Macabre...Galileo's lost tooth and fingers

Maybe not as macabre as you think. Remember Einstein's brain .

"Art collector finds Galileo's lost tooth, fingers"

November 20th, 2009

Reuters

An art collector has found a tooth, thumb and finger of the renowned Italian scientist Galileo Galilei who died in the 17th century, Florence's History of Science museum said on Friday.

The body parts, along with another finger and a vertebrae, were cut from Galileo's corpse by scientists and historians during a burial ceremony held 95 years after his death in 1642.

Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, a science historian who cut away the parts and wrote about the ceremony, "confessed he had found it hard to resist the temptation to take away the skull which had housed such extraordinary genius," the museum said.

The newly-found relics had passed from one collector to another until they went missing in 1905. The remaining finger and the vertebrae have been conserved since 1737 in a mummified state in museums in Florence and Padua.

"All the organic material extracted from the corpse has therefore now been identified and is conserved in responsible hands," the museum said in a statement.

"On the basis of considerable historical documentation, there are no doubts about the authenticity of the items," it added.

They will be exhibited from early 2010, when the museum will re-open after current renovation work and will change its name to the Galileo museum.

Galileo, born in Pisa in 1564, is considered one of the fathers of modern science due to his studies in physics, mathematics and particularly astronomy, where he led great advances in developing the telescope.

His lost fingers and tooth were bought by an unnamed collector at a recent auction, where they were being sold as unidentified artifacts contained in an 17th century wooden case, the museum said.

For 95 years after his death, ecclesiastical authorities refused to allow Galileo to be buried in consecrated ground because his findings were considered contrary to the teachings of the Catholic church.

His body now lies in Florence's Santa Croce church, opposite the tomb of Michelangelo.

Deceased--Albert V. Crewe

Albert Crewe
February 18th, 1927 to November 18th, 2009

"Albert Crewe, First to Show a Single Atom, Is Dead at 82"

by

John Markoff

November 21st, 2009

The New York Times

Albert V. Crewe, the University of Chicago physicist who developed the high-resolution electron microscope that captured the first image of an individual atom, died on Wednesday at his home in the Lake Michigan community of Dune Acres, Ind. He was 82.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his daughter Jennifer said.

Dr. Crewe’s research opened a new window into the Lilliputian world of the fundamental building blocks of nature, giving scientists and engineers in fields as varied as computing and biology a powerful new tool to understand the architecture of everything from living tissue to metal alloys.

It was during the 1960s that Dr. Crewe became interested in electron microscopy, which he wanted to apply to biology research then under way at Argonne National Laboratory, outside Chicago, where he was the director.

After attending a conference in England and forgetting to buy a book at the airport for the flight home, he pulled out a pad of paper on the plane and sketched two ways to improve existing microscopes. Back in Chicago, he determined that one of the approaches had already been pursued but that the other was fundamentally new.

He immersed himself in the design of advanced microscopes with the goal of reaching resolutions as fine as a single angstrom, about a third the diameter of a carbon atom. By 1967, his research had become so compelling that he left Argonne and his role as a manager there to return to the University of Chicago, where a decade earlier he had worked on the Chicago Cyclotron, a superconducting accelerator. This time he signed on as a full professor.

Dr. Crewe designed an enhanced electron source to bombard the object being scanned and later improved lens and detection technologies as well. This culminated in the first successful version of a system known as a scanning transmission electron microscope, or STEM.

While earlier microscopes had achieved resolutions of several angstroms, Dr. Crewe used his new electron source and newly available ultra-high-vacuum technologies to attain a tenfold improvement in image contrast, making it possible to see details not previously visible.

Finally, in June 1970 in the journal Science, he published a research report titled “Visibility of Single Atoms,” in which he cautiously documented photographic evidence that showed images of uranium and thorium atoms.

“It appears that the bright spots which we have observed are probably due to single atoms,” he wrote, noting that the geometric placement of the bright spots corresponded to what would be expected theoretically.

