WBEZ | Science

Bioluminescent creatures keep predators at bay

Sat, 04 May 2013 08:00:00 -0500

When I was in my early 20s I traveled to Puerto Rico on vacation with some friends from high school. We sat on the beach and drank fruity drinks with tiny umbrellas, visited the colonial fort in old San Juan (a place that, with its rolling green meadows and stone turrets perched just above the ocean cliffs, looked to me like Narnia) and for several days we stayed in a rental in Vieques.

The diminutive island eight miles east of the mainland was for many years a U.S. naval base. Much of the heavily forested island was made into a wildlife preserve, which is now off-limits. But the rest of the island has retained a similar kind of rural, unspoiled beauty. There are white sand beaches and coral reefs, and even feral horses that trot around the pastel-colored houses. But Vieques’ most remarkable natural feature is its Bioluminescent Bay.

I went to the Bio Bay at night, on a bus that departed from the tiny town of Esperanza and wound its way east along the coast. It was perfectly dark when we arrived, and silent, except for the sound of insects and giggling tourists. Our tour guides produced canoes, and we filed in by twos and threes, paddling out to the center of the bay.

The water was black and glassy, but at the appointed time we jumped in to meet the creatures that give the Bio Bay its name. As we landed in the murk with one splash after another, the water around us flashed with a bright, milky blue glow, illuminating our limbs and reflecting up onto our faces. I swept my arm through the water and watched as it left a trail of blue stardust lit up behind it.

The Bio Bay, you see, is home to millions upon millions of tiny, one-celled microorganisms called dinoflagellates – in this case tiny marine plankton that are among the earth’s many bioluminescent creatures. They produce their eerie light when they’re disturbed, as they were when we decided to take a midnight swim in their home.

“What’s the point of that light?” J. Woodland “Woody” Hastings asked at a recent Chicago lecture. The Harvard professor of Natural Sciences studies bioluminescence in creatures across the spectrum of life, from simple, one-celled bacteria to angler fish that swim in the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean and carry their light around with them.

Hastings said this is the question he’s invariably asked at his talks. In the case of one such organism he’s studied, a luminous mushroom found in the Brazilian rain forest, Hastings posited that the glow of the fungi attracts insects, which will eat the mushroom and help disperse its spores. But in the case of the plankton in the Bio Bay, my tour guide had another explanation: supposedly, he said, the glow was meant to act like a “burglar alarm,” meant to attract a secondary predator that would threaten and scare away the primary predator bothering the dinoflagellates.

As my tour guide spoke, I felt a blindingly painful sting on my left calf. A jellyfish that I could not see – but which had clearly seen me – had wrapped its tentacle around my leg. I hauled myself out of the water and back into the boat, howling with pain. Nature at work!

In the audio above you can hear Hastings’ account of another mystical spot of bioluminescent water, this time in the Indian Ocean, known to generations of sailors as the “milky sea.” And, you can hear more about the spectrum of creatures that cause our waters to glow like a softly lit siren.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Woody Hastings spoke at an event presented by the Chicago Council on Science and Technology in February of 2013. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

New supercomputer at University of Illinois may help predict the weather

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:07:00 -0500

Imagine being able to more accurately predict what happens before a natural disaster occurs. A new supercomputer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign may help us get closer to that reality.

Today the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is unveiling Blue Waters, a brand new supercomputer that is the first of its kind for a university.

Blue Waters is a 5500 square foot computer with over 10,000 computer processors, that can run more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second.

For comparison, the average home computer only contains 1 computer processor.

Trish Barker is spokesperson for NCSA.

Trish Barker, a spokesperson for NCSA says Blue Waters will enable researchers to make mathematical models for various environmental conditions which will help them figure out how to prevent or even preempt natural disasters.

“ A lot of what people are doing are mathematical modeling,” Barker said. ”They have equations that they feel do a pretty good job of what’s happening in the real world like a tornado or hurricane. They want to make models that match what’s happening in the world more and more closely. And that’s why they want more and more powerful supercomputers that enables them to do more calculations in a shorter period of time.”

