The gooey confections can be used to measure the speed of light and demonstrate relationships between the volume of a gas and its pressure and temperature. Photo by Flickr user John-Morgan

If the Easter Bunny comes to your house this weekend, you may find yourself with a plethora of marshmallows and Peeps. What to do with them all? Aside from simply eating them, cooking with them, or unleashing your artistic side by making dioramas, consider using them….for science!

Marshmallows, it turns out, are must-have pieces of equipment for at-home science experiments. Sure, you can use them test your kids’ self control through the the field of psychology’s notorious marshmallow test and its ever-more complex iterations. But if you’d rather not torture your kids by leaving tantalizingly in reach a marshmallow they’re ordered not to have, consider trying these easy science projects:

Marshmallows in a vacuum

The relationship between the volume of a gas and its pressure can be demonstrated at home with a simple set up. Photo by Mohi Kumar

No, not that kind of vacuum, despite the intriguing possibilities conjured by this phrase. You’ll need:

• A glass jar with a lid
• A mechanism to pump some of the air out of the jar
• Marshmallows

The Physics Hypertextbook recommends using a kitchen vacuum pump for this experiment. Cutting a small hole in the jar’s lid and squeezing a wine preserver’s vacuum pump into it also works.

Place a few marshmallows in the jar, seal it, and then pump the air out:

What’s going on? Marshmallows are basically a foam spun out of sugar, water, air, and gelatin. The sugar makes them sweet, the water and sugar combo makes them sticky and the gelatin makes them stretchy. But the air–which actually makes up most of the confection’s volume–makes marshmallows the tastiest way to encapsulate a gas in a solid. As you pump air out of the jar, the air inside the marshmallow expands and the marshmallow puffs up. Release the seal, and the marshmallows return to their normal size.

Congratulations! You’ve just demonstrated Boyle’s Law, which states that when the temperature doesn’t change, that the relationship between pressure (which is decreased by pumping air out of the jar) and volume of any set amount of gas (the marshmallow) is inversely proportional. In other words, decreasing one necessitates an increase of the other.

If you can’t eat ‘em, nuke ‘em!

If you’ve ever roasted a marshmallow over a campfire, you’ll know where this next demonstration is going. You’ll need:

• A microwave
• A microwavable plate
• A standard-sized marshmallow (avoid minis or jumbos; the former will fry and the latter may make an enormous mess!)

Place the marshmallow on one of its flat sides in the center of a plate. Then microwave the marshmallow for, say, 45 seconds on high.

It’s alive! This time, rather than changing the pressure surrounding the marshmallow, you’re changing the temperature. As the microwave bakes the marshmallow, the water in the marshmallow heats up and warms the air. When air becomes hot, it expands, forcing the marshmallow to puff up. The confection’s water also softens the sugars, causing it to ooze, as seen in the video above (created by YouTube user bbbpwns).

The relationship between temperature and volume is representative of Charles’ Law, which holds that any set amount of gas will expand when heated–increasing the temperature of a gas necessitates an increase in the gas’ volume.

Trying this with Peeps makes for a slightly alarming outcome, showcased by YouTube user UBrocks:

If you flashed back to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, alas–the monster marshmallow you pulled from your microwave doesn’t last–it will cool and deflate into a glob of ooze. But before it cools completely, the ooze is quite malleable and can be sculpted into shapes. But careful! The marshmallow remnants are like naplam–they’ll stick to you and burn. After it cools a bit, brush some oil on your palms before you mold anything, else your sculpture will stay glued to your hands.

 A gooey way to calculate the speed of light

For this demonstration you need a bit of background knowledge as you start out. The speed of a wave can be calculated by multiplying the wavelength (the distance from crest to crest) with the frequency (the number of crest-to-crest cycles that repeat in a stretch of time). Light is a wave, and its speed can be calculated the same way without fancy equipment. You’ll need:

A child measures the distance between melted patches after a layer of marshmallows was microwaved. Photo by Mohi Kumar

• A microwave with the turntable removed
• A  glass casserole dish or baking tray
• Mini marshmallows
• A ruler
• A calculator

Take the baking tray and pack one layer of marshmallows along the bottom, lined up like tiny puffy soldiers.  Make sure the turntable is removed from the microwave–this allows microwaves to move through the glass and the marshmallows in a standing wave pattern. Cook for a few minutes on low, watching the marshmallows carefully. With the turntable removed, the microwave doesn’t heat evenly–you’ll notice melted patches forming in your marshmallow field.

As soon as you see a few such patches, remove the dish and measure the distance between two that form a line parallel to the microwave’s door–these mark the locations of highest amplitudes within the standing wave. Multiply this by two to get the full wavelength of the microwaves that passed through your marshmallows (if you look at the geometry of a standing wave, your initial measurement only gave you half the wavelength). Convert this into meters.