“It was extremely dramatic in 1970 when he saw single atoms,” said Oscar Kapp, a University of Chicago biochemist, who worked with Dr. Crewe on the project as a graduate student and continued to collaborate with him throughout his career.

Five years after that success, Dr. Crewe obtained the first motion pictures of atoms, an achievement that offered new ways of understanding atomic interactions. The film was even shown on a Chicago television station by the movie critic Gene Siskel, although he noted that he would not pay a dollar to watch it, according to one of the graduate students who worked on the experiment.

Dr. Crewe, the university’s dean of physical sciences from 1971 to 1981, continued his research on electron microscopes through the 1980s. He held 19 patents for his inventions in the field and eventually published 275 research papers in it. His work was essential to the development of a generation of commercial electron microscopes, on which he consulted with the Hitachi Corporation. Today electron microscopes are widely used both in the semiconductor industry and in scientific laboratories around the world.

Albert Victor Crewe was born in Bradford, England, in what is now West Yorkshire, and grew up in a working-class family. He had average grades as a young child, but at 15 he passed a nationwide entrance exam and became the first in his family to attend high school. He won a scholarship to attend the University of Liverpool, where he also earned a Ph.D. in physics.

During the summer of 1946 in Cornwall, where he and other college students had gathered to help with a postwar wheat harvest, he met Doreen Blunsdon. They married in 1949.

After doing pioneering work on particle accelerators in England in the early 1950s, Dr. Crewe was invited to the University of Chicago in 1955 as a visiting research associate. A year later, having helped complete the Chicago Cyclotron, he was hired by the university as an assistant professor.

In 1958 he joined Argonne National Laboratory, where he led a team of researchers developing another advanced accelerator. He rose rapidly at Argonne, soon becoming director of the laboratory’s particle accelerator division and eventually managing 100 engineers.

He was appointed the laboratory’s director in 1961, when he was only 34, an assistant professor without tenure and not yet a United States citizen.

In addition to his wife, Doreen, he is survived by four children, Jennifer Crewe of New York, Sarah Crewe of Ruidoso, N.M., Elizabeth Crewe of LaGrange, Ill., and David Crewe of Sunnyvale, Calif.; and 10 grandchildren.

In a public lecture shortly after becoming the director of Argonne, Dr. Crewe bemoaned the growing gulf between scientists and laymen.

“There are too many people behaving like the proverbial ostrich and hoping that science will go away if they bury their heads in the sand,” he said, “and this in spite of the fact that the last few decades have indicated strongly that science will not go away.”

Wikipedia entry

Mona Lisa's smile

Leonardo's Mona Lisa's smile is being scrutinized by scientists and claiming that the "smile" significance is a function of the human eye.

"The secret behind Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile"

The secret behind Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile has been explained by scientists who believe it changes depending on which part of the eye sees it first.

by

Richard Alleyne

October 28th, 2009

Newsweek

One of the charms of the world's most famous painting is that she appears radiant one moment and then serious and sardonic the next.

Now scientists claim to have come up with an answer to her changing moods - our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain.

They believe Mona Lisa's smile depends on what cells in the retina pick up the image and what channel the image is transmitted through in the brain.

Sometimes one channel wins over the other, and you see the smile, sometimes others take over and you do not see the smile.

Different cells in the eye are designed to pick up different colours, contrasts, backgrounds and foregrounds. Some deal with central vision while others with peripheral.

Depending on what cells picks up the image first depends on what channel they are sent to the brian for interpreting.

These channels encode data about an object's size, clarity, brightness and location in the visual field.

"Sometimes one channel wins over the other, and you see the smile, sometimes others take over and you don't see the smile," said Dr Luis Martinez Otero, a neuroscientist at Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain, who conducted the study, told New Scientist.

To get a fuller picture of the reasons behind Mona Lisa's vanishing smile, Dr Martinez Otero varied different aspects of the Mona Lisa that are processed by different visual channels, and then asked volunteers whether they saw a smile or not.

To start with, the duo asked volunteers to look at the painting in varying sizes from varying distances. They found the closer you were the more likely you were to see the smile.

