Surprising Science » History of Science

Read Sir Isaac Newton’s Works Online

Sarah Zielinski — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:22:30 +0000

The Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University (courtesy of flickr user reinholdbehringer)

The Wren Library at Cambridge’s Trinity College is as quiet as any library can be. Break the silence with a cough, and the sound echoes up two stories to the top of the ceiling. It seems too grand a space for anyone to work and yet, nestled between the grand wooden bookshelves, the desks are filled with patrons. The library, designed by Christopher Wren and completed in 1695, is open to the public for a few hours each week, and tourists can amble through the center of the room and peek into exhibition cases filled with items from the library’s special collections. One of the books that is always on display is Sir Isaac Newton‘s own first edition copy of Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica. (That’s the book in which Newton established the three laws of motion.)

When I visited the Wren Library a couple years ago, seeing Newton’s Principia was definitely a highlight, even if a piece of glass did sit between me and the pages. This copy is full of Newton’s own notes–no other copy of this groundbreaking work is quite this special. But now you don’t have to travel all the way to England to read Newton’s own hand. The Cambridge University Library has put online digital copies of Principia and other Newton works, along with his college notebooks and other notes. More works are soon to come.

“You can see Newton’s mind at work in the calculations and how his thinking was developing,” Grant Young, the university library’s digitization manager, told the Guardian.

The project has done more than simply put images of each page online–Cambridge is working with scholars to provide transcriptions of the texts, which will make reading and searching much easier.

The Newton works are the first part of what Cambridge is calling the “Foundations of Science Collection”:

In addition to our Newton collections, the Library holds the papers of, among many other famous scientists, Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Adam Sedgwick, J.J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, James Clerk Maxwell and Sir George Gabriel Stokes. The Library holds the archives of Cambridge’s famous Cavendish Laboratory and is also the repository of the Royal Greenwich Observatory archives, which includes the papers of the Astronomers Royal and the Board of Longitude.

Cambridge has a long and wonderful history of science, from Newton to Darwin to Watson & Crick. It’s good to see the Library make the effort to share the words and works of these titans with the rest of the world.

Five Historic Female Mathematicians You Should Know

Sarah Zielinski — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:47:56 +0000

Sofia Kovalevskaya, Emmy Noether and Ada Lovelace are just three of the many famous female mathematicians you should know. Images courtesy of Wikicommons

If you haven’t yet read my story “Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know,” please check it out. It’s not a complete list, I know, but that’s what happens when you can pick only ten women to highlight—you start making arbitrary decisions (no living scientists, no mathematicians) and interesting stories get left out. To make up a bit for that, and in honor of Ada Lovelace Day, here are five more brilliant and dedicated women I left off the list:

Hypatia (ca. 350 or 370 – 415 or 416)

No one can know who was the first female mathematician, but Hypatia was certainly one of the earliest. She was the daughter of Theon, the last known member of the famed library of Alexandria, and followed his footsteps in the study of math and astronomy. She collaborated with her father on commentaries of classical mathematical works, translating them and incorporating explanatory notes, as well as creating commentaries of her own and teaching a succession of students from her home. Hypatia was also a philosopher, a follower of Neoplatonism, a belief system in which everything emanates from the One, and crowds listened to her public lectures about Plato and Aristotle. Her popularity was her downfall, however. She became a convenient scapegoat in a political battle between her friend Orestes, the governor of Alexandria, and the city’s archbishop, Cyril, and was killed by a mob of Christian zealots.

Sophie Germain (1776 – 1831)

When Paris exploded with revolution, young Sophie Germain retreated to her father’s study and began reading. After learning about the death of Archimedes, she began a lifelong study of mathematics and geometry, even teaching herself Latin and Greek so that she could read classic works. Unable to study at the École Polytechnique because she was female, Germain obtained lecture notes and submitted papers to Joseph Lagrange, a faculty member, under a false name. When he learned she was a woman, he became a mentor and Germain soon began corresponding with other prominent mathematicians at the time. Her work was hampered by her lack of formal training and access to resources that male mathematicians had at the time. But she became the first woman to win a prize from the French Academy of Sciences, for work on a theory of elasticity, and her proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, though unsuccessful, was used as a foundation for work on the subject well into the twentieth century.

Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852)

Augusta Ada Byron (later Countess of Lovelace) never knew her father, the poet Lord Byron, who left England due to a scandal shortly after her birth. Her overprotective mother, wanting to daughter to grown up as unemotional—and unlike her father—as possible, encouraged her study of science and mathematics. As an adult, Lovelace began to correspond with the inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage, who asked her to translate an Italian mathematician’s memoir analyzing his Analytical Engine (a machine that would perform simple mathematical calculations and be programmed with punchcards and is considered one of the first computers). Lovelace went beyond completing a simple translation, however, and wrote her own set of notes about the machine and even included a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers; this is now acknowledged as the world’s first computer program.

Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850 – 1891)

Because Russian women could not attend university, Sofia Vasilyevna contracted a marriage with a young paleontologist, Vladimir Kovalevsky, and they moved to Germany. There she could not attend university lectures, but she was tutored privately and eventually received a doctorate after writing treatises on partial differential equations, Abelian integrals and Saturn’s rings. Following her husband’s death, Kovalevskaya was appointed lecturer in mathematics at the University of Stockholm and later became the first woman in that region of Europe to receive a full professorship. She continued to make great strides in mathematics, winning the Prix Bordin from the French Academy of Sciences in 1888 for an essay on the rotation of a solid body as well as a prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences the next year.

Emmy Noether (1882 – 1935)

In 1935, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the New York Times, lauding the recently deceased Emmy Noether as “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.” Noether had overcome many hurdles before she could collaborate with the famed physicist. She grew up in Germany and had her mathematics education delayed because of rules against women matriculating at universities. After she received her PhD, for a dissertation on a branch of abstract algebra, she was unable to obtain a university position for many years, eventually receiving the title of “unofficial associate professor” at the University of Göttingen, only to lose that in 1933 because she was Jewish. And so she moved to America and became a lecturer and researcher at Bryn Mawr College and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. There she developed many of the mathematical foundations for Einstein’s general theory of relativity and made significant advances in the field of algebra.

The Invasive Species We Can Blame On Shakespeare

Sarah Zielinski — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:39:10 +0000

There are 200 million European starlings in North America (courtesy of flickr user goingslo)

If you live in North America, you probably recognize European starlings, those little black birds with white polka dots that chirp and chatter and, in the winter, hang out in flocks of thousands. There are 200 million of these birds on the continent, and they can be found as far north as Alaska and as far south as Mexico. Numerous though they are, starlings are actually non-native invasive species. And we can blame Shakespeare for their arrival in America.

Steven Marche explains in How Shakespeare Changed Everything:

On March 6, 1890, a New York pharmaceutical manufacturer name Eugene Schieffelin brought natural disaster into the heart of [New York City] completely without meaning to. Through the morning snow, which congealed at times to sleet, sixty starlings, imported at great expense from Europe, accompanied Schieffelin on the ride from his country house into Central Park—the noisy, dirty fulfillment of his plan to introduce every bird mentioned by Shakespeare into North America. Schieffelin loved Shakespeare and he loved birds….The American Acclimatization Society, to which he belonged, had released other avian species found in Shakespeare—the nightingales and skylarks more commonly mentioned in his plays and poems—but none had survived. There was no reason to believe that starlings would fare any better. Schieffelin opened the cages and released the birds into the new world, without the smallest notion of what he was unleashing.

For someone who apparently loved birds, you have to admit this was a pretty daft plan. There was every reason to believe that the birds would die—it was bitterly cold and sleeting, and attempts with other species had led to dead birds. But the tiny flock found shelter beneath the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History, just to the west of the park, and they survived the winter. And then they began to breed, and spread, and breed some more.

It seems that the starlings some special characteristics that gave them an advantage over other bird species, Marche writes:

The protractor muscles of their beaks allow them to pry and to probe better than other birds. They can open their bills after pushing them into the soil, which allows them to forage for invertebrates easily and in drier areas. The starling’s eye have evolved to the narrow front of its face, giving it the perfect view for prying. Its binocular vision combined with its open-bill probing ability means that starlings can find insects in colder climates better than other birds, which means that starlings do not have to migrate to warmer climates in winter, which means that they can take the best nesting holes during the breeding season.

Starlings will bully other birds, kicking bluebirds, flickers and woodpeckers out of their nests. They can consume whole fields of wheat and transmit avian, animal and human diseases. A fungus called Histoplasma capsulatum can grow in the soil beneath roosting starlings; the fungal spores can become airborne if the soil is disturbed and cause the disease histoplasmosis, which, in rare cases, can cause blindness or death.

People quickly realized what a pest these birds could be and tried to get rid of them. In Hartford, Connecticut, in 1914, residents tried to scare the birds away from their nests by fastening teddy bears to those trees and firing rockets through the branches. The White House tried speakers that emitted owl calls. Columns around the U.S. Capitol were outfitted with electrified wires. People have tried shooting, poisoning, trapping, repelling and frightening the birds, but the population still grows. They have plenty to eat and lots of habitat to live on—what else does a species need?

