Element FYI

An anonymous do-it-yourselfer who goes by the name of JavaMoose on Flickr built his own deep-towed underwater camera using PVC tubing, a color camera, and a black and white camera capable of seeing in the dark with infrared illumination. A 100-foot-long cable provides power to the cameras and connects them to an external video capture device and laptop, which allow real-time monitoring and recording of the underwater images. You can see a slideshow of the construction and sample videos of underwater critters recorded by the cameras: Initial Testing, Second Run, and The Feeding Frenzy! In The Feeding Frenzy, JavaMoose and his crew dropped bait into the water and managed to record a swarm of little fish around the color camera. The videos come complete with a clever selection of soundtracks to get you in the spirit. (PS: We'll gladly post his name if we ever find out his true identity.)

Literature.org, the free, online library, has dozens of complete, unabridged books from English literature as well as a few science texts available for you to read online. Three works by Charles Darwin are available on the site, including The Voyage of the Beagle, two editions of The Origin of Species. and The Descent of Man. The site can get away with posting the works online because the authors have been dead for at least 75 to 90 years.

Just as the U.S. is losing its lead in basic scientific research, "Congressional support for boosting U.S. academic research this year slammed head-on into other national needs and a growing demand to curb federal spending," reports Science in the Jan. 6 issue. "The resulting crackup has left the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with its first cut in spending since 1970 and the National Science Foundation (NSF) with an increase that only regains lost ground and mocks the recent rhetoric about the importance of a 7-year doubling of its budget.... Basic and applied research spending across all federal agencies will inch up by $1 billion in 2006, to $57 billion, according to an analysis by AAAS (which publishes Science). But the lion's share of the increase went to preparation for NASA's moon-Mars mission, a bump that helped NASA achieve an overall 1.5% increase, to $16.5 billion. Even a 2.1% increase in the Defense Department's $73 billion research and development budget masks a 2.9% drop in its $1.5 billion basic research account and a flat budget for the $3 billion Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).... NIH and NSF officials have been told to expect little or no increases, with another cut likely in NSF's education programs and no money for any major new scientific facilities. But last-minute agency appeals were still pending at press time, leaving some officials hopeful that White House budgeteers might be listening to the recent drumbeat of support to boost investment in research and training."

Yes, that is a bike with a rocket on its rear. No, you shouldn't try to build one of these yourself, unless of course you actually happen to be a rocket scientist. Tim Pickens, who not only is a rocket scientist, but is president of his own rocket design firm, built a 200-pound-thrust rocket engine that attaches to a bicycle for a mere $750 and lots and lots of work. The rocket blasted his bike from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 5 seconds - as fast as a Porsche. According to Popular Science, "the rocket bike employs the same hybrid rocket technology as the suborbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, whose propulsion system Pickens helped design. In place of synthetic rubber fuel, however, the bike uses ordinary roofing tar. To ignite it, Pickens placed a model-rocket motor inside the engine. A button on the handlebar fires the model-rocket motor, which in turn sets off Pickens's larger motor by lighting the roofing-tar fuel. His next project is to build a company car: a pickup truck with a removable 2,000-pound-thrust rocket strapped into the bed." We all can see where this is headed, and let's just say it isn't pretty; no, not when your helmet has melted around your head.

There are lots of fun online videos covering science topics that we hardly ever take the time to review. So as the work week winds down, take a look at these when the boss isn't watching.

EPIC 2014: How will you get your news in the future? In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?

NASA TV: NASA has replaced its analog TV program with digital TV online. Watch NASA TV live feeds about the International Space Station and other on-going science programs. It's like CNN for space science.

Richard Feynman Lectures: A series of four lectures, the Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures, were given by Feynman at the University of Auckland in 1979 and are now available on digital video. The lectures cover photons, quantum behavior, Feynman diagrams and particle interaction, and an overview of the state of the science in quantum physics (circa 1979). The video quality is excellent and the lectures can be understood by non-scientists. Hosted by the Vega Science Trust.

The award of the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) management contract to the University of California on December 21 by the U.S. Department of Energy is being criticized by the editors of top science journal Nature in the January 5 issue. A consortium led by the University of California and industrial engineering partner Bechtel corporation beat out a challenge by a group led by the University of Texas and Lockheed Martin. In an editorial entitled "No new start at Los Alamos," Nature writes, "Once, this news would have led to celebrations among the 8,000 or so University of California staff at Los Alamos. But their mood is instead forlorn. Staff pensions and other benefits are not guaranteed under the new arrangement, and recent actions by the University of California have eroded goodwill. ... The process by which the Department of Energy awarded the contract has been murky, even by the usual standards of such exercises. Few believe that the department's grey-suited administrators really made an independent choice. Rather, the process was characterized by delays and heavyweight political lobbying from Senator Pete Domenici (Republican, New Mexico), among others. That's par for the course, as the 'management crisis' at Los Alamos has always been more about Washington politics than about actual administrative issues at the lab." This was the first time that the contract has come up for rebidding since Los Alamos National Laboratory was established in 1943 to develop the first atomic bomb and was triggered by recent security scandals and claims of espionage, which in fact aren't all that new at LANL. More on the reaction to the LANL contract decision can be found in LANL: The Real Story, an insider's blog by retired LANL computer scientist Doug Roberts.

