Image of the Week: How to Look Inside a Fish

Scientists Sandra Raredon and Lynne Parenti at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History use
x-rays to get an inside look at fishes like these Lookdowns (Selene vomer).
Image courtesy: Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

Scientists use all sorts of visuals to study the natural world, including graphs, maps and photographs. But some of the most beautiful scientific visuals have to be the fish x-rays taken by Sandra Raredon and Lynne Parenti, ichthyologists (scientists who study fish) at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.  Our image of the week is an x-ray showing three lookdowns (Selene vomer), silvery fish with a permanent "scowl" found mainly in warm waters of the western Atlantic.

The Smithsonian's fish collection contains about four million specimens, representing approximately 70 percent of the world's fish diversity, and Raredon and Parenti can study these specimens without having to dissect or otherwise damage them.  Their images help unravel the long history of fish evolution using clues, such as the number of vertebrae and positioning of fins, that are easily visible in x-rays.


LEARN MORE
Learn about how scientists use this technique and what they are learning from it on the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's exhibit page X-Ray Vision: Fish Inside Out.

Browse more of these beautiful x-rays on the NMNH Flickr page.

Learn about how visual data, whether x-rays or topographic maps, help scientists explore all kinds of topics in our module Data: Using Graphs and Visual Data.

Video of the Week: A Tribute to Rachel Carson and Silent Spring

"Over increasingly large areas of the United States spring now comes unheralded by the return of birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song." 

-- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring 1962 

Fifty years ago this week, Rachel Carson's now-famous book Silent Spring rolled off of the presses. It drew widespread attention to the effects of pesticides like DDT on wildlife and human communities and is often credited with launching the modern environmental movement in the United States. The title laments the loss of songbirds to unintentional poisoning.

As a child growing up on a farm in Western Pennsylvania, Carson learned to love and respect birds and other wildlife. Our video of the week is a tribute to Carson and her enormous impact on public understanding of ecology and environmental toxicology in the United States. The Eastern Towhee shown here is one of many birds Carson likely heard singing on her farm during her formative years.  Thanks in large part to Carson's eye-opening book, broad applications of pesticides have been reduced, and there's hope that we will never experience a truly silent spring.

LEARN MORE
Read a brief biography of Rachel Carson and excerpts from her often lyrical writings

Learn more about the Eastern Towhee (including listening to other audio clips of their songs and calls) as well as many other bird species on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds site

Read the first chapter of Lind Lear's Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, a detailed biography of Carson's life


Have you read Silent Spring or other writings by Rachel Carson? What did you think?

Image of the Week: Printing Blood Vessels and a Whole Lot More

In a paper published this week in the journal Advanced Materials, Dr. Shaochen Chen
demonstrated that blood vessels, which could eventually be used in artificial tissue, can be
created using a new 3D printing technique called dynamic optical projection stereolithography.   
Image courtesy: Biomedical Nanotechnology Laboratory, Chen Research Group, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Do you have a good printer at home?  What about one that can print you a new car part, a toy, or another 3D object?  It may sound bizarre, but 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing because a printer typically builds an object by slowly adding layers of material) is becoming more common in a wide range of contexts, including the battlefield and the medical field.

Our image of the week shows artificial blood vessels printed by researchers in the Biomeidcal Nanoengineering Lab at US San Diego.  Their technique uses light to trigger the formation of a solid 3D structure from a solution containing cells and biomolecules that are photo-sensitive (or reactive to light).  By carefully controlling the beam of light with a series of mirrors, they are able to fabricate tiny, intricate structures like those found in nature.  They believe the new process will lead to better tools for growing cells in the lab and could eventually even allow medical professionals to print tissues for regenerative medicine.

LEARN MORE
Watch an amazing video and read about another application of 3D printing that was recently in the news: a bald eagle named Beauty was given a prosthetic beak made on a 3D printer after being injured by a gunshot. (Warning: although there's a happy ending, images may not be suitable for sensitive readers and viewers.)

