12Jul / 2016

A visit to the Herschel Museum

The day after the Brexit referendum I went to visit a museum dedicated to two German immigrants, and some of England’s most prolific astronomers.

2016-06-24 13.50.02 Siblings William and Caroline Herschel lived in Bath during the 18th century, in New King Street. Two and a half centuries later, the street was quiet, with recycling bags outside every door, and a few straggling hopeful “Vote Remain” posters in some of the windows. The Herschels used to live at number 19, where the front door was now partly open.

I stepped inside, into a very normal corridor of a very normal terraced house. Normal, aside from a man standing behind a desk in the room at the far end of the corridor, welcoming me to the museum, and explaining that I could walk around the house, which was entirely converted to a museum devoted to the Herschels’ life and work.

I started at the basement level, which had access to the garden. This was the very garden in which William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.

Until his discovery, there were only six known planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. All of these could be seen with the naked eye, and had been recognized as planets from the way they travelled across the night sky and changed position in relation to the stars.

2016-06-24 13.47.23 The remaining planets were too far away to see. There were telescopes at the time, but none were good enough to see that far into space with enough detail. William Herschel developed a telescope that made it possible to see further into space in more detail. He had a workshop attached to his home, where he worked on his telescopes, and he soon became the world’s foremost telescope maker.

But despite discovering a whole new planet, astronomy was just Herschel’s hobby at the time. His day job was as organist for the Octagon Chapel in Bath. The organ is no more, but a set of pipes from the old organ are on display in the music room, upstairs in the museum.

2016-06-24 13.57.50 The music room also has several objects related to the life Caroline Herschel. She initially came to England to help her brother around the house and to pursue a professional singing career. When William’s astronomy hobby slowed turned into a full career, she became more involved with that, and made a few astronomical discoveries of her own.

When William discovered the planet Uranus, he proposed to name it Georgium Sidus (George’s Star) to honour England’s King George III, who was also Duke of Herschel’s hometown Hanover. The name didn’t stick, because other astronomers preferred a more international name, but in 1782, William Herschel was employed as King’s Astronomer. A few years later, the king also paid Caroline a salary for her assistance to William, making her the very first woman in the world to receive a salary for scientific work.

In the gift shop on the ground floor of the house I picked up two booklets about the Herschels’ musical careers, before heading back to the train station.

In the following days, it quickly became clear that in the wake of Brexit it has become quite difficult for European scientists in the UK, when nobody knows whether they will need visas, or whether new researchers will even want to come. Even British scientists are already having trouble applying for collaborative grants with their EU colleagues, as they might not qualify for the funding in a few years, and hinder the joint application.

So how did the Herschels get to work in England so easily, centuries before the EU? There may not have been a Europe-wide open borders scheme at the time, but there was an arrangement between Hanover and England, since they shared a ruler (King George III), so it was an obvious and easy choice to move between the two places.

I wanted to visit the museum because I was interested in the Herschels’ dual interests in music and science, but the date of my visit couldn’t have been more poignant, as the Herschel story is a textbook example of the work that foreign scientists have contributed to the UK.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel Tagged: Bath, Brexit, Caroline Herschel, William Herschel

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16Feb / 2016

Music of the Spheres

This was something I wrote for the “review” assignment of my writing course.

2016-01-20 17.44.32 There is a time and a place for complex atonal music, and perhaps the drinks reception of a genomics conference at the Excel Centre was not it. Through the chatter it wasn’t always easy to hear what the string quartet was doing, and meeting attendees were confused about the performance. “I thought they were still tuning”, said one of the guests.

There was a good reason the Kreutzer Quartet was playing here, at the Festival of Genomics, surrounded by exhibit stands for DNA sequencing companies and clusters of geneticists. Their performance was a crucial part of an art piece by Charlotte Jarvis, which explored the possibilities of encoding complex information in DNA.

Jarvis and Goldman introducing the Kreutzer Quartet.

The work, Music of the Spheres (named after a Byron poem), combines music, science, and a bubble machine. It requires some effort on the part of the audience to grasp how all the components fit together.

The core of the work is a three-movement musical composition, written by the Kreutzer Quartet, and inspired by DNA. The musicians performed the first and third movements live during a drinks reception at the Festival of Genomics, on January 20th. They used asynchronous glissando scales to express the coiling strands of DNA, and tapped the strings with the wooden part of their bow (col legno) to suggest the sound of large machines handling genetic information.

