Kids need Science

Although the image above looks as if it could have come from one...

Sat, 25 May 2013 10:35:00 -0400

Although the image above looks as if it could have come from one of the many recent Mars expeditions, this impact crater is about 35 miles outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. The Barringer Crater, also known as the Meteor Crater or even Coon Mountain, is named after American geologist Daniel Barringer (born May 25, 1860, died November 30, 1929), who was instrumental in demonstrating that the crater was the result of a large meteor strike in the distant past. The son of a congressman, Barringer had an Ivy League educations, beginning at Princeton, taking a law degree at the University of Pennsylvania and studying at both Harvard and University of Virginia. He moved out west and began investing in mining operations, investing in several silver and gold mines and discovering the Commonwealth Silver Mine in Pearce Arizona, making him a wealthy man. At the turn of the century in 1902, Barringer became fascinated by Coon Mountain and began searching for the remains of the meteorite in the basin. In fact, Daniel Barringer spent over two decades drilling and mining in the crater, spending over $600,000 (in turn of the century dollars-adjusted for inflation, he spent millions!) without finding evidence of the strike. Later scientists determined that the impact would have been strong enough to completely disperse the meteor—no massive remnant would be found or mined. When scientific papers describing this theory were presented to Barringer, he died shortly after. The Barringer Crater was named for him, though it still is known popularly as both Meteor Crater and Coon Mountain.

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Image of Barringer Crater courtesy shane.torgerson under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Commonly known as the collarbone, the word clavicle came into...

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:28:00 -0400

Commonly known as the collarbone, the word clavicle came into the English language around 1610 from the Middle French word clavicule meaning both collarbone but also small key. The French word was virtually unchanged from the Medieval Latin clavicula, the diminutive of the Latin word clavis, meaning a bolt or small key. The Latin word clavis came from the Ancient Greek word kleis () meaning both key and collarbone. The clavicle (and both the Latin and Greek root words) took its name from its supposed function as the key bone that fastens the upper skeleton together. The Latin word clavis still exists in English in other uses-the clavier for example.

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Animation of the human upper skeleton (with the clavicle in red) courtesy Anatomography under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Born on May 23, 1707, Carl Linnaeus would rise to such a level...

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Born on May 23, 1707, Carl Linnaeus would rise to such a level of greatness that the philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau once said “Tell him I know no greater man on earth,” and was heralded by many of his contemporaries and apostles as Princeps botanicorum - the Prince of Botany. This praise was not without merit: he’s the reason we name almost everything in biology the way that we do. Prior to Linnaeus, the science dealing with naming, organizing, and classifying organisms, called taxonomy, was a disorganized and confusingly complex mess. The word taxonomy is derived from an irregularly-conjugated Ancient Greek word taxis which means arrangement, and the Ancient Greek suffix -nomia, derived from the Ancient Greek word nemein (νεμειν), meaning to manage.

Linnaeus had a passion for botany, and while he went to school to study medicine, his long-term goals always included learning about plants. At 25, he won a grant to travel to Lapland and document the local flora and fauna. While there, he began to classify the flowers he found with what we now know as the bionomial classification system - from the Latin bi, meaning two, and nominus meaning name. Prior to this system, species were given long, many-worded descriptive names, and there were several competing outlines for classifying plants and animals into groups, none of which were particularly accurate or helpful to a scientist not intimate with the specific branch of biology the outline was designed for.

The binomial classification system uses two identifiers for a species - the “generic name” (also known as its genus), and the “specific” name (also known as the species). Linnaeus introduced this system in his book Systema naturae, first published in 1735. Even though the first edition was basic and just twelve pages long, it introduced to the scientific community a system that was simple, understandable, easy to remember, and easy to add new species to. Throughout his life, Linnaeus and his apostles continued work on Systema naturae, and by its 10th Edition in 1758, it classified over 4400 species of animals, and 7700 species of plants.

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Image of ‘The 32-year-old Linnaeus in his wedding finery’ from the Oil painting by J. H. Scheffel, 1739, in the public domain.

Image of the title page of Linnaeus’ thesis Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum on plant sexual reproduction, written when he was a 21 year old first year student at Uppsala University that launched his career. Within a year of this thesis, Linnaus was lecturing to massive classrooms of 300 or more students-while still a student himself!

