Thursday, February 28, 2008
phew!
I wanted to post, but today I'm written out. I sent in a sample writing test for a job today. Wish me luck, and I promise a post tomorrow!
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Jazz It Up
Is it too soon to post about a non-physics science story? I will claim this is physics related because they used an MRI. This story caught my attention because in high school, I played the bari sax in the jazz band. Well, researchers have found that when jazz musicians do improv (something I was terrible at), the large region of the brain responsible in monitoring one’s performance shuts down, while a small region involved in organizing self-initiated thought and behaviors is highly activated. The researchers think this and several related patterns are probably indicators of a brain engaged in highly creative thought (makes sense). The study is published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) One.
Also makes sense to me, I don’t have many self-initiated thoughts. :P No, actually, what I found interesting in the study was that the complexity of the improvisation didn’t make a lick of difference in the brain scans. So for me, it really didn’t matter that I couldn’t do those hard solos, because if I couldn’t master those easy ones, it wasn’t going to matter. Of course, I could play anything that was written on the page, but if I had to make something up, even something really really simple, forget it.
The best part of the study was how the poor musicians had to play. The researchers had the musicians lay on their backs so their heads and torsos would fit in an MRI scanner, with the knees bent upward. They got this little plastic keyboard, which was shortened to fit inside the scanner and had its magnetic parts removed (because an MRI is a giant magnet, so I’m wondering how the keyboard worked), rested on the musicians’ knees. A mirror was placed over the musicians’ eyes so they could see what they were playing, and they had headphones to hear. I wish I could have seen. Somehow, these musicians were able to play well enough for the scientists to record a significant difference in the brain scans while they were improvising.
The scientists explain that the reason part of the brain shuts down is sort of like how over thinking a basketball shot can ruin the shot. I don’t think that part of my brain ever shuts down. I’m always over thinking things. Anyway, the part that’s really active during improv is the medial prefrontal cortex and is involved in self-initiated thoughts and behaviors. It is also very active when a person describes an event that has happened to him or makes up a story.
They also found that there was increased activity in the sensory areas during improvisation, including touch, hearing and vision, even though there were no significant differences in what they were hearing, touching and seeing during both the memorized and improvised sections.
The researchers pretty much concluded that there wasn’t one creative section of the brain, because of this sensory increase. “One important thing we can conclude from this study is that there is no single creative area of the brain, no focal activation of a single area,” said Dr. Allen Braun, one of the authors. “Rather, when you move from either of the control tasks to improvisation, you see a strong and consistent pattern of activity throughout the brain that enables creativity.”
So are there enough readers out there for me to ask this: What does it feel like when you are in a creative state?
For more on this story, go here.
Also makes sense to me, I don’t have many self-initiated thoughts. :P No, actually, what I found interesting in the study was that the complexity of the improvisation didn’t make a lick of difference in the brain scans. So for me, it really didn’t matter that I couldn’t do those hard solos, because if I couldn’t master those easy ones, it wasn’t going to matter. Of course, I could play anything that was written on the page, but if I had to make something up, even something really really simple, forget it.
The best part of the study was how the poor musicians had to play. The researchers had the musicians lay on their backs so their heads and torsos would fit in an MRI scanner, with the knees bent upward. They got this little plastic keyboard, which was shortened to fit inside the scanner and had its magnetic parts removed (because an MRI is a giant magnet, so I’m wondering how the keyboard worked), rested on the musicians’ knees. A mirror was placed over the musicians’ eyes so they could see what they were playing, and they had headphones to hear. I wish I could have seen. Somehow, these musicians were able to play well enough for the scientists to record a significant difference in the brain scans while they were improvising.
The scientists explain that the reason part of the brain shuts down is sort of like how over thinking a basketball shot can ruin the shot. I don’t think that part of my brain ever shuts down. I’m always over thinking things. Anyway, the part that’s really active during improv is the medial prefrontal cortex and is involved in self-initiated thoughts and behaviors. It is also very active when a person describes an event that has happened to him or makes up a story.