These birds are a prime example of why it can be so difficult to control an invasive species once it has become established—no matter how many you wipe out, there’s still plenty to take their place.

The First Supernova

Sarah Zielinski — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:04:37 +0000

A combined image from the Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray observatories of RCW 86, which was determined to have started out as SN 185 (Credits: ESA/XMM, NASA/CXC, University of Utrecht (J. Vink))

Astronomers are getting a bit of a treat this week—they’re watching a supernova exploding 21 million years ago (that is, 21 million light years away) in the Pinwheel Galaxy. That’s pretty close for a supernova (they’re usually around a billion light years away), and you might even be able to see it with a simple pair of binoculars. But what was the first supernova?

OK, that was a trick question. We can’t know what was the first star to explode. But we can look at the first recorded supernova, SN 185.

In 185 A.D., someone in China looked up in the night sky and saw a new star. It sparkled and did not move, so it couldn’t be a comet. This “guest star” stayed in the sky for eight months and then disappeared forever; it was recorded in the Book of the Later Han, which told the history of China from 25 to 220 A.D.

The guest star was a supernova, a star that had run out of fuel and then collapsed in on itself in a thousandth of a second. The core of the star heated to a billion degrees and destructive gamma rays were produced. Neutrinos were generated in huge quantities. Only a tiny fraction were absorbed by the stellar gas, and they had so much energy they ripped apart the outer layers of the star. This violent explosion, which could have been brighter than an entire galaxy, also produced X-rays, gamma rays and ultraviolet light. The resulting shock wave produced radioactive elements such as cobalt and titanium. Any planet too close to such a destructive event would have been torched.

In 2006, scientists using the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the XMM-Newton Observatory determined that the supernova remnant RCW 86 was the leftover bits of SN 185. They calculated how fast the energized shell of the remnant was moving to estimate the original date of the supernova and determined that the star had gone supernova about 2,000 years ago. Scientists had thought RCW 86 might be SN 185 because the remnant’s location matched historical records of the supernova, but previous calculations gave the remnant an age of 10,000 years. It appears those calculations were based on measurements of a part of the shock wave that had encountered a region of dense matter and slowed down.

The Great New England Hurricane of 1938

Sarah Zielinski — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:27:46 +0000

A building in the northern reaches of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, that was destroyed in the 1938 hurricane (credit: NOAA Photo Library/Donated by Susan Medyn, Tiverton, Rhode Island)

A storm formed in the eastern Atlantic near the Cape Verde Islands on September 4, 1938, and headed west. After 12 days, before it could reach the Bahamas, it turned northward, skimming the East Coast of the United States and picking up energy from the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. On September 21, it crashed into Long Island and continued its way north at a speed of 60 miles per hour, with the eye of the storm passing over New Haven, Connecticut. It didn’t dissipate until it reached Canada.

The winds were strong enough that modern scientists place the storm in Category 3 of the Saffir-Simpson Scale. The Blue Hill Observatory outside Boston measured sustained winds of 121 miles per hour and gusts as strong as 186 miles per hour. The winds blew down power lines, trees and crops and blew roofs off houses. Some downed power lines set off fires in Connecticut.

But it was the storm surge that caused the most damage. The storm came ashore at the time of the high tide, which added to the surge of water being pushed ahead by the hurricane. The water rose 14 to 18 feet along much of the Connecticut coast, and 18 to 25 feet from New London, Connecticut to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Seaside homes all along Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island were submerged under 12 to 15 feet of water, and Providence, Rhode Island was inundated with 20 feet. Whole communities were swept out to sea.

One of the homes that washed away was Katharine Hepburn‘s beach house in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Hepburn would later recall:

It was something devastating—and unreal—like the beginning of the world—or the end of it—and I slogged or sloshed, crawled through ditches and hung on to keep going somehow—got drenched and bruised and scratched—completely bedraggled—finally got to where there was a working phone and called Dad. The minute he heard my voice he said, ‘how’s your mother?’—And I said—I mean I shouted—the storm was screaming so—’She’s all right. All right, Dad! But listen, the house—it’s gone—blown away into the sea!’ And he said, ‘I don’t suppose you had the brains enough to through a match into it before it went, did you? It’s insured against fire, but not against blowing away!—and how are you?’

The hurricane, one of the most destructive to ever hit New England, was followed by massive river flooding as the water dumped by the storm—10 to 17 inches fell on the Connecticut River basin—returned to the sea. By the time the devastation was over, 564 people were dead and more than 1,700 injured, 8,900 homes were completely gone as were 2,600 boats. Trees and buildings damaged by the storm could still be seen by the 1950s.

