Wendy Science

NGSS 1-LS3-1. Make observations to construct an evidence-based account that young plants and animals are like, but not exactly like, their parents. Try these book pairs: For more suggestions and full lessons, check out Perfect Pairs :

Hey, if you have time to burn, why not build your own LEGO particle accelerator? Here's the synopsis accompanying the YouTube video: This is a working particle accelerator built using LEGO bricks. I call it the LBC (Large Brick Collider). It can accelerate a LEGO soccer ball to just over 12.5 kilometers per hour. Watch the follow up video to see how it works: http://youtu.be/sjRPTDgjM0Q If you would like to see this potentially become an official LEGO set be sure to head over to LEGO Ideas and support the project! https://ideas.lego.com/projects/86253 You can find more information about how it works on my website at http://jkbrickworks.com/lego-particle... Zz.

When research chemist Jeannette García found a candy-size lump of white material in a flask she had recently used, she had no idea what she had created. The material stuck firmly to the glass, so she used a hammer to break it free. But when she turned the hammer on the material itself, it refused to crack. “When I realized just how high its strength was, I knew I needed to figure out what I'd made,” García says. García, a scientist at IBM Research–Almaden, enlisted the help of several colleagues to solve the puzzle. They found that she had stumbled on a new family of thermoset polymers, exceptionally strong plas-tics that are used in products ranging from smartphones to airplane wings. Thermosets account for about one third of the global polymers produced every year, but they are difficult to recycle. García's new material, nicknamed Titan, is the first recyclable, industrial-strength thermoset ever discovered. Unlike conventional thermosets, which pretty much refuse to be remo...

Match wits with the Mensa puzzlers -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

More than 50 green sea turtles were released into the Gulf of Mexico after recovering from cold-stunning, or hypothermia, brought on by a drastic drop in water temperature. November 28, 2014 | By Amanda Orr HOUSTON (Reuters) - More than 50 green sea turtles were released into the Gulf of Mexico off the Texas coast on Friday after recovering from cold-stunning, or hypothermia, brought on by a drastic drop in water temperature. The release has taken place in phases, with Friday being the last major release for sea turtles rescued after a mid-November cold snap in Texas sent temperatures below freezing in large parts of the state. "We wait until the Gulf waters are warm enough to prevent a repeat cold-stunning event for these individuals," said Donna Shaver, chief of the Division of Sea Turtle Science and Recovery at Padre Island National Seashore. As with other reptiles, sea turtles rely on their external environment to regulate body temperature and cold-stunning occurs whe...

France wants to gradually phase out the use of diesel fuel for private passenger transport and will put in place a system to identify the most polluting vehicles November 28, 2014 | PARIS (Reuters) - France wants to gradually phase out the use of diesel fuel for private passenger transport and will put in place a system to identify the most polluting vehicles, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Friday. Next year, the government will launch a car identification system that will rank vehicles by the amount of pollution they emit, Valls said in a speech. This will make it possible for local authorities to limit city access for the dirtiest cars. "In France, we have long favored the diesel engine. This was a mistake, and we will progressively undo that, intelligently and pragmatically," Valls said. About 80 percent of French motorists drive diesel-powered cars. Valls said taxation would have to orient citizens toward more ecological choices, notably the 2015 state budget mea...

A sharp cry pierces the air. Soon a worried mother deer approaches the source of the sound, expecting to find her fawn. But the sound is coming from a speaker system, and the call isn't that of a baby deer at all. It's an infant fur seal's. Because deer and seals do not live in the same habitats, mother deer should not know how baby seal screams sound, reasoned biologists Susan Lingle of the University of Winnipeg and Tobias Riede of Midwestern University, who were running the acoustic experiment. So why did a mother deer react with concern? Over two summers, the researchers treated herds of mule deer and white-tailed deer on a Canadian farm to modified recording of the cries of a wide variety of infant mammals—elands, marmots, bats, fur seals, sea lions, domestic cats, dogs and humans. By observing how mother deer responded, Lingle and Riede discovered that as long as the fundamental frequency was , those mothers approached the speaker as if they were looking for their off...

