Jellyfish and plastic pieces from the Pacific Ocean.
Crabs, Algae, and Flying Fish Eggs on Ocean Plastic.
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!
“Sophia Tintori and Alison Sweeney talk about iridescence in squid. Audio production and animations are by Sophia, who normally studies siphonophores in the lab.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
“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!
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