Guest post by Arallyn, a humanoid from the third rock from the sun who is fascinated by science and who runs the fantastic blog biomedicalephemera.tumblr.com when she isn’t filling her mind with scientific trivia. Check out and share her cool blog-she has a great eye! Someday she will be curating major museums and you will say you remember reading her awesome blogs.

Self taugh English polymath and inventor William Sturgeon was...

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:43:23 -0400

Self taugh English polymath and inventor William Sturgeon was born on May 22, 1783 (died December 4, 1850). Early in life he was apprenticed to a shoemaker before joining the English army and teaching himself mathematics and physics. In 1824 he invented the first electromagnet, using a 7 ounce piece of iron wrapped in wire to lift 9 pounds of iron. He followed this in 1825 by inventing the first modern electromagetic compass. The word electromagnet is a compound word, taking the Latinized form of the Ancient Greek word elektron (ελεκτρον) meaning amber and combining it with the mid-15th century English word magnet. The word magnet was also formed using a Latinized Ancient Greek root, in this case the Latin word magnetum which meant lodestone and came from the Ancient Greek ho Magnes lithos (ό Μαγνες λιθος) which meant the Magnesian stone, taking its name from Magnesia, a region of Thessaly from which magnetized ore was mined.

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Image of Sturgeon and his electromagnet in the public domain.

The system for measuring temperature on a decimal scale was...

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:24:11 -0400

The system for measuring temperature on a decimal scale was introduced by Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer with many accomplishments in a short life. The Celsius scale was originally called the centigrade scale, from the Latin words centus for one hundred and gradus meaning degree. The eponym Celsius wasn’t adopted by the scientific community until 1948 and remains the only scientific symbol in the upper case (°C), to distinguish it from the lower case c (constant) famous from Einstein’s energy equation.

Despite his obvious genius, the centigrade scale originally proposed by Anders Celsius had 100 as the freezing point of water and 0 as the boiling point. In 1744 and shortly after his death, the great Swedish scientist Carl Linneaus reversed the scale making hot temperatures have higher numbers than cold temperatures.

Today the Celsius scale is the most widely used scale for measuring and reporting temperature. In addition to his interest in a better scale for measuring temperature, Anders Celsius participated in expeditions to confirm Isaac Newton’s theory that the Earth is not a perfect sphere but rather ellipsoid, and also was the first to use colored glass plates to try to analyse and catalog magnitude and differences in stars. He supported the formation of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (along with Carl Linneaus and several others) and was elected to the Academy in its first meeting. He died of tuberculosis in 1744 at the age of 42.

Image of Anders Celsius from the portrait that hangs in his honor at the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory which he founded shortly before his death. Image in the public domain.

cwist is almost here! Click on the image for more info!

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:17:59 -0400

cwist is almost here! Click on the image for more info!

Today is the birthday of English scientist Norman Lockyer, who...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:59:34 -0400

Today is the birthday of English scientist Norman Lockyer, who both discovered (along with others) helium and named it. On August 18, 1868 several teams of scientists gathered along the path of a predicted total solar eclipse to utilize the recently discovered understanding of the emerging science of spectography. Gustave Kirchoff had theorized that the Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum corresponded to elements in the sun. French scientist Pierre Janssen and English scientist Norman Lockyer observed the eclipse independently and both proposed the presence of an unknown element which Lockyer named Helium. Lockyer used the Ancient Greek word helios meaning sun, anglicized to helium. It wasn’t discovered on earth for another 30 years.

Helium has a wide variety of scientific and industrial uses-it is used in cryogenics (its largest single use, absorbing about a quarter of production), for industrial uses—as a pressurizing and purge gas. A minor use is as a lifting gas in balloons and airships.

Image of the solar eclipse of August 1868 from Total Eclipses of the Sun by Mabel Loomis Todd.

On May 16, 1960, Theodore Harold Maiman operated the...

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:24:36 -0400

On May 16, 1960, Theodore Harold Maiman operated the first laser, utilizing a synthetic ruby crystal grown by his colleague Dr. Ralph L. Hutcheson. A race had been underway in the scientific community for more than a decade to develop such a device, starting first with masers before moving on to lasers.