See Inside Books and recommendations from Scientific American Nov 18, 2014 | The Lost Elements: The Periodic Table's Shadow Side Oxford University Press, 2014 (($39.95)) The journey to the periodic table of elements we know today was not smooth. Chemists Fontani, Costa and Orna tell the story of the false starts and stray paths that led to the “discovery” of many elements that turned out not to be. Some, such as “didymium,” were later revealed to be composites of multiple elements; others, such as “brevium,” were isotopes, or variations, on other elements (in this case, protactinium). Many of these efforts, the authors show, were not wasted but rather helped to clarify the true nature of the elements we know now and the chemical laws they obey. “There are many more elemental ‘discoveries’ later shown to be false than there are entries in the present table,” they write. “Some of these were good-faith errors, some were the result of personal wishful thinking, some were the fantasy c...

See Inside Wearing small recording devices could reduce violent confrontations, but without careful planning and better research, the attempt could backfire Nov 18, 2014 | | Less than a month after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a law-enforcement officer in Ferguson, Mo., the municipal police department issued 50 wearable video cameras to its officers so they could record encounters with the public. Since then, at least a dozen other U.S. cities—including Miami Beach, Fla., and Flagstaff, Ariz.—have announced similar plans. The response is commendable, but police chiefs should proceed cautiously. Proponents argue that the small, tamper-proof cameras will lead to fewer violent encounters between police officers and citizens because everyone knows that their speech and actions can be retrieved later. The evidence supporting such a conclusion is preliminary, however. Blindly adopting the technology without a carefully thought out policy and without training on how and when cameras...

From baseball to billiards, robots are improving their play, even competing in the RoboCup and RoboGames November 27, 2014 | Table tennis robot developed at Zhejiang University. Between this Thanksgiving weekend you might want to head outside and toss a football, shoot some hoops or kick a soccer ball around to get a little exercise. If the weather’s nasty (or if you live in Buffalo) perhaps Ping Pong or a game of pool will do.Can’t get any people in your house off the couch? Ask a robot.Of course “a robot that plays soccer” could mean anything from a little cube 15 centimeters high that pushes a tiny ball on a tabletop field, to supersize automatons. For holiday fun I’ve collected videos of humanoids as well as nonhuman-like contraptions that play a real game on a real surface—with a little latitude for “real.” Each video (below) follows a caption explaining it.I’ve checked these out because simply searching the Web can be deceiving. For example, in March that showed an industrial-...

Ant-mimicking spiders are the ultimate imposters -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

See Inside People are increasingly broadcasting symptoms of mental illness on social media. We should listen By Peter's Facebook friends knew something was wrong months before he had a manic episode. He had been posting about expensive shopping trips and name-dropping celebrities he claimed to have partied with—seemingly out of character for the 26-year-old former dental student from Atlanta. When Peter (not his real name) ran away from home in April 2013, he unleashed a flurry of paranoid, all-caps status updates saying his family was out to get him. Meanwhile his sisters left messages on his Facebook wall begging him to come home. What might have been a family affair a decade ago instead played out in front of hundreds of eyes, as friends and acquaintances watched the saga unfold on their news feeds. Some people sent him private messages. Others posted on his wall. Many commenters expressed support and concern, but a few were mocking and unhelpful. One person wrote “lol.” Most p...

