Get Your Geek On
Jul. 3rd, 2007 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueGrab your brolly and your Hogwarts scarf* - it's time for a summer exhibition by The Royal Society! (That's The Royal Society, as in Wren, Rutherford, and that bastard Newton.)
[*Hufflepuff. Because it's funny. "Brolly" is English slang for "umbrella."]
The Setting:
Pretty much like science fairs in middle school, only more advanced and with funding. Lots of nervous-looking exhibitors who get tremendously excited if you're interested in their subject. Since it's the Royal Society, this takes place in a beautiful Regency building with lots of marble, frescoes, and wood paneling. Everyone looks nerdy, and wears functional clothing. We are enthusiastic about swag, and many booths include bowls of toffee or chocolate to lure people in.
[from a chat later that evening:]
Romie: I am so grown up! People gave me mugs and buttons and stickers and pencils and for some reason thought I was a biologist!
Ciro: Because you are alive, of course.
Lower Intestinal Bacteria!
The University of Reading has just discovered that the lower intestinal bacteria of autistics is different from the intestinal bacteria of non-autistics. Hence autistics sometimes deal with milk and sugar badly, get obstreperous if they don't eat frequently, and have frequent stomach aches. Next step: can the balance be righted with the proper probiotics?
Space Bacteria!
A group of folks from various research labs are trying to figure out how to sterilize spacecraft for the Mars missions, so that any Martian samples brought back aren't contaminated - so that if we find, say, spores on Mars, we'll know they're really from Mars. Right now, this involves (in different areas) heat, hydrogen peroxide, gamma rays, and ethylene oxide. Nobody knows yet how to get rid of prions. They also can't sterilize batteries without making them nonfunctional.
Platinum in Road Dust!
Possibly we can recover platinum from road dust. And make awesome hydrogen fuel cells out of it.
A New Kind of Three-Dimensional Printer!
(from University of London:) This one sprays alternating layers of sand and adhesive, which when baked become a light-weight ceramic! The nozzle uses the same principles as Tibetan sand painting, and the vibrations are controlled with sound waves.
Testing the Trees!
Sound waves strike again! A way to measure the hardness of wood in living trees by hitting them lightly with hammers and measuring how they sound!
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizzou!
Using sound to map the bottom of the ocean! Dr. Jason Hall-Spencer just got back from mapping some of the arctic regions, where a few weeks ago he discovered a large coral reef in -2 Celcius waters off the coast of Norway. This means we have to revise basically everything we know about coral reefs. For instance: they don't need heat. Or light. And this one doesn't eat algae; it eats plankton.
Hall-Spencer: "These corals are walls of mouths, fitted with poisoned harpoons. They're not nice like the tropical reefs - they stab and eat what they can get."
These reefs tend to form at nepheloid layers - boundaries between two different densities of water, where fluid dynamics mean plankton and so forth tend to accumulate, and where internal waves tend to move them around, which is great for filter feeders. This places the reefs in the ocean's twilight zone, so the coral is all either white (visible to fish there) or red (invisible to fish there). [There are cool pictures, but the website is down right now. Maybe later.]
They are now scrambling to see if there are more of these reefs and to map them so they can be put off-limits and won't be destroyed by deep-sea trawler nets. The fishing industry has only rolled these out in the past ten years, and they're smashing both coral and sponge reefs, which is dumb because those are the fishes' breeding habitats. 98% of the ocean's population lives on the sea floor. More on this issue here.
Lending to the Zizzou-ness of the lecture, which took place in an elegantly appointed hall, the first photo in the presentation was of Hall-Spencer swimming with a glowing tiger shark. The expedition's ship, The Polarstern, included a swimming pool, a little yellow submarine, helicopters, and motorbikes.
Other stuff!
More exhibits! Blackboards written on by scientists! Archival documents from Scott of the Antarctic! Newly unsealed papers by Chadwick, detailing his work on the neutron during WWII!