Read the Science Insider piece about the newly created National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute and the wide potential uses for and benefits of 3D printing.

Read yesterday's story in Reuters about how the business of 3D printing is starting to make its way into individual homes and garages.

Video of the Week: NASA's Perpetual Ocean Proves Data can be Art

Video courtesy: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Who says data have to come in a dry table? The scientists and animators at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) have made a career out of doing just the opposite. Using some of the same software tools employed by Pixar, they create images and animations that bring data sets to life and make them easier to understand--for both the public and the scientific community. Our video of the week, Perpetual Ocean, is one artful example of their work that recently became popular on social media. By synthesizing a numerical model and a slew of different types of data collected between 2005 and 2007, the SVS team has created a beautiful visualization of the "swirling flows of tens of thousands of ocean currents."

Enjoy.  Happy Friday.


LEARN MORE
Read a Q&A with Dr. Horace Mitchell, Director of NASA Scientific Visualization Studio from Mashable

Learn how the process of visualizing data can help scientists interpret it more easily in our module Data: Using Graphs and Visual Data

Image of the Week: The Science of Garbage (Infographic)

Different countries produce different types of waste. An inforgraphic included in the August 10th
edition of the journal Science compares data about waste from around the world.  G. Grullón/Science

When we think of garbage, we tend to think of municipal waste--the trash (and recycling) that comes out of our homes and businesses.  But there's a whole lot more to the waste stream than just what we set out on the curb.  The August 10th special issue of the journal Science, "Working with Waste," looks at both municipal waste and aspects of waste stream we tend not to think about, like leftovers from agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and sanitary (sewage) systems.

Our image of the week gives a tiny taste of one of the many resources included in the special section: a four-page infographic that visualizes and compares data about garbage from around the world.  This image shows a comparison of the types of municipal solid waste thrown away in France and the United States from 1980 to 2005. View the full infographic, or download a pdf.

While some of the scientific papers in the section require a subscription, many of the other resources (like the infographic) are available free for the next month:

• Read an overview from the editors about why and how some scientists are working to turn trash into treasure

• Listen to the "trashcast" covering Grabology 101; the challenges of recycling rare and precious metals from consumer products; and getting over "the yuck factor," a purely psychological barrier to handing human waste efficiently
 
• Watch a video about efforts to invent a "Toilet 2.0" that more efficiently deals with human waste

For more about visualizing scientific data, see our module "Data: Using Graphs and Visual Data."

Image of the Week: New Fossil Skull Fragments Suggest Greater Complexity in Humanity's Family Tree

The cranium known as 1470, which was discovered in 1972, is shown
pieced together with a lower jaw discovered in Kenya in 2009 and
believed to belong to the same early Homo species.
© Photo by Fred Spoor

In 1972, archaeologists working in Kenya unearthed a mystery: a partial skull with a long, flat face and a large cranium. For the first half of the 20th Century, scientists thought the evolutionary tree for modern humans (Homo sapiens) was pretty simple. We had evolved from Homo erectus on a fairly straight and branchless path, with evidence of only one other Homo species (dubbed Homo habilis) that predated and overlapped with Homo erectus. But the skull, known as 1470, suggested that there might have been another Homo species--a distant cousin of modern humans--living in Africa alongside our direct ancestor Homo erectus about 2 million years ago. With only one specimen to go on, scientists disagreed about whether 1470 truly represented a separate species or simply showed the range of variation in the previously known Homo species.

This week, scientists announced that they had found portions of three additional skulls, which appear to confirm that 1470 was not a complete anomaly and suggest that there were two additional Homo species living alongside Homo erectus. Our image of the week shows one of the new fossils, a lower jaw bone, fit together with 1470 (with the help of computer imaging).

Even with the new evidence, the debate continues about how many distinct Homo species were living in Africa between one and two million years ago. What is certain is that scientists have a new reason to closely examine the shape and complexity of our family tree.