The latest outbreak in humans represents just the most recent but also most deadly among several incidents dating back to 1976 November 26, 2014 | and | Share this Article: Black Friday/Cyber Monday Blow-Out Sale Enter code:HOLIDAY 2014 > X Email this Article X

See Inside As nations dither on meaningful steps to combat climate change, localities are stepping in with their own measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases Nov 18, 2014 | | The People's Climate March in New York City brought thousands to the streets. More In This Article In the city that never sleeps, the lights burn all night. And New York City needs energy for those lights, as well as for heating, air-conditioning and many other services. To meet these demands, the Big Apple belched nearly 60 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in 2005. Eight years later, despite a rise in population and new construction, emissions of greenhouse gas pollution had dropped by more than 11 million metric tons. How did Gotham manage to go so green? By banning the dirtiest oil used for heating and benefiting from a switch to natural gas for generating electricity. New York is not alone in taking climate change seriously. Cities across the globe are stepping into...

Artificial sweeteners. (Credit: PunchingJudy/Flickr) I find it ironic that Thanksgiving coincides with . In honor of that irony, two recently published studies have suggested a possible link between what you eat, how it impacts the behavior of the microbes living in your gut, and type II diabetes. To further explain, allow me use the most adorable analogy I could dream up: minions. A rambunctious gang of rotund homunculi, minions are the tireless workhorses behind Gru’s malicious plots in the movie . Minions are like gut microbes. For starters, despite appearing to be relatively simple-minded, both microbes and minions are capable of astounding things. Building and operating weapons, in the case of minions; regulating immune and digestive function, in the case of microbes. Working in dark, cramped quarters, like microbes, minions excel at their respective jobs, making Gru’s evil-manufacturing plant run like a well-oiled machine. Upsetting the minions’ balancing act is sure to inci...

FRYTOWN, Iowa—Warren McKenna's Jeep SUV glides past stubbled farm fields, kicking up dust and fresh snow where only weeks ago a bumper crop of corn and soybeans filled the horizon. Among the Amish and Mennonite families who have farmed this part of southeast Iowa for generations, McKenna is an outsider, or an "English," as the German-speaking Amish call non-natives. Yet he is well-known in both town and country as manager of the 650-member Farmers Electric Cooperative of Kalona, a job he has held since 1992. One day earlier this month, McKenna was making rounds with a visitor when he pulled the SUV into a farm where Leighton Yoder and his family raise Jersey cows and operate a small dairy. McKenna wasn't there to talk about milk, but another farm product Yoder has been nurturing. "How's the power?" asks McKenna from inside the Jeep. "It's real good," answers Yoder. "We've got strong sun and wind today. I figure I'm making more ...

The found in 2010 that an NFL game has just 11 minutes of actual action. Eight decades earlier, found just about the same thing November 26, 2014 | | Day means [turkey noises] and [football noises]. And you know what: there might be more total action at the than in the game. Back in 2010, the announced that their study of four game broadcasts, combined with analysis by other researchers, found that “the average amount of time .” Turns out the study merely confirmed a investigation that we did 80 years earlier.While scrounging through our digital archives recently I happened on the article from our November 1930 issue, titled, “ ” Author Hugo L. Rusch was the supervisor of the Technical Data Section of the Johns-Manville Corporation. He studied eight college games between 1927 and 1929 that included teams from a few Ivy League schools as well as Notre Dame, Army, Stanford and Ohio State. And he found that the time the ball was actually in play during those games was 12 minutes...

The found in 2010 that an NFL game has just 11 minutes of actual action. Eight decades earlier, found just about the same thing. Steve Mirsky reports. November 26, 2014 | | Day means [turkey noises] and [football noises]. And you know what: there might be more total action at the than in the game. Back in 2010, the announced that their study of four game broadcasts, combined with analysis by other researchers, found that “the average amount of time .” Turns out the study merely confirmed a investigation that we did 80 years earlier.While scrounging through our digital archives recently I happened on the article from our November, 1930, issue titled, “ ” Author Hugo L. Rusch was the supervisor of the Technical Data Section of the Johns-Manville Corporation. He studied eight college games between 1927 and 1929 that included teams from a few Ivy League schools as well as Notre Dame, Army, Stanford and Ohio State. And he found that the time the ball was actually in play during th...

