Two Dishes But To One Table

Book Review -- Planets: A Very Short Introduction

David A Rothery's book is part of the Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press.  Rothery's book is just bigger than a smart phone and in 100 pages creates a very authoritative survey derived from his first hand knowledge designing planetary probes.  He is a real physicist's physicist but the book is readable.

Here are some Planet Facts that Rothery's helpful book has summarized :

1. viewed from above the north pole, looking down, all of the planets in this solar system revolve counterclockwise.
2. what I always considered the intrinsic color of Jupiter is just a thin skin of colored bands made by clouds of solidified ammonia.   The dark bands are sinking and the lighter bands are upwellings.
3. if you could peak under this opaque striped outer skin, Jupiter's atmosphere is transparent! 
4. the transparent stuff is 10 to 1 ratio of very boring hydrogen gas and helium gas, like most of the universe is.  
5. at high altitudes the hydrogen gas is molecules of H2, same as on Earth, but lower down something crazy happens.  The hard-to-imagine intense pressure pushes the atoms together to form one big planet wide molecule of hydrogen that is so compressed that the electrons just wander around, delocalized, like in a metal.
6. and then, finally, yes, there is a rocky planet down in there, estimated to be just triple the size of Earth in Jupiter and Saturn, and just one Earth mass inside Uranus and Neptune.
7. the interior of Jupiter is very hot, just like Earth, but unlike Earth, Jupiter's heat does not come just from radioactive decay.  Models of the gas giant imply that some heat is left over from the formation of the solar system -- Jupiter is so darn big relative to its amount of surface area that the heat from its birth still hasn't leaked out all the way.  
8. on top of that, some heat, strangely, is still being emitted from latent sources (there's a real chemistry topic) as the phases seperate out and chang their state.  for example, there is probably a 'rain' of helium droplets falling out of the hydrogen atmosphere, accumulating ias a layer of helium at the bottom of the atmosphere, releasing heat as it settles.
9.  without directly seeing the pieces of the ring around Saturn or Jupiter   scientists did a clever, indirect measurement of the particle size.  Saturn's rings are made of particles up to 5 meters in size but Jupiter's rings are made of particles about 1 millionth of a meter in size.  This was determined by watching the ring when it was in direct sunlight and then how fast it cooled off when it passed into the shadow of the planet.
10. if the entire ring of Saturn were gathered and mushed into one single ball of stuff it would only be about as big as the city of Detroit

In case you don't know this book series, there are hundreds of titles from Oxford Press that begin with the words A Short Introduction To...  Besides publishing excellent primers on common subjects  they make short introductions to things like a 100 page summary of The Book of Mormon.  Also, summaries on things that are problematic to summarize: one tiny book is a summary of  Happiness and another is simply titled History.

Results From Carrot Top Experiment

Here is a picture of two butts that I cut off of carrots that we ate Thursday. 

 

 The carrot stubs have been sitting in water on our windowsill for two days. The one you see on the left has failed to revive but the butt on the right is showing growth in two places, the lower growth is distinctly leaflike but the top one is merely extending a stem.  This is really weird to me.  On a cellular level what would explain cell division that produces leaves in one piece of tissue but a stem in the other tissue?

I think that stem cells have been created to form the leafy differentiated tissues on the left but that for some reason normal, non-stem cells, cells that are switched to making vertical divisions in a stem, are turned on in the right side protruberance.    Does this sound right?

Make Your Own DIY Stereogram, Version #1

I took two pictures of our living room, one from each from the left eye perspective and right eye perspective.  I laid them side by side (using MS Word, actually, not exactly a graphics program). 

If you look at the photo, you can get a Magic Eye effect by either allowing your eyes to drift apart so the images overlap or by crossing your eyes so the images overlap.  

 

If you have trouble seeing this sort of thing there is further advice here.

Warts Are Interesting!

Both Meg and I fear getting warts.  We don't have them now but we both had them when young. 

Meg fears them more apparently since she usually wears flip flops in the locker room.  I am wondering whether I should start doing the same so I checked around online for info on warts.    I learned several things:

1.     The virus that causes a foot (plantar) wart is a completely distinct species from the one that causes a hand (palmar) wart! Shown above is the phylogenetic tree.  The branch labeled HPV1 is the Plantar wart and HPV2 is the Palmar wart.
2. For you to catch a wart virus (HPV) the virus has to enter through the stem cells of a skin lesion.  This is easier than it sounds; a plucked hair reveals stem cells in the torn follicle.
3. The HPV doesn't go berzerk -- its DNA hangs out in the healthy lowest layer of your skin, dividing with the healthy cells as an episome (an episome is similar to a plasmid - I had to look that up).
4. As the skin cells migrate to outer layers, the virus gets activated.  Those episomes of viral DNA switch over the skin cell chemical machinery, telling your skin cell to make as many HPV DNA copies as possible and make them protein coats (like cozy little pajamas).
5. When the wart skin flakes off, the wart virus inside is protected enough that it remains virulant for several months.   If you step on the skin flake and your skin has any lesion, crack, break, athletes foot fissure -- BAM! the HPV virus might get access to one of your stem cells under your skin.   
6. Since HPV is a virus, you might have some immunity after exposure, according to a health insurance company site. I don't take this as an authoritative site.  
7. Treatments for the wart include "Placebo" which in one study had a 27% success rate.