In the days and weeks following the storm, the federal government sent thousands of men from the Works Progress Administration to assist with the search for survivors and the huge effort to clear away the destruction, as can be seen in this newsreel from the time:

How the Great White Egret Spurred Bird Conservation

Sarah Zielinski — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:30:20 +0000

Great White Egret, by Antonio Soto, photographed March 2009, South Florida

When I first saw this striking photo, the winner of the Reader’s Choice award in Smithsonian magazine’s 8th Annual Photo Contest, I was certain that the bird’s plumage had to have been faked; after all, the photo was in the Altered Images category. But all that the photographer, Antonio Soto, had done to his image was darken the background. Those feathers were real.

I’m not the only one who has been dazzled by the egret’s feathers, though. At the turn of the 20th century, these feathers were a huge hit in the fashion world, to the detriment of the species, as Thor Hanson explains in his new book Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle:

One particular group of birds suffered near extermination at the hands of feather hunters, and their plight helped awaken a conservation ethic that still resonates in the modern environmental movement. With striking white plumes and crowded, conspicuous nesting colonies, Great Egrets and Snowy Egrets faced an unfortunate double jeopardy: their feathers fetched a high price, and their breeding habits made them an easy mark. To make matters worse, both sexes bore the fancy plumage, so hunters didn’t just target the males; they decimated entire rookeries. At the peak of the trade, an ounce of egret plume fetched the modern equivalent of two thousand dollars, and successful hunters could net a cool hundred grand in a single season. But every ounce of breeding plumes represented six dead adults, and each slain pair left behind three to five starving nestlings. Millions of birds died, and by the turn of the century this once common species survived only in the deep Everglades and other remote wetlands.

This slaughter inspired Audubon members to campaign for environmental protections and bird preservation, at the state, national and international levels.

The Lacey Act passed Congress in 1900, restricting interstate transport of wild fowl and game. In 1911 New York State outlawed the sale of all native birds and their feathers, and other states soon followed suit. Passage of the Weeks-McLean Act (1913) and the Migratory Bird Act (1918) took the protections nationwide and mirrored legislation in Canada, Britain, and Europe, effectively ending the fancy-feather era.

The egret population has recovered in the last century and is now thriving in North America, even in some wetlands near urban and suburban areas.

Check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week and get more science news from Smithsonian on our Facebook page.

Why Did the Standards Bureau Need These Heads?

Sarah Zielinski — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:32:44 +0000

Wood models of human heads in the NIST Museum collection (courtesy of National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections, Information Services Division)

At the Smithsonian Institution and Smithsonian.com, we love collections of stuff. The Institution is, after all, the owner of what is probably the world’s largest collection of stuff—137 million artifacts, specimens and works of art. And so how could we resist helping another collecting institution, the National Institute of Standards and Technology Museum, identify some of its stuff?

Take these heads, for instance, some of the items for which the NIST Museum has only minimal information and for which they are searching for more. NIST has placed images of several of these items, with more to come, on the website of its Digital Archives and is asking the public for help.

“We have some artifacts in our collection we want to identify, so we thought we could exhibit them online and ask for help,” NIST Digital Services Librarian Regina Avila told GovCon Executive. “It was fun to photograph them, but challenging. Some artifacts were broken, others had missing pieces. Some were heavy and others were fragile.”

In addition to the heads, there are stamp dies, a frequency-analysis recording of a cicada, a motor, a drafting set—all objects that someone sometime in NIST’s history used to carry out its mission of advancing the science of measurement and American technologies and setting the standards to make that all possible. A clue to the extensiveness of that mission is held in the brief description of those heads:

Wood models of human heads. Inscription on bottom of models reads “National Bureau of Standards 6-1-1946. Size 7″. Some heads are also inscribed “Size 7.5″. These model heads may be a “95% profile model”. The contours of this type of model human head were said to be common to 95% of the population, and could thus be used to design respirator masks and other equipment that were required to seal firmly against the face.

But who used them and to design exactly what kind of masks remains unknown. Perhaps you know. If you do, send an e-mail to library@nist.gov.

Why I’m Not Sorry to See the Space Shuttle End

Sarah Zielinski — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:40:38 +0000

Blogger Sarah brought NASA-mission-themed cookies to the office last week (photo by Molly Roberts)

Just a little while ago the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off into space from the Kennedy Space Center on its last mission, the second-to-last mission for any Space Shuttle. Like many people I watched the liftoff (from my computer at home) and was a bit wistful to see space exploration as I have known it since my childhood nearing its end. But I have to say, when I think about the end of the Space Shuttle program, I’m really not that sorry to see it come to a close.