The word LASER is an acronym (the first acronym to appear on this blog) and stands for light amplification by stimulated emmission of radiation. When the laser (and maser-microwave amplification by stimulated emmission of radiation) was first developed it was know as a solution looking for a problem. Scientists and engineers saw incredible potential for such a device, and now lasers are ubiquitous and range in size from smaller than the head of a pin to the size of football fields. Lasers can be found in cd and dvd players, fingerprint readers, bar-code scanners, in medicine as a replacement for scalpels, in printers, dermatology, welding and cutting and even rock concerts and kids shows.

Image of an early ruby laser Courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Before Edward Jenner discovered and popularized vaccination, the...

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:26:36 -0400

Before Edward Jenner discovered and popularized vaccination, the technique of inoculation had long been in use around the world, with more or less success to combat small pox. Doctors had known for centuries that a small and controlled exposure to the deadly virus variola could lead to immunity even if the mechanism was unknown. What doctors and scientists did not know was that there were many strains of the variola virus, some much more deadly than others. Inoculation worked by introducing controlled amounts of the virus into the system and allowing the body to develop natural antibodies to the virus. Edward Jenner was finally able to show that the different variations of variola virus were similar enough that inoculating with a non-lethal version, in this case cowpox, was enough to grant immunity to the lethal forms.

The word inoculation came from the Latin word inoculatus, the past participle of inoculare meaning to graft in, implant, in the horticultural sense of buds on a tree or plant. Inoculate combined the prefix in- and the Latin word oculus which could mean bud or sprout but originally meant eye. It took its modern meaning of implant germs to produce immunity from around the time Lady Montagu brought inoculation back from India around 1714, where she was stationed with her husband, the ambassador Edward Wortley Montagu. Since the advent of vaccines, the word inoculation has been used synonymously with vaccination.

Image of smallpox vaccination site courtesy Centers for Disease Control.

The word embryo comes into English in the mid 14th century fully...

Sun, 12 May 2013 10:17:04 -0400

The word embryo comes into English in the mid 14th century fully formed from the Ancient Greek word embryon (εμβρυον) meaning a young one. In earlier Greek (specifically Homer) embryon meant a young animal and acquired the poetic use of fruit of the womb, a compound word composed of the prefix en and the root bryein (βρυειν) meaning to swell or be full.

Image of an embryo courtesy lunar caustic, used with permission under a creative commons 3.0 license.

Get ready for the 17 year cicada! A fairly large insect of...

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:29:00 -0400

Get ready for the 17 year cicada! A fairly large insect of the order hemiptera, the cicada is known for the sound of its mating call, a shrill and monotonous buzz that can last for weeks at the end of summer. Unlike crickets who make sounds by rubbing together body parts, cicadas produce their noise with a portion of their chitinous exoskeleton called the tymbal.

The word cicada comes from the Latin word cicada, and although it was common in Latin it is considered a loan word from another language, but the loaner word and language is now lost. The cicada enjoys world wide distribution with most varieties having a lifespan of 2-5 years, though some notably live much longer, specifically the 13 and 17 year cicadas. Note the large wide set eyes-but also note the three smaller eyes in a triangular pattern between the larger eyes.

Image of a cicada emerging as imago from its last instar courtesy of Pete Lounsbury under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Happy May Day! There are approximately 2500 species of Mayflies...

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:04:38 -0400

Happy May Day! There are approximately 2500 species of Mayflies throughout the world, over 600 of which live in North America alone. Mayflies are part of an ancient species of insect dating back millions of years and containing both Dragonflies and damselflies. While most of today’s mayflies are very tiny, fragile bugs that only live from a few hours to a few days (most adult imagos have no functional digestive system-they transform, mate and die!), the ancient ancestors of this group could grow as large as 18 inches (45 centimeters) across!

Mayflies belong to the order ephemeroptera which derive their name from the Ancient Greek word ephemeros meaning in a day and pteron meaning wing. The route that ephemeros takes to get to English is interesting: it arrived in early English in the 14th century as a medical term from medical Latin as ephemera (febris), the adjective here describing the length of the fever as a day. In Ancient Greek,ephemeros is itself a combination of two words, the prefix and conjunction epi- meaning at, near or around and (h)emera meaning a day. Today a majority of the order ephemeroptera live a day or less, rising out of their metamorphoses in giant clouds, mating and dying. As you shoo away mayflies this summer, consider their tiny lifespans! Or remember King Lear:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods,

They kill us for their sport.