Learn More
Read more about the discovery in the New York Times, Science News, or the press release from the Turkana Basin Institute and National Geographic.

Image of the Week: NASA's Curiosity to Land on Mars Sunday

An artist's rendering of Curiosity in the Gale Crater on Mars. Image Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech

You can bet that scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be at work late this Sunday.  In fact, they'll likely be at the edge of their seats until at least 10:31 pm local (Pacific) time--that's when the new Mars rover Curiosity is scheduled to touch down and begin its search for evidence of life on  the Red Planet. Just landing the car-sized rover safely in Mars' Gale Crater will be a feat of physics. (Among other things, it requires a maneuver engineers call a sky crane, which involves lowering the rover on a cable from a hovering rocket stage released by a passing spacecraft.)

Once Curiosity has its wheels under it, it will be a rolling geology and chemistry lab. It's equipped with cameras, a drill, a sieve, analytical tools for assessing the chemical composition of air and soil samples, and laser called the "ChemCam" that can vaporize bits of rock from roughly nine meters (30 feet) away and test their composition. Our image of the week shows an artist's rendering of the Curiosity examining Martian rocks with a set of tools at the end of its two-meter (seven-foot) arm.


LEARN MORE
Visit NASA's "Follow Your Curiosity" page to see more images, watch a video simulation of the Curiosity's landing, download fact sheets about the rover, or find a landing party in your state.

TELL US
Will you be watching?  If you're an educator, are you using the landing as a teaching opportunity?

Video of the Week: EU's 'Science, It's a Girl Thing' Stirs Controversy

This week the European Union launched a new initiative called "Science: It's a Girl Thing" aimed at encouraging more young women to pursue STEM careers.  Their promotional video clip drew a lot of attention--although not the kind they had hoped. In fact, they were so besieged with complaints that the video was superficial and filled with stereotypes that they withdrew it and issued an explanation and apology.  The clip, still available through YouTube, is our Video of the Week.

We hope you'll watch it and share your opinion in the comments below or on our Facebook page:

What Others are Saying
Mary Ann Rankin, President and CEO of the U.S. National Math and Science Initiative, calls the video "a viral disaster" but notes that many of the other materials for the initiative are "quite good."  In particular, she points to a series of video profiles featuring female scientists produced by the campaign and a section called "Six Reasons Science Needs You," which makes the case for women to get excited about STEM opportunities.

In a statement, the European Union explained the rationale behind the video clip and said it will continue the "Science: It's a Girl Thing" campaign sans music video:

The 45-second clip was intended to put this in a lighter context, to grab the attention of teenage girls aged 13 to 18 who have up until now been very hard to reach with messages about science. The goal was to attract their attention so that they might look at the campaign in detail, visit the website where there is lots of information on science and careers in research, including video-profiles of role models.

The concept of the trailer was to combine images of science (such as electronics, mathematics, chemistry, physics) with images closer to cosmetics and fashion to show teenage girls that science is already part of their life.

What do you think?  Is the video effective?  Offensive?

Image of the Week: Has the Elusive Higgs Boson been Found?

Unless you were hiding under a rock this week, you likely heard the buzz about the Higgs boson (or perhaps more accurately the "Higgs-like particle"). The sub-atomic particle, proposed in 1964 by Peter Higgs and other theorists, has eluded scientist for decades. But on Wednesday July 4th, scientists announced that they had amassed enough evidence to officially describe a new sub-atomic particle--one with characteristics closely matched to the long-sought-after Higgs boson.

Image © 2012 CERN

For two years, physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland have been smashing protons together at high speeds and observing the crash sites with sensitive detectors. They were looking for signs that the collisions had (at least occasionally) emitted a Higgs boson, which according to its theoretical properties would immediately decay into other particles. Our image of the week is a computer rendering of one of the experimental collisions. The yellow dotted lines and green towers radiating out from the crash show characteristics matching what scientists would expect to observe as a Higgs boson decayed into a pair of photons.