Movement 2, however, was not performed – at least not by the string quartet. This middle movement was converted into DNA code according to a system developed by Nick Goldman at the European Bioinformatics Institute. He initiated this collaboration with Jarvis to illustrate the enormous potential of using DNA code to digitize large amounts of information: in this case, a recording of the Kreutzer Quartet playing the middle movement of their genetics-inspired piece. This segment of custom-designed DNA was then created and mixed into a soapy solution. So it wasn’t the string quartet playing the middle movement of the piece, but a bubble machine. While the musicians rested, Jarvis switched on the machine, and the music travelled in the air – unheard, but tangible and visible. If you were to capture a bubble, isolate the DNA and sequence it, you might be able to get the data for the recording back out of its unconventional storage format.

2016-01-20 17.48.45 This was not the first performance of Music of the Spheres. It had previously been set up in a large empty building, a gallery along the coast, and Hornsey Town Hall. The string quartet can’t be everywhere, but the bubbles are always there, and form the core part of the work. In fact, Jarvis turned on the bubble machine a few times during breaks at the Festival of Genomics. Without the string quartet, this created an effect of simple party entertainment, not out of place at this conference, which also featured a lively talk show and a treadmill challenge. People engaged with the bubbles by photographing them, popping them, or shielding their coffee cups from soapy surprises. Many of them were unaware that each bubble contained fragments of DNA encoding a piece of music.

2016-01-20 15.29.00

But while the bubbles alone were a good match for the hectic venue, the live performance unfortunately was not. It seems a shame that the talented Kreutzer Quartet came all the way here to perform for a crowd that could barely hear them and was more interested in catching up with colleagues over a drink.

Music of the Spheres is a work that makes us think about the potential of DNA as a data storage method. It requires thoughtful reflection, and is best experienced against a quiet backdrop – not one of clinking wine glasses and murmuring conversations.

Filed under: The Art of Science Tagged: Charlotte Jarvis, Festival of Genomics, genomics, Kreutzer Quartet, Music, Nick Goldman

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09Feb / 2016

Lise Meitner

I’m taking a writing class at the moment, and one of the assignments was to write a profile about Lise Meitner:

Lise Meitner with Otto Hahn

On Christmas Eve, 1938, sitting on a tree trunk in the snow in Sweden, Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch figured out the mechanism of nuclear fission. They had gone for a walk during a family holiday to discuss a letter Meitner had received from her colleague Otto Hahn. He asked for her opinion on a strange scientific phenomenon he had discovered.

Until a few months earlier, Meitner and Hahn had worked closely together at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) in Berlin, where they studied the effect of bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons.

Meitner had moved to Berlin shortly after completing her doctorate degree in her birth city of Vienna. She was one of the first women to reach this level of academia, and encountered some archaic attitudes and ideas: in Berlin, she worked unsalaried for a few years, and was occasionally expected to entertain the wives of visiting physicists while the men talked about science.

During the three decades she worked in Berlin, Meitner made Germany her home, but when the Second World War edged closer, it was no longer safe for Jewish people in Germany. With her piercing brown eyes, dark frizzy hair and pronounced nose, Meitner’s heritage was unmistakable. She fled to Sweden in July 1938, with help from an international group of friends and colleagues from the physics community.

Now, six months later, Hahn’s curious letter had reached her. He described how, after another round of shooting neutrons at uranium, he discovered barium in the reaction mixture. Where had it come from? Pondering this question with Frisch during their winter walk, Meitner realised that the neutron in Hahn’s experiment must have split the uranium atom in half. This would leave two smaller atoms in its place, which would continue to produce even smaller atoms, and generate large amounts of energy.

The discovery came at a dangerous time: Could the Nazis use this technology to create a weapon? The USA quickly launched the Manhattan Project to ensure they were the first to build an atomic bomb. Meitner was invited to join, but she refused. She didn’t want to be part of such a violent application of her discovery – not even to defeat the enemy who had chased her out of Germany.

After the war, Meitner spent several months in the USA as part of a visiting professorship. She was named Woman of the Year there, in 1946, and was interviewed by Eleanor Roosevelt for NBC radio. Roosevelt told her: “We are proud of your contributions as a woman in science”.

