Enviro+ for Raspberry Pi

By Pimoroni: Monitor your world with Enviro+ for Raspberry Pi! There’s a whole bunch of fancy environmental sensors on this board, and a gorgeous little full-colour LCD to display your data. It’s the perfect way to get started with citizen science!

 

Enviro+ is an affordable alternative to environmental monitoring stations that can cost tens of thousands of pounds and, best of all, it’s small and hackable and lets you contribute your data to citizen science efforts to monitor air quality via projects like Luftdaten.

See also: Getting Started with Enviro+

Three reasons why the periodic table needs a redesign

New Scientist: Chemists can’t agree on the best way to arrange the elements, prompting proposals of everything from spiral-shaped alternatives to radically elongated versions.

Above: This reimagining of the periodic table, proposed by chemist Theodor Benfey in 1964, emphasises the continuity of the elements rather than imposing artificial breaks.

Mark Leach at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, keeps the internet database of periodic tables, which contains hundreds of versions.

See also: other posts tagged ‘science’

Look at These Incredibly Realistic Faces Generated By A Neural Network

Futurism: The results are spectacular. Even small seemingly random details like freckles, skin pores or stubble are convincingly distributed in the images the project generated.

See also: Sunspring: a short film written by an algorithm & Portraits of imaginary people

Researchers map where subjective feelings are located in the body

Pixel intensities show regions where each feeling was associated with statistically significant bodily sensations.

British Psychological Society: “How do you feel?” is a simple and commonly asked question that belies the complex nature of our conscious experiences. The feelings and emotions we experience daily consist of bodily sensations, often accompanied by some kind of thought process, yet we still know very little about exactly how these different aspects relate to one another, or about how such experiences are organised in the brain.

Now, reporting their results in PNAS, a team of researchers in Finland, led by neuroscientist Lauri Nummenmaa of the University of Turku, has produced detailed maps of what they call the “human feeling space”, showing how each of dozens of these subjective feelings is associated with a unique set of bodily sensations. [⋮]

The new results provide yet more evidence for the emerging idea that the body plays a crucial role in cognitive and emotional processes – something which has, until very recently, been overlooked. “In other words,” says study co-author Riita Hari, “the human mind is strongly embodied.”

See also: 216 positive emotions that have no direct English translation

Just Add Water: The Dark Past of Sea Monkeys

The Dark Past of Sea Monkeys

Great Big Story: This is the story of how a tiny, magical creature was transformed into a cultural phenomenon by inventor, marketing genius and complicated eccentric Harold von Braunhut. Full of fun facts (both charming and disturbing), Just Add Water is a colorful short film about a half-century of marketing directly to children, the force of nostalgia in pop culture, and an unlikely meeting of flim-flam and hard science. A film by Penny Lane.

Antineutrino Global Map 2015

The open source AGM2015 provides fundamental data for experiments, assists in strategic detector placement to determine neutrino mass hierarchy, and aids in identifying undeclared nuclear reactors.

“The open access availability of these antineutrino maps represents the next generation of cartography and gives important insights into the basic understanding about the interior of our planet.” Shawn Usman — NGA R&D

“This is what Earth would look like if you could see its glow of neutrinos–from natural radioactivity mostly, but lightly dotted with nuclear reactors. Amazing map. [⋮] Continental rocks are enriched in uranium and thorium, so the continents “glow” in antineutrinos.” — @coreyspowell

Further reading

• NGA.mil: New NGA global map advances R&D in geophysics and nonproliferation
• Nature.com: AGM2015: Antineutrino Global Map 2015
• Ultralytics.com: Interactive Google Earth presentations of the AGM2015 data

See also

• Man wearing gas mask and sandals explores Fukushima’s Exclusion Zone — “The radiation level is still very high in the red zone. not many people seen this town for the last 5 years…is like it vanished … i can find food,money,gold,laptop and other valuable in the red zone….I’m amaze that nobody looted this town clean.”
• Genetic map of the UK shows which invasions created Britain’s DNA — Peter Donnelly and colleagues use such data from a selected geographically diverse sample of more than 2,000 individuals from the United Kingdom to reveal remarkable concordance between genetic clusters and geography.
• What’s up in the Solar System? — A diagram by Olaf Frohn, updated once a month, of active space missions traveling beyond Earth orbit.

