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Benjamin Franklin flies a kite in a thunder storm. Frontispiece to The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 1848 (courtesy of The Royal Society)

The Royal Society, one of the world’s oldest scientific societies, turns 350 next year, but the British institution is starting its birthday celebrations a little early. Today, the Society launches an interactive timeline, Trailblazing, which highlights its publishing history by making the original texts of 60 of its most significant papers available online.

Have you ever wanted to read Benjamin Franklin’s own account of flying a kite in a rainstorm and discovering electricity? Now you can. (A Letter of Benjamin Franklin, Esq; to Mr. Peter Collinson, F. R. S. concerning an Electrical Kite)

Other highlights include:

• Isaac Newton’s theory of light and color, from 1672
• A 1763 treatise on the use of willow bark to treat fever, which would lead to the development of aspirin
• One of Caroline Herschel’s comet discoveries (she was the first paid female scientist)
• An 1826 paper on how the Earth’s atmosphere changes with altitude
• Proof that fingerprints are unique
• Barbara McClintock’s discovery of jumping genes
• James Watson and Francis Crick on the structure of DNA
• From 1965, the theory of continental drift
• Early writing on black holes by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose

There’s enough in the timeline to keep me reading well into 2010, when the Society’s celebrations pick up speed. I think I’ll tackle Franklin’s letter first, followed by Caroline Herschel’s comet discovery. Which one will you read?

Forget about bomb-sniffing dogs or cats that travel hundreds of miles to get home. If you’re looking for signs of intelligent life, no animal (and that includes you, chimpanzees) is as impressive as a bird. [Ed.: Of course Laura the birder would say that. We cat lovers know differently, of course.]

Birds can use scent, landmarks, magnetic fields, the location of the sun, the motion of stars and the plane polarization of light to navigate. Western scrub jays store food and retrieve it later, and if another bird sees them hide the food, they move it again for safekeeping once they’re alone. Alex the African Grey parrot (whose obituary ran in the New York Times) learned and combined human words and phrases. New Caledonian crows make and use tools to reach distant food, and, showing an impressive ability to solve complex problems, they can even use tools to get tools to get food. (My all-time favorite typo hints at just how hard it can be for mammals to accept that avians are so clever: the Guardian newspaper attributed the ability to bend a wire into a hook and use it to extract food from a bottle to a New Caledonian “cow” named Betty.)

Anyhow, even though I’m a birder and a bit of a connoisseur of birds-are-smarter-than-your-annoying-pet stories, I was surprised to see these videos of extreme tool use in green herons. Apparently they’ve learned that the bread people toss to ducks and other waterfowl also attracts fish. So they’ve started baiting the water themselves.

You can see other bait-fishing green herons here and here.

A supernova simulation (courtesy Argonne National Laboratory)

When compared with those Apple IIe computers I first used, sending a triangular “turtle” across the screen to draw a picture during Computer Lab in elementary school, the iMac I now work on seems incredibly slick in design, complex in function, and fast. Today’s supercomputers, though, and tens of thousands of times faster than any desktop computer, making it possible to complete tasks like simulating global climate that 20 years ago were the stuff of science fiction. In that time, supercomputers, like regular computers, have gotten cheaper and faster and become more common. Here are the 10 fastest:

10. Red Sky, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Performance: 423.9 teraflop/s
Red Sky is intended to be Sandia’s “everyday” computer, used for small- and medium-sized jobs, replacing Thunderbird. Sandia’s other supercomputers include ASCI Red and Red Storm, which are used in nuclear weapons research.

9. Ranger, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Austin, Texas
Performance: 433.20 teraflop/s
Ranger is the largest computer to be part of the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid. Academic scientists apply for time on the supercomputer to research a variety of subjects, including climate change, water resource management, and drug design.

8. BlueGene/P Intrepid, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois
Performance: 458.61 teraflop/s
Completed in 2007, Argonne’s Intrepid was used to simulate a supernova (stellar explosion) earlier this year.

7. BlueGene/L, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California
Performance: 478.2 teraflop/s
BlueGene/L was designed to address issues associated with aging nuclear weapons owned by the United States.

6. Pleiades, NASA/Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, California
Performance: 544.3 teraflop/s
With Pleiades, NASA scientists are investigating dark matter halos, galaxy evolution, future space vehicle design and climate change.

5. Tianhe-1, National SuperComputer Center/Chinese National University of Defense Technology, Tianjin, China
Performance: 563.1 teraflop/s
The fastest computer in Asia, Tianhe-1 is used for petroleum exploration and engineering tasks, such as aircraft design.

4. JUGENE, Forschungszentrum Juelich, Juelich, Germany
Performance: 825.5 teraflop/s
Scientists at this research center can request time on JUGENE, Europe’s fastest supercomputer, for their research, which includes particle physics, materials science and medicine.

3. Kraken, National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Performance: 832 teraflop/s
Since its completion in 2007, Kraken, the world’s fastest academic supercomputer, has been used in nearly 300 scientific projects, ranging from weather modeling to medicine.

2. Roadrunner, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico
Performance: 1.04 petaflop/s
Though Roadrunner was designed to complement nuclear weapons research taking place at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the computer may also get used for research in areas such as HIV vaccine development, cosmology and ocean modeling.

1. Jaguar, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Performance: 1.75 petaflop/s
For the first time, a civilian supercomputer tops the list. The National Center for Computational Sciences proudly boasts that their Jaguar gets used in the investigation of some of science’s most pressing issues, such as sequestering carbon, harnessing solar energy and designing drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

C. elegans (via wikimedia commons)

It’s the stuff of science fiction: paralysis at the flip of a switch. No need to worry, though, Star Trek fans, unless you’re a nematode worm (Caenorhabditis elegans) and have been consuming the chemical dithienylethene.

When a group of scientists from Canada, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, fed the chemical to the worms and then exposed them to a specific wavelength of ultraviolet light (365 nm), the worms turned blue and became paralyzed. Putting the worms under visible light reversed the paralysis. The chemical worked through at least three rounds of stunning.

Lead researcher Neil Branda of Simon Fraser University told the BBC News that the worms likely become paralyzed because the ultraviolet light triggers changes in the dithienylethene molecule that make it better at attracting electrons, which which may be playing havoc with the worm’s metabolic pathways, causing the paralysis.

The research could help in the development of medicines that could be turned on and off in the treatment of cancer or other diseases.

“I’m not convinced there’s a legitimate use of turning organisms on and off in terms of paralysis, but until somebody tells me otherwise, I’m not going to say that there isn’t an application,” Professor Branda told BBC News.

And now I’m wondering: what were they serving in the Enterprise mess hall?

What is it? A beaded necklace? Red blood cells? No, it’s the Portuguese Man o’War (Physalia physalis), magnified 30 times. Though it resembles a jellyfish, the Portuguese Man o’War is a siphonophore, a colony of organisms that work together. The sting of the venom in the tentacles’ nematocysysts is incredibly painful, though rarely deadly. This photo, taken by Alvaro Migotto of the University of São Paulo in Brazil, won 6th prize in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes Interational Digital Imaging Competition.

Notorious for its painful, powerful sting, the Portuguese Man o’ War has a gas-filled floating chamber that supports the tentacles, which bear sting cells. Shown are the pink batteries of stinging cells and a delicate muscular band responsible for the high contractibility of the tentacles.

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(Hat tip: Transcription and Translation)