In order to use Blue Waters, researchers must request time through the National Science Foundation. Once approved they can access the data through a login that will connect them to the supercomputer.

Barker said researchers can log in remotely even from a smartphone.

“They can study earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, how viruses infect our cells, high energy physics, the formation of galaxies, it’s really a very powerful tool across many different areas.”

There may be other supercomputers similar in size and power, but Barker says Blue Waters is the most powerful on any university campus.

At it’s peak usage it consumes about 12-13 megawatts of power which according to Barker is enough energy to electrify a small town.

Because of it’s large size, the university has placed the supercomputer in a large server room of 20,000 square feet that uses a passive cooling system.

The National Science Foundation funded an initial grant of $208 million toward building Blue Waters. And the state of Illinois provided funding for the 20,000 square foot building that houses it (and eventually other network data and equipment) for $60 million.

Way to go science! You found a squid.

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 21:46:00 -0600

Way to go, science! I am very proud of you.

You haven’t been up to much, lately, have you? I am still waiting to hear about that cure for cancer or cure for AIDS, not to mention the invention that disables cell phones in cars except for 911 calls. Have you really had much to say for yourself since, I don’t know, the cure for polio? It’s gotten to the point where your stock has gotten so low there’s been a backlash against you. Vaccines? Pssh. Hate them! Dinosaurs? Not in my back yard. Global warming? POLITICAL AGENDA.

But this week you delivered. In the form of footage of the giant squid.

I didn’t think you had it in you. I figured the giant squid was one of those things like “Bigfoot” or “black holes” or “germs” that everybody talks about but you can’t really prove. How could you really establish that the “giant squids” that kept washing up on the beach weren’t really just trash bits from some factory in Japan? Giant squids just started seeming like something some crazy old guy with syphilis drew in the middle of the ocean on an old-timey map to take up space.

But now we know that you’re not completely full of it, scientists. This is very exciting. However! You’re now going to have to step up your game. I guess this 3-D printer thing is pretty cool, but you know what comes next. That’s right. Unicorns. Show them to me, or else I’m going to lose faith in you all over again.

Reporter Joshua Foer explains how to remember everything

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

Science reporter Joshua Foer was standing outside the building where the U.S.A. National Memory Championship competition was taking place. He was there covering the event, which was new to him, and which he thought of as a kind of quirky curiosity.

A British competitor who had come to the American championships as a kind of “spring training” in advance of the world championships stood outside smoking a cigarette.

“You’re a journalist,” he said to Foer. “Do you know Britney Spears?”

No, Foer said. He did not.

Ah, it was too bad, the competitor replied. He had a dream of teaching Britney Spears some age-old memory-enhancing techniques on live television, to prove that anyone could learn to memorize hundreds upon thousands of random words or digits in a row, as he and the other would-be memory champs did every year.

Foer reasserted that he did not know the young pop star.

“But maybe you can train me,” Foer said.

That was the beginning of how Foer went from observer to competitor, training himself with those same memory-enhancing techniques, and eventually going on to win the 2006 U.S. championship. (He documented his journey in his much-praised book, Moonwalking with Einstein.) In the process, he also set a new U.S. record, memorizing the order of a randomly shuffled deck of playing cards in 1 minute 40 seconds. (His record has since been broken, and currently stands at 29 seconds.)

Foer went on to represent America at the world championships that year, where unfortunately, he “had his tuchas handed” to him by the Brits, the Germans and the Malaysians, among others.

But through his journey, Foer learned that the British competitor he met that first day was right: People who succeed at this memory thing aren’t geniuses. They aren’t smarter than the rest of us, nor do they have brains that are anatomically superior.

What they’ve done is trained themselves with a technique called the Memory Palace -- a mnemonic device that dates back to ancient Greece that allows users to trick themselves into using the visual and spatial parts of their brain to remember things that don’t always have a visual or spatial dimension.

