Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science focuses on the work of Felice Frankel. She's a photographer at MIT who works with scientists to take cool photos of their work. The photo above was taken of a ferromagnetic fluid on a glass slide with seven magnets underneath. There are several other of her photos displayed in a recent New York Times profile of her. She has one book of photos (On the Surface of Things) that's out of print, and another (Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image) that is intended for photographers.

If anyone can point me towards a source for her prints, I would appreciate it.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science was posted recently on Pharyngula. I've already watched it about 15 times, it's very cool. This video shows a small cephalopod un-camouflaging itself and fleeing from a diver. Very cool, it manages to change the color of its skin in just over 2 seconds.



PZ Myers has an interesting discussion about the ability of cephalopods to camouflage themselves so quickly. Read it here.

Update:

Here's another video where you can get a really good idea of how quickly they can change color. In this case, it appears the cephalopod is dead, and yet it continues to change color.

62nd Skeptics' Circle

The 62nd Skeptics' Circle, entitled It's The Show That Never Ends! is up at Polite Company. Take a gander.

If I only had a brain.

It came to my attention today that whether or not the brain is important to the human organism is still an open question. No, really.

Denyse O'Leary, a frequent intelligent design advocate at Uncommon Descent writes in her post entitled Brain: Do you really need a brain?:

Recent research has cast doubt on just how neurons transmit information in the brain, and some wonder just what role the brain as a whole plays in thinking.

Beg pardon? What role the brain plays in thinking? I thought this problem had been solved quite some time ago... But no, she presents this anecdote from Richard Milton:

In 1970, a New Yorker died at the age of 35. He had left school with no academic achievements, but had worked at manual jobs such as building janitor, and was a popular figure in his neighbourhood. Tenants of the building where he worked described him as passing the days performing his routine chores, such as tending the boiler, and reading the tabloid newspapers. When an autopsy was performed to determine the cause of his premature death he, too, was found to have practically no brain at all.

What, no data? Watch, I can do that too. I knew a guy in college. He doesn't have a liver. Or a heart. Nice guy. I wonder what role the heart plays in pumping blood... Apparently not an important one. (hint: I'm lying).

But wait, Mr. Milton has more to contribute to this important topic:

what on earth is the brain for? And where is the seat of human intelligence? Where is the mind?

Watch for it. Next you'll be hearing demands for medical schools to teach the controversy.

Update: Thanks to Paul for pointing me towards the original proprietor of this anecdote: John Lorber. An brief news report was published about him in Science over 20 years ago. Nonetheless, in the intervening period, apparently he has never published proof of his brainless wonder.

I only wish...

... that I could some day publish a paper that has as cool a title as this:

Threatening a rubber hand that you feel is yours elicits a cortical anxiety response

Why teaching science properly is important

This is an old one, but a good one.

(click on cartoon to enlarge it)

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science comes from NASA. Observations from the Hubble allowed astronomers to map out the distribution of dark matter.

Although astronomers cannot see dark matter, they can infer its existence in galaxy clusters by observing how its gravity bends the light of more distant background galaxies, a powerful effect called gravitational lensing. The blue streaks near the center of another Hubble image of the cluster are the distorted shapes of more distant galaxies, whose light was bent and magnified by the powerful gravity of Cl 0024+17.

This photo is a map of the dark matter that they found, superimposed on a photograph taken by the Hubble space telescope. What is dark matter?

[Dark matter] is an invisible substance composed of atoms that are far different from those that make up the universe’s normal matter, such as stars and galaxies.

In fact, if you drove into a wall made of dark matter, you wouldn’t crack a headlight or inflate an airbag. You wouldn’t even know it happened. But what happens to dark matter during a collision?

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope got a first-hand view of how dark matter behaves during a titanic collision between two galaxy clusters. The wreck created a ripple of dark matter, which is somewhat similar to a ripple formed in a pond when a rock hits the water.

The ring's discovery is among the strongest evidence yet that dark matter exists. Astronomers have long suspected the existence of the invisible substance as the source of additional gravity that holds together galaxy clusters. Such clusters would fly apart if they relied only on the gravity from their visible stars. Although astronomers don't know what dark matter is made of, they hypothesize that it is a type of elementary particle that pervades the universe.