Posted on August 31, 2009  Comments (4)

They Might Be Giants creates great music and has moved into creating music aimed at kids, of any age, over the last few years. They are releasing a new Album and animated DVD Here Comes Science, is being released tomorrow. Their music is both enjoyable to listen to and educational, something that is often attempted but rarely done as successfully as they do.

Related: Istanbul by They Might Be Giants – science gifts
– Studio 360 show w/ TMBG – Kids on Scientists: Before and After – Sarah, aged 3, Learns About Soap – Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids – What Kids can Learn – Hollie Steel

The release include the following songs and videos:

1. Science Is Real
2. Meet the Elements
3. I Am a Paleontologist w/Danny Weinkauf
4. The Bloodmobile
5. Electric Car w/Robin Goldwasser
6. My Brother the Ape
7. What Is a Shooting Star?
8. How Many Planets?
9. Why Does the Sun Shine?
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Posted on August 29, 2009  Comments (0)

Social media is definitely a fad filled with lots of ways to waste time. It also does have real value, ways to connect to things people care about and wish to focus on. Reddit is a good site for finding interesting resources online. Sub-reddits are topical areas within Reddit (I have set up management and investing sub-reddits). A new experiment subreddit looks very interesting:

I have joined. You can go to Reddit and join this subreddit to see experiences with experimenting to learn about the world around us.

Related: posts about experimenting – General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test – Curious Cat StumbleUpon – Home Experiment: Deriving the Gravitational Constant – Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus – Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources – Encyclopedia of Life, social science – John Hunter Online

Posted on August 28, 2009  Comments (0)

The delicate inner structure of a pentacene molecule imaged with an atomic force microscope. For the first time, scientists achieved a resolution that revealed the chemical structure of a molecule. The hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings in the pentacene molecule are clearly resolved. Even the positions of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be deduced from the image. (Pixels correspond to actual data points). Image courtesy of IBM Research – Zurich

IBM scientists have been able to image the “anatomy” — or chemical structure — inside a molecule with unprecedented resolution. “Though not an exact comparison, if you think about how a doctor uses an x-ray to image bones and organs inside the human body, we are using the atomic force microscope to image the atomic structures that are the backbones of individual molecules,” said IBM Researcher Gerhard Meyer. “Scanning probe techniques offer amazing potential for prototyping complex functional structures and for tailoring and studying their electronic and chemical properties on the atomic scale.”

The AFM uses a sharp metal tip to measure the tiny forces between the tip and the sample, such as a molecule, to create an image. In the present experiments, the molecule investigated was pentacene. Pentacene is an oblong organic molecule consisting of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms measuring 1.4 nanometers in length. The spacing between neighboring carbon atoms is only 0.14 nanometers—roughly 1 million times smaller then the diameter of a grain of sand. In the experimental image, the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings as well as the carbon atoms in the molecule are clearly resolved. Even the positions of the hydrogen atoms of the molecule can be deduced from the image.

Related: MRI That Can See Bacteria, Virus and Proteins – images of the naphthalocyanine molecule in the ‘on’ and the ‘off’ state – What is a Molecule?

Read full press release: IBM Scientists First to Image the “Anatomy” of a Molecule
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Posted on August 26, 2009  Comments (6)

LEGO Mindstorms Rubik’s Cube Solver

Very cool. Related book: Building Robots With Lego Mindstorms

Related: Build Your Own Tabletop Interactive Multi-touch Computer – Babbage Difference Engine In Lego – If Tech Companies Made Sudoku – Lego Autopilot Project Update – Rubick’s Cube Solving Lego Mindstorms Robot – Open Source for LEGO Mindstorms

Posted on August 25, 2009  Comments (1)

2005 video of Dr. Michio Kaku speaking on BBC on physics from Universe to Multiverse.

Unfortunately BBC leaders decided to hide this from the world and removed the video. Maybe scientists should stop talking to organizations won’t share the output with the world.

Related: Extra-Universal Matter – Before the Big Bang – Great Physics Webcast Lectures – Neutrino Detector Searching for String Theory Evidence

Posted on August 24, 2009  Comments (4)

One of the things I keep meaning to do more of with this blog is provide some post on basic science concepts that may help raise scientific literacy. Some of these will be pretty obvious but even reminders on some facts you know can sometimes help.

What is a molecule?