In the tape above, Foer demonstrates the Memory Palace technique to the audience at the talk he gave at Elmhurst College last week. And in doing so, he proves that whether you’re Britney Spears or not, you too can turn an ordinary assembly hall into your very own Memory Palace.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Joshua Foer spoke at an event presented by Elmhurst College in February. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Leon Lederman's offer: 'Ask a Nobel Laureate'

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 09:54:00 -0600

On a rainy day in September, a crowd gathered outside the Wrigley Building in downtown Chicago. They were waiting in line to take advantage of a rare opportunity: A chance to ask a Nobel Laureate anything and everything they ever wanted to know about science.

In this case, the Nobel Laureate was Leon Lederman. Lederman won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1988 for his role in using particles called neutrinos to expand scientific research about the structure and dynamics of matter. His many accomplishments and accolades include time spent as the head of Fermi Lab and his status as the founder of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora.

For two hours Lederman tackled all kinds of questions from impressively smart, curious and science-savvy passersby. (Their questions were especially impressive if you believe what the media tends to say about how none of us are interested in science.)

An engineer in his late 70s asks for advice on how he could best use science to fight for social justice.

A gamer asks for help understanding how recent discoveries on the structure of a protein in the AIDS virus would help other scientists develop a cure.

A 7^th grader asks for input on what kind of experiment she could conduct for her school science fair. She is, she says, “interested in cats.” Perhaps Lederman could suggest a cruelty-free experiment she might conduct with her furry friends?

Unfortunately, for a man who has dedicated much of his life to science education, Lederman seemed to have trouble connecting to some of the answer-seekers that day.

A question from a woman who wanted to know whether we’ll ever see far enough in space to catch a glimpse of the Big Bang went unanswered, as did the request from the 7^th grade cat-lover.

But what became clear from many of Lederman’s answers that day was that at age 89 he remains as committed as ever to a scientific method rooted in skeptical inquiry, evidence-based conclusions, and results that can be duplicated. Whether it’s verifying new research that suggests some particles can move faster than the speed of light (Lederman very much doubts these findings) or atheists seeking rebuttals to attacks from their God-fearing friends, Lederman emphasized the need to be suspicious - and to provide your proof.

You can hear him argue on behalf of the scientific method in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Leon Lederman appeared on behalf of Street Corner Science and the Chicago Council on Science and Technology in September of 2011. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Top hair-raising research moments

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:18:00 -0600

Several weeks ago I had the pleasure of moderating a conversation among four scientists from local institutions, all of whom worked in rather unconventional “labs:” a mine shaft half-a-mile underground, a volcanic crater in Siberia, a racetrack in rural America.

The subject of the event was “Xtreme research” (cue air guitars!). You can listen in full via the link above (skip to minute 11:00 if you want to bypass my gobbledygook and cut straight to the panel). It was a really lively discussion and a great window into how science happens in unusual places. But for brevity’s sake, I’m including a few highlights here:

Hot foot

Albert Colman works in the geophysical sciences department at the University of Chicago, and he studies extremophiles – that is, organisms who like extreme conditions, such as boiling hot, oxygenless volcanic hot springs. His main venue is the Uzon Caldera in Kamchatka, off in far-eastern Russia. Beneath much of the ground there is basically boiling mud (think Yellowstone in Siberia), so nearly every step comes with the risk of punching through the crust into the inferno below. One time Colman was about to take a photograph there, and he stepped back just a bit too far, only to feel his booted foot sinking. This was quite perilous – like in quicksand, if you yank out your stuck foot you risk just working your way in deeper. Colman says it took a full minute to carefully extricate himself. When he did get it out, the footprint was already filling with boiling liquid.

