Help for your weekend…

Happy Friday!

Sorry I have not been posting. Things have been crazy busy and I’m taking a little blogger’s vaca. Don’t you worry your pretty little face, I’ll be posting again soon.

In the absence of my posts, I recommend you get a hobby (real housewives of NYC reference). Better yet, go out this weekend and find a nice, upstanding boy or girl (or in-between – I don’t judge. You do you) and have a wholesome weekend with them. Here are some pickup lines you can use:


Can I be your enzyme, because my active site is dying for a chemical reaction

If I were an enzyme, I’d be DNA helicase so I could unzip your genes

You’re so hot, you denature my proteins

Hey hottie! Will a little more alcohol help catalyze this reaction?

I want to work on your leucine zipper with my zinc fingers

If you were oxygen, I would totes be an alkali metal so I could get in you and explode!

Are you an alpha-carbon, because you look susceptible to backside attack

How would you like my endoplasmic reticulum: smooth or rough?

You remind me of telophase – I just can’t stop looking at your cleavage

I’d go down on your concentration gradient



Yup, its confirmed. I’m a nerd.

Have a great weekend, everyone! xoxo

Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head…

If you haven’t seen the new show on the Discovery channel (narrated by Oprah), “Life”, you need to fix that ASAP. It’s produced by the same people that made “Planet Earth”. The last episode I saw was on amphibians and reptiles, where I discovered a tiny lizard I now love.

The Brazilian pygmy gecko (Coleodactylus amazonicus) is one of the smallest lizards on earth, at only about half an inch long. Evolution probably made these geckos small to protect them from predators and competition, but in doing so it opened them up to a whole new dilemma of survival: drowning.

The pygmy gecko can be found in the tropical rainforests of South America – not exactly the driest places in the world. One minute the gecko could be sitting on a leaf, just enjoying the warmth of the sun and, without warning, a raindrop can slam into that leaf and send the gecko plummeting towards the ground. Before the gecko even knows what happened, it finds itself in the middle of a puddle trying to stay above water. Let’s not forget that when you are 2 cm long, a puddle seems like one of the Great Lakes.

Many geckos must have drowned before evolution stepped in and solved this survival problem with a simple solution: waterproof skin. This gecko can float.

The skin of a pygmy gecko is highly hydrophobic (the scientific word for waterproof). This skin paired with the gecko’s tiny size and weight allows it to float on top of water. They are even able to walk on water. They are much faster on land, so jumping into a puddle is not the ideal way to escape a predator, but hey, at least they won’t drown.

Happy Easter!

It’s impossible to think about Easter without thinking about Peeps. These chewy chicks and bunnies are some of the most iconic Easter figures. For the past decade, Peeps have been the number one (non-chocolate) Easter candy. I don’t like them, but I guess a lot of people do. They come in 6 colors (yellow, pink, lavender, blue, orange and green) and in 2008 yellow tulip Peeps joined the shelves next to their bunny and chick cousins (the first time a new design has been released since 1950).

There is something about these artificial masterpieces that has captivated the imaginations of scientists. It has been found that Peeps are a seasonal organism. They are hyper-sensitive to both hot and cold temperature extremes. Despite their sensitivity to temperature, they are highly adapted and will not dissolve or degrade when submerged (actually, they float) in water, acetone, sulfuric acid (strong acid) or sodium hydroxide (strong base). A Peep did, however, dissolve in phenol after sitting for almost an hour. No matter the substance or how long the exposure, scientists have yet to be able to dissolve the eyes of a Peep.

Check out this website to see images of the Peeps while they were being tested, as well as images of a surgery separating quadruplet Peep siblings that were attached at birth!

Like several other organisms in the wild, Peeps have evolved and acquired a defense mechanism to protect from being preyed upon by predators. Similar to a pufferfish, when a Peep is exposed to a high stress environment, it will grow in size. Appearing larger and more impressive can help ward off predators. And what is more stressful than a microwave? When you put a Peep in the microwave it will blow up in size and the mechanism for this exaggeration of physical proportion in response to stressful stimuli is well understood.

Well like all other living organisms, Peeps are comprised mostly of water. A microwave sends out its electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength (approximately 10^-6 meters) that is perfectly absorbed by water molecules. As the water absorbs the radiation it gains energy. More energy makes the molecules start to bounce around and heat up. In addition to water, Peeps contain high levels of marshmallow, which in turn contains lots and lots of air bubbles. As the water heats, the air will also start to heat up and heating air expands. The air will expand and before you know it, you have a giant peep in your microwave.

It’s a great defense mechanism that totes works – most people don’t eat the giant Peep.

Happy Easter, everyone!

And it didn’t end the world by making a giant black hole!

In the 1970s, three physicists, Peter Higgs, Robert Brout and François Englert, sat down and tried to figure out how the universe began. It had just been discovered that magnetism, electricity, light and some radioactivity were all different expressions of the same force know as the electroweak force, but in order for this theory to work, the particles carrying the force must have no mass (they know this because they did fancy-pants math). Particle physics proves that these particles do have mass, so Brout, Higgs and Englert came up with the idea that maybe all particles had no mass right after the Big Bang. As the universe cooled, an invisible force (Higgs field) formed with these non-mass particles (Higgs boson). Any particle that came in contact with these forces gained a mass. The longer they interacted, the more massive they got. If they never interacted, they never got a mass. In theory this works great, but scientists have still never seen the Higgs boson (aka: the God Particle) – well, not yet…

I don’t know about you, but that hurts my head when I try to understand it. I’ll throw it out there again, I am not a physicist. That means I am really not a particle physicist. But in the wake of the huge news yesterday (and a request from a friend), I want to talk about the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) Large Hadron Collider.


