This interactive site allows participants to learn about skeletal anatomy by viewing the bones of a human, chimpanzee, and baboon. Users select a bone from the list of four bone types on the skeletal image, and launch the bone viewer. A detailed look at each bone from six viewing angle options is provided along with the option to select another bone or make a comparison with another species (chimpanzee or baboon). The Comparative Anatomy section enables users to make direct comparisons of bones. The material is appropriate for science teacher education as it illustrates how careful observation leads one to wonder about the dizzying beauty of a planet that works by bringing us one different creature after another.

VR Molecules presents dynamically and interactively the vibration and rotation modes for 24 molecules (out of a more extensive list) containing up to twelve atoms. It allows the user to create and save on his or her hard disk documents containing, much in the same way as Power Point presentations, up to 10 "pages", each featuring one or two molecules with specific parameters (viewpoint, active modes, etc.). These presentations can be made available through the Internet, with optional sound and text explanations associated with each page.The latest, augmented version of VR Molecules, called VR Molecules Pro 1.1, is available online as well as in a stand-alone version (Mac and Windows).To view a video of the award winning author, go to View VR Molecules - Chemistry Award Winner 2007 video VR Molécules est un logiciel de simulation (en ligne et en mode local) permettant de visualiser et d'explorer les modes de vibration et de rotation des molécules (24 molécules sont disponibles).Il peut tout aussi bien être utilisé par le professeur pour préparer des démonstrations en classe, intégrer des animations (interactives ou non) dans ses documents HTML, que par les étudiants pour revoir les démonstrations présentées en classe et explorer par eux-mêmes la vibration et la rotation des molécules.La plus récente version (1.12) de VR Molécules, est accessible en deux versions : en ligne et en mode local (à télécharger, pour Mac et Windows).

DNA from the Beginning is an animated tutorial on DNA, genes and heredity. The science behind each concept is explained using animations, an image gallery, video interviews, problems, biographies, and links. There are three sections, Classical Genetics, Molecules of Genetics and Organization of Genetic Material. Key features are the clear explanations of classical experiments and the excellent photographs of researchers and their labs.For information and credits on the development of DNA from the Beginning, go to http://www.dnaftb.org/dnaftb/credits.html

Here's your chance to mix chemicals without wearing safety goggles. You won't spill any acid on the spectrometer in this lab. Choose solutions from the vast database and mix 'em together till the cloned cows come home. Marvel as the chemical solutions react in real time.

The acoustics of musical instruments and the voice. The "Basics" directory introduces and explains general concepts. There are "Introduction to the Acoustics of [instrument name]", data bases, technical material, web services (including a hearing test) and a FAQ.

Educational physics applets designed to be scripted in JavaScript for use in quizzes, homework problems, and Just in Time Teaching activities. Includes applets that can be used in a wide range of classes and at different levels.

A collection of simulations and virtual labs focusing on first-year college physics. An interview with the award winning author can be found in About us at Phet Video

MecMovies is an extensive collection of examples, theory, and games designed to complement the entire Mechanics of Materials course. The software features impressive graphics and animation that are highly effective in visually communicating course concepts to students. Special emphasis is placed on developing the learner?s understanding and proficiency in basic concepts and skills through interactive exercises and games. Classroom implementation of the software has produced improved student performance and more positive student attitudes regarding the Mechanics of Materials course. To see a video with the award winning author, go to View MecMovies video

This provides text description and audio examples of various heart and breath sounds. The sounds are broken up into certain catagories. The heart sounds are divided into systolic, where you can hear aortic stenosis, mitral regurgitation, etc.., and diastolic, where you can hear mitral stenosis, aortic regurgitation, etc.. The lung sounds provide examples of cackles and wheezes.

The entry point to an extensive site concerning the nervous system and neuroscience. The site includes descriptive materials, experiments, activities, links to articles, resources for teaching neuroscience, and a listing of Internet resources related to the neurosciences.

As I was stuffing my face today, I wondered if the Universe cared. The short answer is no. The slightly longer and more depressing answer is: my existence is more marginal than a speck of stray DNA on a grain of sand staring at vast oceans (that's literally true, oh the irony...). Clearly, there's no point to existence except amusement. So, here's some:

On average, each of us human beings from birth till death consume about (2000 per day x 365 days x 70 years) calories. That is a pretty big number (51,100,000 calories).Big, of course, is a relative term. The big calories translates to about 0.00002 milligrams of matter. In the scheme of things--compared to, say, the amount of matter Sun converts to pure energy per second--, the amout of matter we manage to process in 70 years is stupefyingly underwhelming. Sun converts about 4,000,000,000 kilograms of mass to pure energy every second compared to our biological knickers-in-knots process*. Still, we are here and we can point a resounding finger at the Sun. That's quite something, isn't it? Life is an extraordinarily strange and fragile business whichever way you look at it (the strangeness includes the looking-at-it part too). Perhaps, in a thousand years, we may climb up the energy ladder, sit alongside stars and have a proper material breakfast of a few hundred tons of hydrogen. It would be way more amusing than what we do with the less-than-nothing we consume today. Of course, we've got to survive to do that.