Bat brain

Regina Rameika of Fermilab worked for a time in an underground lab in a Minnesota mineshaft. She studies the behavior of extremely elusive particles called neutrinos, which in this case are best observed deep inside the earth. Every trip in and out of the lab, including the construction of a 5,000-ton particle detector, had to go via one elevator, about 20-feet square. I asked Rameika what would be going through her mind on the way down, and she responded without hesitation, “bats.” The shaft is full of them, and she said her chief preoccupation on the way down is keeping them out of her hair.

Day at the races

Forrest Jehlik researches engine technology at Argonne National Laboratory, but much of his work takes place at speedways across the Midwest and South. He helps spearhead the “green racing” project, which aims to test uber-efficient engine designs in the context of circle-track racing. (He quipped that while his colleagues may have to fend off bears and bats, he has to worry about Coors-fueled locals who favor Ford, while he brings a Chevy.) At one race he and another engineer volunteered for pit crew duty. These guys are gearheads, to be sure, but not professional racing crew members by any stretch. At one point they improvised a fix to wring a few more horsepower out of the engine, which diverted a cooling system from the brakes. At one pit stop, Jehliks says the brakes got so hot they were “cherry red.” He says they burned through his gloves, and his skin, as he worked to remove them.

Gimme shelter

Doug Sisterson makes a beeline for the places where models of the climate don’t match up with the actual data. This typically means remote spots from Barrow, Alaska to Papua New Guinea. He’s a research meteorologist at Argonne, and he brings truckloads of cutting-edge equipment into inaccessible locales, to figure out what’s going on with the climate. He talks about caravanning his gear to an isolated village on the edge of the Sahara in Niger – a place where “if you forgot a roll of duct tape, it’s a long way to a Radio Shack.” When he got there he discovered that the site was completely exposed to the elements. So he asked the impoverished locals if they could help him build a research building. They enthusiastically complied, building a sturdy complex to house millions of dollars of sophisticated equipment, made entirely of what appear to be mud bricks.

It’s not at all clear that the skill sets needed to be a careful physicist or geochemist are anything like the skills needed to live and work in such extreme environments. I asked the scientists how they squared that disconnect. They all agreed: The common denominator is passion.

December 2, 1942: Enrico Fermi and atomic Chicago

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:15:00 -0600

The story begins with a letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. The celebrated physicist warned the president that Nazi Germany was developing the makings of an atomic bomb.

Roosevelt knew what would happen if Hitler got such a weapon. The president ordered a massive secret project to make sure the U.S. beat him to it. Scientists from all over the country were enlisted in the effort.

Early in 1942 Enrico Fermi and a team of physicists gathered at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory. Their goal was to develop a self-sustaining nuclear pile. This was the first step needed to produce the bomb.

Put simply, the scientists would arrange graphite blocks and uranium pellets in a certain way. Since nobody knew what would happen when the pile was finished, control rods were inserted as a safety measure.

A new lab for the project was being built in suburban Argonne. Then the construction workers went on strike. Fermi decided to push ahead without delay, using a room under the stands of Stagg Field, the university's unused football stadium. Since the university president probably would have vetoed the location, he was not told about it.

On the afternoon of December 2, after a hearty lunch, Fermi and his team tested the pile. The control rods were slowly withdrawn. The reactions of the materials were measured. Fermi made his calculations using the most advanced equipment available--a six-inch slide rule.

The scientists were nervous. If the pile got out of control, there might be an explosion, or a radiation leak, or any number of possibilities that hadn't even been imagined. Still Fermi pressed on, adjusting the rods and trying different variables. After four-and-a-half minutes, he gave the order "Zip in!"

"There was a small cheer," one of the team recalled. "The experiment was a success."

The atomic age was launched. Later Argonne Laboratory was finished, and Fermi's team moved out of its cramped quarters under the football grandstand. Argonne is currently operated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Back at the university, Stagg Field was eventually torn down to make way for a library. Today the site of the world's first self-sustaining nuclear reaction is marked with a sculpture--shaped like a mushroom cloud.