Multiplying this result by frequency of the microwave, found in the microwave’s manual or in a label inside the device, gives ~299,000,000 meters per second–roughly speed of light! Catch a video of this here.

One of the hundreds of trees lost to Friday night’s derecho (courtesy of flickr user woodleywonderworks).

The Washington, DC area has seen its fair share of destructive storms–we get hurricanes, tornadoes and even the rare snowpocalypse. But on Friday night we got hit with another type of storm–one that I’d never heard of–called a derecho (pronounced ”deh-REY-cho”).

The storm swept through the area late Friday evening, bringing an incredible amount of thunder and lightning, winds up to 80 mph and sheets of rain. By morning, hundreds of trees had been blown down, millions were left without power and several people were dead. Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram had all been taken down by Amazon server outages caused by the storm. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival had to shut down for a day to clean up the mess. We were all left wondering, “what in the world had happened?”

Friday’s derecho originated near Chicago and raced southeast towards Washington, DC (courtesy of NOAA)

The stifling heat wave that we’d been suffering through, which had stretched from the Midwest through the mid-Atlantic to the Southeastern United States and brought temperatures in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, was to blame for the fast-moving band of thunderstorms. The Capitol Weather Gang explains:

As this stifling air bubbled northward, clashing with the weather front draped from near Chicago to just north of D.C., thunderstorms erupted. They grew in coverage and intensity as they raced southeast, powered by the roaring upper level winds and fueled by the record-setting heat and oppressive humidity in their path.

The coverage and availability of this heat energy was vast, sustaining the storms on their 600 mile northwest to southeast traverse. The storms continually ingested the hot, humid air and expelled it in violent downdrafts – crashing into the ground at high speeds and spreading out, sometimes accelerating further.

Though unfamiliar to those of us here on the East Coast, derechos occur more commonly in the Corn Belt, which runs from Mississippi into the Ohio Valley, but even there they are relatively infrequent. They can wreak their havoc at any time of the year but are most likely to occur during May, June and July. Derechos get their starts in curved bands of thunderstorms called “bow echoes,” which are perhaps better known for their ability to spawn tornadoes. But instead of rotating cells of winds, derechos blow and travel in straight lines.

Derechos have a long history here in the United States. The term “derecho” was coined by University of Iowa physics professor Gustavus Hinrichs in an 1888 paper in the American Meteorological Journal in which he illustrated the path of such a storm that had crossed over Iowa on July 31, 1877. The storm’s straight path across the state gave Hinrichs the inspiration for the storm’s name–”derecho” means “straight” in Spanish. But path alone isn’t quite enough for a storm to qualify as a derecho; wind speeds must also reach a minimum of 57 mph.

Given that derechos are associated with warmer weather, could they become more common as the United States heats up due to climate change? Tom Kines, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.com, told the Guardian: “If indeed we are seeing global warming, then it will certainly increase the risk of something like this happening again.”

If you don’t want to show an misformed Moon on a Christmas card, a full moon is a safe option (courtesy of flickr user sally_monster)

You probably don’t pay too much attention to the imagery on the Christmas cards you receive or the paper wrapping your presents. You probably care more about the card’s message or the attractiveness of the gift wrap. And it’s probably just as well, since a new study in the journal Communicating Astronomy With the Public has found that depictions of the Moon on Christmas cards and gift wrap and in children’s Christmas books are often wrong.

Peter Barthel, an astronomer at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, was spurred to look into this issue after seeing a Unicef Christmas card in 2010 and a popular animated Advent e-calendar that year that both showed an unlikely Moon. The card depicted children decorating a Christmas tree beneath a waning crescent moon (one with its left-hand side lit) while the calendar scene showed people caroling, also under a waning Moon. The problem here is that the waning Moon doesn’t rise until 3 a.m. While it’s not impossible that these scenes could take place in the early morning hours, “it’s unlikely,” Barthel writes.

And so Barthel began to examine Christmas scenes on wrapping paper and cards and in books in both the Netherlands and the United States, two countries that have done much to shape our modern view of Santa Claus and Christmas. He found that 40 percent of the pictures in Dutch Christmas books and 65 percent of the Dutch gift wrap samples incorrectly showed the waning Moon. And this wasn’t a modern problem–six out of nine samples from a collection of older Dutch gift wrap also depicted, wrongly, the waning Moon.

American Christmas artists did better at showing a believable Moon in their images, but simply because they more often draw a full Moon in Christmas scenes. (The full Moon rises at sunset and shines over evening holiday scenes naturally.) That said, Barthel did find examples of incorrect waning Moon scenes. One booklet even showed a full Moon and a waning Moon in the same night.

