Sorry for the expletive, but after taking a week off, I have a LOT of science stories to sift through this week. 22, as a matter of fact. So I hope you folks appreciate what I do for you when I make these silly science reports.
I feel like an employer with only eight job openings and almost three times that number of applicants. No matter what I do, a lot of them will go away disappointed.
But them’s the breaks in the rough and tumble world of science reporting. You’re either fascinating enough (and/or important enough) to make it in the big bad world of the FSW, or you’re yesterday’s lab reports.
Part I – General Science
We’ll warm up with a few miscellaneous science stories that I thought were cool.
The Gorgon Lake
This story is both tragic and incredibly beautiful in a very morbid way. There is a lake called Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania that both kills and petrifies any animal unlucky enough to enter its waters.
The lake takes its name from natron, a naturally occurring compound made mainly of sodium carbonate, with a bit of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) thrown in.
Birds are attracted to (or possibly are confused by) the lake’s extremely reflective surface and crash into the lake, where the high temperatures (up to 60 degrees Celsius) and extremely high alkalinity (between pH 9 and pH 105… wow.) kill them. Then, over time, the natron calcifies the birds, turning them into statues.
This is, I admit, not a very important science story, hut its ethereal and deathly beauty meant I could not possible ignore it.
Hacking The Genetic Code
Brace yourself for some scientific vertigo : Engineers at University of Washington have written a programming language for designing your own custom DNA.
Feel that? That’s the feeling of the future opening up before you.
The language is crude as of yet, more like the machine code of DNA than C++, but it’s an amazing first step towards a world where anyone with a computer can design a genome, code for proteins, or just see what would happen if the DNA molecule was shaped like Angeline Jolie’s tits.
C’mon. You know some programming geek will try it!
More Water On Mars
It turns out there is not just SOME water on Mars.
It’s freaking EVERYWHERE on Mars!
Pick any spot on Mars. Dig up a spadeful of dirt. Heat it up a little. Boom, you got water. 2 percent by mass!
That is freaking awesome. Not only does it mean that we could land anywhere on Mars and find water to both drink (important) and electrolyze for oxygen (SUPER FREAKING IMPORTANT), but it really strengthens the argument that at one point, the surface of Mars was covered with water.
After all, how else would it end up so evenly distributed?
And if there was water on the surface of Mars, then that vastly increases the odds that it once had life, and draws even more attention to the vital question of “What went wrong”??
Part II : Energy
Baking with Carbon
A new kind of carbon capture plant deals with the stuff by turning into baking soda.
Yup, good old bicarbonate of soda, the same stuff your Mom used to make her biscuits fluffy. The technology is called Airmine, and it could very well be just the thing to capture the bad stuff coming out of a power plant or factory and turn it into useful stuff.
A Skymine plant is around the size of a semi, and, get this, is powered by the waste heat of the processes it is cleaning up. It would scrub out all the guck like sulfur and mercury out of the emissions (all of which have other industrial uses), then use a relatively simple chemical reaction to turn the carbon dioxide into bicarb, hydrogen gas, and chlorine gas.
There’s lot of uses for bicarb, and both hydrogen gas and chlorine gas have industrial uses, or you could just recombine them into hydrochloric acid which has even more uses.
Oh, and the only thing the process needs besides carbonaceous air is water and salt.
Not for nothing, but this is exactly the sort of thing that gives me a huge efficiency boner.
But of course, if we could make energy a green way, we wouldn’t even need Skymine.
And we are surrounded by more energy than we could ever use. We just need to tap into it with devices like this new design for river water turbines.
It’s a simple idea. Put turbines in river. River flow spins turbines. Turbines generate electricity. No need to build a giant dam in order to tap in to energy of water based altitude differentials!
A simple idea, but tricky to implement. Luckily, the people at Verdant Power, the folks testing their gear on the East River in the story above, have the kind of funding that lets them just keep trying, and they now have a blade that survived 10 days of submersion perfectly intact.
In the future, energy will come from everywhere.
Part III : Brains
You knew it was coming! Time to talk brains.
The Most Extraordinary Brain Ever
The name of the article is Is This The More Extraordinary Brain Ever Seen?
And, well…. you tell me.
Above : an actual human brain that was actually inside someone’s skull doing all their brain things.
Looks like something an Alien from Alien leaves behind in the bathroom, doesn’t it? Or something that H. R. Giger left on the cutting room floor.
But no, that was actually the brain of some unknown person. All is known is that the person lived their whole life in a mental facility (quel surprise) and died in 1970. We don’t even know gender.
What we do know is that a smooth human brain with absolutely no crenelations is incredibly rare. Most people with this disorder don’t live to see their tenth birthday. There is a reason the brain is all wrinkly and crinkled, it’s because that vastly increases the surface area available for neuronal connections.
No wrinkles? No room for a human brain inside a human skull.
That person must have had very low function. Bravo to the hospital for keeping him or her alive!
The Eating Center
Scientists have refined our idea of what part of the brain controls appetite and eating.
We’ve known for decades that eating behaviours were somewhere in the lateral hypothalamus, mainly because when that is damaged, people don’t eat.
But scientists at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill have used the completely freaky new techniques of optogenetics (using light to activate and deactivate genes) to further refine the picture down to a particular set of neural pathways that when activated, make mice voraciously hungry, and when deactivated cause the mice to lose all interest in food.
Being neurologists, the authors of the study are confident that it will turn out that eating disorders, including obesity, are really just neurological disorders.
But knowing where the problem can be seen and knowing what causes the problem are two different things.
Stopping Brain Death
For the real jaw dropping bit of brain news this week, though, you have to go to the realm of Alzheimer’s research, and the King’s College of London, where they have discovered a chemical that stops brain tissue death in its tracks.
That is huge news. We are eons away from being able to actually fix dead brain tissue, so our only hope in fighting Alzheimer’s and many other degenerative brain disorders any time soon is to keep the brain tissue from dying in the first place.
After all, if the brain tissue dies, so does the information stored in it, and even if you could repair the cell, that information is lost forever.
And that information is you
So anything that can keep those nasty prions from accumulating in your brain tissue and causing your brain cells to shut down protein production for so long that they starve to death is a good thing.
Well, that’s all for this bonus-sized edition of the Friday Science Whatever for this week. Trimming a list of 22 awesome science stories to the 8 most awesome was a brutal, bloody process, but in the end, only the truly worthy stories survived to stand on the platform of victory, heads wreathed in laurels.
And you just read them all! Good for you.
Seeya next week, science fans!