Event: An evening with Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:33:00 -0500

This Friday, October 21, author Deepak Chopra and physicist Leonard Mlodinow will be discussing the universally controversial topic of "science versus spirituality" at DePaul University. They will also sign copies of their new book War of the Worldviews.

An Evening with Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow

October 21, 2011, 6-8 PM

The Concourse at DePaul Center,

E. Jackson Blvd., Chicago, IL 60604

Fermilab's Particle Accelerator Shuts Down

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:00:00 -0500

Physicists who study the most basic building blocks of the universe have just said goodbye to a beloved giant in their field.

Not a fellow scientist. But rather, a machine. A huge device near Chicago called the Tevatron.

For about a quarter of a century, the Tevatron was the most powerful machine of its kind in the world. But scientists gathered to shut it down in a brief and bittersweet ceremony.

The Tevatron, located at the Fermi National Acceleratory Laboratory in Illinois, was designed to reveal the mysterious innards of tiny atoms. To do that, the machine had to be really complicated and really big. It sent bits of atoms racing through an underground tunnel four miles around.

Protons and antiprotons sped up to nearly the speed of light, then smashed together so that scientists could sift through the subatomic rubble for clues about hidden particles.

"It was a very interesting machine to work on in the first place, because we knew we were building something that had never been built before," recalled Roger Dixon, who has worked at Fermilab for over three decades.

He says people who worked closely with the Tevatron felt the machine had a real presence. "It definitely has a personality, and that started right away," Dixon said recently. "It had an attitude at the beginning."

As one operator wrote in recollections posted by Fermilab: "The Tevatron does not forgive mistakes and it punishes those who have the temerity to think they know what they're doing. The Tevatron taught me humility and gave me paranoia."

Dixon says caretakers endlessly battled things like floods, blizzards and weird equipment failures to keep the Tevatron running 24 hours a day, seven days a week — because it was worth it.

"This machine has certainly opened windows on the universe that you couldn't imagine opening before," he said. "It's done a great job."

For example, the Tevatron is where the top quark was discovered — confirming scientists' predictions about the fundamental nature of matter. And the technology inside this machine laid the foundation for an even bigger and more powerful particle collider that's just fired up in Europe, the Large Hadron Collider.

That collider is what finally made the Tevatron obsolete.

So today, a physicist named Helen Edwards stood in the Tevatron's control room. Decades ago, she led the construction of this machine. She got the honor of shutting it down, in a ceremony that was that was broadcast online.

When operations expert Bob Mau told her to, Edwards pushed a big red button. He pointed to a computer screen. "As you can see on the red display, the line has gone to zero," Mau announced, "so there is no longer any colliding beams of protons and antiprotons in the Tevatron."

Then he told Edwards to push a blue button, to turn off power to its four mile ring of superconducting magnets. The light on the button went off, but for a long moment nothing happened on the computer screen. Then, a green line began to drop. "There it goes," said Mau, adding, "it didn't want to give up so easy!"

The power faded away. And that was that.

The Tevatron's twitter feed and Facebook page announced simply, "It is done. The Tevatron is now off."

Fermilab invited all of its scientists to a party, a kind of wake for the beloved physics instrument. The researchers will now turn to other experiments, and the lab hopes to build new physics machines to probe elusive particles like neutrinos.

The silent Tevatron will eventually be opened up for public tours, to let people see the machine that was once the greatest in the world.

Lord, save me from the Krebs Cycle

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:57:00 -0500

Little kids love dinosaurs, bugs and exploring the woods. Science doesn't scare them; they find it fun — until 9^th grade. That's when most of us take our first biology class and everything changes. That's when we learn, not because we choose to, but because we know it might be on The Test, and too often, curiosity gets replaced by fear.

For me, of all the fear-inducing horrors of 9^th grade biology, the monster in the pack, the highest mountain of meaningless memorization is — do you remember this? — the Krebs cycle.

Oooh, the Krebs Cycle. If there were a single moment in high school when kids all over the country lose interest in the life sciences, it's right here: when their teacher shows them a diagram covered with mysterious acronyms, little dots and squiggly arrows pointing in different directions, and says, "This will be on the test."