See Inside Early in its history the Milky Way gobbled up many tiny galaxies. The cosmic rubble it left behind is now yielding fresh clues into how our corner of the universe came to be By Go outside on a dark, clear night, far away from the glare of city lights, and look up. You will see the glowing band of the Milky Way arching dramatically overhead. It has now been four centuries since Galileo Galilei first turned a telescope toward this awesome sight and noted that the “milk” is actually countless individual stars, too faint to be separated by the naked eye. It took another three centuries for astronomers to convince themselves that the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. In fact, the Milky Way itself is not simply one galaxy: recent work has shown that it has lured in and engulfed many smaller galaxies over time, integrating their stars into itself. At least 20 dwarf galaxies—ranging in size from one millionth to one hundredth the size of the Milky Way—a...

Right before dying, many people experience vivid and meaningful dreams and visions, according to accounts across cultures and throughout history. Yet little scientific research has investigated the phenomenon. A new study in the , the first study to focus primarily on the patient's perspective, found that most of these dreams are a source of personal comfort. They bring about a sense of peace, a change in perspective or an acceptance of death, suggesting that medical professionals should recognize dreams and visions as a positive part of the dying process. Researchers at Daemen College and at Hospice Buffalo, an agency of the Center for Hospice & Palliative Care, studied 63 patients admitted to the hospice over a period of 18 months. Investigators interviewed patients daily, asking them about any dreams and visions and taking down detailed descriptions of them. Most participants reported experiencing at least one dream or vision, memorable in much more clarity than other dreams...

Camera traps are a great way to monitor the forest without actually being there. In order to get more information about the forest here at the in North Sumatra, I’ve set up four camera traps, which I’m using to get a better look at the wildlife around the site. The traps have been so successful in such a short time period that together with another graduate student, John Abernethy of , and the , we’ve decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign over at Experiment, . Hopefully the campaign will be a success, and periodically I’ll post the best of my pictures so you can see how unbelievable animal life in the forest is in Sumatra! Camera traps are great, because a lot of animals will run from humans or are nocturnal, meaning that we’d never get to see them otherwise. I’m using the idiot proof but slightly cumbersome and the more complicated but compact , which I attach to trees using locks to prevent them from being stolen. In the daytime the cameras shoot bursts of three color pho...

Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson's first glimpse of Lucy came on November 24, 1974. Steve Mirsky reports. November 25, 2014 | | Forty years ago yesterday, November 24, 1974, paleoanthropologist found in Ethiopia what’s arguably the most famous and important fossil of a : Lucy. Last month, at the meeting in Columbus, Ohio, Johanson talked about the moment he laid eyes on Lucy. “On that eventful day in 1974 I was out, with a graduate student, Tom Gray, and we were walking back to our Land Rover to go back to camp to enjoy a swim in the river with the crocodiles and enjoy a nice little lunch. And I am always looking at the ground. I find more quarters by parking meters than anybody I know, I think. And you know how it is you find what you’re looking for, right? “Because a year before the discovery a geologist had left his footprints four-to-five feet away from the skeleton, because he was looking for rocks. I was looking for bones. And I found a little piece of elbow, that...

The Ecuadorian government's closure of the station's gift shop could doom the foundation that runs the key research station November 25, 2014 | and | Scientists at the station have helped to bring the iconic Galapagos tortoise back from the brink of extinction. For more than half a century, the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) has supported a thriving research station in Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. Scientists at the station have helped to bring the iconic Galapagos tortoise back from the brink of extinction and to eradicate invasive goats from Isabela, the largest island in the Galapagos archipelago. But that long legacy is being threatened by a spat with the local government, which could force the Charles Darwin Research Station to close. In July, officials on Santa Cruz island ordered the CDF to shut its lucrative gift shop in the town of Puerto Ayora, citing complaints from restaurateurs and shop owners who said that the store was siphoning away their business. That h...