They also found that there was increased activity in the sensory areas during improvisation, including touch, hearing and vision, even though there were no significant differences in what they were hearing, touching and seeing during both the memorized and improvised sections.
The researchers pretty much concluded that there wasn’t one creative section of the brain, because of this sensory increase. “One important thing we can conclude from this study is that there is no single creative area of the brain, no focal activation of a single area,” said Dr. Allen Braun, one of the authors. “Rather, when you move from either of the control tasks to improvisation, you see a strong and consistent pattern of activity throughout the brain that enables creativity.”
So are there enough readers out there for me to ask this: What does it feel like when you are in a creative state?
For more on this story, go here.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Purdy Pic for the Night
I'll write the Enceladus story or something even cooler later in the week, but tonight I thought I'd post a nice picture from NASA. Tonight's image was taken from the Swift satellite. They made it by combining 39 frames together over 11 hours of exposure time. This is the nearby “Triangulum Galaxy” and is in the ultraviolet light range (the galaxy is purple only if we could see in ultraviolet). It’s about 2.9 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Triangulum.Go here for a better image:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/214434main_M33_UVOT.jpg
And for more of the story:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/m33.html
Monday, February 25, 2008
Smile! You're on camera!
Starting this new blog, I got lucky. What was I going to wow everyone with? Come on physicists, give me your best! And what was in my mailbox? Physicists film the electron.
Now every reporter needs to learn that releases like these are more complicated than at first glance, but my first thought was “cool”! I have to admit, I thought of a little shiny ball zooming around. Actually I thought of a bubble chamber, check that out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_chamber. But it’s a little more complicated. If you ever took chemistry, you know that an electron is charge, or really, it’s a charged particle smaller than an atom. An atom is made of these guys and protons. Its mass is itty bitty, a thousandth the size of the tiniest atom, and as far as we know, it cannot be broken down into any smaller units. But can we actually see one?
Electrons live around atoms, zooming around. To get one you need to detach it from an atom. Before, it had been impossible to actually photograph an electron because they move so fast and the extremely short flashes you need weren’t available.
It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. The definition of an attosecond is one quintrillionth of a second. Yes, that’s a word. But I like this quote better: “an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe,” according to Johan Mauritsson, an assistant professor in atomic physics at the Faculty of Engineering, Lund University. He is one of seven researchers behind the study.
Scientists at Lund University in Sweden have the technology that can capture something going this fast. They call it a stroboscope (another device like it captures still images of a hummingbird’s wings). The researchers synchronized light pulses with the oscillations of a weak infrared laser. They made these pulses kick a cloud of helium atoms (where the electrons came from) at a precise time. Each attosecond pulse released a few electrons, some of which were thrown back against their atoms before being pushed sideways and detected.
After many, many of these events, the team was able to get some clean images of the “quantum state of electrons ionized at a single moment in their laser oscillation cycle.” This made a bullseye pattern, which you can see in the video.
"The length of the film corresponds to a single oscillation of the light, but the speed has then been ratcheted down considerably so that we can watch it. The filmed sequence shows the energy distribution of the electron and is therefore not a film in the usual sense."
http://www.atto.fysik.lth.se/
“By taking several pictures of exactly the same moment in the process, it’s possible to create stronger, but still sharp, images. A precondition is for the process to be repeated in an identical manner, which is the case regarding the movement of an electron in a ray of light. We started with a so-called stroboscope. A stroboscope enables us to “freeze” a periodic movement, like capturing a hummingbird flapping its wings. You then take several pictures when the wings are in the same position, such as at the top, and the picture will turn out clear, despite the rapid motion,” clarifies Johan Mauritsson.
No shiny ball, but still pretty neat.
Later in the week I’ll talk about Enceladus. Then, who knows?
