SEAPLEX Ocean Plastic Study Voyage

September 13th, 2009

Jellyfish and plastic pieces from the Pacific Ocean.

Jellyfish and plastic pieces from the Pacific Ocean.

Crabs, Algae, and Flying Fish Eggs on Ocean Plastic.

Crabs, Algae, and Flying Fish Eggs on Ocean Plastic.

Barnacles living on plastic bottles in ocean.

Barnacles living on plastic bottles in ocean.

A research ship recently docked back home after weeks out at sea studying plastic in the ocean. You can read about the fascinating trip and see amazing photos on their blog. Or check out the official website.

Their destination was a location in the Pacific Ocean, far off the coast of California, where sea currents converge and cause a mass gathering of plastic. The plastic gathering isn’t a floating raft; but small pieces suspended at varying depths.

These plastic pieces probably leech chemicals into the water but they also act like magnets attracting hydrophobic industrial and agricultural chemicals – which are suspected to be consumed by small fish and work up the food chain to top-level-consumers like us.

Interestingly, larger pieces of ocean plastics become homes to pelagic creatures like crabs, algae, flying fish eggs. They anticipate needing six months (or more) to analyze all the data – should be some interesting results!






Creature Casts: Squid Iridescence

August 17th, 2009

This awesome hand-drawn and water-color painted video explains the surprising methods squids use to change color quickly and fluidly.

It looks like this is the first in an intended series of Creature Casts. I can’t wait to see the future episodes!

CreatureCast Episode 1 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

“Sophia Tintori and Alison Sweeney talk about iridescence in squid. Audio production and animations are by Sophia, who normally studies siphonophores in the lab.”

Infinite Universe Blog

August 13th, 2009

Photo from a post titled "Occupational Hazards"

Photo from a post titled "Occupational Hazards"

The Infinite Universe Blog is an engaging and witty site authored by local naturalist and photographer Tim Boyle.

I highly recommend scrolling down and checking out the sidebar section titled “Things kids say to a naturalist…”

Picnic On Your Roof Tonight

August 12th, 2009

Image from the BBC

Meteors radiate from the constellation Perseus (Image from the BBC)

If the weather cooperates, tonight may be a stunning night for star-gazing. Even though the North American peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower was this morning, there should still be some good viewing tonight – if the clouds stay away. The bright moon may also obscure your view so bring along binoculars.

Despite the less than ideal conditions you should check it out in honor of 2009 being the International Year of Astronomy.

If the clouds roll in or you’re not in the mood to lay on the ground outside you can follow along on twitter or check out photos.

New Giant Carnivorous Plant Discovered

August 12th, 2009

Giant Pitcher Plant (From BBC Earth News)

Giant Pitcher Plant (From BBC Earth News)

Discoveries like this are one of the reasons I love environmental science so much!

From the BBC Earth News:

“A new species of giant carnivorous plant has been discovered in the highlands of the central Philippines.

The pitcher plant is among the largest of all pitchers and is so big that it can catch rats as well as insects in its leafy trap.

During the same expedition, botanists also came across strange pink ferns and blue mushrooms they could not identify.

The botanists have named the pitcher plant after British natural history broadcaster David Attenborough.”

Bonus Link: Awesome Photos of Pitcher Plants.

Cymatics

August 5th, 2009

A whole new world of programming opportunity has just opened up to me; I just learned about cymatics.

Cymatics is the study of visible sound and vibration, typically on the surface of a plate, diaphragm or membrane. Directly visualizing vibrations involves using sound to excite media often in the form of particles, pastes and liquids.” (wikipiedia)

Make has a great video using an amp and a cornstarch-water mixture to demonstrate how cymatics work.

Crows Recognize Us

July 31st, 2009

Crow Faces (Image from NPR)

Crow Faces (Image from NPR)

NPR has a great web feature about crows recognizing individual human faces. There is a video, a podcast, and a fun game testing if you can recognize individual crow faces.

The basic story:
A crow researcher asked students to catch and tag crows while wearing a caveman mask. Then he asked different students, of a variety of shapes and sizes (who never caught or tagged a crow), to wear the mask among the same crows. No matter who wore the mask, the crows reacted to it by cawing danger warnings to other crows demonstrating they were recognizing the facial features of the mask.

MinnAqua Leader’s Guide

June 23rd, 2009

Black Crappie Image From the Leader's Guide

Black Crappie Image From the Leader's Guide

I finally got a chance to take an indepth look at MinnAqua’s Leader’s Guide.

I knew it would be good because it won a 2008 NAI Interpretive Media Award, but it far exceeded my expectations. I anticipated a curriculum guide much like the Project WET and WILD guides – which are great resources. However, the MinnAqua Guide builds on the template in a couple major ways.

First, each chapter contains an impressive quantity of local aquatic natural history, essentially eliminating the need to seek out other sources to build your knowledge or to tweak activities to be locally applicable. The guide is alone worth reading to simply increase your natural history knowledge.

Second, the guide also comes with a CD containing a plethora of seriously impressive images, especially of fish. No simple line drawings here, think detailed full-color images that look like the fish jumped out of the water onto your page.

The guide also includes hyper-detailed evaluations of how each lesson meets Minnesota’s Academic Standards and ready-to-use assessment quizzes and standards. To top it all off, the entire guide was reviewed by over 100 experts in various fields so you can feel ultra-confident about the accuracy of the content.

You can get a copy by attending or hosting a MinnAqua Educator Workshop. Contact Michelle Kelly for more info.

Foldit

May 4th, 2009

Foldit Protein Game

Foldit Protein Game

Foldit is super addictive game you can feel good about playing. The purpose of the game is to help scientists discover all the possible ways a proteins can fold-up. The way a protein folds up determines its function.

Here are some of the rules:

“Your score on each protein is based on how well you do with these three things.

1. Pack the protein

The smaller the protein, the better. More precisely, you want to avoid empty spaces (voids) in the structure of the protein where water molecules can get inside. So you want the atoms in the protein to be as close together as possible. Certain structures, such as sheets, will even connect together with hydrogen bonds if you line them up right and get them close together. This is also good. Key word: Compact.

2. Hide the hydrophobics

Hydrophobics are the sidechains that don’t want to be touching water, just like oil or wax. Since most proteins float around in water, you want to keep the hydrophobics (orange sidechains) surrounded by as many atoms as possible so the water won’t get to them. The other side of this rule is that hydrophilics (blue sidechains) do want to be touching water, so they should be exposed as much as possible. Key word: Buried.

3. Clear the clashes

Two atoms can’t occupy the same space at the same time. If you’ve folded a protein so two sidechains are too close together, your score will go down a lot. This is represented by a red spiky ball (clash) where the two sidechains are intersecting. If there are clashes, you know something is wrong with your protein. So make sure everything is far enough apart. Key word: Apart.”

I haven’t yet tried the game yet because I here its really hard to stop once you start – and I’ve committed to being productive today. If you try it, let me know what you think!

Photo Synthesis Blog

April 16th, 2009

Aedes triseriatus, Eastern Treehole Mosquito (Larva) by Alex WIld

Aedes triseriatus, Eastern Treehole Mosquito (Larva) by Alex WIld

Science Blogs has added a new science photo blog called Photo Synthesis. The first featured photographer is entomologist Alex Wild.