Catching up on the latest science news is a pain if you have to click to a dozen different websites. Now iTunes has over 40 free science podcasts that you can download and listen to on your commute to work. Most of the major science news organizations have podcasts listed there, including Science, Nature, New Scientist, and Discovery. NASA produces its own podcasts such as one on the Spitzer Space Telescope, which presents newscasts on recent science discoveries, alien asteroid belts, star formation, and more. Smaller science groups you may have never heard of are there too like The Naked Scientists, a weekly live radio show by Dr. Chris Smith from Cambridge University, who just happens to be an expert on ... herpes! Just download the latest podcasts every morning, and you'll be the smartest kid in the room by the time you get to work. Don't have iTunes? Download it here.

The Cascades Volcano Observatory of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has released truly awesome videos created from photos taken daily by an automated digital camera on the Sugar Bowl Dome, located 2.3 km (1.4 miles) north-northeast of the vent. The camera, on loan from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, was installed on October 10, 2004. The camera snaps one photo every 3 minutes and sends a picture to observatory scientists once every hour. The pictures shown in this movie were taken from June 16 to August 16, 2005 - only two months! The video shows the dome on the left rising then collapsing as the dome on the right diverts the flow of magma. The current status as of today (Jan. 3) of Mount St. Helens is at volcano advisory alert level 2, color code ORANGE. Small earthquakes are being recorded every 2-3 minutes with intermittent larger events. According to the USGS, "The eruption could intensify suddenly or with little warning and produce explosions that cause hazardous conditions within several miles of the crater and farther downwind."

Nature released in its December 22, 2005 issue a timeline of events in the scandal involving South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang, who not only exhibited questionable ethics by using eggs from a junior female lab member, but faked his headline-making cloning experiments. The harvesting of eggs from a junior lab member was supposedly uncoerced, but there is a high likelihood that there was pressure of one form or another in this high stakes game of big-money research. As they say, where there's smoke, there's fire. The South Korean media reported the source of the eggs on November 21, and less than a month later, on December 13, reports surfaced that Hwang and his team had faked data from their 2005 Science paper, in which Hwang's group claimed to have established 11 embryonic stem-cell lines from the skin cells of individuals. In a related article in the same issue of Nature (see Where now for stem-cell cloners? (subscription required)), scientists say that "complete loss of confidence in Hwang's work has set the field back by years. It has also taken away what seemed to be firm confirmation of the feasibility of using cloning to produce patient-matched stem cells."

Cell phone: check. Laptop: check. Digital camera, iPod, PDA: check, check, check. Chic, cozy place to store and charge all these gadgets: Huh? If you're like most people, you probably have a half-dozen cords dangling between your electonic gadgets and a powerstrip against the wall or else the gadgets themselves are scattered throughout the house and plugged into various outlets. Not only is it unsightly, but it takes up valuable space. Now the technology furniture company, Anthro (as in anthropology, get it?), has come to the rescue with eNook, a wall-mounted charging workstation. eNook allows you to charge all of your gadgets, including a laptop computer, in a sleek hideaway that's attached to the wall and opens up to create a handy little desktop. It's especially useful if you work at home and want to hide away your desk when you're done for the day. The inside panel is covered with your choice of fabric and doubles as a bulletin board. Anthro's asking price is $399 plus $29 for the interior metal shelves. If you're feeling short on change, the DIYer in me thinks you could make one of these yourself with some enginuity and a trip to the hardware store. [Ed.: Add a lock to the cabinet, and you'll have added security for your gadgets as well.]

The December issue of Wired magazine contained a short article and data report on where the U.S. stands relative to other nations in spending on research and development, number of researchers per 1,000 people, total number of Ph.D.s., and number of published scientific papers by origin. The U.S. consistently falls at or below average by these measures, particularly when it comes to research spending, where China is spending more than twice as much on science as a percentage of gross domestic product (6% of GDP) than the U.S. (2.5% of GDP). Of course, this comparison doesn't consider private sector spending in the U.S. Ironically, the Wired article by Greta Lorge cites the breakthrough research on cloning of human embryos by South Korean scientists as evidence that the U.S. has lost its lead in biotech. But as the world learned last month, the stem cell research has been found to be fraudulent, and the lead South Korean scientist, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang, admitted to fabricating evidence, casting doubt on his entire body of work. The scandal simply demonstrates how much pressure is on scientists and nations to be first in the science race. Perhaps the more important question isn't why is the U.S. falling behind, but why don't Americans seem to care? In science, it only matters who is first with a scientific breakthrough. Not only are there no awards for Number Two, but top scientific journals won't publish articles by also-rans unless they add something new to the story. Even then, there is little glory in merely adding another decimal point.