Walking in crowds means predicting the future. When navigating heavily trafficked areas, people adjust their paths after subconsciously calculating how long it would take to collide with another person. Researchers have come to this conclusion by analysing videos of crowds. They say that it could lead to safer design of public spaces and help in the development of crowd-monitoring methods to prevent deadly stampedes. Brian Skinner, a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, and his colleagues will publish the work in an upcoming . When scientists study crowd movement, they often model people as moving particles that repel each other, similarly to electrostatic charges of the same sign. Skinner and his colleagues expected that the ‘repulsive force’ would depend on the separation in space between the pedestrians, making them change trajectory when they get too close, so as to avoid collisions. If the electrostatic analogy were correct, the strength of the force w...

, , Scientific American “The world is heavy on us sometimes,” says Katsunobu Sakurai, recalling the day it almost crushed the life out of his city. The disaster began for him, as for millions of other Japanese, at work. The mayor of the coastal city of Minamisoma, Sakurai was with a group of visiting delegates on the fourth floor of the city hall when the building began to shake, gently at first, then in jerky, violent movements that seemed to go on forever. In some parts of the building, he could hear people crying. Others began pleading to the distance, to God, perhaps to the ground itself: “Tasukete!” (Help!); “Tometekure” (Please stop). Cracks opened up in the walls above his office. It was, Sakurai found, difficult to stay upright. He looked up at the ceiling of the 40-year-old building, then focused on a jug of water on the desk in front of him, catching it before it tipped over and spilled, jolted by the power of the quake. He was surprised to find himself not especially afraid...

If we could somehow make our own cells do our bidding, they might manufacture insulin, attack tumors and do other helpful things. But hijacking a cell is not easy. Current methods entail penetrating the cell walls with a virus, which tends to inflict permanent damage. In 2009 researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology solved this problem, by accident. The researchers were playing around with a method of implanting cells with large molecules and nanomaterials using a microscopic water gun. Mainly, they were trying to get things inside a cell—the sorts of things that might alter a cell's behavior while keeping it alive. Chemical engineer Armon Sharei noticed that some of the water-shot cells became momentarily misshapen, and while they were, the material was getting inside them. “It turns out if you deform a cell fast enough, you can temporarily break down its membrane,” Sharei says. The water gun was too crude a tool, however. They needed a gentler way to squeeze cells...

On a visit to China a few years back, I asked a local official about pollution controls after enjoying my first . China’s new coal-fired power plants and other industrial boilers often came equipped with expensive scrubbers to clean acid rain and smog-forming sulfur dioxide out of the hot mix of gases that went up and out the smokestack. But the scrubbers required energy to run, this official noted, and therefore were shut off except on days when dignitaries (or foreign journalists) visited. © David Biello According to Hu Tao, an ecologist and environmental economist who directs the China program at the World Wildlife Fund, not much has changed. On his recent visit to a coal-fired power plant, the scrubber was turned off for “inspection,” he explained at a talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum on November 24. How often were such machines inspected, Tao inquired? Well, if no one from the government was visiting, the plant manager told him, the machine is turned ...

Steve Jobs often swam against the tide of prevailing opinion. (“You can't make a mouse without two buttons!” “You can't make a computer without a floppy drive!” “You can't make a cell phone without a swappable battery!”) He turned out to be right many times. Occasionally, though, his decisions took the industry into awkward directions from which we've never really recovered. Jobs was fixed, for example, on the idea of a cell phone without any keys. The iPhone became a hit, it spawned imitators, and the rest is history (or the future, depending on how you look at it). Eliminating the keyboard has its perks. It leaves more room on the phone for screen area—for photographs, movies, maps and reading material. Only one activity really suffers: entering text. The first iPhone offered an on-screen keyboard. The advantage, as Jobs pointed out, was it could disappear when you didn't need it. It could also change languages or alphabets in a flash. But at its core, typing on g...