Should we care? Barthel says yes:

The errors are innocent, somewhat comparable to incorrectly drawn rainbows, with the colour at the inside of the arc. Now watching beautiful phenomena like rainbows and moon crescents is one thing, but understanding them makes them all the lot more interesting. Moreover, understanding leads to knowledge which lasts.

And I don’t think it’s too much to ask for artists, especially ones drawing for children, to pay a little attention to accuracy in something like this. After all, if artists like Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch could take the time to use real moons and stars in their paintings, surely modern artists could as well.

Read more articles about the holidays with our Smithsonian Holiday Guide here

A lunar eclipse turns the moon reddish brown (credit: Sky & Telescope / Akira Fujii)

On the night of May 22, 1453, the people of Byzantium could see an eerie red shadow cross the Moon. It was a partial eclipse–the Earth had gotten in between the Sun and Moon–and the Byzantines took it as a bad omen. And perhaps they were right–the city of Constantinople fell before the month’s end.

A full lunar eclipse will take place this weekend, visible from Asia, Australia and western North America. But people today don’t view this astronomical event as a worrying sign. Instead, it’s time for science! And you can participate.

The Classroom Astronomer magazine has set up a website, measurethemoon.org, to coordinate observations of the position of the moon in the sky as it passes through our planet’s shadow. And if you’re in the right place, you can measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

There are two ways to do this. The first is called the Shadow Method, and it’s the way that the ancient Greeks first measured the distance between the Earth and Moon thousands of years ago. Amy Shira Teitel explains in Universe Today:

Start with the few knowns. We know, as did the Ancient Greeks, that the Moon travels around the Earth at a constant speed—about 29 days per revolution. The diameter of the Earth is also known to be about 12,875 kilometers, or 8,000 miles. By tracking the movement of the Earth’s shadow across the Moon, Greek astronomers found that the Earth’s shadow was roughly 2.5 times the apparent size of the Moon and lasted roughly three hours from the first to last signs of the shadow.

From these measurements, it was simple geometry that allowed Aristarchus (circa 270 B.C.) to determined that the Moon was around 60 Earth radii away (about 386,243 km or 240,000 miles). This is quite close to the currently accepted figure of 60.3 radii.

You can follow Aristarchus’ method in your own backyard if you have a clear view of a Lunar eclipse. Track the movement of the Earth’s shadow on the Moon by drawing the changes and time the eclipse. Use your measurements to determine the Moon’s distance.

The second method, the Lunar Parallax Method, was familiar to the ancient Greeks but they lacked the ability to communicate over the far distances that is necessary to carry this out. Telephones and the Internet make this easily possible now. Two observers at least 2,000 miles apart will have to snap a picture of the Moon at the exact same moment. Because the angle at which the Moon and the stars behind it will be different for each person, the images they snap will be slightly different, particularly the stars in the background. “What your images have given you is a triangle,” Teitel explains. “You know the base (the distance between you and your friend), and you can find the angle at the top (the point of the Moon in this triangle). Simple geometry will give you a value for the distance of the Moon.”

If the people behind measurethemoon.org get enough participants, they’ll be able to compare all the various calculations, determine which method is more accurate and figure out how close two people have to be to get an accurate calculation with the Lunar Parallax Method.

If you’re not up for calculations, there are a few other lunar eclipse science projects you might want to participate in:

• Roger Sinnott of Sky & Telescope is collecting telescopic timings of the the passage of Earth’s shadow across lunar craters (find instructions here) as part of a long-term project to track the unpredictability of the diameter of the shadow.
• John Westfall of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers is collecting timings of when the phases of the lunar eclipse begin and end, made with the unaided eye, to calibrate similar observations made in the past when mariners used the Moon to determine longitude.
• Richard Keen of the University of Chicago will collect reports of the Moon’s brightness from amateur astronomers for use in volcano-climate studies.

After reading all this and seeing the picture above, you may be wondering why the Moon in a lunar eclipse turns red, not black. “That red light on the Moon during a lunar eclipse comes from all the sunrises and sunsets around the Earth at the time,” says Robert Naeye, editor in chief of Sky & Telescope. “If you were an astronaut standing on the Moon and looking up, the whole picture would be clear. The Sun would be covered up by a dark Earth that was ringed all around with a thin, brilliant band of sunset- and sunrise-colored light, bright enough to dimly light the lunar landscape around you.”

If, like me, you’ll miss out on this chance to see a lunar eclipse, your next opportunity will come in April 2014.

Many of us long to leave the cubicle farm, even for a day or two each week (courtesy of flickr user ste3ve)

If you’re trying to convince your boss to let you telecommute, you quickly run into a data problem. That is, there isn’t a lot of it. Oh, there are plenty of studies, but many of them are theoretical or anecdotal. What’s really needed is an experiment, with large numbers and a control group, like what is done when researchers test new medicines.