A molecule is the smallest particle of a compound that has all the chemical properties of that compound. Molecules are made up of two or more atoms, either of the same element or of two or more different elements. The example of molecules are water (H₂O) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) and molecular nitrogen (N₂).

Organic molecules contain Carbon, for example, Methane CH₄). The original definition of “organic” chemistry came from the misconception that organic compounds were always related to life processes.

A few types of compounds such as carbonates, simple oxides of carbon and cyanides, as well as the allotropes of carbon, are considered inorganic. The division between “organic” and “inorganic” carbon compounds while “useful in organizing the vast subject of chemistry…is somewhat arbitrary”

Ionic compounds, such as common salt, are made up not of molecules, but of ions arranged in a crystalline structure. Unlike ions, molecules carry no net electrical charge.

Related: Why is it Colder at Higher Elevations? – Why is the Sky Blue? – 10 Science Facts You Should Know – Bacteria Communicate Using a Chemical Language

Posted on August 22, 2009  Comments (7)

photo of ladybugs covering the bark of a tree near the Guadalupe Peak, by John Hunter, Creative Commons Attribution.

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At Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas at 8,749 feet in Guadalupe Mountains National Park I found a huge city of ladybugs. They covered the bark of many bushes and trees and crawled over rocks (as seen in the photos). They were everywhere. It seems odd to me that they would have such a huge concentration since it would seem like food would then be a problem, but there they were.

Related: Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve, Ohio Photos – Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly – North Cascades National Park Photos – Mount Rainier National Park Photos

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Posted on August 21, 2009  Comments (2)

And here is a cat taking a human elevator.
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Posted on August 20, 2009  Comments (8)

2008 Data from Spencer Stuart on S&P 500 CEO shows once again more have undergraduate degrees in engineering than any other field, increasing to 22% of CEO’s this year.

The report does not show the fields for the rest of the CEO’s. 39% of S&P CEOs have MBAs. 28% have other advanced degrees. The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard tied for the most CEO’s with undergraduate degrees from their universities at 13. Princeton and the University of Texas had 9 and Stanford had 8.

While the CEO’s have engineering education backgrounds the work they have done is often in other functions. The top function that CEO’s that have worked in during their careers: Operations (42%), Finance (31%), Marketing (24%), Sales (17%), Engineering (11%).

Data for previous years is also from Spencer Stuart: S&P 500 CEOs are Engineering Graduates (2007 data) 2006 S&P 500 CEO Education Study – Top degree for S&P 500 CEOs? Engineering (2005 study)

Related: Another Survey Shows Engineering Degree Results in the Highest Pay – Science and Engineering Degrees lead to Career Success – The Future is Engineering

Posted on August 17, 2009  Comments (3)

by Justin Hunter

Jeff Fry linked to a great webcast in Controlled Experiments To Test For Bugs In Our Mental Models.

I firmly believe that applied statistics-based experiments are under-appreciated by businesses (and, for that matter, business schools). Few people who understand them are as articulate and concise as Kohavi. Admittedly, I could be accused of being biased as: (a) I am the son of a prominent applied statistician and (b) I am the founder of a software testing tools company that uses applied statistics-based methods and algorithms to make our tool work.

Summary of the webcast, on Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web: Listen to Your Customers not to the HiPPO – a presentation by Ron Kohavi with Microsoft Research.

1:00 Amazon: in 2000, Greg Linden wanted to add recommendations in shopping cards during the check out process. The “HiPPO” (meaning the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) was against it on the grounds that it would be a bad idea; recommendations would confuse and/or distract people. Amazon, a company with a good culture of experimentation, decided to run a small experiment anyway, “just to get the data” – It was wildly successful and is in widespread use today at Amazon and other firms.

3:00 Dr. Footcare example: Including a coupon code above the total price to be paid had a dramatic impact on abandonment rates.

4:00 “Was this answer useful?” Dramatic differences occur when Y/N is replaced with 5 Stars and whether an empty text box is initially shown with either (or whether it is triggered only after a user clicks to give their initial response)

6:00 Sewing machines: experimenting with a sales promotion strategy led to extremely counter-intuitive pricing choice

7:00 “We are really, really bad at understanding what is going to work with customers…”
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Posted on August 16, 2009  Comments (3)

Very nice webcast (of an old 1930′s filmstrip by GM) explaining how a differential gear works.

Related: how things work – A Journey Into the Human Eye – Science Explained: What The Heck is a Virus? – Magenta is a Color