Next, Dr Martinez Otero's team compared how light affects our judgement of Mona Lisa's smile. Two kinds of cells determine the brightness of an object relative to its surroundings - "on-centre" cells, which are stimulated only when their centres are illuminated, and allow us to see a bright star in a dark night; and "off-centre" cells, which turn on only when their centres are dark, and allow us to pick out words on a printed page.

Dr Martinez Otero jammed these channels by showing another set of volunteers either a black or white screen for 30 seconds followed by a shot of the Mona Lisa. The black would mute off centre cells while the light on-centre.

Volunteers were more likely to see Mona Lisa's smile after they had been shown the dark screen, leading Martinez Otero to conclude that it is these the on-centre cells that sense the Mona Lisa's smile.

Eye gaze also affects how volunteers see the smile, Martinez Otero says. His team used software to track where in the painting 20 volunteers gazed while they rated whether or not Mona Lisa's smile became more or less apparent.

With a minute to gaze at the painting, volunteers tended to focus on the left side of her mouth when judging her as smiling – further evidence that dead-centre vision picks out the smile.

When volunteers had only a fraction of a second to discern her smile, their eyes tended to focus on her left cheek, hinting that peripheral vision plays a role, too.

So did Leonardo intend to sow so much confusion in the brains of viewers, not to mention scientists? Absolutely, Martinez Otero contends. "He wrote in one of his notebooks that he was trying to paint dynamic expressions because that's what he saw in the street."

The research was originally presented at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago.

This isn't the first time scientists have deconstructed Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece.

In 2000, Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School with a side interest in art history, showed that Mona Lisa's smile is more apparent in peripheral visionMovie Camera than dead-centre vision.

Crocs in the Sahara

Now wouldn't this give Steve Irwin a smile.

"New fossils reveal a world full of crocodiles"

by [editor]

Sandra Maler

November 19th, 2009

Reuters

New fossils unearthed in what is now the Sahara desert reveal a once-swampy world

divided up among a half-dozen species of unusual and perhaps intelligent crocodiles, researchers reported on Thursday.

They have given some of the new species snappy names -- BoarCroc, RatCroc, DogCroc, DuckCroc and PancakeCroc -- but say their findings help build an understanding of how crocodilians were and remain such a successful life form.

They lived during the Cretaceous period 145 million to 65 million years ago, when the continents were closer together and the world warmer and wetter than it is now.

"We were surprised to find so many species from the same time in the same place," said paleontologist Hans Larsson of McGill University in Montreal who worked on the study.

"Each of the crocs apparently had different diets, different behaviors. It appears they had divided up the ecosystem, each species taking advantage of it in its own way."

Larsson and Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, funded by National Geographic, studied the jaws, teeth and what few bones they had of the crocodiles. They also did CT scans, which are computer-enhanced x-rays, to see inside the skulls.

Two of the species, DogCroc and DuckCroc, had brains that looked different from those of modern crocodiles.

"They may have had slightly more sophisticated brain function than living crocs because active hunting on land usually requires more brain power than merely waiting for prey to show up," Larsson said in a statement.

RatCroc, a new species formally named Araripesuchus rattoides, was found in Morocco and would have used its buck-toothed lower jaw to grub for food.

PancakeCroc, known scientifically as Laganosuchus thaumastos, was 20 feet long with a big, flat head.

DuckCroc represents new fossils found in Niger from a previously known species called Anatosuchus minor. It would have eaten grubs and frogs with its broad snout.

The more ferocious BoarCroc was also 20 feet long but ran upright and had a jaw built for ramming, with three pairs of knife-like teeth.

Some walked upright with their legs under the body like a land mammal instead of sprawled out to the sides, bellies touching the ground.

"Their amphibious talents in the past may be the key to understanding how they flourished in, and ultimately survived, the dinosaur era," Sereno wrote in a separate article for National Geographic.

Rocket emissions and the environment

All rockets and the Shuttles do pollute.

"Dirty Rockets"

What's the environmental impact of going into space?

by

Nina Shen Rastogi

November 17th, 2009

Slate

We hear so much about the environmental impacts of transportation. What about space travel? How do rockets affect the atmosphere?