What is the Krebs Cycle? It was created by a German chemist, Hans Adolf Krebs (of course, he would have that middle name ... though, truth to tell, he was Jewish and got kicked out of Germany) and it describes, in excruciating detail, how, say, a hamburger (rich with protein and fat) gets broken down chemically in a series of repeating steps, till it releases the energy that fuels the teeny batteries (or mitochondria) in your cells.

How food becomes energy, is, obviously, a very important thing to know, but when it's dumped on you in Learn-All-This-Or-Else form, a lot of 9^th graders just get scared. For some people, fear will push them through, but for many more, this is the beginning of the end. This is when you decide you don't want to learn any more science and that the science you're learning is being shoved down your throat like an uninvited hamburger.

But now comes the news.

We are living, you and I (and every 14-15 year old taking biology this year), in a new world, a world that feels our pain. These days, if you want to, you can zip over to Google, or your favorite browser, write in Krebs, and up will pop any number of alternate guides to the Terrible Cycle.

And many of them will be deliberately, almost giddily friendly. Take this hip hop version, "Oxidate It Or Love It," performed by Derrick Davis, a student at Stanford, and Tom McFadden, a biology instructor there. It's a riff on "Hate It or Love It" by 50 Cent, and "On to the Next One" by Jay Z. It's totally fun to watch, and very catchy ...

But did you understand what they were singing? In its friendly, unscary way, it's just as dense as the diagram at the top of this post. Instead of being frightened and mystified, this song leaves me giddy and mystified.

But we also live in an era of extraordinary popular science writing. So here are two sample paragraphs, just as brilliant in their way as the hip hop song, from Pulitzer Prize science writer Jonathan Weiner. Here's his description of the Cycle:

To power all of its molecular machinery ... each cell contains anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand mitochondria. And every one of those mitochondria contains a large collection of rotary motors. With every breath you take, you set off a long series of actions and chemical reactions that make those rotary motors spin around and around in every living cell of your body like zillions of turbines, windmill vanes, or airplane propellers. These rotary motors turn out a concentrated energy food, an energy-rich molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.
And this ATP, more than any other molecule in the cellular inventory, makes all the rest of the machines go. This is the fuel of all our mortal engines. Without ATP it would be useless for us to breathe in air, to drink and to eat. Without ATP, even the smallest piece of action in our bodies would slow down and stop.

You can see why Jonathan gets the big prizes. But as easy as this one is to read, it doesn't give you the details; it isn't meant to, it's a beautiful summary.

So where do you go if you want to explore the Krebs Cycle in a dense-but-friendly environment? Is there any realm where Krebs can be digested by a not very sciency 9^th grader?

Yes, yes and yes, I say. And here I quote the 19^th century educator John Dewey: "Understanding derives from activity." Kids learn when they want to know the answer, when they care. The place to learn the Krebs Cycle is any classroom where the teacher knows how to make you want to know. Teachers who teach to the test are failing their students. The videos can help. Popular science can whet the appetite, but when all is said and done, it's the teacher who shows you a hamburger and then shows you a human cell with an impossibly small battery part inside spinning a ridiculously small motor, who says "How can we break this burger down into bite size chemicals and power this motor?" If the 15 year old looks up, and says, "I don't know. How?" That's how you begin: with wonder.

A young teacher, Dan Meyer, who taught high school math for five years, has a similar critique of classroom learning (which is now a TED Talk) that he calls "Math Class Needs A Makeover." If you like, check him out. The extended quotation from Jonathan Weiner comes from his eloquent and moving book Long For This World, The Strange Science of Immortality (Harper Collins, 2010). If you want to see and hear more from Stanford's "Science Rappers," in 2009 they had a web hit with Regulatin' Genes; and for football fans, the Ohio State marching band does a Krebs Cycle demo on its 50-yard line that is, in its high steppin' way, incomprehensible.