Meitner continued to inspire women in science throughout her retirement years. A photo taken at Bryn Mawr, in 1959, shows her sitting casually on the steps of a university building. Her frizzy hair now grey, but with the same dark piercing eyes, she is surrounded by students in long floral skirts who have come to hear her fascinating stories.

Maybe she told them about the time she went for a walk with her nephew, through the snow in a cold Swedish winter. Or maybe they asked her about that other winter in Sweden, when in December 1945, Hahn – and Hahn alone – received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the award ceremony in Stockholm.

It’s an oversight that’s still often mentioned, especially in the context of continuing challenges to retain women at the top level of science. But even without a Nobel Prize, Meitner was well-respected, and happy to sit down for a chat about her work: in the snow with her nephew, on the radio with a former president’s wife, or casually outside on the steps with admiring students.

Image: Meitner and Hahn. Public domain, via Wikimedia. Other image described in the text was not free to use, so click that text for a link.

Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition, This Mortal Coil

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12Jan / 2016

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

“Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is closed until further notice”, says the website for the Oregon bird sanctuary.

This is the refuge that is currently being held by an armed group. There is much circulating online about the fact that they have guns and want snacks, but very little is mentioned about the location.

Some unarmed occupants of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

The Malheur Refuge was originally founded in 1908, and has expanded since then by government purchase of surrounding lands. This is ultimately what the group holding fort in the wildlife center is acting against: they are acting on behalf of ranchers who want their land back – not just this land, but land in other locations as well.

So why has the wildlife refuge been buying these lands? Conservation.

In the late 19th century, many birds in the area fell prey to hunters who gathered their feathers to sell to the hat industry. The white heron population almost entirely disappeared during this time. Rather than sitting idly by as their local fauna was turned into hats and fascinators, locals took action. Wildlife photographers and the Oregon Audubon Society lobbied for the creation of a preservation area, and in 1908 President Roosevelt established what was then known as the Lake Malheur Reservation.

These days, the area supports “between 5 and 66 percent of the Pacific Flyway’s migrating populations for priority waterfowl” and “over 20 percent of the Oregon population of breeding greater sandhill cranes”. It’s a major bird habitat, but it’s also home to many species of mammals, fish, and insects.

Researchers make use of the refuge for moth, bee and bat inventory studies. According to a recent study, Malheur is one of the few places in the Pacific North-West where the canyon bat is found.

If you want to see the bats or birds on the refuge, you’re going to have to wait for the occupation to end. Don’t send snacks.

Image by Barbara Wheeler, CC-BY via Wikimedia.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel

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08Dec / 2015

Of Mice and Men – a poem

Every line in this poem is the title of a scientific article. References below. Reposted from easternblot.net.

Of mice and men?¹

Of mice and men.²
Of mice and men, metals and mutations.³
Of mice and men, corticosteroids, and vicarious participation.⁴
Of mice and men–universality and breakdown of behavioral organization.⁵
Of mice and men: the riddle of tubular regeneration.⁶

Of mice and men: the human sciences and the humanities.⁷
Of mice and men: skin cells, stem cells and ethical uncertainties.⁸
Of mice and men. ⁹

Of mice and men, rats, and atherosclerosis. ¹⁰
Of mice, cats, and men: is human breast cancer a zoonosis?¹¹
Of mice and men. ¹²

Of mice and men: a model of HIV encephalitis.¹³
Of mice and men: murine models of anti-GBM antibody nephritis.¹⁴
Of mice and men: genetic skin diseases of keratin.¹⁵
Of mice and men. Honesty and integrity in medicine.¹⁶

Of mice and men.¹⁷
Of digital mice and men. ¹⁸
Of cholesterol-free mice and men. ¹⁹
Of (stressed) mice and men.²⁰
Of (only) mice and men.²¹
Of mice and men…but so much more too!²²

Of mice, men, and physicians.²³
Of mice, men, and trypanosomes.²⁴
Of mice, men, and cholesterol.²⁵
Of mice, men and the genome.²⁶

Of mice and men, and chandeliers.²⁷
Of mice and men…and elephants. ²⁸
Of mice and men – and lopsided birds. ²⁹
Of mice and men: the road to tolerance. ³⁰

Of mice and men: the evolving phenotype of aromatase deficiency.³¹
Of mice and men: an introduction to mouseology or, anal eroticism and Disney.³²

Of mice, and other beasts, and men. ³³
Of mice and men (and cows and cats)³⁴
Of mice–and rats, dogs, rabbits, cats, and monkeys–and men.³⁵
Of fruit flies, mice, and men: the illicit review of science. ³⁶
Of flies, mice, and men.³⁷
Of mice and men.³⁸

Of mice and men…and broken hearts.³⁹
Of mice and men: the tale of two therapies.⁴⁰

Of mice and men: the mice were right.⁴¹

First published on easternblot.net. All titles by their respective authors – and by John Steinbeck. Placed in a moderately pleasant order by me. Image by Kim Carpenter, CC-BY.