Oh, it’s not that I’m not a fan of space exploration (I even made NASA-space-mission-themed cookies last week for my office), but the Space Shuttle never lived up to its original concept, and it’s been sucking up a lot of money over the years, money that could have paid for even more discoveries than have already been made.

When the Space Shuttle was conceived in the 1960s, before we had even landed on the Moon, proponents were making claims that a reusable space vehicle, one that could land like an airplane, could be cheaper to operate on a per-launch basis and could launch as frequently as once a week. But the reality was far different.

The Space Shuttle is expensive: Putting people into the unnatural environment of Earth’s orbit is never going to be cheap, but the shuttle is particularly costly. One analysis of the program pegged the cost per mission at $1.3 billion (I’ve also seen estimates of $1.5 billion), enough to fund almost 3,000 research grants at the National Science Foundation or pay for a big chunk of a spacecraft like Cassini that will be producing data for decades. Another way to look at this is the cost per kilogram of getting something into space: The shuttle averages about $10,400 per kilogram of payload while the Russians pay only about $5,400 using their Soyuz spacecraft. We’re overpaying for the service when it’s delivered via shuttles.

The Space Shuttle launches infrequently: Those dreams of once-a-week launches were quickly dashed by reality. Once-a-week became twice-a-month became less than once-a-month. It took months to turn over a Space Shuttle for its next mission, and frequently launching people, science experiments and satellites into low-Earth orbit has been impossible.

The Space Shuttle is not reliable: Shuttle launch delays are frequent and costly (good luck to anyone planning to go to Florida to watch the last liftoff next month). But even worse is the rate of catastrophic failure, about 1 in 65. My memories of the program are not the trip to the Kennedy Space Center my family took when I was a kid; they are of the images on TV of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Space exploration is never going to be risk-free, and if we’re going to explore our solar system and beyond, bad things will happen—just as they did for early Earth-bound explorers. We still need to decide as a society whether or not this is worth the risk.

When I was making the cookies for work last week, I realized how little our greatest space science has depended on the shuttle. Out of the five missions, only Hubble had depended on the Space Shuttle program, and it didn’t have to—its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, won’t. And without the shuttle program draining NASA’s limited funds, perhaps even more and better science will happen in the coming years.

Replacing one-time-use rockets with a reusable spacecraft is still a good idea, but we’re just not technologically ready for this. Our imaginations are far bigger than our abilities. That might seem like a sad realization, but it’s not. All it means is that we will keep inventing and striving to reach our sci-fi dreams, and that journey is a truly fascinating one.

(Think I’m wrong? That’s what the comment section is for.)

50 Facts for the 50th Anniversary of the First Man in Space

Sarah Zielinski — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:05:26 +0000

Yuri Gagarin in 1964 (via wikimedia commons)

1 ) Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space in Vostok 1 on the morning of April 12, 1961, 50 years ago today.

2 ) He was a 27-year-old military pilot.

3 ) He and his family were thrown out of their house by the Germans during World War II.

4 ) They had to live in a dugout in the garden.

5 ) Gagarin was interested in space even as a child.

6 ) He joined the “AeroClub” in high school.

7 ) He met Valentina Goryacheva while in military flight school.

8 ) He married her in 1957.

9 ) They had two daughters, Elena and Galina.

10 ) Elena remembers that her father liked poetry and literature.

11 ) In 1960, the Soviet Union chose 20 pilots, including Gagarin, to begin training for a human space flight.

12 ) That group was narrowed down to the “Sochi Six.”

13 ) Gagarin and Gherman Titov were the final two potential spacemen.

14 ) They were chosen not only for their excellence in training but also for their short stature (the cockpit was small).

15 ) Gagarin was 1.57 meters (5 feet 2 inches) tall.

16 ) Before taking off, Gagarin wrote a letter to his wife saying he likely wouldn’t return.

17 ) But he didn’t give it to her. (She found it after he returned home.)

18 ) Legend says that Gagarin had to relieve himself on the way to the launch pad.

19 ) And now modern (male) cosmonauts do so as well: “They leave the bus and stand at the left back wheel of the bus, to relieve themselves,” says the European Space Agency.

20 ) Gagarin was launched into space at 6:07 UTC from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

21 ) This was only 3 1/2 years since the first object, Sputnik, had been launched into space.

22 ) Vostok 1 made one complete circuit around the Earth.

23 ) The journey took 108 minutes.

24 ) He was the first human to see Earth from space.

25 ) Gagarin ejected from the space capsule when it was still 7 kilometers from the ground.