Well, we’ve lucked out, as someone has actually run that experiment, as Slate noted this week. A group of researchers at Stanford University partnered with a large (>12,000 employees) travel agency in China that was founded by a former Stanford Ph.D. student. The company’s chairman was curious about whether instituting a telecommuting policy would work for his employees and what kind of effect it would have. So they used employees in the company’s call center–the people who handled phone inquiries and booked trips–to test the questions (the results haven’t been peer reviewed yet, but they can be seen in this presentation [PDF]).

A call went out for volunteers, and 508 of the 996 employees in the group spoke up. Of those, 255 qualified for the study; they had the right space at home and enough experience at the company to be trusted on their own. The company then held a lottery, and employees with even-number birthdays were allowed to telecommute four out of five shifts a week, and those with odd-number birthdays worked solely out of the office. Like a medical trial, this setup gave the researchers an experimental (telecommuting) group and a control (office) group, which could easily be compared.

What the researchers found should hearten those of us who’d like to telecommute, even once in a while. After a few weeks of the experiment, it was clear that the telecommuters were performing better than their counterparts in the office. They took more calls (it was quieter and there were fewer distractions at home) and worked more hours (they lost less time to late arrivals and sick breaks) and more days (fewer sick days). This translated into greater profits for the company because more calls equaled more sales. The telecommuters were also less likely to quit their jobs, which meant less turnover for the company.

The company considered the experiment so successful that they implemented a wider telecommuting policy. But Slate reports that not everyone in the experiment chose to continue telecommuting; they valued the daily interactions with their workmates more than they disliked their commutes or other downsides of going into the office every day.

Clearly telecommuting is not for everyone. Another factor to consider might be how much a person’s family life interferes with their job, and vice versa. A new study in the Journal of Business and Psychology, for example, found that people who experience a lot of conflict between their family and work priorities suffered more exhaustion when they telecommuted, whether they stuck to traditional work hours or had more flexible schedules. In other words, people who had problems separating the work and personal parts of their lives found it just increased their stress levels when they combined the two at home.

But perhaps I should point out that work-family conflicts aren’t a problem for me, so I’d be delighted to telecommute.

Ecologists warn that New England's maples could be at risk (courtesy of flickr user paul+photos=moody)

The blog io9 is running a series of Public Science Triumphs, explaining how publicly funded science makes the world a better place. “It’s tempting to offload the cost of science onto business, but there are some kinds of research that only government can make possible,” io9 editor Annalee Newitz wrote this weekend in the Washington Post. That research, often called “basic,” may seem useless to some but can lead to great payoffs in the future. Basic research provides the foundation for monumental discoveries, fosters the development of ground-breaking technologies and gives us the information we rely on when making important decisions, like when and where to build and how strong to make a structure.

An important, and often under-appreciated, source of that information comes from the world of ecology. Everything in the world is connected, but not in the new age way most people mean when they say that. It’s all connected through more mundane (though, frankly, more fascinating) ways, like carbon and nitrogen cycles, food webs, water and fire—the subjects of the science of ecology. And it’s this kind of information that will help a builder to know why a warehouse will flood even if constructed a fair distance from the river, explain how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone led to an increase in beaver dams and guide management decisions, such as setting levels for sustainable fishing of salmon.

Ecology is not a glamorous science; no one will ever accuse an ecologist of being motivated by money. (The practical clothes and sensible sandals usually deter such accusations.) Field sites are basic, at best. Your average college dorm provides more space and better food. But an ecologist probably won’t mind because she’s happier out in the muck anyway.

Much ecological research provides a simple slice in time, perhaps a few years of data. But to truly understand how everything is working together, more data is needed. That’s where the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network comes in. These are sites all over the world (included 26 in the U.S. LTER Network, funded by the National Science Foundation) that have been collecting data on primary production (the energy created by plants), the distribution of organisms in the ecosystem, the decay of dead organisms, the movement of water and nutrients, and the patterns of disturbances—at some sites for more than 30 years. Put that data together and an ecologist will have a picture of how organisms and the world around them are working together, and affecting the human population, too.

At Harvard Forest, for example, LTER ecologists have documented the spread of the Asian long-horned beetle (ALB), which took up residence in Worcester, Massachusetts a decade ago. Scientists have been trying to keep the beetle confined to the city, but LTER scientists found that the insect has spread to the nearby forest, infesting nearly two-thirds of the maple trees in one area. “If the ALB continues to spread outside Worcester, the abundance of red maples could provide a pathway for its dispersal throughout New England and other parts of eastern North America,” says the study‘s co-author, David Orwig of Harvard University. And if the beetles spread and take out New England’s maples, they would also destroy the region’s maple industry and even, perhaps, a good portion of the autumn tourist trade. More than one million people come to the area each year, spending about $1 billion in their quest to see the red maples’ stunning foliage. Knowing the maples are at risk may lead to changes in how the infestation is being fought.