While English knows them as Mayflies, most of the world knows them as Dayflies: German Eintagsfliege, Dutch eendagsvlieg, Slovenian enodnevnica, Swedish dagslända, Danish and Norwegiandøgnflue, Polish jętka jednodniówka, Finnish päivänkorento, Turkish birgün sineği, Russian подёнка,Bulgarian еднодневка, and Greek εφήμερος. The Greek name, transliterated efímeros, is the origin of the names in Romance languages: French éphémère, Italian effimera, Portuguese efêmera, Spanish efímera, and Romanian efemeride. In Korean harusarimok (하루살이목).

Image of a mayfly by Richard Bartz, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Image of a mayfly fossil 300 million years old copyright Richard Knecht, read the full story here.

Foreign names courtesy Wikipedia, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Today is the birthday of Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:10:00 -0400

Today is the birthday of Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912), French philosopher of science, engineer, mathematician, and theoretical physicist. Among his many contributions, Poincaré was the first to propose that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. He also wrote a short paper on relativity that predated Einstein’s by several months-although Poincaré is rarely credited popularly with contributions to relativity, Einstein himself acknowledged his debt. Poincaré’s assertion that nothing is faster than light in a vacuum came at time when science was trying to establish what a vacuum meant at all-whether or not there was a measurable ether.

The word vacuum came into English in the 1540s from the neuter noun use of the Latin vacuus meaning empty.

Another shout out needed here: Poincaré taught at L’Université de Caen, in Lower Normandy, an institution I am proud to call one of my alma maters! Allez Phénix!

On April 25, 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope was placed into...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:00:46 -0400

On April 25, 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope was placed into orbit 381 miles above the earth, making it the first optical telescope in space. Named for American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953), the Hubble Space Telescope continues to work in Edwin Hubble’s field of deep cosmological inquiry and extra-galactic astronomy. Despite early problems including a dramatic in-space repair mission, the Hubble has been sending back pictures and data of every corner of the universe, making it one of the most important scientific tools every created. The Deep Field View pictured above, was a series of 342 photos taken in December 1995 and composed and rendered into a single image. The area for the Deep Field View was chosen as one of the ‘darkest’ spots in the sky: imagine holding a grain of sand at arms length or a viewing a tennis ball at 100 meters, and looking in the direction of the darkest, least populated portions of the night sky. In addition to its day to day duties, Hubble has returned to its Deep Field views several times, with the Deep Field View South a couple years later, the 2004 Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and the Hubble Extreme Deep Field of 2012.

The Hubble Deep Field, the Hubble Space Telescope as seen from Atlantis Space Shuttle, and the Cat’s Eye Nebula as photographed by Hubble, all images courtesy NASA/Hubble.

On April 24, 1925, substitute science teacher and Rhea County...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:00:00 -0400

On April 24, 1925, substitute science teacher and Rhea County High School football coach John T. Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee’s Butler Act which prohibited the teaching of evolution. Nicknamed the ‘Monkey Trial’, the case was actually formed after the American Civil Liberties Union sought a defendant and citizens of the small town of Dayton, Tennessee convinced Scopes to stand trial to gain publicity for the town. Both sides had superstar legal teams, led by Clarence Darrow for the defense and perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryant for the prosecution. The case ended in July of 1925 with a guilty verdict-Scopes was fined $100. The case went to the Tennessee Supreme Court but was overturned on a technicality and remained on the books until 1967 when it was finally repealed.

The word evolution arrived in English in 1620 and comes from the Latin word evolutionem (nomnative form evolutio) meaning the unrolling of a book or revealing that which was rolled up. The word evolve arrived a bit later in the 1640s from the Latin wordevolvere meaning to unroll and could also pertain to other ‘hidden’ things (see also for example the etymology of vulva), but mostly meant books, when a ‘volume’ was a rolled up manuscript made from vellum. The modern meaning that scientists such ad Darwin meant for it began around 1832 and reached its first full expression in Darwin’s work. The word evolve had been used in a scientific sense specifically in biology for over a hundred years before Darwin wrote Origin of Species-which is one reason why he avoided it. By the mid 1850s, the word had connotations of perfectibility-something Darwin wanted to avoid. It was the last sentence of his book:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

