Finding Science

2012-01-17T05:25:00.000-08:00

A DC Science CaféEvent

QuantumMechanics: Embrace the Weirdness

Many scientists rate quantum mechanics as the mostsuccessful description of the physical world ever. It accounts for the anticsof atoms, electrons, photons and other minutiae with stunning precision, evenas it provides the physical foundation for the world-changing technologiesunderlying the information revolution. There’s more to it than that. This sametheory of theories also reveals that our reality is weirder than all get out.Particles can be in two places at the same time…or they can exist (sort of)without actually being here at all. If you measure the trait of one particle inone location, you just might end up locking in properties of another distantparticle instantaneously. Our notions of cause-and-effect and of objectivereality in our daily lives do not apply so well in quantum mechanical realms. Join discussion leader Steve Rolston, physicist at the University ofMaryland and co-director of the Joint Quantum Institute (a research partnershipbetween UMD and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology) , for anevening of eating, drinking and thinking that will leave you wide-eyed andneither here nor there and thereby most attuned to your own quantum mechanicalfoundation.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

6:30 - 8:30 pm (program starts at 7:00 pm)

Busboys and Poets, 5^th and K St., NW,Washington, DC

www.busboysandpoets.com/about_5th.php

For info, contact Ivan Amato: DCScienceCafe@dcswa.org

How your harsh reaction to horseradish may lead to new pain-managing medicines

2011-09-08T08:05:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post
By Ivan Amato, Published: September 5

The next time you experience a horseradish rush— you know, those tear-jerking omigod seconds when your entire head istsunamied by pungency from the too-big dollop of herb you just wolfed down —consider that some biologists describe your moments of agony as nothing less thana brief exposure to a natural form of tear gas.

Read more....

Because overheating can be fatal, humans and other animals find ways to cool off

2011-07-14T17:07:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post
By Ivan Amato, published July 11

It may seem like plain-old common sense to seek cooler air on sweltering summer days. But there’s a complex, carefully orchestrated biological imperative behind that hunt for air conditioning and a chilled drink.

First and foremost, we need to stay cool to stay alive. Thankfully, like all members of the animal kingdom, we have a repertoire of behavioral and physiological tactics to keep from fatally overheating. This enables us to pursue a strategy that might, in Washington-speak, be called a Save the Proteins campaign.

Read more....

Beautiful Beetle Bedazzles at Bethany Beach

2011-07-10T15:54:00.001-07:00

There is really nothing to say, but OMG. This little creature joined us at the beach by landing on a beach towel. I captured it so that my camera lens could enjoy it for awhile and then I set it free.

Spiders Making A Living

2011-06-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

There are marvels everywhere, including in my back yard. As I walked out the door this afternoon, I spied a few orchard spiders (perhaps of the Leucauge venusta species) in an azalea bush. A closer look revealed one web shared by two spiders apparently rehearsing for a synchronized swimming competition and a successful trapper who has woven his catch into a peaceful-appearing death pose, replete with forelegs folded upon the thorax.

A backyard butterfly, up close.....

2011-06-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

This butterfly enchanted me for twenty minutes on a crisp Saturday morning as it flitted about on these purple flowers, dipping its impossibly long proboscis into each for a harvest of nester. When I zoom in on these images, I am amazed by the thick tufts of hairs and the patterns on the eyes. Who would not want to be a Lepidopterist?

Iridescent bugs: the science behind nature's bling

2011-05-26T03:05:00.001-07:00

The Washington Post

By Ivan Amato, Published: May 16

With bug season approaching, you might be stocking up on citronella, repellent sprays and swatters. But before the murderous assault begins, it’s worth considering the elegant optical wizardry of some of the insects you will be offing.

My latest piece in the Washington Post's Health and Science Section...