Ecology, and especially long-term ecological projects, are scientists’ “gifts to the future,” as one of my colleagues put it. There is no Nobel Prize for ecology, and groundbreaking research papers are rare. Ecologists are pursuing this science because they simply want to know. And the benefits for the rest of us can be monumental. By better understanding how an ecosystem works, we are able to make better decisions that can save money and prevent disasters. No company is ever going to pay for this–their shareholders would never stand for it–but I’m glad to see NSF and other government agencies step in.

The skeptics were not happy and immediately claimed that the study was flawed.

Also in the news last week were the results of yet another study that found no link between cell phones and brain cancer. Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Denmark looked at data from 350,000 cell phone users over an 18-year period and found they were no more likely to develop brain cancer than people who didn’t use the technology.

But those results still haven’t killed the calls for more monitoring of any potential link.

Study after study finds no link between autism and vaccines (and plenty of reason to worry about non-vaccinated children dying from preventable diseases such as measles). But a quarter of parents in a poll released last year said that they believed that “some vaccines cause autism in healthy children” and 11.5 percent had refused at least one vaccination for their child.

Polls say that Americans trust scientists more than, say, politicians, but that trust is on the decline. If we’re losing faith in science, we’ve gone down the wrong path. Science is no more than a process (as recent contributors to our “Why I Like Science” series have noted), and skepticism can be a good thing. But for many people that skepticism has grown to the point that they can no longer accept good evidence when they get it, with the result that “we’re now in an epidemic of fear like one I’ve never seen and hope never to see again,” says Michael Specter, author of Denialism, in his TEDTalk below.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you think I’m not talking about you. But here’s a quick question: Do you take vitamins? There’s a growing body of evidence that vitamins and dietary supplements are no more than a placebo at best and, in some cases, can actually increase the risk of disease or death. For example, a study earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that consumption of supplements, such as iron and copper, was associated with an increased risk of death among older women. In a related commentary, several doctors note that the concept of dietary supplementation has shifted from preventing deficiency (there’s a good deal of evidence for harm if you’re low in, say, folic acid) to one of trying to promote wellness and prevent disease, and many studies are showing that more supplements do not equal better health.

But I bet you’ll still take your pills tomorrow morning. Just in case.

This path has the potential to lead to some pretty dark times, as Specter says:

When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don’t want to be. You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease.

If you don’t think that can happen here, think again. We’re already not vaccinating children against preventable diseases, something that will surely lead (and probably already has led) to lives lost. We have big problems to address in the coming decades—even greater changes to temperature, weather and water as the planet warms; a growing population—and we need to start putting our trust back into science, into the process that has brought us to where we are today, with longer lives, cleaner water and skies, more efficient farming. Because you have to admit, this is a pretty great time to be alive and it’s science that got us here.

We no longer think of the stars as points of light on the tapestry of the night but now know that they're burning balls of gas billions of miles away in the black expanse of space (Credit: NASA and H. Richer (University of British Columbia))

Two weeks ago I asked readers to weigh in on why they like science. Two submissions caught my eye. This first essay is from a friend, Sandy Lee, who is the IT support specialist for the Phillips Collection, an art museum here in Washington, D.C., as well as an amateur artist. His personal and professional lives often give him reason to like science, he writes:

Science is the partner of Art. There is an inherent beauty in the mathematical progression of an arpeggio, the molecular structure of a graphene molecule and the resident harmony of a finely tuned Formula One engine at full throttle.

Science is also the quest for truth. While I may not be the most skeptical of persons, I marvel at our capacity to continually ask the question, “Why?” and to seek the answers existing at the edges of the universe and deep within ourselves. Because “just because” is not a good enough answer.

Science is tragic. Masterpieces from forgotten civilizations are ravaged by time, elements and human vanity. Countless lab hours are spent in search of a medical cure that is still unknown. Computer viruses decimate invaluable data on a global scale, and scores of people braver than I gave everything they could in the name of science.

Science is sexy. We all dream of having that one “EUREKA!” moment, when it all comes together, works like it should and validates the countless hours of research. Sure, it’s simply a behavioral reaction caused by adrenaline and dopamine, but isn’t that what it’s all about?

This second essay is from Leo Johnson, a 19-year-old biology and secondary education student at Louisiana State University. “I was previously a pre-veterinary major,” he writes, “but decided I would make more of a difference teaching kids science than taking care of sick animals.” It’s great when teachers are passionate about their subjects, and that’s obvious from this explanation of why he likes science:

I was going to attempt to write something eloquent and awe-inspiring, but science is already those things. Science, when you truly understand it, is truly magnificent and astounding. Science has shown me that because of the unique combination of my parents’ DNA that came together to form me, I’m one of more than 70 trillion potential combinations that could’ve been made.

