Garret Fitzpatrick

The Phase Between Gemini’s Legs

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I’m lying on my back in the grass—cold, but not too cold. Just enough to cause fingers to numb slightly in fifteen minutes’ time. I hear a couple laughing as they walk somewhere behind me. A tall guy with a beard passes by, looks at me funny. A girl power walks across the courtyard, holding a plastic bag at the end of each arm. I see a jogger with a headband, unicolor in navy blue. I hear cars, trucks, buses, horns, and nineteen seconds of crosswalk beeping roughly every minute and a half.

Above, the bright light of Venus blurs behind a thin cloud layer, off to the right of my view. An almost perfect half moon—a first-quarter moon actually—is pretty much directly overhead, a bit right of center. Off to my left, the illuminated, curving spire of the MIT Chapel shines skyward, pointing to the pale red dot of Mars.

The first-quarter moon phase began today at exactly 3:41pm, EDT, Friday, March 30, 2012. It shines in front of the constellation Gemini, between the legs of the twins, Castor and Pollux of Greek mythology, high above the faint, sinking sparkle of Betelgeuse.

Summer just started in the northern hemisphere of the red planet, causing the Martian North Polar Cap to slim to a sliver—a tiny white hat on top of a round, horribly sunburned fat man.

It takes sunlight about six minutes to reach Venus.

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On the Playground with the Bullies of Science

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A review of The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Can’t Solve Our Global Problems, by Henry Petroski
274 pages. Knopf, 2010. $26.95

If would-be pocket-protecting scientists were the kids that received wedgies on the playground and were nearly forced into malnutrition by bullies stealing their lunch money, I wonder what would-be engineers endured in Henry Petroski’s school.

“Engineering can be as much of an assault on the frontiers of knowledge as is science,” asserts Petroski in The Essential Engineer, sounding the battle trumpet of engineering. A professor of civil engineering at Duke University, Petroski’s out to get engineers some respect. He’s tired of bully scientists hogging the spotlight of public esteem and relevance. Full Review »

Entropy and the Kitchen Sink

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Is your sink full of dirty dishes right now? Mine is. Well, it isn’t full, but it’s got a few items in it I’ve been putting off washing since yesterday. There’s a plate I had pizza on last night, the knife I used to cut the pizza, a fork I used to pick sausages from the pizza when it was too hot to pick up the whole thing, one coffee cup shaped like a cow, and the little grease-catching tray thing from my George Foreman grill—a hold-out I missed during the last Great Kitchen Cleanup of 2012 sometime last week.

I’ll do dishes a couple times a week (on a good week), but almost never right after a meal. I let them build up a little before I give in. I think that’s normal. So normal that physicists even have a term for this practice of hygienic procrastination. They call it entropy. It’s the tendency for disorder to steadily increase in a system, or to think of it a different way, for the amount of useful work to decrease in a system over time. Some say it may eventually bring about an extreme state of critical sluggishness in the universe, when disorder has reached such epic levels that all the bits and pieces we’re made of, all the stars and planets and black holes and galaxies have completely degraded to a state of universal, equally distributed heat and matter. When life as we know it ceases to exist.

The ultimate sink full of dirty dishes.

(Don’t worry, we technically don’t need to worry about this breakdown for another 10100 years. That’s a one with a hundred zeroes behind it, otherwise known as a googol.)

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More Likely To Get Flu Being Near the Sick Than Touching Infected Items

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You’re far more likely to get the flu from breathing in the virus when you’re around someone who has it than you are from touching infected items around your house, say researchers from Great Britain.

Most household materials can’t sustain enough influenza—the virus which causes the common disease we call “the flu”—to infect another person by physical contact after only a few hours. These results confirmed what most scientists suspected: the influenza virus is quite fragile.

To test the survival of the virus on household items, researchers deposited small amounts of influenza on items like light switches, toys, kitchen counters, keyboards, and window glass in a laboratory setting. Then they measured the amount of viable virus (meaning a large enough quantity to lead to an infection) at set times.

On all surfaces tested, there was no longer any viable virus after nine hours. In fact, most surfaces could be considered “contamination free” in four hours or less. Hard, non-porous materials such as stainless steel allowed for longer survival times while softer, porous materials like wood allowed for the shortest.

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Fear Trumps Happiness in Vocal Cues

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Given only vocal cues, humans can identify fear faster in other voices than happiness, say researchers.

The cause lies in biological-survival imperatives. And the implications may prevent your next computer technical-support call from ending in a one-sided screaming match with a voice recording.

Understanding the time it takes to identify an emotion can help engineers develop better automated call centers, aid psychologists in training people with autism to learn subtle social cues, and assist public speakers to analyze the effectiveness of their speeches.

Researchers at McGill University in Canada and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany have measured the time it takes for people to correctly identify certain emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness). Experimenters speak a neutral, meaningless phrase (e.g., The rivix jolled the silling), which is then broken into seven pieces based on syllables. The time each participant takes to react to each piece is recorded.