26 ) He then deployed a parachute at 2.5 kilometers in altitude.

27 ) Some people have argued that Gagarin does not qualify for the title “the first man in space” because he didn’t land inside his aircraft.

28 ) They are wrong.

29 ) Gagarin and his spacecraft landed 26 kilometers southwest of Engels, Russia, at 51° North, 45° East.

30 ) Two schoolgirls witnessed the landing and described a huge ball that bounced on the ground as it landed.

31 ) A farmer and her daughter came upon Gagarin dressed in his orange spacesuit and dragging his parachute and backed away in fear.

32 ) He told them, “don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!”

33 ) Americans congratulated the Soviets on their space achievement.

34 ) And then sent their own man, Alan Shepard, into space a few weeks later.

35 ) It wasn’t until the next year, however, that an American astronaut, John Glenn, would make a full circuit around the Earth.

36 ) Gagarin became a celebrity.

37 ) He went on a world tour and was greeted by adoring crowds.

38 ) But he soon returned to the cosmonaut facility.

39 ) There, he spent years working on designs for a reusable spacecraft.

40 ) Although he was a backup pilot for later spaceflights, he was ultimately banned from space because the Soviets were worried about losing their hero.

41 ) Gagarin died on March 27, 1968 in a training flight in a MiG-15UTI fighter.

42 ) His ashes were interred on Cosmonauts’ Avenue outside the Kremlin in Moscow.

43 ) So are the ashes of four other cosmonauts who died during their missions.

44 ) Current Soyuz crews leave red carnations at this Kremlin wall.

45 ) A crater on the Moon is named for Gagarin.

46 ) As is asteroid 1772 Gagarin.

47 ) More than 500 people have gone into space since Gagarin.

48 ) Every year, people around the world celebrate Yuri’s Night on April 12.

49 ) You can post this handy infographic on your wall to remind yourself about details of Gagarin’s flight.

50 ) And you can read this post from Starts With A Bang about what cosmonauts (and astronauts) can see as they orbit the Earth.

Five Reasons Anti-Evolution Measures are a Bad Idea

Sarah Zielinski — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:01:24 +0000

Biology teacher John Scopes went on trial for teaching evolution in 1925 (via Wikimedia commons)

In 1925, John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was put on trial in Tennessee for having the audacity to teach evolution to his students. In the 21st century, teachers don’t have to worry about being arrested for teaching this fundamental topic in science, and the Supreme Court declared teaching creationism unconstitutional in 1987, but that hasn’t stopped state legislators around the country from trying to enact laws that encourage the teaching of alternative theories or protect teachers who do so. The latest attempt, in Tennessee, looks like it might actually become law. But here are five reasons why it shouldn’t:

1 ) Evolution is the basis for all biology. Without it, much of biology and modern medicine just doesn’t make sense. There’s general agreement that good science education is needed to produce a populace capable of handling our increasingly technological future. Evolution has to be part of that, but sadly, it rarely is. A recent poll of high school biology teachers found that only 28 percent consistently teach evolution.

2 ) Teaching unscientific “alternatives” only confuses students. “There is virtually no scientific controversy among the overwhelming majority of researchers on the core facts of…evolution,” Alan Leshner, executive publisher of Science, wrote recently to two Tennessee legislators. “Asserting that there are significant scientific controversies about the overall nature of [this concept] when there are none will only confuse students, not enlighten them.”

3 ) Science-based industries might conclude the state is anti-science. Florida is considering its own law to require “critical analysis” of evolution, which could open the door to unscientific theories being presented in the classroom. In response to the measure, the Florida Academy of Sciences issued a statement noting that the measure would “undermine the reputation of our state and adversely affect our economic future as we try to attract new high tech and biomedical jobs to Florida.”

4 ) Anti-evolution theories aren’t science and don’t belong in a science classroom. Whether you call it creationism, creation science or intelligent design, it isn’t science and shouldn’t be taught alongside scientific theories. I could see the story of creation being taught in a history class, while studying the creation mythologies of various world cultures, but anything else is promoting religion and is unconstitutional in a public school.

5 ) If it goes to court, the anti-evolution side will lose, potentially costing a school district or state a lot of money. Case in point: Dover, Pennsylvania. The Dover Area School District was sued by parents after it mandated the teaching of intelligent design. The district lost, spectacularly (pdf), and paid more than $1 million in legal fees. Defending the teaching of anti-evolution theories now could potentially cost millions more.

Piltdown Man, Paleoanthropology’s April Fool’s

Sarah Zielinski — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:07:45 +0000

The enigmatic piltdown man's skull. (C) Bettmann/Corbis

This is the story of a missing link that never was.