Science tells me just how amazing the world and the things in it are. All the animals I see everyday are the products of billions of years of evolution, of change. I’m the product of that change.

Science somehow takes the mystery out of things but also makes them more magical. We no longer think of the stars as points of light on the tapestry of the night but now know that they’re burning balls of gas billions of miles away in the black expanse of space. This, to me, is more fantastic and amazing than anything someone could’ve made up.

Science, simply, is both factual and fantastic. All the things science tells us are supported by facts and results. The facts say that the universe we live in is more amazing than we could ever imagine and we’re lucky enough to be able to have science to show us this.

It’s because of this that I like science so much. Science allows me to discover and understand. It shows me things I would never know, or be able to know without it. Science provides me with answers, and if my question hasn’t been answered yet, I can be assured that someone is working on answering it. It’s the understanding that allows us to question. Science is the gift that keeps on giving; the more we understand, the more we seek to understand. The broader our knowledge, the more we want to expand it. Science makes the world more fantastic, and the more we already know, the more we’ll soon discover.

If you’d like to participate in our Why I Like Science series, send a 200- to 500-word essay to WhyILikeScience@gmail.com; I’ll publish the best entries in future posts on Surprising Science.

A glowing kitty may help in the fight against AIDS (credit: Mayo Clinic)

Cat owners might find a glow-in-the-dark kitty to be fairly useful—you’ll never trip over the cat at night again—but the Mayo Clinic scientists who created this glowing cat had a bigger goal in mind: fighting AIDS.

The substance that makes the cat glow is a version of the green fluorescent protein that lights up the crystal jelly, a type of jellyfish that lives off the West Coast of the United States. Years ago scientists realized that the gene for GFP is a perfect marker when they insert another new gene into an organism. By inserting a version of GFP along with their gene of choice, they could easily see if they were successful because the organism would glow. Since the technique was first developed, researchers have made many glowing animals, including pigs, mice, dogs, even fish you can buy in the pet store.

In this latest bit of research, published in Nature Methods, the Mayo Clinic scientists inserted a version of the GFP gene along with a gene from the rhesus macaque that blocks the feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV)—the virus that causes feline AIDS—into the unfertilized eggs of a cat. After those eggs were fertilized, they produced kitties that glowed green, showing that they also had the anti-FIV gene. Even better, subsequent generations of cats also glowed and had the anti-FIV gene.

The researchers still have more work to do to determine whether the anti-FIV gene works in the cats. “We haven’t shown cats that are AIDS-proof,” study co-author Eric Poeschla told LiveScience. “We still have to do infection studies involving whole cats. That the protection gene is expressed in the cat lymphoid organs, where AIDS virus spread and cell death mostly play out, is encouraging to us, however.”

The ultimate goal of this line of research, though, is to figure out how to make humans resistant to HIV, the virus that causes human AIDS. “We want to see if we can protect the domestic cat against its AIDS virus, if we can protect any species, eventually including ours, against its own AIDS virus,” Poeschla told LiveScience.

Without science, we wouldn't know that prehistoric creatures, like this short-necked plesiosaur (at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum) were real (courtesy of flickr user owillis)

Science is under siege these days. Some politicians proudly proclaim that evolution is just a theory and that climate change is a conspiracy among scientists. Health gurus advocate homeopathy or “natural” remedies rather than modern medicine. Parents ignore the advice of doctors and experts and refuse to vaccinate their children against deadly diseases. People who are quite happy to reap the benefits of science—new medical treatments, for example, or sci-fi-like technological devices—advocate for schools to teach religion in science class.

And so I think it’s time for the rest of us to speak up. Let’s explain what it is about science that satisfies us, how science improves our world and why it’s better than superstition. To that end, I’m starting a new series here on Surprising Science: Why I Like Science. In coming months, I’ll ask scientists, writers, musicians and others to weigh in on the topic. And I’m also asking you, the readers, why you like science. If you’d like to participate, send a 200- to 500-word essay to WhyILikeScience@gmail.com; I’ll publish the best.

And to start us off, here’s why I like science:

When we are little, we ask “why.” “Why is the sky blue?” “Why do balls fall down and not up?” “Why can’t my fish live outside water?” Good parents root their answers in science. The sky is blue due to the way light is scattered in the atmosphere. Balls fall down because of gravity. Your fish doesn’t have lungs, and gills only work in water.

But science doesn’t just give us answers to the why’s of our childhoods; it gives us the tools we need to keep answering them as we grow up.

Science is the tool I use to understand the world around me. It provides logic and sense and order in what might otherwise seem chaotic. And though the answer to the why’s of my adulthood may sometimes be “we don’t know,” it’s really just “we don’t know yet”—the answer will eventually be found, with science.