2011-03-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

Researchers try to understand naked mole rats' resistance to cancer

By Ivan Amato
Monday, March 8, 2011

With their pinkish, translucent and wrinkly skin, double-saber buck teeth and black-bead eyes, naked mole rats look like characters in a nightmare from hell. In fact, they do live underground in pitch-dark burrows where their air, from a human point of view, can contain chokingly little oxygen, toxic carbon dioxide levels and a perpetual stench of ammonia...

Read more...

Fire of two kinds

2010-12-12T17:49:00.000-08:00

A candle's flame presents a substance that is more energy than stuff, more spirit than body, and so it captivates. Visible inside the flame, upon close inspection, is another kind of fire, this one confined within a vanishing solid. A wick becomes ember becomes gas, all the while assuming golden contortions.

Photos: Ivan Amato

Cricket Karma

2010-10-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

Too many mornings
At three-twenty-four
Or four-forty-nine
I am a cricket hunter

Wide-eyed and groggy
The chirps are my guide
Lift a shoe here, move a box there
Where is my six-legged chider?

Vigilant, still, antennae on alert
There is my buggy jerk
He, or is it she?, stares silently
A ruse, I can see, to falsely appease

Fearing for my karma
I choose not to smite
But to catch with a cup
And deport to the night

But too many mornings
At two-thirty-three
Or five-twenty–five
I am a cricket hunter

So karma be damned
And blood lust on high
I squash and I squish
Killing is my wish

Add dark of night
And soft of bed
To dead cricket unheard
Sweet silence fills my head

But with slumber in sight
For what’s left of the night
What goes around
Indeed does come around

My uvular flaws
That snore such a racket
Have driven my lover away
Even in this life, I am her cricket

©Ivan Amato

Citrus at its rotting best

2010-10-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

I bought a sack of tiny Clementine oranges from Trader Joe's a few weeks ago. We ate most of them, but one ended up sitting out on top of our bread box. A mold colony decided to squat in on the fruit and it started in on its own sort of exterior design.....

Photos: Ivan Amato

Geometries of Incompatibility

2010-09-26T17:12:00.000-07:00

I tend to become fixated by the forms and motions of liquids as they mix together or as they don't. Oil and vinegar are the classic antipartners, where the oily nature of the former and the watery nature of the latter lead to liquid-in-liquid compositions, often veritable works of art. If you drill down to the chemistry behind these self-organizing liquid paintings and sculptures, it all has to do with how smoothly or not electric charges distribute on the respective liquid's molecules. Chemists toss terms like hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity around to describe the behavior. Rough translations: water-loving and water-fearing. Olive oil is water-fearing. So if you drop some into a bowl of vinegar, as I recently did, it will express its hydrophobia. As the molecules in my olive oil opted to huddle with one another, rather than surround themselves by the more abundant, fearful, and water-based vinegar solution, they assembled into forms, mostly spherical, that minimized their contact with their aqueous surroundings. I loves me mutually loathing liquids.

Photos: Ivan Amato

Lepidopteran curios....

2010-06-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield, "moths don't get no respect." Here's a few reasons why they should. I spied both of these specimens around my house in recent days. The mostly white one is a Giant Leopard Moth.

How and Why: Volcanic ash and cotton candy share molecular characteristics with glass

2010-05-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

Ivan Amato
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Even when the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull was shooting more than 500 tons of ash per second into the air last month, children somewhere surely were parading around with festive funnels of cotton candy.

The connection between the ash and the candy? More than you might think (unless you are a chemist): Both are forms of glass.

Read more...

Some of my recent musings in the Washington Post...

2010-04-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

Not a hole lot you can do to keep roadways smooth

By Ivan Amato

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

KaTHUMP-kaTHUMP. That's the sound of rubber meeting potholed road. If you're the one kathumping, you're probably adding a few staccato profanities to that street beat. None of this should blind you to the presence of nature's grandeur in the mix. We're talking here about the magnificent power of water and ice to defeat the pavement's man-made mix of gravel, sand and asphalt.