Myh conclusion:  unless I learn otherwise, warts seem to be contagious.  Meg is right.  I should protect my feet in the locker room.

An okay link explaining the weird life cycle of the papilloma DNA is

here.

 

Two good, long Wikipedia links are:

Papillomaviridae  [for great info on the virus life cycle]  and 

Wart   [for an explanation of what you see and what the doctor will do]

Caught On Camera: Black Hole Eating Part of Our Galaxy

The next 18 years will be exciting times if you have the patience to watch a cloud of space gas get devoured by the all-but-proven supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.   This gas has been headed for the center of our galaxy for a few years now.  Here are direct images from the ESO Southern Observatory in Chile:

 

You may have been resigned to thinking of the center of our galaxy as a featureless thing resembling the yolk on a fried egg.  But the new telescopes, like Chile-ESO, can peer inside this opaque egg yolk.  The images above are all images of massive stars orbiting inside this previously secret place in the center of our Milky Way galaxy.   The stars' motion makes more sense when viewed as an animated video from the European Space Observatory.  

 Stills from an animation artist's conception of the upcoming gas carnage, which will last for the next 20 years or so:

 

In both stills shown above the moving stars of our inner galactic center are shown in white while the doomed gas cloud is shown in orange, both before encountering the black hole (left) and after (right). 

 

Earth Knows a Turtle by Name

Lonely George passed recently, aged 100+ years.  The Galapagan giant tortoise is so famous that when you type his name into Google Earth, the globe does a little half-spin and plops you down near the southern beach, where George lived!    Known by Google Earth!  Many of us could do worse for a legacy. . .

 

Cooking With Hexagons, circa 1997

Dr Rajanbabu, my mentor at Ohio State is doing well.  I see he got a second publication into SCIENCE. 

For an organic chemist, Science or Nature are the non plus ultra place to publsh.   Getting research into that journal twice in a lifetime is an accomplishment.  

Dr. Rajanbabu's site still has a link to the molecule that bedeviled me in Columbus Ohio.  Everything in the picture below I accomplished between 1996 to 1998.  This is me cooking with chemicals:

Each of those arrows, a, b, c, and d, represents several weeks (for a slowpoke like me) of finding the method in the published literature, trying to tweek the conditions, doing it wrong, going back and re-doing it, getting it clean enough to make an NMR spectrum, and then going back and repeating it.   It was slow work, not entirely pleasant or interesting although it looks blithe and innocent in the above diagram.   There are many personal memories crammed into every letter, every detail of the above figure has significance for me the cook:

• NaH is a grey powder that smokes upon exposure to air.  It's that reactive.
• CCl4 is a proven carcinogen that noone else in the lab ever went near
• MeI is a beautiful little elegant way to add a carbon atom to a nucleophile and it came in a nice tiny brown glass bottle.  The iodine atom made the small bottle surprisingly heavy.
• that little part on step b that says hv   stands for "light".  I have vivid memory of junk picking a dirty white plastic reading lamp from behind the undergrad apartments and just runing that step of the recipe with a regular 100 watt bulb, not even ultraviolet light.
• all of those steps that say "90%" or higher would have been 60% or less in my hands.  They had one of the post-doctoral fellows run the reaction in skillfull hands to create those glowing yields of 90% throughput at each step.

Want to Test Your Fingerprint Knowledge?

I really enjoyed teaching the fingerprint unit in Forensics Class recently.   

There were many hands on things we were able to do, including one that I had always wondered about, how to 'dust' for a hidden fingerprint around a smooth surface like a doorknob or cookie jar. [That one it turns out is super easy to do at home and anyone with a child and time to spend should show the child how to do that because it's very satisfying.  The only trick is you need a make up brush, borrowed from the lady of the house. Search on You Tube for any of their examples of how to do the dusting.]

(Thanks to Juan in my first period class for the fingerprint image at right, obtained by rubbing his finger with a pencil and then touching that to Scotch Tape.)

I invite you to try out below one of the questions I wrote for their exam.  I was worried whether I had worded it clear and unambiguously {always tough when addressing to a mixed group of teens} but there were zero issues with wording.  I will put the answers down in a post below this one. . .

 

Question #19.  

In each blank write  looks the SAME  or looks  DIFFERENT 

1. _____Your left thumb 1 day before you were born and your left thumb now.
2. _____Your left thumb, your mother’s left thumb
3. _____the print you leave on a door knob and the print that is on your finger
4. _____your left thumb and your right thumb
5. _____the left thumb of a twin and the left thumb of the other twin
6. _____the right thumb of Barack Obama when he was 2 years old and  the right thumb when he was 40 years old
7. _____Your left middle finger when you were a  20 week old fetus and when you were a 1 week old fetus [fetus is you before you were born]

 

Fingerprint Test Answers

(answers to Question 17 from above)

1. same
2. different
3. same
4. different (for some reason I caught a lot wrong on this one)
5. different
6. same
7. different (the fetus fingertips change from smooth to folded in the tenth week of pregnancy, caused by the basal layer of skin growing too fast and folding up relative to the skin layers above and below it)

Unusual Nontraditional Periodic Tables

There are a few dozen periodic tables at this Ohio school's site.

Some are historic, others are modern and strange.