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Why Are So Many Deep Sea Creatures Red?
Red light does not reach ocean depths, so deep-sea animals that are red actually...
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Happy Mother’s Day!
Here’s a great photo of UCLA’s Anna Fisher: the first mother in space.
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Giant Asian Mantis (Hierodula patellifera)
by Sinobug (itchydogimages) on Flickr.
Pu’er, Yunnan, China
See more Chinese praying... -
every 17 years these cicadas come out of the ground, by the billions, along the east coast of the u.s. they are due any day now.
they have sex for...
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Been sketching things - will reupload over at dA eventually with better editing of two pages. It’s nearly finals; I’m lazy.
Cicadas are cool.
On this day in 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) using unacknowledged photographs and research by their colleague Rosalind Franklin. They had considered many other candidates for the structure, including single and triple strand helices before deciphering the structure. They would publish a paper that same year describing their discovery, but the significance of the discovery was largely overlooked by the general public for over a year. Today it stands as one of the most remarkable milestones in the history of science.
The word deoxyribonucleic is a compound word formed around the main root word ribose, which arrived in English in 1892 via the German word Ribose which was itself borrowed from the English word of 1880 arabinose, a sugar derived from gum arabic. The word nucleic comes from the Latin word nucleus meaning a kernal around 1700, from the Latin diminutive nucula meaning a little nut. It did not take the meaning of a central characteristic or attribute until 1762. It wasn’t applied to cellular structures for another 70 years around 1862. The -oxy- root comes from the Ancient Greek word οχυς oxys meaning sharp or pointed (sharing the earlier common root word that gave the Latin word acer with the same meaning and ultimately the English word acid). The de- prefix is a Latin preposition meaning down from, off or away from, used mainly in English compound words as a privative, meaning that something lacks something.
Many teams have raced to map the outer solar system, specifically the belt of asteroids and debris in the scattered disc known as transneptunian objects, and today, January 5, marks the anniversary of the 2005 discovery of Eris. The discovery of Eris and its moon Dysnomia took several years of searching, two years of analysis utilizing both computers and good old fashioned legwork. The team of Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz had programmed their computers to rule out objects moving too slowly to count and missed seeing Eris when it was first photographed. Manually pouring over the photos almost a year and a half later, they found the largest (to date) plutoid or dwarf planet. Wanting to name more sky objects after women, internally the team referred to the dwarf planet as Xena, after the popular television series. After a period of several years (and much consensus building) the name Eris was settled on. Eris was the goddess of strife in Greek mythology, the meddling troublemaker who doomed the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, which led to the disastrous war that destroyed both Troy and much of the invading Greek armies. The name is perfect for a planet that has such and irregular orbit and lies so far out of the ecliptic. Eris’s own son was named Dysnomia, meaning lawlessness, and when the Hubble Space Telescope discovered that Eris had a moon, well, the name was inevitable. Since the discovery of Eris and Dysnomia, several more plutoids have been discovered, but none yet as large. Eris is very very far from the sun: aphelion is 97AU and perihelion is 37AU, and remember that an astronomical unit (AU) is the distance between the earth and the sun, or approximately 93 million miles! The discovery of Eris finally gave the International Astronomical Union cause to define what makes a planet a planet, leading scientists to downgrade Pluto to a dwarf planet or plutoid.
Images of Eris and Dysnomia courtesy NASA/Hubble.
In 1772, German astronomer Johann Elert Bode noticed that the arrangement of planets in the solar system was not quite what he expected, and proposed that there was an undiscovered planet somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. Herschel’s discovery of Uranus in 1782 only confirmed his hypothesis, an he and several other astronomers looked for two decades before deciding that an organized effort was needed. They formed a commission in the year 1800 headed by Hungarian astronomer Baron Franz Xaver von Zach, who selected 24 promising astronomers to begin the search. Among the astromers selected, a letter went out to Italian astonomer Guiseppe Piazzi, who discovered Ceres on January 1, 1801, before his letter arrived and before the search began in earnest! Not sure what he was seeing, he described it after several days as a comet. Ceres was exactly where (meaning distance from the sun) scientists expected it to be. Piazzi observed Ceres 24 times over a period of two months before illness caused him to cease observation. He announced his discovery on the 24 of January 1801, but the new discovery was soon occluded by the sun, and was not ‘rediscovered’ until 24 year old math phenom Carl Freidrich Gauss came up with an accurate method of predicting its location, and Ceres was seen again almost exactly a year later on 31 December 1801.
Since then, Ceres has been known as a nova, the Latin word for new which had long been used for new objects in the sky that have not yet been classified, an asteroid (a word coined by William Herschel to describe Ceres, and later as a dwarf planet and even plutoid. There is still debate today on how to classify Ceres-scientists are studying its shape, size and orbit to determine its best classification. The name Ceres was proposed by Piazzi as Cerere Ferdinandea, Cerere being the Italian for Ceres, and Ferdinandea in homage to the King of Sicily, King Ferdinand III.