References:

Nomura, T. Of mice and men? Nature 345, 671 (1990).
Martin, J. B. Of mice and men. Nature 307, 10 (1984).
Danks, D. M. Of mice and men, metals and mutations. J Med Genet 23, 99–106 (1986).
Laudenslager, M. L. Of mice and men, corticosteroids, and vicarious participation. Brain Behav Immun 18, 414–415 (2004).
Nakamura, T. et al. Of mice and men–universality and breakdown of behavioral organization. PLoS ONE 3, e2050 (2008).
Romagnani, P. Of mice and men: the riddle of tubular regeneration. J Pathol 229, 641–644 (2013).
Caplan, A. L. Of mice and men: the human sciences and the humanities. Hastings Cent Rep 10, 38–39 (1980).
Sugarman, J. & Mathews, D. J. Of mice and men: skin cells, stem cells and ethical uncertainties. Regen Med 4, 791 (2009).
Holliday, R. Of mice and men. Nature 360, 305 (1992).
Russell, J. C. Of mice and men, rats and atherosclerosis. Cardiovasc Res 59, 810–811 (2003).
Szabo, S., Haislip, A. M. & Garry, R. F. Of mice, cats, and men: is human breast cancer a zoonosis? Microsc Res Tech 68, 197–208 (2005).
Ben-Neriah, Y. & Schmitz, M. L. Of mice and men. EMBO Rep 5, 668–673 (2004).
McArthur, J. C. & Kieburtz, K. Of mice and men: a model of HIV encephalitis. Neurology 54, 284–285 (2000).
Borza, D. B. & Hudson, B. G. Of mice and men: murine models of anti-GBM antibody nephritis. Kidney Int 61, 1905–1906 (2002).
Fuchs, E. & Coulombe, P. A. Of mice and men: genetic skin diseases of keratin. Cell 69, 899–902 (1992).
Ariyan, S. Of mice and men. Honesty and integrity in medicine. Ann Surg 220, 745–750 (1994).
Pennisi, E. Of mice and men. Science 349, 21–23 (2015).
Rew, D. A. Of digital mice and men. Eur J Surg Oncol 29, 624–627 (2003).
Brown, A. J. Of cholesterol-free mice and men. Curr Opin Lipidol 15, 373–375 (2004).
Bateson, M. Of (stressed) mice and men. Nat Methods 11, 623–624 (2014).
Leyland-Jones, B. & Grieshaber, C. K. Of (only) mice and men. Br J Cancer 81, 753–755 (1999).
Kelsh, R., Arnheiter, H. & Bosenberg, M. Of mice and men … but so much more too! Pigment Cell Melanoma Res 26, 285 (2013).
Cohen, I. Of mice, men, and physicians. J La State Med Soc 143, 3–5 (1991).
Of mice, men, and trypanosomes. Lancet 2, 860–861 (1977).
Aftring, R. P. & Freeman, M. W. Of mice, men and cholesterol. Hepatology 19, 1054–1056 (1994).
Margolin, J. Of mice, men, and the genome. Genome Res 10, 1431–1432 (2000).
Woodruff, A. & Yuste, R. Of mice and men, and chandeliers. PLoS Biol 6, e243 (2008).
Gordon, M. Y., Lewis, J. L. & Marley, S. B. Of mice and men…and elephants. Blood 100, 4679–4680 (2002).
Corballis, M. C. Of mice and men – and lopsided birds. Cortex 44, 3–7 (2008).
Tolkoff-Rubin, N. E. Of mice and men: the road to tolerance. Curr Opin Nephrol Hypertens 11, 579–581 (2002).
Jones, M. E., Boon, W. C., Proietto, J. & Simpson, E. R. Of mice and men: the evolving phenotype of aromatase deficiency. Trends Endocrinol Metab 17, 55–64 (2006).
Berger, A. A. Of mice and men: an introduction to mouseology or, anal eroticism and Disney. J Homosex 21, 155–165 (1991).
Watkin, B. Of mice, and other beasts, and men. Nurs Mirror 146, 10 (1978).
Davies, K. Of mice and men (and cows and cats). Nature 361, 478 (1993).
Frank, R. N. Of mice–and rats, dogs, rabbits, cats, and monkeys–and men. Arch Ophthalmol 108, 502–503 (1990).
Lewin, B. Of fruit flies, mice, and men: the illicit review of science. Cell 38, 343–344 (1984).
Verity, C. Of flies, mice, and men. Dev Med Child Neurol 42, 723 (2000).
Campbell, K. Of mice and men. Lancet Oncol 4, 334 (2003).
French, B. A., Yang, Z., Berr, S. S. & Kramer, C. M. Of mice and men . . . and broken hearts. Circulation 104, E110 (2001).
Hawley, R. G. & Sobieski, D. A. Of mice and men: the tale of two therapies. Stem Cells 20, 275–278 (2002).
Bennett, V. Of mice and men: the mice were right. J Clin Invest 95, 921–922 (1995).

Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition

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05Nov / 2015

Fossil Butte

This is not one of Michele’s snaps from Finland, but rather a picture of Fossil Butte National Park in Wyoming. Fifty million years ago, this area looked VERY different. It was a lot warmer, and there was a lake. We know this because this particular lake has left behind some extremely well conserved fossils.

Prehistoric horse found at Fossil Lake.

When railroad workers in the 19th century visited the area, they noticed so many fossils that they named the nearby settlement “Fossil”.

Fish from Fossil Lake

The fossils from this region are so well conserved because the ancient lake was rich in calcium carbonate. Layers of calcium carbonate would settle on newly dead animals that had sunk to the bottom of the lake, and over the years this created well-preserved fossils set in limestone.

The species found in the limestone are familiar – similar to many creatures alive today – but unexpected for Wyoming. There are crocodiles and palm trees, for example. It suggests that back then, the climate in Wyoming would have been more like that of Florida today.

To see the fossils from Fossil Lake, you can visit Fossil Butte National Park in Wyoming, or see a large collection of the fossils at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Crocodile and palm tree photos are both CC-BY-SA (according to Field Museum usage terms) taken by Eva Amsen. Other photos are public domain, via National Park Service.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel Tagged: Fossil Butte, Paleontology

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13Oct / 2015

Action Potential Lab

Imagine a cross between 826 stores, the Wellcome Collection, makerspaces and the best birthday parties you remember from your childhood. That’s Action Potential Lab. Located in a century-old pharmacy building in Toronto, Action Potential Lab welcomes kids and adults to explore the intersection of art and science.

Lisa Carrie Goldberg started Action Potential Lab when she returned to Toronto after eight years studying in Boston and Perth. When I visited Toronto recently, I dropped by the lab to meet her. Even though I was there after hours, Lisa’s day was far from over, and she had to briefly interrupt our conversation to receive some samples for an upcoming thermochromatic dye screenprinting workshop. She had a few minutes for an interview, though:

I was curious how you ended up here. What got you to start this place?

I’m from Toronto originally but went to art school in Boston, where I did interrelated media: everything from film and photography to textiles and glassblowing. That program was really great, because it wasn’t about perfecting one skill set, but rather about concept-based work and learning how to practice as a working artist.

The theme I kept going back to was science in general: Trying to understand the world, or using scientific tools and technologies, but from an artistic perspective. I was doing a lot of work with a microbiology lab across the street from my art school. I made a connection with a professor there at the pharmacy college, who taught me basic microbiology and from that relationship I was left to just do my own work in his lab. That was really one of the most fruitful times, and this became my studio for the last two years of my undergrad. I would present my work to my peers, and they’d be like “Where are you even creating this stuff?”. I’d have mixed different agars and was ordering sheep’s blood though the professor. It was amazing that this could happen! I would have to sneak in at night, because I had to be there when classes weren’t there, but I was given free reign to this lab. It was just incredible.

When I was finishing up my undergrad, and showed my professors the whole catalog of what I’d been working on, they mentioned that there was a program in Perth, Australia, that was bringing scientists and artists together. It just so happened that the professors who started that program were in New York, showing at the Design and the Elastic Mind show at MOMA, so I took the bus from Boston to New York to meet them and was hooked from there.