There's a simple reason why we hear a lot more about cars, ships, and planes than we do about rocket ships: There are lot more of them. Each flight into space does have a small impact on the planet it leaves behind, but—for the moment, at least—these launchings are very rare. Only a couple of rockets blast off every week around the world. As a result, space travel doesn't register on most environmentalists' radars.

One issue that might deserve some attention has to do with the depletion of stratospheric ozone, a topic we discussed a few months back. Rocket engines emit reactive gases that cause ozone molecules to break apart. They also discharge microscopic particles of soot and aluminum oxide, which may increase the rate at which those gases wreak havoc. Each variety of rocket propellant delivers its own blend of ozone-depleting substances: Solid propellants, for example, are more damaging than liquid ones, though exactly how much is unclear. Engine design matters, too. To make matters worse, spacecraft dump some of these pollutants directly into the upper and middle stratosphere, where they can start causing damage immediately.

Despite all this, spacecraft contribute very little to the global ozone problem. In a recent paper on the topic, researcher Martin Ross and three co-authors estimated that rocket launches are responsible for roughly 1 percent of the total ozone depletion that can be attributed to human causes. That percentage may rise, however, as more traditional pollutants, like CFCs, start to fade from the atmosphere (thanks to the 1987 Montreal Protocol). At the same time, the number of launches—for purposes of exploration, tourism, and space-based solar power—is expected to increase. One of the study's co-authors has been quoted as saying, "If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realized by CFCs."

All that stratospheric damage may increase rates of skin cancer and cataracts, but what effect might rockets have on global climate change? The exhaust from space-ship engines does add several kilotons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. But that's just a smidgen compared with the several hundred kilotons produced by aircraft, as Ross and his co-authors point out. Aircraft, in turn, are responsible for just 2 percent to 5 percent of the world's CO2 emissions. Even with major growth in the space industry, the authors say, it's unlikely that rockets will become a significant issue vis-à-vis climate change.

One wild card, though, are those microscopic particles we mentioned earlier—soot and aluminum oxide. They don't last very long in the stratosphere—only a few years, as opposed to centuries for carbon dioxide—but on a per-unit-of-mass basis, they can be very effective at changing the radiation balance in the atmosphere. The problem is, it's not always clear how they'll change that balance. Bits of aluminum oxide, for example, reflect the visible light from the sun back into space, which cools the Earth. But those same particles can also absorb infrared radiation emanating from the planet's surface, essentially trapping heat the way a greenhouse gas does. Soot, too, can help warm or cool the planet, depending on the size, number, and location of the particles.

Atmospheric scientists do have the models to calculate what the overall climate effects of a given launch might be, even taking the fickle particles into consideration. What they don't have, Ross says, are good enough data on what's actually in those rocket plumes, particularly when it comes to engines using liquid propellants or the new "hybrid" propellants (which use a combination of a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer).

While this research proceeds, it's worth taking a moment to consider how rocket launches pollute the environment just beyond our borders—namely, the otherwise pristine wilds of outer space. Space journeys leave behind all kinds of debris, including old batteries, jettisoned components, and human refuse. NASA estimates that there are upward of 500,000 pieces of debris larger than one centimeter currently orbiting the planet—not to mention tens of millions of really tiny particles, which can damage sensitive equipment despite their diminutive size. One astrophysicist recently compared our celestial junkyard to a massive Superfund site. If we really want future generations to have the option of enjoying the final frontier, it's worth thinking about how to keep the place clean for them.

Rocket Launches May Need Regulation To Prevent Ozone Depletion, Says Study

Deceased--Earl Coleman

Earl Coleman
January 9th, 1916 to October 12th, 2009

"Earl Coleman, Publisher and Poet, Dies at 93"

by

William Grimes

November 14th, 2009

The New York Times

Earl M. Coleman was a fledgling short-story writer and poet fresh out of the Army when he got the idea for a custom translation business in 1946. At a poetry workshop he organized, he got to talking with two students, one a French teacher, the other a German engineer.