Image of Ceres courtesy NASA/Hubble, in the public domain.
Happy New Year! A year is a unit of measure used to describe the revolution of a planet around its star-in our case this is usually given as 365 days or occasionally as 365.2429 days and some years (2012 for example) we actually say a year is 366 days. But first, the history: the word year comes from Old English gē(a)r, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch jaar and German Jahr, from an Indo-European root shared by Greek hōra meaning year, season, any part of a year, also any part of a day, hour, and the Latin word hornus meaning of this year. The root probably came from the verbal root *ei- meaning to do or make a complete cycle.
Scientists say that the year is exactly 31557600 seconds, and in the Unified Code for Units of Measure, the symbol a (without subscript) always refers to the Julian year aj. They do the math as follows: 365.25 days times 86400 seconds in a day = 1 a = 1 aj = 31.5576 Ms. Under the code of uniformity that governs all things SI, the SI multiplier prefixes may be applied to it to form ka (kiloannum), Ma (megaannum) etc.
On the planet Mars though the year is approxitmately 687 days long, and every planet has a different revolution around its star. Mecury takes 88 days, Venus 224 days, but Jupiter takes almost 12 years! Saturn takes 29 years, Uranus takes 84 years, Neptune 165 years and Pluto (still a planet in my book!) takes almost 250 years to go around the Sun a single time. And a very special Happy Birthday to the Planet Neptune!
Here on Earth, we celebrate many types of years, starting with the calendar year and birth year. But we also recognize many types of years: fiscal, sidereal, academic, Julian, tropical, draconic, heliacal, Bessellian, Gaussian, Sothic, and leap. We are leaving the Year of the Dragon according to the Chinese calendar and about to enter the Year of the Snake on February 10.
Whatever year or years you hope to celebrate, here at kidsneedscience we wish you a very happy New Year! And a special thanks to all our followers all around the world-this is our 251th post and our 15 month anniversary (a word connected way back to the root for year, before the Romans had the word annus). In just over a year we’ve found 40,000 followers in 125 countries: from New Zealand to Chile, from China to Canada, Indonesia to Peru, Japan to Mexico, Saudi Arabia to Brazil, The United Kingdom to Egypt. Thank you to everybody for liking, posting and re-blogging! May you have a New Year filled with Science and Words! Finally, a quote from T. S. Eliot: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.” Here at kidsneedscience we’re all about digging up the meanings and origins of last year’s words.
Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/MARS program.
A siphuncle is the tube that connects the old abondoned sections of a chambered nautilus to the chamber that is in use by the cephalapod. The word siphuncle comes from the Latin word siphunculus meaning a little tube, which comes from the Greek word σιφων meaning siphon.
Image of a siphuncle in a chambered nautilus courtesy Biodidac, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
![Tribrachidium heraldicum was a very early organism that first appears in the Ediacaran period notable for its tri-radial symmetry. The fossils were first found (and named by) Brian Daily and Martin Glaessner in the Ediacara Hills in South Australia in 1959. Since then tribrachidium have been found in the White Sea in Russia as well as Podolia, Ukraine. Tribrachidium is unusual for its triple radial symmetry, a type of symmetry that is extremely rare in animals, most of which are either bilaterally or radially symmetrical. The name tribrachidium comes from the Ancient Greek words τρεις (treis) meaning three and βραχιων (brachion) meaning arm. The word heraldicum is meant to indicate a heraldic emblem or shield, but the etymology of this word is complicated. Heraldic entered English as early as the twelfth century (some call it Anglo-Latin) as an adjective, becoming a noun (a herald) in the 14th century.
Image of tribrachidium courtesy Aleksey Nagovidsyn from the Arkhangelsk Regional Museum, used with permission under a creative Commons 3.0 licence.
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Tribrachidium heraldicum was a very early organism that first appears in the Ediacaran period notable for its tri-radial symmetry. The fossils were first found (and named by) Brian Daily and Martin Glaessner in the Ediacara Hills in South Australia in 1959. Since then tribrachidium have been found in the White Sea in Russia as well as Podolia, Ukraine. Tribrachidium is unusual for its triple radial symmetry, a type of symmetry that is extremely rare in animals, most of which are either bilaterally or radially symmetrical. The name tribrachidium comes from the Ancient Greek words τρεις (treis) meaning three and βραχιων (brachion) meaning arm. The word heraldicum is meant to indicate a heraldic emblem or shield, but the etymology of this word is complicated. Heraldic entered English as early as the twelfth century (some call it Anglo-Latin) as an adjective, becoming a noun (a herald) in the 14th century.
Image of tribrachidium courtesy Aleksey Nagovidsyn from the Arkhangelsk Regional Museum, used with permission under a creative Commons 3.0 licence. [edit]
Today is the birthday of Irish Chemist Thomas Andrews, born to a linen merchant in Belfast Ireland in 1815. Andrews was the first scientist to understand and demonstrate that ozone is a form (O3) of oxygen. Ozone is known for its peculiar smell-humans can discern the prescence of Ozone in concentrations of as little as ten parts per billion in the air. This unusual property gave ozone its name, which comes from the Ancient Greek word ὄζειν (ozein) meaning to smell. The word was coined by Christian Friedrich Schöenbein with his discovery in 1840. Schöenbein recognized that the peculiar smell after lightning strikes was due to ozone.