As soon as I finished my undergrad I went straight to Perth to start my masters in biological art. The program was a bunch of artists working in wet labs. We were housed in the Anatomy and Human Biology department. It wasn’t a medical illustration or anatomical drawing kind of program; it was hands-on work in collaboration with or inspired by science. You would take science courses if you had an art background or art courses if you had a science background, and then you’d find a field that you’re interested in. I thought I would continue doing microbiology, but I ended up getting very excited by the new sleep lab that was being built. It was a research facility that hadn’t even been used for any work yet, and they were willing to let me use it for my own studies. I did my thesis on body positions in sleep, and reflecting that with dancers’ movements. That was really wonderful.

When I came back to Toronto after being away for eight years I started looking for a group of peers that were working in a similar way. There were a lot of amazing initiatives here. There’s Subtle Technologies, which has been around for a long time, and little things were popping up, like DIYbio. A lot of cool and interesting things were happening around science, technology, art and community. But while I was making these connections I realised that, yes, there were these groups of people, but there was no hub. So I thought “what would it be like to create my own hub and bring them all together?”

That became a new journey. In the first few months I was envisioning it like a kind of open source wet lab space. I’d met with DIYbio, and just tried different ideas, and looked for spaces that could house it. Ultimately the realisation was that there should be a space for workshops and classes, and, with finding this location, that’s how Action Potential was formed.

Do you think something like this would have worked in another city, or did it work here because Toronto already had these groups of people that would be interested?

Well, when we started off, me and the others, we were still very new. We were meeting in Hacklab, in a small space off Kensington Market, so it wasn’t like we were part of the mainstream. We were still trying to define what we do. Even MakerKids – another space like mine, but more of a hacking space for kids – were only about one year old at the time, so it was still a very fresh idea. So we still had to convince people that this is worthwhile and different and cool.

At the same time, though, the public school system was starting to integrate this idea of STEAM learning, so that kind of language or concept was already integrated into the education system. Educators were aware of it, so we didn’t have to try as hard to convince the schools that this was important. So it was easy and hard at the same time.

Toronto is also in an interesting time and space where people have a little bit more money to spend on creative endeavors. Anything you can imagine, you can do in Toronto. You’re into gaming? There’s three hackerspaces for gaming, You’re into metalwork and fire? There’s another place for you. So, in answering, I don’t know how successful this would be in a smaller town that isn’t used to such a unique idea. People are more open here, or more aware of new initiatives happening all the time.

That’s not to say that other towns wouldn’t benefit or wouldn’t be excited by something like this. For instance, SymbioticA is in Perth, the most isolated major city in the world! But the professors would often say that they wouldn’t have been able to run a program like SymbioticA in a less isolated mainstream city. We were doing tissue engineering as artists! We had access to a full lab! I’m not quite sure larger institutions in larger cities would be so open to that kind of playfulness.

Other than for kids, you have things for adults here as well?

Yeah, we do kids programming and youth workshops on the weekend and adult workshops on Thursdays or on the weekends. All of those have been such a blast! The ethos is art and science in every program that we do, but we try to offer unique things that they can’t get anywhere else. I think that’s what’s bringing people back again and again.

So what are your future plans for this space?

In the last year and a half we have been trying to see how strange and playful we can get with the adult workshops, and people have been eating it up, so I thought “oh my gosh, I can really let my freak flag fly and test out all the crazy ideas”. For instance, we’ve done a few dissections here, which are really fun. They’re for adults that didn’t necessarily take science in high school or maybe didn’t have a chance to re-engage with hands-on science since high school. We’ve been doing cow eye-ball dissections to learn about sight and how the eye works. We’ve done squid and octopus dissections, followed by printmaking and calligraphy with squid ink. In that workshop we also taught everyone how to make their own DIY specimen preservation, and everyone got to take home a small octopus that they preserved. Taxidermy has been really popular too. We’ve done rabbits and rats, and hopefully birds soon. I think taxidermy is a really good merger of science and art. There’s a craft to it, there’s a science behind it, and it involves techniques for both art and science.

If you’re in Toronto, you can sign up for classes at Action Potential Lab, or drop in during opening hours and see what’s on the shelves!

