on it too soon though, I'm pretty sure they still have a long way to go. All the good stuff you'll probably have to wait a long time for) The outer 40 rings form the shell that the light/microwaves enter, and the inner 20 actually absorb it. Each of the rings apparently look like a circuit board. In the first version, the absorber converts the microwaves (or is it light? I'm confused) into heat.

Now that the version for microwaves is done, they are hoping to do the same for light. However, since light has smaller wavelengths than microwaves (the electromagnetic spectrum!), they have to make the circuitry on the boards a lot smaller. The purpose for this is that they could hopefully put a solar cell in the middle of the absorber, converting the light into electricity. If so, they could use this black-holeish thing instead of huge mirrors to focus enough sunlight on the cells. (Yes, you need sunlight for solar cells to work, you can't put it in half-shade and expect it to produce a whole bunch of electricity).

In my opinion, this is definitely impressive, but it is not exactly the biggest thing that ever happened. After all, with the ability to bend light and all those smart people (not me, I'm just the critic) out there, somebody probably would have come up with it sooner or later. However, the speed that they work and the neatness is definitely a big accomplishment. Also, I think that they (I don't know who gave the name, so I'm saying they) completely misnamed it. Black holes will make people jump, you know! Couldn't they have named it something like the "light-trapper" or "sun-collector" or "light labyrinth" or even "a device that simulates the effects of a black hole on space-time with meta-materials in order to bend light into a compact thingamajig." Making a black hole in any headline would definitely make people read it, but still, when it's in Chinese (English too) it's hard to get the real scoop without using dictionaries and a lot of prior knowledge that's there because of luck! (Actually, you could argue it's my fault for not learning Chinese properly and that I shouldn't be on a Chinese website in the first place, but it still makes people jump to weird conclusions). Wow, I just realized there are a lot of comments, and a treasure trove of information as well. I like how one person said "it is more of a lens made of meta-materials" because that makes more sense and is not nearly as extreme as a black hole! Plus, some people interpret it as sucking in light, while others think that the light has to hit the thing first, then it navigates its way to the middle. I agree with the latter more, because it says nothing about attracting anything other than the reference to black holes. There are also a lot of people pointing out that meta-materials aren't exactly cheap, so whether this light-trap (as people call it) would be more expensive or cheaper than mirrors is also something to consider. Others point out that this could have other uses. The one that I think was the most interesting (and probably practical) would be to create cheaper versions of this in order to trap excess radio waves and other radiation types from cell phones and wireless devices in the office to reduce exposure. There are also a lot of comments (you can see the varying degrees of "it's a black hole" vs. it's not) that actually take the idea of a black hole literally (one started talking about a black hole bomb! I don't think that would be possible with a light-trap). Overall a good discussion of the article in the comments- and there's a link to another version of the article! Here it is! http://blogs.discovery.com/space_disco/2009/10/first-ever-black-hole-created-on-earth.html Don't read the comments on that one, though, since it's a somewhat nasty discussion. Otherwise, it's definitely a good discovery, but they could have been clearer on the actual device, not just going "it's like a black hole!" because that isn't a good analogy at all- and certainly not good for innocent schoolkids to read, since they can get mixed up.

Science Flash: Protection for Coral Reefs

When I was in second grade, we spent an enormous amount of time on the ocean (half a year with a teacher that actually appreciates science is a lot of info to soak in) and a large amount of that was spent on coral reefs. Therefore, it was very gratifying to see this particular headline at sciencedaily.

Coral Reefs Inspire Rare Consensus -- Just Save Them

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091105143821.htm

The basic point of this entire article is that people want to save the coral reefs for the sake of saving them even if it means that people will be kept out for a while. For some basic info on coral, coral are little polyps with skeleton (that's the coral that shows up on beaches) and live with algae inside them, which provides the coral with food and their colors. The coral have to live with certain conditions to keep the algae alive: a warm temperature and clear waters so sunlight can reach the algae. Many creatures live in the coral reef (which is basically a whole lot of coral polyps all together), including but not limited to tropical fishes, eels, starfish, rays, and a lot of colorful critters. Here is a picture (I've given up trying to add more):

From: http://openphoto.net//volumes/dkeats/20050705/openphotonet_clownfish_fiji.jpg

The thing about coral reefs is: they're delicate, easy to kill, and take a long (millions of years) time to grow. If the temperature is a little higher or lower, or you accidently step on them, spill some chemicals, and a whole lot of other things, then a piece of coral can die as a result. They are incredibly diverse and beautiful, and having studied them for so long in second grade, I have a bit of an attachment to them. Anyway, they did some surveys, and found that the attitude of people towards coral reefs is that the reef comes first, and we should preserve them even if that means less revenue from the coral reefs. This is just amazing, but consider this: we can barely conserve our forests because we need the paper and timber. The equivalent of "paper and timber" for the coral reefs would be the large amount of money from the tourist industry. However, people agree that coral reefs are something to preserve, and say that if they can't visit it anymore, then they'd be fine with that. I am very, very happy about that, and that's about all I can say. (I know this is brief compared to what I usually do, but it's a simple article with a lot of meaning that's hard to express.) Perhaps our grandchildren and great-grandchildren may be able to witness the stunning beauty of the coral reefs after all.