Why not translate scientific material into English? Mr. Coleman suggested.

With his wife at the time, Frances, he started Consultants Bureau, a custom translation service, and over the years built it into the Plenum Publishing Corporation, one of the world’s largest translators and publishers of scientific and technical material. Through Da Capo Press, founded in 1963, it developed a profitable line in reprinted books on music, art and architecture.

Mr. Coleman died of a pulmonary embolism on Oct. 12 at the age of 93, his second wife, Ellen Schneid Coleman, said. He lived in Somerset, N.J.

Mr. Coleman had started with a hundred dollars and a flash of intuition. Soon after setting up Consultants Bureau, he learned that the United States government was sitting on 21 tons of captured German scientific documents. He immediately offered to buy a ton of them, only to be told that the government did not work that way.

Instead, the Commerce Department sent out to American businesses a monthly bulletin describing selected documents in the German cache. Those interested could order a document and then translate it.

Mr. Coleman saw that companies were translating the same articles over and over — a pointless duplication of effort. “Obviously the problem was how to mass-produce translations of scientific material,” he told Publishers Weekly in 1975.

He then turned to the Soviet Union as a source of material. Other companies were already translating articles from Soviet scientific journals, but Mr. Coleman decided to publish journals in their entirety, starting in 1949 with The Journal of General Chemistry, U.S.S.R.

By 1956, his company was translating a dozen Soviet journals, using a stable of 50 translators. It was at this point that the British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, the owner of the science and medical publishers Pergamon Press, came calling with an offer to buy out Mr. Coleman for $50,000 in cash — “more money than I had ever seen in any one place in my life,” Mr. Coleman wrote in an article in Publishing Research Quarterly in 1994.

Mr. Coleman turned him down flat, whereupon Maxwell threatened to start his own Russian translation service. To drive home the point, he showed Mr. Coleman a list of the journals he intended to translate. It included all the titles offered by the Consultants Bureau.

Undeterred, Mr. Coleman did an end run around his adversary. He signed a royalty agreement with the Soviet government’s copyright agency, the first such large-scale agreement between a Western company and the Soviet Union and the foundation of Mr. Coleman’s success.

When Maxwell persisted, the Soviets, at Mr. Coleman’s instigation, told Maxwell that if he did not desist, the Soviet government would prohibit Soviet learned societies and scientists from having any dealings with his company.

The threat from Maxwell evaporated.

Earl Maxwell Coleman was born on Jan. 9, 1916, in the Bronx and attended New York University and City College. He was drafted into the Army in 1941 and re-enlisted, in the Army Air Corps, after World War II broke out. He trained airmen on flight simulators in the United States and in Britain. He also won a pot of money playing poker.

After the war, Mr. Coleman, intent on becoming a writer, managed to place a short story with Esquire but otherwise found that the literary life was depleting his gambling winnings. He spent the next 40 years as a publishing executive, writing fiction and poetry on the side.

There was a bit of poetry in his renaming of the company in 1965. He called it Plenum “for full, rich, plentiful,” Mr. Coleman told Publishers Weekly. “It was either that or Nova, which I discovered was a bright star that burned out, so that wasn’t for me.”

By that time, it was a large and growing presence in scientific and technical publishing, where the profit margins on books like “Electron Spin Relaxation in Liquids” could be huge. When Mr. Coleman sold his rights to Plenum in 1977, it published 92 Russian journals in translation, nearly 75 English-language journals, and 225 scientific titles.

Mr. Coleman’s marriage to Frances Allan ended in divorce in 1965. In addition to his second wife, he is survived by his sons, Allan Douglass Coleman, of Staten Island, and Dennis Scott Coleman, of Rockville, Md.; a sister, Lucille Bandes, of Manhasset, N.Y.; and four grandchildren.

After retiring from Plenum in 1977, Mr. Coleman started a new publishing venture, Earl M. Coleman Enterprises, with his second wife as editor in chief. In 1984 he became president and publisher of National Publishers of the Black Hills, provider of educational books and electronic training materials, which he sold to Prentice Hall in 1988.