Now every reporter needs to learn that releases like these are more complicated than at first glance, but my first thought was “cool”! I have to admit, I thought of a little shiny ball zooming around. Actually I thought of a bubble chamber, check that out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_chamber. But it’s a little more complicated. If you ever took chemistry, you know that an electron is charge, or really, it’s a charged particle smaller than an atom. An atom is made of these guys and protons. Its mass is itty bitty, a thousandth the size of the tiniest atom, and as far as we know, it cannot be broken down into any smaller units. But can we actually see one?
Electrons live around atoms, zooming around. To get one you need to detach it from an atom. Before, it had been impossible to actually photograph an electron because they move so fast and the extremely short flashes you need weren’t available.
It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. The definition of an attosecond is one quintrillionth of a second. Yes, that’s a word. But I like this quote better: “an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe,” according to Johan Mauritsson, an assistant professor in atomic physics at the Faculty of Engineering, Lund University. He is one of seven researchers behind the study.
Scientists at Lund University in Sweden have the technology that can capture something going this fast. They call it a stroboscope (another device like it captures still images of a hummingbird’s wings). The researchers synchronized light pulses with the oscillations of a weak infrared laser. They made these pulses kick a cloud of helium atoms (where the electrons came from) at a precise time. Each attosecond pulse released a few electrons, some of which were thrown back against their atoms before being pushed sideways and detected.
After many, many of these events, the team was able to get some clean images of the “quantum state of electrons ionized at a single moment in their laser oscillation cycle.” This made a bullseye pattern, which you can see in the video.
"The length of the film corresponds to a single oscillation of the light, but the speed has then been ratcheted down considerably so that we can watch it. The filmed sequence shows the energy distribution of the electron and is therefore not a film in the usual sense."
http://www.atto.fysik.lth.se/
“By taking several pictures of exactly the same moment in the process, it’s possible to create stronger, but still sharp, images. A precondition is for the process to be repeated in an identical manner, which is the case regarding the movement of an electron in a ray of light. We started with a so-called stroboscope. A stroboscope enables us to “freeze” a periodic movement, like capturing a hummingbird flapping its wings. You then take several pictures when the wings are in the same position, such as at the top, and the picture will turn out clear, despite the rapid motion,” clarifies Johan Mauritsson.
No shiny ball, but still pretty neat.
Later in the week I’ll talk about Enceladus. Then, who knows?
Saturday, February 23, 2008
What's to come
This will be a fun science news blog written by a geek who needs to release her science writing to the world. I'm physics-centered, so most the of the stories will be physics, and geophysics when they come up, but I love all science and will let you know all the coolest stuff as soon as it hits the science news wires. If you stay here you will be lucky enough to get the best science stories first and have the best conversation topics for your cocktail parties.
I will update at least once a week, I'm not sure what day because I want to get the stories out the day they release for your benefit since this is a blog and not a print and unlike, say the NYT, I don't have to wait until Tuesday to publish my science stories.
Next week I will have a couple of stories that released today for your reading pleasure. Here's a preview:
The electron was filmed for the first time ever: "The movie shows how an electron rides on a light wave after just having been pulled away from an atom. This is the first time an electron has ever been filmed, and the results are presented in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters."
And a new theory of what causes the giant plumes from Saturn's moon Enceladus.
I hope to see you all here later on. Can't wait!
I will update at least once a week, I'm not sure what day because I want to get the stories out the day they release for your benefit since this is a blog and not a print and unlike, say the NYT, I don't have to wait until Tuesday to publish my science stories.
Next week I will have a couple of stories that released today for your reading pleasure. Here's a preview:
The electron was filmed for the first time ever: "The movie shows how an electron rides on a light wave after just having been pulled away from an atom. This is the first time an electron has ever been filmed, and the results are presented in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters."
And a new theory of what causes the giant plumes from Saturn's moon Enceladus.
I hope to see you all here later on. Can't wait!
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