Juno Perijove — Jupiter Flyby

A wonderful video by Seán Doran putting recent imagery from the Juno spacecraft to György Ligeti’s Atmosphères, famously used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

From the original video: This computer animation uses the JunoCam images of PJ-05 as textures, and SPICE trajectory data in order to reconstruct the flyby as seen from Juno’s perspective.

Above: Edits by Seán Doran // Below: as featured on APOD

On May 19, the Juno spacecraft once again swung by Jupiter in its looping 53 day orbit around the Solar System’s ruling gas giant.

APOD: Beginning at the top, this vertical 14 frame sequence of enhanced-color JunoCam images follows the spacecraft’s rapidly changing perspective during its two hour passage. They look down on Jupiter’s north polar region, equatorial, and south polar region (bottom images). With the field-of-view shrinking, the seventh and eighth images in the sequence are close-up. Taken only 4 minutes apart above Jupiter’s equator they were captured just before the spacecraft reached perijove 6, its closest approach to Jupiter on this orbit. Final images in the sequence pick up white oval storm systems, Jupiter’s “String of Pearls”, and the south polar region from the outward bound spacecraft.

See also

• JunoCam — A part of the Juno payload included by NASA for public outreach, to discuss and decide which points of interest on Jupiter should be photographed.
• The pastel astronomical drawings of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1882)
• Chart of human space exploration

The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings (1882)

The Public Domain Review: The French artist, astronomer and amateur entomologist Étienne Léopold Trouvelot is noted for ⋮ the 7000 or so illustrations he created from his astronomical observations, the quality of which reached their zenith in the 15 exquisite pastel works which were published as ‘The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings’ in 1882.

As well as his illustrations, Trouvelot also published some 50 scientific papers, and was credited with discovering “veiled spots” on the Sun in 1875.

See also

• The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings: Atlas on The New York Public Library Digital Collections website. Includes high resolution (~70MB TIFF) downloads of all images, free to use without restriction.
• The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual (1882) on the Internet Archive.

See also: Other posts on this blog tagged ‘space’.

See also

BBC Earth: Movile Cave has been cut off for millions of years. Its air is thick with harmful gases, yet it is home to an array of strange animals.

A cave woodlouse

An unidentified leech from Movile Cave

Despite a complete absence of light and a poisonous atmosphere, the cave is crawling with life. There are unique spiders, scorpions, woodlice and centipedes, many never before seen by humans, and all of them owe their lives to a strange floating mat of bacteria.

Strangely, the worse the air gets the more animals there are. It’s not at all obvious why that should be, or how the animals survive at all.

A waterscorpion attacks its crustacean prey

An unidentified pseudoscorpion

Two woodlice which lack skin pigment

Without any signs of water reaching the deep cave from the surface, it is unclear how the animals in the cave survives. Tests have shown that the water flowing in does not contain any food particles. Instead, the food comes from the strange frothy foam sitting on top of the water. This floating film, which looks like wet tissue paper and can even be torn like paper, contains millions upon millions of bacteria known as “autotrophs”.

A waterscorpion

A centipede with extra-long antennae

In 1996, researchers categorised the animals in the cave. They included 3 species of spider, a centipede, 4 species of isopod (the group that includes woodlice), a leech never seen anywhere else in the world, and an unusual-looking insect called a waterscorpion.

• The Geologic Time Spiral — A timeline of the evolution of life.
• The Wellcome Image Awards 2015 — Showcasing the best in science imaging talent and techniques.
• Timelapse: The “slow life” of a coral reef, sped up — These animals are actually very mobile creatures, however their motion is only detectable at different time scales compared to ours.

FORMS IN NATURE: Understanding Our Universe

Through scientific study and understanding, we deepen our connection to the natural world.

A collaboration between Kevin Dart, Stéphane Coëdel, Nelson Boles, and David Kamp.

Gallery 1988: Kevin Dart “Science & Nature”

The Zipf Mystery

The of and to. A in is I. That it, for you, was with on. As have … but be they.

The Atlantic:

Every so often scientists notice a rule or a regularity that makes no particular sense on its face but seems to hold true nonetheless. One such is a curiosity called Zipf’s Law. George Kingsley Zipf was a Harvard linguist who in the 1930s noticed that the distribution of words adhered to a regular statistical pattern. The most common word in English—”the”—appears roughly twice as often in ordinary usage as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common, ten times as often as the tenth most common, and so on. As an afterthought, Zipf also observed that cities’ sizes followed the same sort of pattern, which became known as a Zipf distribution. Oversimplifying a bit, if you rank cities by population, you find that City No. 10 will have roughly a tenth as many residents as City No. 1, City No. 100 a hundredth as many, and so forth. (Actually the relationship isn’t quite that clean, but mathematically it is strong nonetheless.) Subsequent observers later noticed that this same Zipfian relationship between size and rank applies to many things: for instance, corporations and firms in a modern economy are Zipf-distributed.