In 1912, Charles Dawson, an amateur British archaeologist, told Arthur Woodward of the British Museum about a fragment of skull found in the Piltdown quarry in Sussex, England. Soon, Dawson, Woodward and a third man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, returned to the quarry and found more skull fragments, a jaw bone and an elephant molar. By the end of the year they presented their findings to the British scientific community. These were the remains of an ancient human ancestor, they said, one that shared features with both apes and men. That is, the “missing link.”

The British paleontological community was enthralled by such a find on British soil. Others weren’t quite so enthusiastic, and many were skeptical. But after Dawson discovered a second skull, Piltdown II, the finds seemed more plausible.

Over the next decades, however, as more hominids were found around the world—australopithecines, Peking man, Homo erectus—Piltdown Man got less and less attention; it didn’t fit into the growing collection of human ancestors, either in shape or geography.

In 1925, geologist F. H. Edmonds found that Dawson’s dating of the gravels in which the fossils were found was in error. They were younger than Dawson had claimed. In 1947, a new test for fluorine content was applied to the fossils and established that they had a relatively recent origin. And then in 1953, scientists finally exposed Piltdown Man as a hoax, composed of pieces of medieval-era human skull, an orangutan jaw, and a couple of genuine fossils from the Mediterranean region.

The bones had been treated with an iron solution, and the teeth filed to fit or to show wear. A “canine” tooth included in the lot had been filled with sand and was patched with gum.

That the hoax wasn’t exposed earlier is rather amazing, but the forgery was a good one and the initial analysis was pretty bad, even for its time.

The perpetrator of the hoax has never been found, though there are theories aplenty. Charles Dawson would seem to be the prime suspect, but there is little evidence he did it, and he died in 1916 without leaving a convenient deathbed confession. Other suspects over the years have included various acquaintances of Dawson, museum curators, Pieree Teilhard de Chardin, the guy they hired to do the digging, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was Dawson’s neighbor. (Conan Doyle’s The Lost World supposedly describes the hoax.)

What makes finding who did it even harder is that there is no obvious motive for such a forgery, particularly one that consisted of finds made over a period of years. Perhaps the forger or forgers just thought it was funny, an April Fool’s joke for the ages.

(Find more details, including a timeline and references, at the Piltdown Man web site.)

Great Depression Had Little Effect on Death Rates

Sarah Zielinski — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 14:04:15 +0000

Men wait for a five-cent-meal during the Great Depression (source: Library of Congress)

There’s this somewhat counter-intuitive idea that economic downturns are good for your health. You might expect the privation and malnutrition inherent in such times would take a toll. But during the Great Depression, mortality rates fell. And since that time, the idea that recessions are a net-positive for health has only grown.

But a new study in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health questions that idea. The researchers examined mortality rates from 114 U.S. cities in 36 states between 1929 and 1937 along with data on bank suspensions, which were used as an indicator of the impact of the financial crisis in the individual states.

They found declines in deaths due to pneumonia, flu and tuberculosis and increases in deaths from heart disease, cancer and diabetes. But none of those causes of death were associated with bank suspensions, and only the increase in deaths from heart disease could plausibly relate to the economic depression, the scientists write.

Two causes of death did correlate with the pattern of bank suspensions: suicide rates rose but motor vehicle accidents declined, so much so that they outweighed the increase in suicides.

But there was more going on in the 1930s than just and economic downturn. The 20th century was a period of great change, particularly in terms of sanitation and health care, two factors that could account for much of the decrease in mortality during the Great Depression. In addition, the New Deal—the economic programs instituted between 1933 and 1936 to respond to the crisis—and Prohibition may have also had positive effects on health.

“Our study provides evidence that even major depressions do not imply mortality crises,” says study lead author David Stuckler, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “Whether health improves or worsens during hard times depends mainly on how governments choose to respond.”

The Lost Naturalist: A 163-Year-Old Australian Mystery

Sarah Zielinski — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:57:40 +0000

A 1936 expedition through Australia's Simpson Desert, where Leichhart may have perished (via wikimedia commons)

When I was preparing to visit friends in Australia a few years ago, I read a book about all the ways the continent would kill you. The entry on scorpions, I remember, stood out because it said not to worry about them—their stings only hurt.

I was reminded of this while reading a story from Australian Geographic about the explorer Ludwig Leichhart, a Prussian naturalist who came to Australia in 1842 and, having studied everything from philosophy to medicine to natural sciences, began documenting the continent’s flora, fauna and geology. After six years, though, Leichhart disappeared. He was only 34.