And then there’s the act of finding those answers, putting the methods of science into action, that I find more fascinating than any bit of fiction. There are astronomers who use telescopes to peer back in time. Biologists who discover new species in both familiar and faraway places and struggle to figure out how to save others from extinction. Even a non-scientist sitting at a computer can help to solve molecular structures, hunt for planets or decipher ancient Egyptian texts during lunch break. Science is often, simply, fun.

Science is also the light that keeps us out of the dark ages. It may not solve all of our problems, but it usually shows us the path to the solutions. And the more we know, the more questions we find. It’s a never-ending search for answers that will continue for as long as the human race exists. And guaranteed satisfaction for the little girl inside me, the one that still asks “why.”

A screenshot from The Great Flu, an online game.

I’m looking forward, with some trepidation, to seeing the movie Contagion, which comes out in theaters tomorrow. The subject is scarier than any made-up horror flick–a realistic scenario of a killer pandemic virus. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University and an expert consultant on the new film, gave me real reason to worry about the scenario dreamed up by the moviemakers, telling Salon: “We know that if we were to have some sort of an outbreak—or pandemic, worse yet—in the United States, we don’t at present have the tools that are required to rapidly ramp up some sort of a strategy for making vaccines and distributing them. Those are just the cold, hard facts.” After watching Contagion, we’re all going to either want to hide away in our homes and/or start calling our congresspeople to take action so we’re better prepared for something like this.

Or we could just play games. Here are five games to play after watching the movie:

Sneeze: The goal of this mini online game is to sneeze at just the right time and in just the right direction to transfer a virus to others who then transfer it to others and so on, eventually reaching as many individuals as possible. It’s a simple demonstration of how easy it is to transmit a virus when people don’t cover their mouths when they sneeze (and one out of four people in one study didn’t bother).

Pandemic, The Board Game: In this cooperative game, two to four players work together to cure four diseases. Each player takes on a role—such as scientist or medic—and on each turn travels the world, treating people, building research centers and finding cures for the diseases. If you find the cures, everyone wins. If not, you’re all dead. The message of the game is that if this happens in real life, we’re all going to have to work together to fight a pandemic or we’ll all end up dead.

Pandemic 2: This is another mini online game (and not related to the board game, despite the name), and the goal is to wipe out the world. Pick a virus, bacteria or parasite and let it loose. As more people become infected (and eventually die), you earn points that you can use to buy new traits for your disease, such as symptoms, drug resistance and modes of transmission. Can you evolve your disease faster than humans can develop and deploy a vaccine? This game excels at demonstrating how the various traits of a disease can affect where and how quickly it spreads and how virulent and deadly it becomes.

The Great Flu: Choose from one of five viruses (difficulty levels) in this online game and then pick through a selection of strategies to defeat it. You can stockpile vaccines and antiviral medicines, spend money on research facilities and teams, shut down schools or airports, distribute face masks, or isolate infected individuals. Trying to contain the disease in a single country is not easy, and the numbers of infected and dead can quickly pile up. This game is an interesting simulation of some of the realistic options available to those fighting a pandemic disease.

Killer Flu: This game, from the U.K. Clinical Virology Network, should give us all a little hope. The UK CVN developed the game, in part, to demonstrate just how hard it is for a flu virus to mutate, spread and kill. And that adds a layer of difficulty to the game, in which you try to make a flu virus spread from person to person and city to city, infecting as many people as possible, and makes it that much more fun.

In this GOES satellite image taken on August 24, the eye Hurricane Irene, traveling over the Bahamas, can be clearly seen (Credit: NOAA/NASA GOES Project)

Not that long ago, people got little to no warning about hurricanes. They couldn’t know when the winds would kick up, when the surge of water would arrive, what kind of destruction a storm might bring. But now we have satellites orbiting overhead, powerful computers that can forecast a track days in advance and plenty of scientists to make sense of a wealth of data. We may not be invulnerable, but we can, at least, limit the amount of destruction and loss of life. (If anyone asks, “what good is science?” here’s a great example.)

And because this is mostly government-funded science, the public gets plenty of access to information and tools to help us better understand hurricanes and prepare for them.

“Understanding the history of hurricane landfalls in your community is an important step toward assessing your vulnerability to these potentially devastating storms,” says Ethan Gibney, a senior geospatial analyst for NOAA. He’s one of the developers of NOAA’s Historical Hurricane Tracks online mapping application. Users can map the tracks of storms around the world and get detailed information about tropical cyclones going back to 1842.

Information about Irene (as well as Tropical Depression 10, brewing in the Atlantic) is available from the National Hurricane Center. Most of us will be satisfied with the array of maps, advisories, podcasts and videos produced by the center, but even more detailed analysis tools are also available to those who are interested and understand it.