Image of the ozone hole courtesy NASA, in the public domain. See a very short animation of the changing size of the hole here.
Conifers are a division of pinophyta in the plant kingdom comprosed largely of trees varying in size from two feet to one hundred and fifty feet tall and typified by their mostly cone shape and cone shaped seed pods. The noun conifer was first recorded around 1841 to include most of the trees in this group which date back to the Carbiniferous period 300 million years ago. Conifer derives from the adjective coniferous which has been in English since just after the time of Chaucer and comes from the Latin words conus meaning cone or cone shaped and ferre meaning to bear or to carry. The Ancient Greeks used the same word with the same meaning: κωνος, and the word has remained unchanged for 2500 years.
Image of conifers in winter courtesy www.christmasstockimages.com, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
On December 13, 1920, Albert Abraham Michelson and Francis Pease measured diameter of the star Betelgeuse, the first measurement of the size of any star other than the Sun. Although the relative size of Betelgeuse has been in dispute since then mostly due to its massive size and incredible speed through space, the methods devised by Michaelson and Pease have been used for decades. The name Betelgeuse is derived from the Arabic يد الجوزاء (Yad al-Jauzā’), meaning the Hand of al-Jauzā, al-Jauzā being the constellation known in the west as Orion the Hunter. Betelgeuse is the right shoulder (or armpit) of Orion and the alpha star of the constellation. The letter B in Betelgeuse, however, was a mistransliteration from Arabic into medieval Latin of the first character Y, which was misread as a B. Betelgeuse arrived in English in 1515 as a direct phonetic transliteration of the Arabic as Ibt al Jauzah, which due to this mispelling was also mistranslated as the Armpit of the Central One. Intermediary forms include Bed Elgueze, Beit Algueze, Betelgeux and Betelgeuze, finally settling on Betelgeuse around the time Michaelson and Pease were measuring the star.
Everything about this star has been misunderstood for centuries, starting with its name in English and continuing to the present day. When Michaelson and Pease attempted to measure its size, interferometry was still a new science and early estimates both missed its size and proximity. Long considered the largest star in the catalog (currently Betelgeuse ranks third largest), Betelgeuse is a massive red super giant millions of times larger than the sun. As recently as the last ten or fifteen years the size and distance of Betelgeuse have been refined and updated as new and improved methods have been implemented.
Michaelson, the scientist who first measured Betelgeuse, had a life scripted by Hollywood: his parents fled Poland when he was only two years old and settled in the American West. Michaelson recieved an appointment from no less than President Ulysses S. Grant to attend the fledgling United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland where he began his scientific endeavors in earnest. He is actually more famous for his experiments to measure the speed of light accurately, known as the Michaelson-Morley experiment, which he began while in Annapolis and which he continued to refine for decades as he tried to measure the impact of aether on the speed of light. He never was able to find evidence of aether, which later became significant and celebrated when Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity. He was awarded most major scientific prizes including the Nobel Prize of 1907 and is considered the first American to win that prize. His life was so dramatic and crammed with acheivement that his early life and appointment to USNA managed to penetrate into popular culture when his life was celebrated on an episode of Gunsmoke, in which an unpleasant local teacher attempts to block his advancement. The episode Look to the Stars was broadcast in March 1962, 31 years after his death on May 9, 1931.
Although Michaelson and Pease’s first measurement has been in flux since publication, this was not due to flaws in their science or methodology. As recently as 1991 the Yale University Observatory measured the distance to Betelgeuse at 330 light years. The Hipparcos Input Catalog measured the distance two years later at 650 light years, almost doubling Yale’s measurement. In 2008 a team working with Very Large Array Radio Telescopes lead by Graham Harper measured the distance at 643 light years with a margin of error of plus or minus 146 (!!!) light years.
An eponym is a word that comes from a name, and few words are as famous in science as Nobel, courtesy of the Nobel Prizes that bear his name. One hundred and one years ago today Swedish chemist and industrialist Alfred Nobel died at the age of sixty three. Although he was an incredibly prolific scientist and businessman, he is chiefly remembered as the inventor of dynamite. Five years after his death, the first NobelPeace Prize was awarded to Frédéric Passy, co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Union along with Henry Dunant, who was founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to poet Sully Prudhomme, causing the first Nobel scandal as many expected the great Russian novelist Lev Tolstoy to win. The first Nobel Prize in Physics went to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and the first prize for Chemistry went to Jacobus van’t Hoff.
Today the Nobel Prize is known as the prize recognising and rewarding the greatest achievement in science.
Image of Alfred Nobel in the public domain, photo by Gösta Florman (1831–1900) / The Royal Library.