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What’s Up in the Solar System?
A diagram by Olaf Frohn, updated once a month, of active space missions traveling beyond Earth orbit.

The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox — Where Are All The Aliens?

The universe is unbelievably big – trillions of stars and even more planets. Soo… there just has to be life out there, right? But where is it? Why don’t we see any aliens? Where are they? And more importantly, what does this tell us about our own fate in this gigantic and scary universe?

Pigeons are wildly underrated

Pigeons are gross. They’re also wildly underrated.

Vox: Sure, there are bad things about these birds (like the way they deface statues of our own species’ great leaders). But over the centuries, their unique abilities to be trained and to find their way home have been used in interesting and surprising ways (that almost make up for their constant cooing).

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A path to the past

The Geologic Time Spiral — Designed by Joseph Graham, William Newman, and John Stacy

The Earth is very old—4.5 billion years or more according to scientific estimates. Most of the evidence for an ancient Earth is contained in the rocks that form the Earth’s crust. The rock layers themselves—like pages in a long and complicated history—record the events of the past, and buried within them are the remains of life—the plants and animals that evolved from organic structures that existed 3 billion years ago.

USGS: The Geologic Time Spiral (via Wikipedia)

See also: 4,000 years of human history in one chart

Slow Life, by Daniel Stoupin

The most important living organisms that play the key functions in the biosphere might not seem exciting when it comes to motion. Plants, fungi, sponges, corals, plankton, and microorganisms make life on Earth possible and do all the hard biochemical job. Similarly to all living things, they are dynamic, mobile, and fundamentally have the same motion properties as us. They grow, reproduce, spread, move towards source of energy, and away from unfavorable conditions. However, their speeds happen to be out of sync with our narrow perception. Our brains are wired to comprehend and follow fast and dynamic events better, especially those very few that happen at speeds comparable to ours. In a world of blazingly fast predators and escaping prey events where it takes minutes, hours, or days to notice any changes are harder to grasp.

“Slow” marine life is particularly mysterious. As colorful, bizarre-looking, and environmentally important as we know corals and sponges are, their simple day-to-day life is hidden. We know some bits about their biochemistry, corals’ interaction with zooxanthella algae, their life cycles, and systematics. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell what we don’t know about the rest, and particularly when it comes to interaction with other organisms happening over long periods of time.

Time lapse cinematography reveals a whole different world full of hypnotic motion and my idea was to make coral reef life more spectacular and thus closer to our awareness. I had a bigger picture in my mind for my clip. But after many months of processing hundreds of thousands of photos and trying to capture various elements of coral and sponge behavior I realized that I have to take it one step at a time. For now, the clip just focuses on beauty of microscopic reef “landscapes.” The close-up patterns and colors of this type of fauna hardly resemble anything from the terrestrial environments. Corals become even less familiar if you consider their daily “activities.” — Daniel Stoupin

(via Mental Floss)

See also: Wellcome Image Awards 2015: The art behind the science of life, death, sex, and disease and other posts tagged photography.

How we naturally think vs. the scientific method

In the most recent You Are Not So Smart podcast, host David McRaney broadcasts a 2014 lecture he gave at DragonCon about ‘just-so stories’, contrasting how we naturally think with the more formal scientific method.

“Throughout all of our history we kept falling into this giant hole of stupid, and the only way we could climb out of that hole was to create a tool by which we could do that climbing. That tool is of course the scientific method. Without it we get into a lot of trouble, because this is the way we naturally think:

“You have a emotion or an intuition and then you form a biased conclusion (I’m sure you’ve seen this on Facebook before). Then you seek supporting evidence through motivated reasoning, you stop when you think you’ve found enough evidence. That’s actually called in psychology the ‘make-sense stopping rule’. You only question the disconfirmatory evidence; everything else passes through. You argue for your conclusion with logical fallacies and then you feel smug. And then you repeat all that if you get challenged and you avoid all challenges.

“The unnatural way we think is that you have an emotion or intuition, but then you form a hypothesis and you have observation and experimentation to see if it confirms your hypothesis. Then you disconfirm it and if you disconfirm it well enough you can let other people replicate what you’ve done then you debate and you argue and everybody gets together and then based off everything you’ve learned you can form a theory and then you can feel smug.”