*The comparison is sort of fudged. Sun does atom crushing, we don't do that. Sun literally converts the mass to energy. OTOH, we do a lot of very very minute electrochemical energy extraction. The comparison aims to show the scale of energies involved, which differ by orders of magnitude. Physics savvy readers please pitch in and clarify my muddle if needed. Read the comments on this post...

Seriously! Go have a look.

It seems my book The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math's Most Contentious Brainteaser made the list! And to think I wasn't planning to do a blog post today.

Browsing through the other entries, it looks like my reading list just got a bit longer. (Of course, they will have to get in line behind Stephen King's forthcoming magnum opus, coming out on Tuesday. But that's a different post...)

Read the comments on this post...

A bit of follow-up on the two experiments we described last week:

First off, the water cycle model.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Divining sticks that consist essentially of an antenna not even attached to a radio (which might make it slihgtly useful for listening to music and stuff), and costing between 16 and 60 THOUSAND DOLLARS each, are being used as the main technology for detecting bombs at check points staffed by the Iraqi army.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Here's a question which pretty much everyone gets wrong. But the readers of this blog aren't just a random sample, so I bet most of you will get it right:

Two identical vehicles A and B, both traveling at speed V directly toward the other vehicle, collide exactly head-on. At another test track, car C collides with an indestructible concrete barrier at speed V'. All other things being equal, the crash-test dummy occupants of vehicles A, B, and C will experience the same forces (and therefore injuries) if...

1. V' = V/2
2. V' = V
3. V' = 2V
4. Something else (explain)

How might the answer change if the A and B do not have equal masses?

I'll let my astute readers answer, but I'll give a place to start for those who want to make sure they're thinking from a physics perspective. Momentum is mass times velocity. Force is the time rate of change of momentum. Go from there. Also, in this case I have to suggest you not try to find the answer experimentally!

Read the comments on this post...

A puppet commenter informs me that El Naschie is suing Nature. El Naschie, you may remember, was the journal editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals who was accused of not reviewing his own papers in the journal. To be expected, I suppose. But the commenter that pointed this out is entertaining:Sarah Limbrick [Pontiff: writer of the above linked article about the suit] would surely be interested to know what the leading libel expert in England had to say about the Nature article complained of. He said he is in a state of disbelief that the worlds most respectable scientific journal Nature should publish an article which bears all the hallmarks of the tabloid press. Another interesting point is the conspiracy theory linking the plagiarism of El Naschies work published in Scientific American with the Nature article as well as a far worse article published in Die Zeit. Interestingly all of these three publications are owned by Macmillan. I understand from confidential sources that a mega surprise will be released at the trial engulfing highly reputed names some of whom are Nobel laureates.OOooh, Nobel laureates in a libel case and conspiracy theories to boot! That's bigger than the Scopes monkey trial!

Read the comments on this post...

It's hard to believe that until 1929, we were pretty sure that the Universe consisted entirely of our galaxy, and everything else was inside of us.

Hard to believe that you can look at something like this and not think it was another galaxy like our own, isn't it?

Yet when you look in the visible light -- which is all they knew how to do back then -- this is what the pinwheel galaxy (above) looks like through a modern advanced amateur telescope.

Is it really so clear to your naked eye that this image is so different from the one below?

Believe it or not, this image is of a planetary nebula, or just the gas blown off by a single star as it dies and collapses into a white dwarf. It isn't obvious to me that they should have known back then that these "spiral nebulae" are so different from planetary nebulae. Take a look at another spectacular one...

...and maybe a few more general ones.

Yup, they're all just dying stars that form planetary nebulae, and they're all within our own galaxy. Why couldn't the spiral ones be in there too? Thankfully, we've learned a lot more, and our observing abilities simply dwarf what they were 80 years ago. Take a look at today's Astronomy Picture of the Day, and see if you can't tell instantly what's a planetary nebula and what's a galaxy.

But without the full power of what we have today, it isn't obvious without doing some serious astronomical analysis, like measuring individual stars in these nebulae, which is what Hubble had to do. So enjoy the nearby planetary nebulae and the distant spiral nebulae, and enjoy the fact that we don't have to get them confused anymore. (And, it's always nice to give you some pretty pictures to look at on a Friday.)

Read the comments on this post...