Of all the science stories and weblinks that were posted to the Element List website this past year, none were nearly as popular with readers as our post in November on the MIT graduate student article "On the Effectiveness of Aluminum Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study," by Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter. Looking through the lead author's website, Rahimi has a curious collection of alternative research articles, or hacks as they're more popularly known. Previous hacks by Rahimi include "How to Eat Muffins: Heuristic Considerations" and a traditional telephone handset attachment for cell phones. When he's not doing science, he apparently moonlights as the campus pimp. Just amazing. How does this busybody find time to spend with his girlfriend?

Imagine a world in which every child has a laptop that can connect with, among other things, the world's major news organizations, libraries, and universities? What could that child do? Better yet, what could they not do? In a new program led by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, children in developing countries such as Africa and China may finally have laptops of their own at a cost of under $100 per laptop. The laptops, scheduled to be distributed by late 2006 or early 2007, will be contain a 500MHz processor running the Linux operating system, 1GB of RAM, and a 1Megapixel color display. Costs will be kept down in part by redesigning the display to use a rear projection image or electionic ink, also developed at the MIT Media Lab. The laptops will be marketed directly to ministries of education particularly in Africa and China in bundles on the order of millions of units and distributed like textbooks, where larger orders will keep per-unit costs down. The laptops will have Wi-Fi wireless connectivity and will connect with each other in a peer-to-peer network "right out of the box". The only real limitation of the $100 laptops compared to more expensive models is that they will lack large amounts of hard disk space. The project is being supported by a consortium of companies including Google, Advanced Micro Devices, and News Corp.

An international team of scientists led by Dr. Ron Elsner of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center report that NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory satellite imaged low-energy (0.1 - 10 kilo electron volts) X-rays created by auroral activity, or 'northern lights,' above Earth's northern polar region over a four-month period in 2004, shown as the rainbow false-color images above a simulated Earth image. The colors represent X-ray brightness, with maximum brightness shown in red. Previous satellites had only revealed high-energy X-rays. According to NASA, "Auroras are produced by solar storms that eject clouds of energetic charged particles. These particles are deflected when they encounter the Earth's magnetic field, but in the process large electric voltages are created. Electrons trapped in the Earth's magnetic field are accelerated by these voltages and spiral along the magnetic field into the polar regions. There they collide with atoms high in the atmosphere and emit X-rays." Chandra was launched and deployed by the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999 to observe X-rays from high-energy regions of the universe, such as remnants of exploded stars.

If you only read Element FYI, the Element List blog, you're missing out on about 90% of the website. Element List subdirectories contain links to scientific research labs, educational websites, online data sources, science news sources, science jobs, weblogs, and more. To help you skim what's new in the various categories, we've reprogrammed the homepage to show the lastest posts in each main category. So scroll down and see what's new. As always, you can find the latest ten posts as well as the ten most popular posts from the entire Element List website on the left-hand sidebar. If you have a cool science website suggestion or if you've designed a science website or blog of your own, you can either post it yourself or email it to us. We only accept non-commercial websites for the directory with the exception of science magazines. If you want to help support the site, click our advertisers - that'll encourage them to support the site so you don't have to.

A one-year-old male hippo calf was found in the Indian Ocean off Malindi on December 27, 2004 after the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami devastated the region. The calf, named Owen, was then placed in Haller Park wildlife santuary in Kenya, where he met a giant male toroise named Mzee. According to Snopes.com, Mzee "was not immediately taken with the brash newcomer he turned and hissed, forcing the hippo to back away. Yet Owen persisted in following the tortoise around the park (and even into a pool), and within days the pair had forged a friendship, eating and sleeping together. Owen has even been seen to lick the tortoise, whom he regards as his new mother." Wildlife experts speculate that Owen was attracted to Mzee because his body shape and color are similar to that of an adult hippo. As of December 2005, Owen and Mzee are still together one year later.

Solar Austin, a non-profit organization devoted to the promotion of solar and other renewable forms of energy, is organizing the first Energy Freedom Challenge competition for the title "Clean Energy Capital of the U.S." The group received a $45,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in August to host the contest in its first year. The objective is to challenge U.S. cities to rely upon renewable energy sources for at least 50 percent of their energy consumption by 2025. Potential alternative energy sources include wind, solar, geothermal, methane, and biomass power. The Union of Concerned Scientists will be responsible for establishing the rules, metrics, and qualifications for the contest. Austin city officials see the contest and the "Clean Energy Capital" title as a way to create positive publicity and attract new businesses and residents. (via alt-e blog)

One of my favorite words is dodecahedron. If you've ever taken a mineralogy class, you should know that garnets are natural dodecahedrons. The name refers to the number of faces, twelve, which also happens to be the number of months in a year. How conveeeeeenient. Ole Arntzen at the Institutt for Informatikk in Norway has created a website that shows you how to make your own dodecahedron calendar. Just type in the year, language, your preference for the week start day, and either PDF or PostScript format. You even have a choice of a regular dodecahedron or a rhombic dodecahedron. Then follow the instructions on the website for folding your print out origami-style into a perfect little dodecahedron. (Hint: You might want to use extra stiff paper.)