And while I am at it, let me add this: Go Rhea County Golden Eagles! I was briefly a student at that school and have some fond memories. -kidsneedscience

The word epilepsy first entered the English language in the...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:56:00 -0400

The word epilepsy first entered the English language in the 1570s courtesy William Shakespeare, in his play Julius Caesar, who was known to be epileptic. It came via the French word epilepsie from the Late Latin transliteration epilepsia of the Ancient Greek word epilepsia meaning a seizure. The Greeks combined the prefix epi- meaning upon with lepsis (root leps- from the future stem of lambanein, to fall) meaning falling-epilepsy was the falling sickness.

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare, born April 23, 1564.

Image of the bust of Julius Caesar courtesy Andreas Wahra, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Today is the birthday of German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, born...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:00:20 -0400

Today is the birthday of German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, born April 22, 1724, who was the first person to suggest that nebulae were galaxies or ‘island universes’ at incredible distances. A contemporary of the French Astronomer Charles Messier, Kant made this assertion while Messier was compiling his famous ‘catalog’ of celestial objects that were clearly neither stars nor comets, which is what Messier was searching for. But when the word nebula originally entered English in the early 15th century, it had nothing to do with astronomy. Arriving as nebule meaning a cloud or mist from the Latin word nebula meaning mist, which in turn came from the Proto Indo-European root word *nebh-meaning cloud, vapor, fog, moist, sky. Ancient Greek had the related word nephele, nephos which also meant cloud. When the word nebula reappeared in English it had a medical meaning for cataracts or cloudy defects in the eye. The astronomical meaning of a cloud-like patch in the night sky was first recorded around 1730. It wasn’t until the early 20th century with the advent of modern and powerful telescopes that nebula were fully understood as massive clouds of gas and dust.

Image of the Ring Nebula, courtesy NASA from Hubble Space Telescope Program.

The element platinum was first identified independently in the...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:43:31 -0400

The element platinum was first identified independently in the 1740s by both Spanish scientist Antonio de Ulloa and English metallurgist Charles Wood from samples collected in Colombia. The most important and abundant member of the platinum group metals, platinum has an atomic number of 78 and a face centered cubic crystal structure. Platinum is favored for its extreme strength and resistance to corrosion or reaction with other elements and compounds making ideal for laboratory tools. The English word platinum (considered Modern Latin) derives from the Spanish word platina (courtesy de Ulloa) which was a diminutive of the Spanish word for silver, plata. The word first existed in English as platina, when both English and Spanish scientists thought platinum was an inferior version of silver. Platinum had an intermediate step in platinium around 1812, before dropping the I and entering English finally as platinum a short time later.

Platinum has many important industrial uses courtesy of its high strength and resistance to heat and corrosion, with a notable use in car engines-the tops of spark plugs are covered in platinum and can often last the life of the vehicle. While platinum has some uses in jewelry, its resemblance to silver often limits its appeal.

Image of platinum crystals courtesy Periodictableru, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Although Modern English allows acid as both a noun and an...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:01:16 -0400

Although Modern English allows acid as both a noun and an adjective, the word entered Early Modern English strictly as an adjective from the Latin adjective acidus meaning sharp or sour. Related to both acer meaning sharp or sour and acetum meaning vinegar, science gave a reason for the substantive use of the word by defining substances that have the shared quality of reacting with bases. Salicylic acid has been know as a pain reliever since the time of Hippocrates, and in the 1850s acetylsalicylic acid was chemically derived and by the turn of the century was sold around the world. Acids come in solids, liquids and gases, are both organic and inorganic and exist in every corner of the planet and universe. Scientists have three main classification for acids, based on either adding protons or accepting electrons in a reaction. You can find acids everywhere: throughout your kitchen, for both cooking and cleaning, in car batteries as a power source, and in every fiber of your being in DNA-deoxy-ribonucleic acid. Many acids share the quality of tasting sour.

Image of deoxy-ribonucleic acidcourtesy Zephyris under CC 3.0 license.

NASA TV-Wallops Island Launch at 5:00pm Eastern Time

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:39:00 -0400

NASA TV-Wallops Island Launch at 5:00pm Eastern Time: If you can’t see the launch from your...