Science Flash: Dark Matter Even More Complicated?

Dark matter and dark energy never really made sense to me, but then again, I think that's because no one really knows much about it. Anyway, it just got more complicated.

Is Unknow Force in Universe Acting on Dark Matter?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091022154644.htm

To sum up my history in the pursuit of dark matter and energy, I knew before August 2009 that dark matter basically was unknown "stuff" in the universe (actually, it's the majority of stuff in the universe) and it acted on visible matter, so our galaxies can stay together and not fly apart, since it exerts gravitational effects. Dark energy is like the opposite of gravity, but again, it's called "dark" because they don't really know what to call it-or even what it is, seeing as the "opposite of gravity" is just a wild guess. Then, I read two books by Michio Kaku about all of the bizarrities of physics. He started to throw in negative matter and energy, which is really bizarre, and then I got really confused. All I could glean from that discussion was that nobody really knows what dark matter is, and that we walk through it all the time (it's omnipresent!) yet it doesn't interact with us (that is, while we can catch things like air in a balloon, or "interacting" with it, we can't do the same with dark matter. Bearing this in mind, I shall try my very best to figure out what the article is talking about and explain it as well.

The article starts with saying that there is "an unexpected link between mysterious 'dark matter' and the visible stars and gas in galaxies that could revolutionise our current understanding of gravity." How gravity got in there is beyond me, because the first part is a whopper in the first place. Dr. Hongsheng Zhao then suggests that there is an unknown force in the universe acting on dark matter. (Although I have to say: aren't there enough complicated forces already? Do we really need another one?) I'll get back to this later, though, because the article describes it more clearly later on.

The next paragraph then is basically what I said in my first paragraph, but to illustrate my point of what I was saying earlier, here are some citations: It says that "only 4% of the universe is made of known material," which means there's a lot of unknown stuff (gases, stars, quasars, and all of that doesn't count as "unknown") in the universe. It also says that "a solid understanding of dark matter as well as direct evidence of its existence has remained elusive," which basically means they flat out don't know what dark matter is and can't really prove that there is "dark matter" at all.

After that, we really start getting into the hard part of the article. It says that the team researching this thinks that the interactions (but remember, we walk through the stuff all the time without even knowing we are, so this is pretty significant) between normal matter and dark matter "could be more important and more complex than previously thought," or that dark matter isn't just keeping our galaxies together, it could be doing other things as well- or it might not even exist at all, it could be a new force. Dr. Benoit Famaey basically explains, as I see it, that dark matter is doing an intricate balancing act throughout the entire universe, and that the dark matter "acts" in a way that it seems to "know" where the visible matter in the universe. Dr. Zhao allows us to visualize it by saying that it's like going to a zoo with all sorts of animals at different ages and finding that they all have the same backbone weight- so an elephant and a monkey have the same backbone weight. In the universe, even though all the galaxies are like different animals that are at different ages, they seem to all have the "fingerprints" of an "invisible fifth force." Then, it says that this force might solve a mystery I mentioned earlier: dark energy (We're just back to square one). Of course, if you aren't sastified with that craziness, they also say that it could also lead to a revision and a whole new outlook of gravity (quick history: Newton discovered gravity, Einstein revised it to make it better.) I can't quite grasp this (if anyone who knows physics can explain, I'd be very grateful) because, from what I know about the universe, it's hard enough to grasp the size of the universe (let's just say it's so incredibly big I've given up trying to imagine it), let alone what's in it. My opinion summed up on all of this: it's all mind-boggling, really complicated, and immensely bizarre craziness! That's why I like it.

Science Flash: Flies with Fake Flashbacks?

I remember discussing with a friend of mine how weird it would be if we could manipulate our own dreams not so long ago. Of course, manipulating dreams implies that we could manipulate other things in our heads as well- not quite a good thing in the wrong hands, but a cool concept. Now, it seems as though scientists are starting to get there.

Scientists Give Flies False Memories

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091015123552.htm

This article was about a group of scientists who managed to isolate a couple of neurons (12, to be exact) and manipulate them in a fly so that it would create false memories to avoid a specific odor. If you ask me, this is pretty amazing. Think of it this way: usually, if you watch documentaries or look at brain diagrams, you can see only the sections of the brain that is activated when doing a specific task. These sections contain a lot of neurons that all work together. Think of it this way: the brain of a fly (which I'd guess is really, really small, not to offend the fly) has a few thousand neurons. Humans, who are larger, have a large brain in proportion to our bodies, and have pretty sophisticated brains as well, would have a lot of neurons- just to put things in proportion. Memory, especially, is really complex: whenever we recall a memory, it isn't stored in one part of the brain. Rather, if I were to remember, say, what I ate for breakfast, I would remember the taste, smell, feel, sounds, what it looked like, the words associated with those images and other perceptions, and all these different sections contain many, many neurons that work together to "remember" this event (makes you appreciate your breakfast a lot more, doesn't it?). Now, bearing this in mind, these scientists managed to isolate 12 neurons in the entire brain of the fly (bearing a few thousand neurons) and stimulate these neurons to give the fly an unpleasant memory. Doesn't that just blow you away?