It seems like I've been stepping on a lot of people's toes lately, so in an effort to foster more camaraderie and less belligerence between the "old media" (this is not derogatory, but rather refers to anything pre-internet news source or classic journalistic source) and "new media" (this includes internet-era news sources, bloggers and the like), I'd like to put down my thoughts on the state of science journalism on the internet today.

1. I do not think all media is bad at science. There are a multitude of great science sources out there that handle the issues quite well, mostly associated with professional societies like AGU or APS or through more popular-slanted journals like Science or Nature.
2. I do think that science journalism (not science writing) is vital in news media and bloggers cannot fully replace - heck, I don't have time to track down and talk to all the players regarding a specific issue and that is where science journalists earn their bucks.
3. That being said, if you just look at an aggregator like Google News and look up a current interesting science topic, you'll find that a vast majority of sources are just not very good. Sure, there are the Live Sciences of the internet that handle the material well, but on the whole, there is a lot of misinformation being disseminated.
4. In my opinion, the problem is that many of these news sources are second-, third- or more-handing the news rather than looking at the primary source. This is because (a) they might not have anyone that can understand it; (b) they don't have the time to do it or (c) they don't care.
5. I also think that many media sources will look for the "hook" before looking for the real ramifications - this is the "eyes" problem with internet news: you need to get people's attention and fast. It started in TV news, with sensationalist coverage (Al Capone's vault anyone?) and the internet has embraced the format.
6. I also think the rampant antiscience sentiment in a lot of the US, combined with a lack of proper science education has promoted a generation (or more) that either (a) doesn't care about science and/or (b) doesn't understand enough to question some of these questionable sources.

So, how do we solve this?

1. We need to make science fascinating again. It has become so myopic in many fields - mostly thanks to the current academic structure to publish or perish. People are interested in science, just maybe not the Nd isotopes of minerals found in a specific hydrothermal pool in upper Mongolia.


2. We need our new Carl Sagans, Arthur C. Clarkes or Stephen Goulds - people who understand science and can advocate for it. I have trouble thinking of anyone filling those roles anymore.


3. We need to strength science education at all levels - and I'm not talking about standardized tests. I'm talking about teaching the scientific method and making people want to think about science and how it is done. That is what makes people interested, not memorizing the formulas for 100 minerals, but rather how they form and what that can tell us about the Earth. Science should be a hands-on event that fosters thinking rather than memorization - the current educational system in the US emphasizes the later thanks to the love of testing we now have.


4. We need people who understand science and have been trained to become journalists. I hate to say it, but maybe we don't need another 1,000 science Ph.D.s trying to become professors, but rather they should try to bring their love of science to the public through journalism and writing.

I think that covers a lot of what I think about the state of science journalism on and off the internet. I think the real problem is likely the deeper, societal anti-science sentiment that doesn't foster scientific thought. I also think that we've taken a lot of the wonder out of science - that sort of Victorian mentality that anything is worth pursuing because it might be interesting. The business model that only science that will have a practical end result or that will have a successful outcome has neutered a lot of the ingenuity of science. Science is about looking at the universe and thinking "this is amazing, how does it work?" and somehow we need to get back to that both in science as a discipline and society as a whole.

Read the comments on this post...

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.

Sol Lederman is the Consultant for US Dept of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a blogger. He also tweets for the Department. I interviewed Sol earlier this year, after his session at ScienceOnline'09. At the next conference, Sol will lead a workshop "Make your own social networking site with Drupal".

Chris Nicolini is the Web Producer and Editor for the American Institute of Physics and runs (and tweets for) InsideScience.org.

Lenore Ramm works at Duke Center for Instructional Technology, is an artist and a food blogger and a twitterer.

Tyler Dukes is a Web producer at News 14 Carolina and a freelance journalist in Raleigh, NC. He blogs on -30- and is on Twitter.

Ryan Somma is a software developer, works in USCG Aviation Logistics Center and is an amateur scientist at Port Discover Science Center in Elizabeth City on the coast of North Carolina. He blogs on Ideonexus and is also on Twitter.

Read the comments on this post...

Today's Quantum Optics lecture is about quantum computing experiments, and how different types of systems stack up. Quantum computing, as you probably know if you're reading this blog, is based on building a computer whose "bits" can not only take on "0" and "1" states, but arbitrary superpositions of "0" and "1". Such a computer would be able to out-perform any classical computer on certain types of problems, and would open the exciting possibility of a windows installation that is both working and hung up at the same time.

There are roughly as many types of proposed quantum computers as there are people working on quantum computation. It's not clear which of them, if any, will eventually prove to be useful, meaning that this is the perfect subject for a blog poll:

The quantum computers of the future will be based on:(survey)

While this is a poll about quantum computing, the machines running the poll are strictly classical, so you can only choose one option.

Read the comments on this post...