I’ve been perfectly guilty of this behaviour myself.

See also: How to sound smart in your TEDx talk

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Our Pluto

On July 14, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly past Pluto, and we will map that distant world and its moons for the first time.

The New Horizons team plans to assign names to the features on the maps of Pluto and its large moon Charon, once we have seen them in sharp detail this summer.

Before

After?

At the Our Pluto site you can suggest your ideas for names and vote for your favourites. The ballot closes on 7th April 2015, so get in there quickly!

Further information

‘A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with part of Scotland; exhibiting the collieries and mines, the marshes and fen lands originally overflowed by the sea, and the varieties of soil according to the variations in the substrata, illustrated by the most descriptive names’

BBC News: William Smith: Seminal geology map rediscovered

A first edition copy of one of the most significant maps in the history of science has been rediscovered in time for an important anniversary.

Tucked away in a leather sleeve case, the mislaid artefact was last seen roughly 40 or 50 years ago. Smith spent the better part of 15 years collecting the information needed to compile the map. It is said he covered about 10,000 miles a year on foot, on horse and in carriage, cataloguing the locations of all the formations that make up the geology of the three home nations.

The roughly 1.8m by 2.5m map is made up of 15 sheets.

The outline of the geography and the strata were printed from copper plate engravings, but the detail was finished by hand with watercolours.

The lower edge of a formation is saturated and then the paint is made to fade back to the high edge. It is this colouring technique, combined with the tendency of many of England’s rocks to dip to the south or southeast, that gives Smith’s map its iconic look.

• William ‘Strata’ Smith (1769-1839), the Father of English Geology.
• Images of the rediscovered Smith map on Flickr. There’s lots of additional information on this main image.
• More William ‘Strata’ Smith images on Flickr

See also

• Recovering The Doves Type from the bottom of the Thames
• Canyonlands National Park texture and shaded relief map

Computer colour is broken

Minute Physics: Computer Color is Broken

Did you know that most software (and websites like Instagram) handles color incorrectly?

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Nature: The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population

Clustering of the 2,039 UK individuals into 17 clusters based only on genetic data.

European ancestry profiles for the 17 UK clusters.

Britain has a long history of invasions: over the past two millennia, various armies from the Romans to the Anglo-Saxons conquered the bulk of the British Isles. A new genetic analysis of the country has revealed which invading force had the greatest impact on its DNA.
The Verge: Genetic map of the UK shows which invasions created Britain’s DNA

Major events in the peopling of the British Isles.

Nature: The results throw new light on several aspects of the peopling of Britain. For instance the genetic contribution to southeastern England from Anglo-Saxon migrations is under half, suggesting significant pre-Roman but post-Mesolithic population movement from the European continent. The data also reveal that non-Saxon regions contain genetically differentiated subgroups rather than a general ‘Celtic’ population.

See also:

The Verge: The best science images of the year are all about life, death, sex, and disease

This scanning electron image shows the head of a boll weevil

Each of these bumps contain lenses, which work together to form a greenfly’s eye. It can spot quick movements, but can’t see far

A tiny parasite wasp that lays its eggs in other animals. It’s just .75 millimeters long

An illustration of grains of pollen being released from a a flower in the Asteraceae family

The surface of a cat’s tongue from an old Victorian slide. It shows the rough texture of the tongue

The Wellcome Image Awards 2015: Showcasing the best in science imaging talent and techniques, this year’s Wellcome Image Awards winners include: a scanning electron micrograph of a greenfly’s eye; a clinical photograph of an elderly woman’s curved spine; an illustration of pollen grains; a confocal micrograph showing drug-carrying particles in the lungs of a mouse; and a picture that shows the intricacies of a paediatric multi-sensory unit.

The lungs of a mouse, with the pink spots used to indicate microparticles being delivered to the lungs to research cancer medicine

This confocal micrograph shows the nerves in a cross-section of an adult mouse’s brain

Transmission electron micrographs were used to create this color-coded representation of a fruit-fly’s nervous system

“The breath-taking riches of the imagery that science generates are so important in telling stories about research and helping us to understand often abstract concepts. It’s not just about imaging the very small either. It’s about understanding life, death, sex, and disease: the cornerstones of drama and art.”
Adam Rutherford, scientist and judge for the Wellcome Image Awards

• The best photography of 2014: My picks of the best pics of 2014.
• Visualising Race, Identity, and Change: To understand race—and more specifically racial ambiguity—it helps to understand those whose lives are defined by it.
• Face-Off With a Deadly Predator: Coming face-to-face with one of Antarctica’s most vicious predators.
• Hubble’s modern art: A piece of art? A time-lapse photo? A flickering light show?