Marc Pell, from McGill University’s School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, says emotion recognition studies of the voice are important, though rarely studied compared with facial expression.

“When you look at a face, all of the information that will allow you to recognize the emotion is available instantaneously if you’re focusing on it,” says Pell. “What is different about the voice is that emotions have to evolve over time.” Full Article »

Coffee Growers Take Note: Fungi Have Sex, Too

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Here’s news to researchers studying coffee rust, a fungal disease that has devastated coffee crops around the world for more than a hundred years: It was always assumed the coffee fungus reproduced asexually—meaning its cells split instead of fused with other cells from another host. But new research confirms they also reproduce sexually.

Coffee rust is the most economically damaging disease affecting coffee crops worldwide (estimated to cost the global coffee industry up to $3 billion a year). This new insight into the personal life of coffee fungus could help control the spread of the deadly disease in coffee and other plant life as well, including wheat grain and pine trees, which also suffer from different forms of rust fungi.

Coffee growers wage a never-ending war with fungi that escalates periodically as the disease constantly adapts to fungicides, developing increasing genetic immunity to every control the growers throw at them.

“This is the principle example of the arms race in fungi, or rust, versus their hosts,” says Shawn Kenaley, a post-doctoral associate in the plant pathology and plant-microbe biology department of Cornell University. It’s Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection at work: “Eventually there will be a selection for genes which allow for these fungi to be undetected by the coffee or able to thwart the genetic defense of coffee,” he adds.

Understanding how the fungi reproduce is vital to geneticists who are trying to stay ahead in the arms race. Full Article »

Cambridge We (Almost) Have a Problem

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I first heard the surprising tale on a Boston duck tour the weekend after I moved to the area from Houston. Having never lived in New England, I couldn’t think of a better way to get to know the city of Boston than on a 20-passenger open air amphibious tank painted bright yellow that promised to bring passengers to all the historical sights from both land and water. The tour was narrated by a tall, goateed man—call sign Duck Pin.

We’d just turned around on the Charles River to head back to the landing site when Duck Pin guided the car-ship through the glassy water toward the iconic towers of the Longfellow Bridge. “And there, behind those buildings about three blocks down on Broadway,” declared Duck Pin, “was the site where NASA wanted to build their Mission Control Center, right next to MIT in the Kendall Square area. It wasn’t until after the Kennedy assassination—since, remember, JFK was a local Massachusetts man—that NASA decided to move Mission Control to Houston, conveniently, in Texas, the home state of our new President Lyndon B. Johnson.”

Huh? I thought. Mission Control would have been in Cambridge?

“If it wasn’t for his assassination, we would have been saying ‘Cambridge, we have a problem’ instead of Houston,” continued Duck Pin.

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Unexpected Forms of Life Found in the Dead Sea

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Researchers found green and white mats of bacteria on the bottom of the Dead Sea during a scuba diving expedition that may reveal new insights into the nature of life in extreme environments.

The sprawling communities of bacteria were found near a series of submarine freshwater springs that had never been directly observed by scientists before the summer 2010 expedition. Freshwater from a nearby aquifer must travel through several hundred feet of salty soil before emerging in the sea, creating an unusual chemical mix at the bottom of what is one of the saltiest bodies of water on the planet.

That life exists there at all is still a mystery to the joint Israeli-German research team. Principal investigator Danny Ionescu of the Microsensor Group at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, says the presence of biofilms found at the springs is an exciting new discovery.

Ionescu can’t yet reveal specific details on the identity of the bacteria, since the paper documenting the team’s results hasn’t yet been published. “In general,” says Ionescu, “the green biofilms are associated with phototrophs. The white biofilms are normally associated with sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. Never before have these been found in the Dead Sea.”

Phototrophs get their energy from light by photosynthesis, just like flowers and trees. Sulfur-oxidizing bacteria, on the other hand, manufacture their energy through chemical processes when the right ingredients are mixed together. Understanding how life can survive without photosynthesis poses an intriguing challenge for researchers. Full Article »

A Virtual “What’s Up Doc” on Your Cellphone

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Researchers have devised a way to project the image of a cartoon character from a cell phone onto any surface where it can then interact with another projected character from a different cell phone.

The images may wave at each other, shake hands, and even give each other presents. Might be a good way to score a date, say its creators at the MIT Media Lab.

Their recently developed prototype is called PoCoMo, for Projected Collaboration using Mobile Devices, which is the brainchild of principal investigator, first-year PhD student Roy Shilkrot.

PoCoMo uses a Samsung Halo projector phone integrated in a prototype case that employs a mirror to align the camera and the projector, along with unique computer vision algorithms, to create a simulated “ice-breaker” meet-up between an interested cartoon man and a potentially attracted cartoon woman, or vice versa.

“Initially we brainstormed fifty types of games before we came up with this idea,” says Shilkrot. “What finally brought us to this—we tried to create a social interaction in a mobile, projected way.” Full Article »