Leichhart is renowned in Australia for an expedition he undertook in 1844. He set off from southern Queensland, near current-day Brisbane, and led a small group nearly 3,000 miles to Port Essington on the northwest tip of the continent. It was a grueling journey through horrible heat and humidity. They men had to eat rancid meat and became covered in boils. One was killed by Aborigines. When Leichhart arrived at his party’s final destination on December 17, 1845, after 15 months of traveling, he wrote, “I was deeply affected in finding myself again in civilised society, and could hardly speak.”

Although Leichhart didn’t succeed in his mission to find a good route to Port Essington, he was rewarded with gold medals from the geographical societies in London and Paris.

A second expedition, begun in December 1846, was less successful. Leichhart set out to travel from the east coast to the west coast (near the Swan River), but managed only about 500 miles before turning back, overcome by rain, malaria and a lack of food.

But it was the third expedition that was truly doomed. In March 1848, Leichhart again set out, this time with five other white men, two native guides, horses, mules, bullocks, pots, horseshoes, saddles, nails and plenty of other supplies. Again the goal was to traverse the continent from east to west. But after they left McPherson’s Station on the Darling Downs, they were never heard from again.

Theories have included: the party drowning in a river (which would account for the fact that no one has ever found a pile of bones and supplies), a massacre by Aborigines, assassination by the British colonial government with poisoned flour, and poor navigation skills.

The most likely answer might be that they simply ran out of water and died before they could find any more. Evidence of that includes a 6-inch-long brass plate, now at the National Museum of Australia, with Leichhart’s name and the year 1848 that was found in 1900 in the outback near the Western Australia/Northern Territory border. Though its history is somewhat murky, it seems to support the idea that the party managed to get as far as the Simpson Desert, some two-thirds of the way across the continent.

But water is scarce in that part of Australia, and even if they had decided to abandon their journey and travel up to Port Essington, they would have been out of luck—the settlement had been deserted.

And then there’s the story told by some Aboriginal people in 1889 or 1890, of four men on horses who came from the northeast but died, searching fruitlessly for water among the rocks.

Until someone finds a pile of 160-year-old bones and explorer supplies, though, the tale remains a mystery.

Marine Archaeologists Find Shipwreck Linked to Moby Dick

Sarah Zielinski — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:30:52 +0000

George Pollard Jr. was not a very lucky sea captain. In 1819, he became captain of the whaling ship Essex, out of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and headed for the Pacific Ocean. Just four days out, though, a storm struck and damaged the ship. Still, Pollard pressed on, rounding Cape Horn in January 1820 and then sailing north. Worse luck struck in November, when the ship was rammed twice by a large sperm whale. The Essex sank, and the crew piled into the small whaleboats with as much supplies as they could carry. It wasn’t enough, however—many men died and some had to resort to cannibalism to survive. The first mate wrote an account of the ordeal, and it inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick about Captain Ahab and his quest for the white whale.

When Pollard returned to Nantucket, he was given command of another whaling ship, the Two Brothers. And his back luck held. On the night of February 11, 1823, the ship struck a shallow reef off French Frigate Shoals, about 600 miles northwest of Hawaii. The crew members fared better that time, at least, and were rescued the next day by another Nantucket whaling ship. But Pollard’s career as a whaling captain was over. He made one trip on a merchant vessel and then spent the rest of his life as a night watchman, safe on dry ground in Nantucket.

A diver examines an anchor from the Two Brothers (credit: NOAA)

The Two Brothers remained hidden on the bottom of the sea until 2008 when marine scientists went on an expedition to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands to study the marine life there. This area is part of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, 140,000 square miles of protected ocean and one of the world’s largest protected areas.

Divers on the expedition first spotted a large anchor, the first clue that there might be some bigger find on the seafloor. Then they found other items, such as cast-iron pots, called trypots, of the type used to melt whale blubber, indicating that it wasn’t just any old wreck; marine archaeologists concluded that they had found a whaling ship.

Expeditions in 2009 and 2010 turned up items such as ceramics and glass that helped the scientists date the wreck, and first-hand accounts from sailors who had been on the Two Brothers approximately matched the location of the find. Now the scientists are ready to publicly conclude that the wreck was Captain Pollard’s ill-fated ship.

This is the first wrecked Nantucket whaling ship to ever be found, which is rather amazing considering how many hundreds of those ships were in existence during Nantucket’s whaling heyday in the 1700s and early 1800s, and how many must have sunk; whaling was never a safe occupation. “Shipwreck sites like this are important in helping tell the stories of the early days of sailing, including whaling and maritime activities both in the Pacific and around the world,” said Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument maritime archaeologist Kelly Gleason, who led the expedition.