Dinosaur-era plants learned the value of scent and sensibility

By Ivan Amato

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

When a love-struck suitor, with outstretched hand, offers a red red rose to the object of his heart's desire, he need not utter a word. Sure, a Shakespearean-caliber sonnet and a good pickup line might help, but the flower conveys the message, first with a blast of color sprinting eyeward at the speed of light and then, a moment later, with a more sluggish plume of fragrance.

Trophies from a Bud Hunt

2010-04-10T14:00:00.001-07:00

This time of year in the mid-Atlantic, especially at places like Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, MD, the vegetable world vogues an arresting diversity of form and color and anatomy and fragrance. This is a small photographic ode to that world's ever-so-welcome flamboyance......

Mists of Ice from Enceladus

2010-03-12T05:56:00.000-08:00

Scientific investigation is all about finding novel and telling points of view, which is why planet-roving, instrument-laden satellites have provided such a torrent of fantastic data over the past few decades. Last year, on November 21, NASA's Cassini spacecraft was flitting about near the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Now that's a hard won point of view. One of Cassini's cameras capturedplumes of ice particles, water vapor, and organic compounds jetting out of surface features known as "tiger stripes." Even moons need to vent.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

A cauldren of antimatter

2010-01-12T18:48:00.000-08:00

That antimatter actually exists takes some of the pizzazz away from science fiction, which is supposed to be stranger than the factual side of the reality line. Antimatter is the stuff that is just like the matter that you, everyone you know, and every thing you ever encounter in your life on Earth is made of. Except that it also is opposite to normal matter in such deep physical ways that when matter and antimatter meet they annihilate each other’s matterness to become nothing but a magnificent flash of fast-as-light energy.

Which is why I am thrilled by a report earlier this month in Washington, D.C., at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society by astronomer Peter Garnevich of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. This report comes to my attention by way of Phillip Schewe of the American Institute of Physics, an adept and elegant writer who does as much as anyone to inform the world about the fascinating discoveries of physicists. At the meeting, Garnevich reported that he and his colleagues observed signs of antimatter—in particular, the optical signature of the formation and annihilation of newly formed electron-antielectron pairs—in a massive and ancient supernova.

Garnevich and his colleagues carefully analyzed light that had traveled for 7 billion years from a supernova dubbed Y-155 and finally was collected—along with light from about 200 other supernovas—by a 4-meter telescope in the mountains of Chile. The astronomers combined those observations with a more detailed scan of the supernova with the Keck Telescope (on Hawaii), which was able to record the full spectrum of visible light arriving from Y-155. The overall data revealed that Y-155 had generated much more radioactive nickel than standard supernovas and that was one of the clues that antimatter was in the midst.

The once magnificent star apparently had been 200 times heavier than our most local star, the sun. That is why it was able to muster gravitational pressures at the end of its shining life that were unusually gargantuan compared to more everyday stellar collapses. As Garnevich sees it, that pressure was such that it could focus energy from nuclear reactions catalyzed by the collapse enough to spawn the creation of antimatter.

The image above is not of Y-155. But it is a most becoming portrait of the aftermath of a more local supernova that continues to expand in the Crab Nebula. The image shows a six-lightyear-wide remnant of a supernova explosion that Chinese astronomers observed in the year 1054. Some of the colors are telling. The red, for example, indicates oxygen atoms with two electrons stripped away and the blue corresponds to oxygen that retains all of it electron. Green marks sulfur. These atoms and electrons all are of the normal matter variety.

Photo credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester (Arizona State University)

Vogueing Snow

2009-12-19T06:33:00.000-08:00

Snow is beautiful enough as it falls, but find a way to keep snow crystals frozen as you harvest them and get them inside of your low temperature electron microscope and you can see snow in its full crystalline glory. Microscopist Eric Erbe and his colleagues at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Service in Maryland has had such a tool at their disposal and they they are loved by the snow science community for adding images like the one at the left to the world's portfolio of snow crystal photography.