By examining the subatomic shrapnel from trillions of collisions, the scientists were able to conclude that they had indeed shaken loose this new Higgs-like particle.  This is big news because the Higgs boson is the last piece "missing" (undetected by science) from the "Standard Model" of particle physics that describes the structure of matter and our universe.

While the researchers are cautious about saying that the particle they have observed is definitely the Higgs boson, they are certain that it's a huge discovery for physics. And the possibility that it's a different, as-yet-unpredicted particle is equally as exciting. To gain a clearer picture of the discovery, the research teams will gather as much data as possible before the LHC shuts down for a two-year period of maintenance and upgrades.


Bonus footage! We selected an image of the week, but we couldn't resist sharing this video as well. NOVA produced it last year when scientists were still searching for evidence of the Higgs boson. It's a little dated in that respect, but it gives a nice, quick explanation of the Higgs boson and an interview with Peter Higgs.

Watch The Higgs Particle Matters on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Dig Deeper
Learn more about the LCH, the massive (27-kilometer-long) particle accelerator, where scientists labored to find evidence of the Higgs boson

Read the Science News story "Higgs Found" by Alexandra Witze

Image of the Week: Solar Eclipse Dazzles

This past Sunday, observers in and parts of Southeast Asia and North America witnessed an annular solar eclipse--an arrangement in which the moon shades out most but not all of the sun, leaving a bright ring around the dark lunar form. Although Earth-bound viewers couldn't look at the eclipse directly with naked eyes, the Hinode spacecraft snapped some dazzling shots, including the one below. Hinode, a joint venture between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is cruising in low-Earth orbit to help scientists study the sun's magnetic field and energy releases.

A picture of the annular solar eclipse on May 20, 2012, captured by the Hinode spacecraft.
Image Courtesy: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

To see more images of the eclipse and the wild shadows it created, visit the 2012 Annular Solar Eclipse Group on Flickr.

Then tell us: did you witness the eclipse? Where were you, and how did you view it?

Using Skype in the Classroom

One of the benefits of incorporating new technology into the classroom is that it allows the teacher and students access to things they otherwise wouldn't have access to. In today's post, we'd like to highlight the benefits and uses of Skype -- the free software that allows for video conferencing.

What you need:
Skype is installed onto a computer (PC or Mac), so it goes without saying that your classroom will need a computer with internet access. Because it is a video conferencing tool, you will also require a camera and microphone. These last two do not need to be particularly hi-tech. In fact, combination units can easily be picked up at many stores for around $10. If your computer system happens to accommodate an overhead projector, that will be of use as well because it will allow all the students in the class to see the person/people they are speaking with.

How you can use Skype:
In the 'old days' -- meaning, pre-1990s -- it was quite common to be set up with a pen pal through school. Writing to a pal on the other side of the country or ocean helped young people practice their penmanship, learn about other cultures, and build communication skills. In today's day and age, pen pal programs are less common. However, new technology (like Skype) can be used to interact with folks outside of the classroom in other ways. For example, you can use video conferencing to:

• talk with students in classrooms in other states or countries.
• have discussions with scientists working in different fields (it's far easier than trying to bring that scientist into your classroom proper).
• create research projects with students or classes in another place.
• have specialists provide tours of places students would never have access to.
• provide students access to lectures or presentations they can't physically travel to (with permission).

The initial set-up of the computer takes a matter of minutes, and making the connections for such video conferences can be built into classroom activities. Make students responsible to contacting potential scientists or specialists for conferences (with instructor direction). Ensure that students do their research prior to any conference so that they have thoughtful questions to pose. With a little bit of planning and preparation, you can have your students building important connections in no time at all!

Do you use multimedia or new technology in your classroom? We'd love to hear how you incorporate them. How does it affect your teaching and students' learning?