SCIENCE!
[*Hufflepuff. Because it's funny. "Brolly" is English slang for "umbrella."]
The Setting:
Pretty much like science fairs in middle school, only more advanced and with funding. Lots of nervous-looking exhibitors who get tremendously excited if you're interested in their subject. Since it's the Royal Society, this takes place in a beautiful Regency building with lots of marble, frescoes, and wood paneling. Everyone looks nerdy, and wears functional clothing. We are enthusiastic about swag, and many booths include bowls of toffee or chocolate to lure people in.
[from a chat later that evening:]
Romie: I am so grown up! People gave me mugs and buttons and stickers and pencils and for some reason thought I was a biologist!
Ciro: Because you are alive, of course.
Lower Intestinal Bacteria!
The University of Reading has just discovered that the lower intestinal bacteria of autistics is different from the intestinal bacteria of non-autistics. Hence autistics sometimes deal with milk and sugar badly, get obstreperous if they don't eat frequently, and have frequent stomach aches. Next step: can the balance be righted with the proper probiotics?
Space Bacteria!
A group of folks from various research labs are trying to figure out how to sterilize spacecraft for the Mars missions, so that any Martian samples brought back aren't contaminated - so that if we find, say, spores on Mars, we'll know they're really from Mars. Right now, this involves (in different areas) heat, hydrogen peroxide, gamma rays, and ethylene oxide. Nobody knows yet how to get rid of prions. They also can't sterilize batteries without making them nonfunctional.
Platinum in Road Dust!
Possibly we can recover platinum from road dust. And make awesome hydrogen fuel cells out of it.
A New Kind of Three-Dimensional Printer!
(from University of London:) This one sprays alternating layers of sand and adhesive, which when baked become a light-weight ceramic! The nozzle uses the same principles as Tibetan sand painting, and the vibrations are controlled with sound waves.
Testing the Trees!
Sound waves strike again! A way to measure the hardness of wood in living trees by hitting them lightly with hammers and measuring how they sound!
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizzou!
Using sound to map the bottom of the ocean! Dr. Jason Hall-Spencer just got back from mapping some of the arctic regions, where a few weeks ago he discovered a large coral reef in -2 Celcius waters off the coast of Norway. This means we have to revise basically everything we know about coral reefs. For instance: they don't need heat. Or light. And this one doesn't eat algae; it eats plankton.
Hall-Spencer: "These corals are walls of mouths, fitted with poisoned harpoons. They're not nice like the tropical reefs - they stab and eat what they can get."
These reefs tend to form at nepheloid layers - boundaries between two different densities of water, where fluid dynamics mean plankton and so forth tend to accumulate, and where internal waves tend to move them around, which is great for filter feeders. This places the reefs in the ocean's twilight zone, so the coral is all either white (visible to fish there) or red (invisible to fish there). [There are cool pictures, but the website is down right now. Maybe later.]
They are now scrambling to see if there are more of these reefs and to map them so they can be put off-limits and won't be destroyed by deep-sea trawler nets. The fishing industry has only rolled these out in the past ten years, and they're smashing both coral and sponge reefs, which is dumb because those are the fishes' breeding habitats. 98% of the ocean's population lives on the sea floor. More on this issue here.
Lending to the Zizzou-ness of the lecture, which took place in an elegantly appointed hall, the first photo in the presentation was of Hall-Spencer swimming with a glowing tiger shark. The expedition's ship, The Polarstern, included a swimming pool, a little yellow submarine, helicopters, and motorbikes.
Other stuff!
More exhibits! Blackboards written on by scientists! Archival documents from Scott of the Antarctic! Newly unsealed papers by Chadwick, detailing his work on the neutron during WWII!
SCIENCE!
Thanks much!
Date: 2007-07-12 08:49 am (UTC)Looks good! Very useful, good stuff. Good resources here. Thanks much!
G'night