In the article, they also discuss an interesting point that I find is worthwhile to contemplate: intelligence from something, well, non-intelligent: "the physical interactions between cells and molecules." What they mean is that all of our "intelligence" can be reduced to what happens between our neurons- the capability to create memories, have thoughts, and carry out other advanced functions. So, in a sense, I can type this article because of the reactions and interactions between the neurons in my brain. I think it's kind of like how the computer can do all of the things it does from 1's and 0's, or how we can form so many words from the letters of the alphabet- creating complex things from simple materials. Still, my question is: if we messed with those "physical interactions," would that mean we are messing with our brains?

The article also discusses another point in the last paragraph that has to do with my question: the fly of a brain can probably tell us a lot about how more complicated brains like ours work. As we look more into how brains work, in simple and complex organisms, will there come a time when we can manipulate our own brains? When we can choose what we dream at night, or "delete" memories, or even mess with ourselves so much that we become completely different? While such precise control as choosing our dreams is probably far in the future (hopefully), we are already messing with our minds- and fixing them as well, in some cases. Take drugs, for instance. When people smoke, the nicotine can go to our brain and coat our neurons in an unhealthy layer of the stuff- slowing down our thoughts and messing with our brains, in way. Conversely, when our brain lacks certain chemicals, we can now "fix" ourselves, at least for a while, by supplying that chemical. For instance, people with Parkinson's disease, a disease that slowly destroys neurons in the brain (in a book I read, one patient described it as being a lizard that is cold and frozen, and needs the sun to warm it up to move) making movement more and more difficult. One of the reasons for this is the lack of dopamine, a chemical produced in the brain that isn't being produced as readily in people in Parkinson's disease. Neurologists can prescribe such patients with L-Dopa, which will turn into dopamine when it gets into the brain, fixing it for a while. Of course, as the disease progresses, the L-Dopa will help less and less, until they eventually succumb to the disease. However, we are still fiddling with our brains in that way.

For now, scientists are only creating false memories in flies, so there's no need to worry about whether our memories are genuine or not- although we create false ones ourselves anyways. (I would launch into a story about an online lecture I heard a bit of while doing research for a memory presentation, but I'm afraid I'll put some unwary person to sleep). While the thought of controlling minds scares me, this discovery still excites me: after all, we are just beginning to tap into the power of our minds. Who knows what people will discover in the field of neurology?

Science Flash: The Nocebo Effect

I know that everyone's heard of the placebo effect: two groups are given a pill, they are both told that it is the real thing, but one group is actually given a sugar pill. The sugar pill group feels better for some reason, which we call the placebo effect. However, there appears to be a reverse for this: the Nocebo Effect.

The Flip Side of Placebos: The Nocebo Effect

By John Cloud

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1929869,00.html

The placebo effect is when something happens, like taking medicine, and we think that we will get better, and we do, even if the medicine wasn't real. It's like fooling yourself into getting better. In fact, placebo in Latin means, "I shall please," as the article says. However, the opposite of this is the nocebo effect, or "to do harm" in Latin.

The article says that "A nocebo response occurs when the suggestion of a negative effect of an intervention leads to an actual negative outcome." In other words, when someone says something negative, like "That flu shot is going to hurt really badly," then the flu shot will seem to hurt really badly. Also, the negative effects will usually be related to the drug taken, like if the "doctor" says it's likely to cause nausea, then a lot of people will say, "I'm feeling sick." Basically, it's mind over matter in a negative way.

Nobody really knows why the placebo and nocebo effect works. There are probably dozens of theories, but any of them could be right- or wrong. One explanation that the article mentions is that perhaps the worry caused by all the warnings causes the brain to issue certain commands, causing, for instance, pains in the stomach. Another explanation of the (positive) placebo effect is that it evokes certain chemicals, starting the body's own "health-care system," as they say. I think that perhaps the real explanation will be a combination of the two. After all, our thoughts do influence our body. For example, there was a documentary about stress that explained how it can cause numerous health problems. For instance, stomach ulcers were originally thought to be caused by stress. However, they later discovered that it was actually a type of bacteria that caused it, to the great relief of many doctors (an amusing clip goes something like this: "Doc, my stomach really hurts." After diagnosing the patient with stomach ulcers, the doctor, faced with the fact that stress caused them, says, "How's your attitude lately?.... You need to work on your attitude." The patient replies, "I should work on finding a new doctor.") After more research many years later, though, they find that stress causes the body to halt or slow down certain functions, since stress was originally the "flee for your life!" response. One of those functions is repairing the stomach wall (after all, if a lion is after you, you don't really care about your stomach lining at the moment) and chronic stress would, in turn, greatly weaken the stomach wall, causing it to be vulnerable to bacteria and ulcers. So, mind over body really is a genuine thing that we should consider.

Mind over matter is an interesting topic, but what do we do when we don't want our "mind" to rule over our body? The article offers a simple solution: placebo and nocebo is simply a trick of the mind. To outwit it, we must be aware of the effects: in other words, it's "mind over mind."