Few things are as engaging or beautiful in the night sky as a full moon. Next time you gaze up, consider a word (acronym, really, with the strength of a word in some circles) well known to scientists at NASA: KREEP. KREEP stands for the group of elements found in a sample (along with samples collected from many other missions) retrieved by the Apollo program almost exactly 43 years ago this week: K stands for potassium, REE for Rare Earth Elements and P for phosphorous. Of all the lunar soil samples returned to earth (841 pounds worth!) the KREEP samples were particularly important to scientists as the combination of elements rarely occurs outside of a molten state. The KREEP sample furthered knowledge of the early formation of both Earth and the Moon, and remains a significant milestone in the understanding of Earth and lunar geology.

Image courtesy Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be

On March 25, 1655 Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens discovered the first moon of Saturn, later named Titan.  Huygens did it with the help of his brother Constantijn, also an astronomer, with a telescope they built themselves.  

Huygens called it Saturni Luna, Latin for Saturn’s Moon in his publication of the discovery, New Observations of Saturn’s Moon.  When the next five moons of Saturn were discovered a few decades later, astronomers began referring to them by number, Saturn I through Saturn VI, though the list was not sequential and Titan was variously named Saturn I, IV and even VI.  The name Titan was given 50 years after Huygen’s death by astronomer John Herschel, son of Anglo-German astronomer William Herschel in John Herschel’s 1857 publication  Results of Astronomical Observations Made at the Cape of Good Hope.  He named the moons after the twelve titans (Τῑτάν), the mythical race of deities that preceded the traditional canon of Greek deities.  

The word titan was in common use in English by the 1500s, becoming an adjective by 1709, then applied to the element titanium in 1796 and finally the moon of Saturn.   

Image of Titan from the Cassini program, courtesy NASA

This is the first full weekend of the sequester, so you better get used to it and be ready to discuss it. And as long as there is a scientific component to the word in carbon sequester, we better get some science word history as well. The word sequester entered English in the late 14th century from the Old French word sequestrer which came from the Late Latin sequestrare meaning to place in safekeeping. This is the sense used when discussing carbon sequestration, the process to capture and contain carbon dioxide emissions in order to contain the damage caused by the greenhouse effect. The original Latin source was the word sequester meaning a trustee, mediator or even follower. This sense also gave the early 15th century meaning of to seize by authority, place in receivership, confiscate.

There are many types of carbon sequestering proposed, from basic reforestation and green-scape projects to more ambitious proposals to utilize deep sea currents or even chemical or physical processes to lock up the carbon dioxide.  You can see the President discussing how to end the sequester here.  And if you want to see the effect of the sequester on science, head over to my old blog home at sciencefriday.com for a good analysis.

Image of the United States Capitol courtesy Rob Crawley, used with permission under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Special Guest post:

“Ew, you have cooties!” is more than just a childish playground taunt; cooties were (and are) a real thing, and a serious problem for much of history.

The term refers to Pediculus humanus corporis, otherwise known as the human body louse. During wartime, body lice were a scourge to soldiers and civilians in crowded conditions, and were a much more dire problem than the other human lice species (head lice and pubic lice, or “crabs”). Cooties carried typhus, a disease that killed over three million people on the former Eastern Front, between 1918 and 1922. De-lousing stations set up on both sides of the conflict kept the cootie from running rampant in Western Europe, but it was still a persistent problem throughout the war. The body louse was most notably found in German concentration camps in WWII, and the typhus carried by Pediculus humanus corporis is what killed both Anne Frank and her sister Margot.

Typhus has plagued humanity for centuries, but cooties have not. The term cootie was first coined by the British army in WWI, and is presumed to be from the Malay word kutu, meaning either biting body louse or dog tick.

Today’s 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 her cool blog-I don’t know where she finds her material, but it is spectacular!

Calling all Etymologers!  Kidsneedscience is looking for talented writers with an interest in word histories and science, technology, engineering and math.  Are you fascinated by science and discovery and love how their discoveries and innovations translate into words and culture?  Are you secretly thrilled to find connections between words you never knew existed?  Consider submitting a sample post-kidsneedscience is looking for contributors to grow this website.  Right now KNS has over 60,000 followers and is growing.  Are you studying molecular biology and want to write about interesting words?  Did you take Latin or Greek in school and wouldn’t mind finding your dictionaries and lexicons on your bookshelf?  Submit a sample post to me via direct message.  Posts can be anywhere from 100-400 words and tell a compelling story about a word or name from science or math.  Students and educators welcome.  

Style guide is short and simple:  third person voice, key word in bold, root words and definitions in italic. If you have rights to a photo or illustration for your word, perfect!  If not we will find one.

Image courtesy the Oxford Universal English Dictionary, published 1937.  Full details here.

The element antimony has been known and used since antiquity for a variety of purposes in several different mineral forms.  Stibnite (Sb2S3),the most common mineral form of antimony,  pictured here, was used 5,000 years ago for among other uses as an eye cosmetic called kohl, crushed up into a sparkling powder much like the glitter used by today’s tweens.  Antimony takes its symbol and periodic table abbreviation Sb from stibnite, which is a direct Anglicization of the Latin form stibium which meant antimony.   First isolated by Vannocio Biringuccio, (1480–c. 1539) an Italian metallurgist, antimony is now a common component of solders, fireworks and electronic components.  With an orthorhombic crystal structure, stibnite forms spectacular growths prized by collectors.  The etymology of antimony is much less certain-some etymologists give the early Greek form a lost transliterated origin, while other more fanciful explanations abound, including the folk-etymology from France of anti-moine, meaning anti-monk as a compound of antimony was known to be poisonous and therefore hazardous to early monks and alchemists.  

Image of stibnite courtesy of conspiracyofhappiness via flickr used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.  

Seventy years ago today on 20 February 1943, a cornfield in southern Mexico in the town of Paricutin erupted in a spectacular explosion and continued to shoot ash into the air for a year.  By the time it was finished, the cornfield had grown a cone of ash over a thousand feet high and covered ten square miles.  This explosion of gas, molten lava and solid ash is known as tephra, which is nothing more than the Anglicized version of the Ancient Greek word (tephra) which meant ash. This type of eruption is also known as a pyroclast or pyroclastic flow or even pyroclastic density current, which comes from the Ancient Greek words πῦρ (pur), meaning fire, and κλαστός (klastos), meaning broken in pieces.  

Image of the Paricutin Volcano during its first period of activity in 1943 courtesy of NOAA via wikipedia, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Although scientists as early as Aristarchus of Samos knew the relationship between the sun and earth around 270 BCE, it wasn’t until 1543 that Nicholas Copernicus published his masterwork De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published the same year that he died that the heliocentric model received wide distribution. Perhaps his death and inability to defend his thesis led to the very slow spread and adoption of his idea, so that by the year 1616 a group of cardinals and bishops under the direction of the Vatican met to denounce Galileo Galilei, who was using the results of his observations made with the new technology of the telescope to re-introduce the heliocentric model of the solar system. A decade and half passed before Galileo was dangerous enough to draw a trial, which commenced on this day in 1633. Galileo was furious with the philosophers, theologians and scientists who denounced his idea, complaining to his friend and fellow astronomer Johannes Kepler,

My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.

He lost the trial and spent his last eight years under house arrest, working on his theories from his home in Pisa.

The word heliocentric comes from Ancient Greek, a combination of the words ἥλιος (helios) meaning sun and κέντρον (kentron) meaning center. It would take another three centuries for scientists to understand that not only is the Earth not the center of the Universe, neither is the Sun.

Image from Copernicus in the public domain.