This is a classic stellar dendrite snow crystal, which had been transferred to a chilled copper plate (a bath of liquid nitrogen was the key) soon after it had fallen. Despite the quick transfer, the crystal had begun to metamorphose. The slam dance of crystal on crystal chipped the edges a bit and it looks like this crystal had suffered some subtle melting. Here, the lower three arms of the crystal are offset a bit from the central hexagonal hub. No snow crystal really is perfectly symmetrical. In a snowpack, more changes unfold. Pressure from the overlying mass, melting and refreezing, and wind are among the forces and processes that keep the form of a snow crystal evolving until it looks nothing like it did as it fell from the sky. The blue tint here comes from a few computer keystrokes.

Photo Credit: Eric Erbe

GODNA

2009-12-15T13:45:00.000-08:00

“DNA: the web that spins the spider”*

Not a bad metaphor for a molecule

known by most as a three-letter word,

an impersonal acronym like IBM or NBC,

This one denoting a mouthful: deoxyribonucleic acid

Each syllable of which specifies

primordial molecular anatomy,

whose marriage of form and function

has performed the vastest of miracles.

GODNA

A web that spins a spider

would bear a creature

that spins a web

that spins a spider.

A self-making circle

Or more like a spiral

that winds and winds

the way GODNA does

into an all-knowing helix

whose embracing strands,

when viewed down their axis,

look like a web.

This molecular web,

its helical partners decouple

only to reform replicas

of their former partners.

One becomes two.

Even better than a web

that weaves only one spider.

*The metaphor was devised by Trevor Spencer Rines

Glassware of Potential

2009-12-11T17:11:00.000-08:00

The cabinetry was luscious. High end and polished. It stretched for 50 yards along a hallway of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine on the Busch campus of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. I was on my way to an appointment at the Protein Data Bank, which had just recently relocated into the CABM building from a lesser venue on the other side of the campus. I always have had a thing for laboratory glassware. In my offices, I have displayed it as ornamentation. But here, in this hallway, there was a proud audacity to the legions of beakers, flasks, graduated cylinders, and funnels. Like fine china, they were lovingly arranged on the shelves by undergraduates earning work-pay money, who had autoclaved them into a microbe-free cleanliness and then capped one-by-one with aluminum foil before putting them into the beautiful cabinets. Over the next days, no doubt, lab-coated researchers would emerge from their labs on the left and right of the hallway, reach onto the shelves of their fine cabinetry, and take their lab china with all of the intention of using them to discover something--maybe about their vaccine work or secrets about proteins' shapes--that they might one day just have to tell the world about.

Photo Credits: Ivan Amato

Shifting Sands on Mars

2009-12-07T06:30:00.000-08:00

Wind and fine sand can do a lot of large-scale sculpting, even on planetary scales. On February 9th of this year, a high resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this lovely shadow-rich image of the red planet's Proctor Crater. Drawing on studies in earthbound labs of fine sand particles and on Marsbound observations by the rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, planetary scientists suspect the ripples are composed of sand particles with diameters of less than 200 microns--or several times the diameter of biological cells--that are themselves coated with larger sand particles and granules. Around the central ripple zone of the image are dunes that also are primarily composed of the fine basaltic sand of volcanic origin and that gets blown around by the wind enough that dust cannot readily accumulate on them. The dust covering of the ripple particles and the absence of the same on the dune particles might account for the brightness of the former and and darkness of the latter, NASA scientists suggest. You could spend all day perusing NASA's images.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Twisted Cousins

2009-12-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

Twisted wood
Winding between up and down
Wrenching time into solid tension
A vine’s way
Brittle with the growth
Scaled with the ordeal
It accretes into
A dumb noose that lives

Cousin of vine, my spine
Winding from neck to ass
Wrenching sensation with thought
A mind’s way
Startled by its own self
Convoluted by the ordeal
Devoid of dumbness,
It dreads the growing tautness

ÓIvan Amato

Geodesics Underfoot

2009-11-30T16:24:00.001-08:00

At South Bethany beach in Delaware,

while looking away from the captivating Little Assawoman Bay and toward the sandy yard of a rented house instead, I just manged to resteer my next football to avoid wrecking this work of fungal art. It's a type of puffball, which is a casual name for many mushroom species. This one is probably of the taxonomic fungal order known as Agaricaceae.