The myth of race, debunked

The myth of race, debunked in 3 minutes

You may know exactly what race you are, but how would you prove it if somebody disagreed with you?

Of course, the way society defines our race has a big impact on our lives. But that doesn’t make it biologically real.

Wanderers – a short film by Erik Wernquist

Wanderers is a vision of humanity’s expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. The locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available.

Without any apparent story, other than what you may fill in by yourself, the idea with the film is primarily to show a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds – and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there.

This is the view from a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter, looking down at the huge anticyclonic storm known as the Great Red Spot.

This scene shows a group of people hiking across the icy plains of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

This shot follows the cabin of a space elevator descending on a cable towards the northern parts of the Terra Cimmeria highlands on Mars.

What we see here is the inside of a hollowed out asteroid, pressurized and filled with a breathable atmosphere.

(via @neilcocker)

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Wired: The Warped Astrophysics of Interstellar

Kip Thorne is an theoretical physicist who helped developed the concept for the movie Interstellar.

“The story is now essentially all Chris and Jonah’s,” Thorne says. “But the spirit of it, the goal of having a movie in which science is embedded in the fabric from the beginning—and it’s great science—that was preserved.”

The film put so much effort into the appearance of the black holes that they actually made some legitimate scientific findings…

“We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” [Double Negative senior supervisor, Paul] Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn’s rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.” That’s what led Thorne to his “why, of course” moment when he first saw the final effect. The Double Negative team thought it must be a bug in the renderer. But Thorne realized that they had correctly modeled a phenomenon inherent in the math he’d supplied.

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NASA’s warp drive spaceship!

Of course, it’s called the IXS Enterprise. And the Star Trek connection doesn’t end there: Mike Okuda designed the ship’s insignia.

The IXS Enterprise is a theory fitting concept for a Faster Than Light ship. It’s designed for/with NASA scientist Dr. Harold White and used in his presentations as an extra.

Excellent renderings by Mark Rademaker who has put in excess of 1600 hours into the project.

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Astronomy Picture of the Day

By amateur astro-photographer Alan Friedman.

(via @BadAstronomer)

Cosmos: science propoganda

I’m not a big fan of science shows like the new Cosmos, and while listening to the most recent episode of the podcast Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project Norm captured my feelings perfectly. He explained that it feels a lot like science propaganda and that if there was a creationist version of Cosmos that just stated things as if they were fact that he would be totally unsatisfied with it. Cosmos suffers from the same failings.

(That’s my highly paraphrased version of Norm’s words, but you can hear the Cosmos discussion right at the start of the episode. The nub is about 4 minutes in.)

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

The Neil deGrasse Tyson quote above (often simplified as “facts are true whether you believe them or not”) exhibits the same problem. It sounds compelling if you’re pro-science (as I very much am) but it’s a needlessly hostile statement to science skeptics, for whom the counterargument could just as easily be that the good thing about Christianity is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.

It also seems to grossly misrepresent the ‘truth’ of science, which isn’t that it has all the answers but that it’s a working method for being able to discover all the answers. Religion is a fixed truth and only changes (when it does) by looking backwards and reinterpreting itself. By contrast science looks forwards to learn whatever it can, updating the facts as it goes.

qCraft: quantum physics in Minecraft

qCraft: A Beginner’s Guide To Quantum Physics In Minecraft

qCraft is a mod that brings the principles of quantum physics to the world of Minecraft.

qCraft is not a simulation of quantum physics, but it does provide ‘analogies’ that attempt to show how quantum behaviors are different from everyday experience, allowing players to create structures and devices that exhibit Minecraft versions of quantum properties like observer dependence, superposition and entanglement.

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The Hubble Space Telescope’s foray into abstract photography

A piece of art? A time-lapse photo? A flickering light show?

It is suspected that in this case, Hubble had locked onto a bad guide star, potentially a double star or binary. This caused an error in the tracking system, resulting in this remarkable picture of brightly coloured stellar streaks. The prominent red streaks are from stars in the globular cluster NGC 288. It seems that even when Hubble makes a mistake, it can still kick-start our imagination.

(via Explore)