The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a $10 billion piece of equipment that is 17 miles around (spanning the border of France and Switzerland), roughly 300 feet underground and operating at -271.3°C (that is just a little bit above absolute zero – the temperature at which molecular movement is theorized to stop). This machine is the product of thousands of scientists, all hoping it will uncover the answers to some of physics craziest questions: what is the “God Particle”, why is there no more anti-matter, what is dark matter, are there other dimensions in the universe, and how did the Big Bang work?

This is all highly theoretical science and it is very easy to get lost in the jargon and complex physics. I want to just give you a basic idea of what is actually going on.

The LHC is a giant ring comprised of two tubes. Each tube contains a single beam of particles traveling (each tube in an opposite direction) nearly at the speed of light (0.999999991 times the speed of light) in a freezing cold, ultrahigh vacuum. The particles (Hadrons) used are protons and iron ions (charged iron) because of their size, charge and ability to prevent decay and loss of energy as they travel. The beams are guided along the track by powerful magnets: 1232 dipole magnets (15 meters long) bend the beams and 392 quadrupole magnets (5–7 meters long) to focus the beams. Each magnet is super cooled with liquid nitrogen and liquid helium.

The two tubes intersect at 4 places along the track, allowing for collisions. The energy released from a head on collision between two beams is equal to the sum of both beams. Basically, when these two beams smash into one another at such high speeds, they release so much energy that temperatures can reach more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun!

There are 6 experiments (6 socialized machines) constantly recording data from each collision. These are intense machines. Some are over 7 stories tall and can still record time to the billionth of a second and distance to the millionths of a meter. With over 600 million proton collisions a second, about 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data gets generated a day! Obviously they have some impressive computer systems to back all of this equipment up with.

Yesterday the science world was amazed when, for the first time, beams of protons were hurled around the LHC, smashed into one another and released an energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts (7 times higher than ever created before)! Trust me, that’s AMAZING!

All that sounds great and is super exciting, but what does this mean for the everyday person? Nothing really. But this is still some awesome stuff to learn!

As much science as I could deal with today

I mean, the song is called "Biology"...

Just a rainy friday...

Happy Friday, everyone! I don’t know about you, but this has been a loooong week for me. I am so ready for the weekend. Since I am a little blah today (boo to the rain) I figured why not try something new again. Anyone that knows me knows that I adore art and art history. Here are some famous paintings that highlight science…



The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, Rembrandt
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) was a Dutch painter and one of the most famous artists of all time. In this painting, Rembrandt shows off his impeccable realism and untouchable skill in oils. Dr. Tulp (in the hat) is explaining the anatomy of the arm to other doctors (all of which are real doctors that paid to be included in the painting). This painting is a recreation of a real autopsy performed on Aris Kindt, who was hanged for robbery in 1632. The muscles and tendons show in this picture are perfectly anatomically correct. It is still unknown how Rembrandt gained his anatomical knowledge.



The Astronomer, Johannes Vermeer
Vermeer (1632-1675) was another master of Dutch painting. In this work he shows an astronomer looking over the globe, maps and, obviously, the bible. It is believed that the man in the painting is Anton von Leeuwenhook – the Father of Microbiology. Leeuwenhook made vast improvements on the microscope and was the first to describe single celled organisms.



An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Derby


A Philosopher giving a Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun, Joseph Derby
Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) has become one of the most famous British painters and is accredited with being the first artist to capture “the spirit of the Industrial Revolution”. His paintings captivate and pull the viewer into the drama. He was known to push away from the artist norms and standards of the time and these two paintings show this – there are no mythical or historical figures here. Notice his use of candle light to illuminate his subjects.


The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was an American artist who studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as well as the Jefferson Medical College. He studied human anatomy and had a passion for scientific realism.

Sucks to be Pluto

The moment I finished the space odyssey, I began getting grief about not including Pluto. Sorry friends, but Pluto is not a planet. Sure it used to be, but it was downgraded. Like most other scientists I have to agree that it doesn’t deserve to be in the same class as bodies like Jupiter and Saturn.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is who started the drama around Pluto. They are the big shot organization that controls how we think about space. They are also the ones with the authority to name heavenly objects.

The drama started in January 2005 when Eris (official name: Eris 136199) was discovered. Eris was found orbiting out past Pluto in the Kuiper Belt. It was determined to be 27% more massive than Pluto. NASA started calling Eris the tenth planet and got excited about the high probability of finding more planets, but the IAU had something to say about that.

In August 2006, the IAU held a meeting in Prague and passed Resolution 5A. This resolution established guidelines to determine if something is a planet or a dwarf planet.

To be a planet, an object must:
1. Orbit the sun
2. Be large enough to produce enough gravity to make itself (mostly) round
3. Clear the neighborhood around its orbit

To be a dwarf planet, an object must:
1. Orbit the sun
2. Be large enough to produce enough gravity to make itself (mostly) round
3. Not have cleared the neighborhood of its orbit
4. Not be a satellite (moon)

All other objects (i.e. comets, asteroids, etc) are classified collectively as “Small Solar System Bodies”.

Pluto is tiny (only about 70% the size of our moon), but it is able to meet requirements one and two of being a planet. The problem lies in requirement three. Pluto orbits in the Kuiper Belt (basically the same thing as the asteroid belt, just a little larger. It starts right outside the orbit of Neptune). A true planet would have cleared the belt out of its orbit, but Pluto did not.

Picture from http://www.mathiaspedersen.com/

Just like that, Pluto got its planet card revoked. Our solar system only contains 8 planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). In Resolution 6A, Pluto was officially named a dwarf planet as well as the prototype for a new variety of trans-Neptunian objects, which (according to Resolution 6B) will be called “Plutonian Objects”.

Now Pluto gets to hang out with the other dwarfs, like Ceres and Eris.

Whatever, I would rather hang out with them anyway!