Photo Credit: Ivan Amato

Killing Time

2009-11-24T15:49:00.001-08:00

There is no ill intention
A glass lollipop and a boy
A cloudless summer day
One more thing: curiosity

A glass lollipop and a boy
With time to kill
A cloudless summer day
Ants scurry about

Time to kill
Squeeze the summer light
Ants scurry about
Into a miniaturized sun

Squeeze the summer light
See-through glass does that,
Into a miniaturized sun
That burns ants alive

Astonished by the violence
On a cloudless summer day
The boy hunts for ants
There was no ill intent

©Ivan Amato, 2009

Combing for science: a new novel for the mycophile

2009-11-24T05:18:00.000-08:00

Invisible Lines, novelist Mary Amato’s ninth book, is about a struggling 7th grade boy who finds inspiration in the unlikely study of mushrooms. Funny and talented, and one step away from being homeless, Trevor finds inspiration in an eccentric science teacher for whom mushrooms harbor lessons for just about every challenge in life. After you read this book, you just might look up your local mycological association and become an eccentric yourself.

Combing for science: plastic from bacteria, butterfly proboscises, creatures from the deep

2009-11-23T08:19:00.000-08:00

In an effort to kick the habit of making polymers out of nonrenewable, petroleum derived building blocks, researchers in South Korea reengineered the metabolic system of E. coli bacteria, a renewable resource, to churn out polylactic acid, a biodegradable polymer already in use for such things as packing material, sutures, and the adsorbents in diapers. They report their work in the the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering. [|||] Being the delicate creatures that they are, butterflies cannot generate enough suction to draw up water, animal tears, and other liquids of their choice through their straw-like proboscises, because at the scale of that tiny feeding tube even water runs like molasses. A Clemson University physicist, Konstantin Kornev, has found that a butterfly's proboscis works by the same sort of wicking action of a paper towel. Makes him think he might be able to copy that trick to make tiny liquid-sampling probes to such up stuff from individual cells.. and then analyze it. [|||] By towing cameras in the darkest deepest abysses of the ocean, where the sun never shines, an international ocean life survey program, called Census of Marine Life, observed 17,650 species—among them crabs, shrimps, worms and other creatures like the “Dumbo” species in the photo—that have learned how to live on methane, dead and sunken whale bones and other strange cuisine.

Photo Credit: David Shale, MAR-ECO, Census of Marine Life

Found object destined for change

2009-11-22T18:25:00.000-08:00

There it was by my front door--a pipe cleaner maybe, two-toned and fat? Turned out to be alive and wanting to stay that way. Which is why it curled up this way, a lepidopteran fetal position. A gorgeous caterpillar worthy of a closeup picture (on a glass tabletop) with a macro lens. May it escape the butterfly net when the time comes.

God's Table

2009-11-22T15:07:00.000-08:00

God’s Table

The Periodic

Table

Of the

Chemical

Elements.

Woefully clinical.

Its flat boxes holding unprettied letters and numbers

in a seemingly anything-goes polygonal frame

bearing no resemblance to anything familiar.

If anything, its name recalls unnatural aromas

and longings for class to end, now, now.

The teachers forget to tell their students:

The Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements

is a mandala of creation.

It is every color, every texture.

It is the encryption

of every thing that ever was, is, or, will be.

They forget to say:

Take off your goggles and gloves

and stare at the Table as if it were

the Burning Bush itself.

They forget to teach their students

to praise the omnipotence of the Table’s

mix-and-match atoms that are

the fountain even of matter that thinks and weeps

and comes to know of universes.

The Table should be set in a rococo frame,

gold-leafed and intricate,

flanked by candles day and night,

never coiled up like a window shade

unfurled merely for academic reference.

2009-11-22T14:35:00.001-08:00

It begins.