NASA monitors storms from above the Earth and publishes the best of its imagery online. Instruments on the GOES and Terra satellites provide great visible images along with temperature (of both air and sea surface), pressure, wind and cloud data. The TRMM satellite, meanwhile, measures the hurricane’s rainfall and gives insight into the storm’s structure.

And anyone who lives near Irene’s projected path should consult FEMA’s hurricane site and learn what they should do to prepare.

Check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week and get more science news from Smithsonian on our Facebook page. And apologies for the East-Coast-centric coverage the last few days; we’ll go back to regular science blogging once the Smithsonian office is no longer plagued by natural disasters. Good luck to all who sit in Irene’s path.

The music was the best kind of intelligent humor. Where else could you find a song about the United Nations or one that named all the countries of the world? If you didn’t have a decent knowledge of history, geography or literature, a lot of the jokes would go over your head, but it was all so entertaining that kids would never realize that they were learning along the way. And science was a frequent theme, as would be expected from a program that included lab mice trying to take over the world (they were so great, the mice eventually got their own TV show). YouTube is chock full of clips from the show—I hope you enjoy a few that I found:

Yakko’s Universe:

The Senses:

Pinky and the Brain theme:

A Quake! A Quake! (about the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake):

Bones in the Body:

The Planets (from when Pluto still qualified):

One of the most dangerous jobs in science has to be a volcanologist. When you watch the video above you can see why (although trying to get that close to a bubbling cauldron of lava is not just dangerous; it’s stupid enough that even your fellow volcanologists will yell at you). But collecting and analyzing samples of lava and deadly gases are just a couple tools in the volcanologist’s box; here are some of the other—safer—ways they study volcanoes:

Measure seismic activity: Earthquakes are an early warning sign that something is going on underground with a volcano. The rumblings can be difficult to interpret, but an increase in activity often presages an eruption.

Measure ground movements: Scientists often set up sensitive tiltmeters that can detect the tiniest changes in the shape of a volcano’s surface. Before an eruption, the volcano may start to bulge as magma accumulates closer to the surface. Before Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, the north side of the volcano visible bulged, but more often this deformation is detectable only with sophisticated equipment.

Take the volcano’s temperature: If a volcanologist wants to see how hot a volcano has become and which lava flows are newer (and hotter), there’s no need to get up close. A thermal imaging camera on an airplane or satellite can take a picture and identify the hot spots.

Check on its geophysical properties: Minute changes in the electrical conductivity, magnetic field and even gravity around a volcano can indicate that something is brewing beneath the surface.

Map it in three dimensions: A 3-D map of all the nooks and crannies on the surface of a volcano can help scientists make predictions about where the lava will flow and who is most in danger in the event of an eruption.

Study the volcano’s past: Scientists examine geologic deposits to learn about past eruptions, which can give important clues to what a volcano may do in the future.

(HT: Bad Astronomy)

One of Will Walker's demotivational posters for scientists

We’re big fans of science humor here at Surprising Science HQ. Some of the funniest, most innovative new comics have a science angle, whether it’s dinosaur spokescharacters, grad students toiling in a lab or stick figures with sophisticated math skills. We keep this poster in our time machine, earn our badges, celebrate the IgNobel Prize winners and encourage educators to teach the controversy. And, of course, although it’s a non-denominational blog, we’re Pastafarians at heart.

One of my favorite new (to me) examples of humor as a form of release from scientific tension comes from Will Walker, now a post-doc at the McLaughlin Research Institute for the Biomedical Sciences in Montana. He has a series of mock-motivational posters [update: you must log on to Facebook to see them, apologies!] that capture the absurdity of lab work. (They’re akin to the “Demotivators” from Despair, Inc. that you may be familiar with. My favorite is a photo of a sinking ship titled: “MISTAKES. It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.”) Here’s where Will’s poster inspiration came from:

I was in the throes of my dissertation research at Cornell University. As a baby scientist, I was super excited to test a great idea I thought I’d had, but I was learning for the first time about all the gremlins that stand between the researcher and The Answer. It’s just the nature of science, really: since you’re trying to extend the boundary of the known, there’s necessarily a lot of inefficient fumbling around with things you barely understand. Still, troubleshooting all the problems that pop up at the lab bench can feel like fighting a multi-headed hydra of experiment failure, so you have to find ways to manage your frustration during the rough patches. There’s no class in grad school to teach you this, but it’s a huge part of the mental equipment you end up acquiring. The posters were part of a conscious effort to maintain a little space for humor between me and my frustrations: I found it was easier to keep banging my head against the wall if I could do it with a modicum of ironic detachment. (An earlier part of my self-prescribed frustration therapy was to buy a sledgehammer and a pile of cinder blocks to smash, but that got expensive after a while. Making posters was cheaper!)

What are your own favorite science humor sites? Please share them in the comments.