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel, The Art of Science

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15Sep / 2015

Music of the Burgess Shale

This is the second of two posts about the Burgess Shale. The first went up last week.

Last week I took you on a virtual trip to the Burgess Shale. This area of Cambrian-era fossils didn’t just inspire paleontologists, geologists and climate scientists, but musicians as well.

In 1994, composer Rand Steiger wrote an orchestral piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic called “Burgess Shale”, inspired by Stephen Jay Gould’s book about the fossils. Each movement is named after a different organism.

Of the movement “Anomalocaris”, Steiger writes:

“This was by far the largest and fiercest creature found in the shale, and it was also the most disfigured by the calamity (probably a mud slide) that instantly snatched the life of these creatures and preserved them. The most interesting thing is that parts of anomalocaris were thought to be four individual creatures; it wasn’t until recently that it was discovered that they were component parts of the same animal. SO the music for this section became a monstrous concoction featuring tuba, along with contrabass clarinet, horn, and lower strings.”

I can’t manage to find any working clips of the Burgess Shale piece online [UPDATE: See comments section – the audio links on Steiger’s site have been fixed], but in this video Steiger talks about his inspiration for the work.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel, Song of the Week Tagged: Anomalocaris, Burgess Shale, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Rand Steiger, Stephen Jay Gould

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08Sep / 2015

The Burgess Shale

This is the first of two posts about the Burgess Shale. The second one will go up next week.

In 1909, paleontologist Charles Walcott discovered fossils of the strangest organisms anyone had ever seen in the Canadian Rockies. Some had five eyes, some had strange shapes or protrusions. Over the next years he went back many times with his family, in an attempt to collect and describe the organisms.

Charles Walcott and members of his family at the Burgess Shale

The organisms were all from the Cambrian era, and this fossil field, the Burgess Shale, is a treasure trove of fossils. Wolcott found over 65 thousand, and the area is still being studied. Many of the fossils are on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and at Cambridge’s Sedgwick Museum, and affiliated researchers of these and other institutes are working on the fossils and discovering new species all the time.

Why is there such a wealth of Cambrian fossils in the Burgess Shale? These were creatures living in the oceans after the “Cambrian Explosion” – a period of time over 500 million years ago when lots of new creatures evolved. These diverse organisms swam around the prehistoric oceans, but were concentrated here in a mudslide. When the continents moved, this area ended up high in the Rockies.

You can visit the fossil fields only on a guided hiking tour. Who knows, maybe you’ll discover a new fossil while you’re there!

Image in the public domain, via the Smithsonian Institution archives.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel

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01Sep / 2015

The zero meridian, or something like it

This weekend I took my parents to visit the Greenwich Meridian – or did I?

The marked meridian on the site of Greenwich Observatory, where tourists line up to pose for silly pictures with one foot in the East and one foot in the West, has claimed to be zero degrees longtidude since 1884, but if you check your smart phone GPS on that spot, you’re NOT at exactly 0.000 degrees.

According to GPS, the zero meridian appears to be in a park adjacent to the observatory, and not in the section behind the fence that charges admission so you can “visit the meridian”.

2015-08-29 14.06.58

What’s going on here?

Earlier this month, an article by Stephen Malys and others in the Journal of Geodesy revealed the reason behind the discrepancy. The technology used in the 19th century to determine the location of the zero meridian was subject to local distortions from the Earth’s gravity and shape of the local terrain. GPS technology uses measurements from satellites, which aren’t affected in the same way as technology located on Earth.

The dotted line is the much photographed meridian established in 1884. The solid line is where the GPS says it should be.

So the meridian really is in the wrong place. What does that mean for maps or for time? Well, the Ordnance Maps used in the UK were already using a slightly different zero meridian as reference point, because they were established before the 1884 meridian convention. And the effect of the new meridian location on Greenwich Mean Time, which determines Universal Time, is unnoticably small, so nothing much has changed.

Except, for a shorter line and a cheaper visit, you could technically skip the museum and the crowd of tourists and find the true GPS meridian about a hundred meters to the East of the Observatory in Greenwich Park. It’s probably not as fun a place for a family visit, though.

Aerial photo is Figure 1 from the article by Malys et al. (CC-BY). Photos taken from the ground are by me and by the man who was behind us in line at the almost-but-not-quite meridian line. I previously wrote about the history of the Greenwich Observatory on this site.