Plenum was bought for $258 million by the Dutch publishing company Wolters Kluwer in 1998. In 1999, the Perseus Books Group acquired Da Capo Press. Since 2004 it has been part of Springer.

Through the years Mr. Coleman continued to write poetry and fiction. In 2001, through Mellen Poetry Press, he finally published his first book of poems, titled “A Stubborn Pine in a Stiff Wind.”

Mt. Wilson Observatory needs help

60-inch Telescope

"Superintendent who helped save Mt. Wilson Observatory is raising funds to preserve it"

by

Baxter Holmes

November 12th, 2009

Los Angeles Times

As the Station fire raged, Dave Jurasevich slept at the facility, working with firefighters to protect the site. Now he's seeking donations for repairs and to improve fire protection there.

Every morning for 19 days, Dave Jurasevich awoke on Mt. Wilson to sunrises darkened by smoke and ash.

Every night, the superintendent of the Mt. Wilson Observatory slept at the site he hoped to protect. He was too worried to catch more than three or four hours of rest a night. When he did sleep, he bedded down on a mattress on the floor of a small office. He was usually hungry. Firefighters slept in the next room.

Overhead, the night sky glowed hot as the Station fire raged closer.

During those days and nights that Jurasevich, 59, stayed at the observatory in August and September, the fire tore through the Angeles National Forest, burning more than 160,000 acres and becoming the largest wildfire in L.A. County history.

The observatory was seriously threatened three times, he said, but he stayed to help protect a "priceless" structure replete with scientific history.

Now, Jurasevich speaks to community groups about his experiences during the fire and asks for donations to help repair the damaged grounds and improve fire protection. The nonprofit observatory receives most of its funding through private sources, grants and a few site fees.

He sprinkles his presentations with anecdotes: How ash fluttered like snow when the fire began; how he was evacuated from the observatory twice before deciding to stay; how shortly after he recovered from double pneumonia, smoke from the fire gave him bronchitis. His voice still fades from time to time.

He says he will never forget the day the fire began, Aug. 26, 2009.

"That's a date that is forever burned into my mind," he said. "It will stay with me until the day I die."

Jurasevich, who has been superintendent for three years, was not alone atop the 5,800-foot peak in the San Gabriel Mountains. His assistant, an electrician and the manager of the high-tech telescopes stayed with him, as did several dozen firefighters, including some elite hotshot firefighters assigned to protect the building.

Early on, a fire chief asked him to rank which buildings to save. More than 40 structures sit on the 40-acre site.

"I wanted to draw a cloud around" it all, he said, "but I couldn't."

Founded in 1904, the Mt. Wilson Observatory has been the birthplace for landmark scientific discoveries, including astronomer Edwin Hubble's finding that the Milky Way is not the only galaxy in the universe and that the universe itself is continually expanding.

Shortly after the fires began, it was clear the observatory might be threatened. It was evacuated twice, but when Jurasevich returned the third time, he decided to stay to help firefighters around the grounds.

Once his decision was made, the fire's ferocity made it too dangerous to leave.

"If we're worried, concerned, there's nothing we can do," said Enlee Lin, Jurasevich's wife of 19 years. "Like all the soldiers in Iraq, all the families here, it's a general feeling: There's nothing you can do about it, just know he is doing his job."

Lin watched the fire from their Alhambra home and tried not to think about him being there. Their two children -- Aaron, 14, and Rachel, 16 -- were a welcome distraction, but at night, she would wait for her husband to call.

During the day, the firefighters cut fire lines and set backfires. Jurasevich helped where he could. Some nights, when it was clear, he would take the firefighters up to the 60-inch telescope and show them planets and constellations.

Jurasevich said he was never in danger. If the flames had engulfed the observatory, he could have taken shelter in the corrugated steel dome that houses the 100-inch Hooker telescope.

The office where he slept was not far from the dome.

In the end, no structures were damaged.

"I'm not a brave man," he said. "I never feared for my life. I knew that dome was a safe haven if that fire ever got to us."

All information here...

Mt. Wilson Observatory