This interactive site allows participants to learn about skeletal anatomy by viewing the bones of a human, chimpanzee, and baboon. Users select a bone from the list of four bone types on the skeletal image, and launch the bone viewer. A detailed look at each bone from six viewing angle options is provided along with the option to select another bone or make a comparison with another species (chimpanzee or baboon). The Comparative Anatomy section enables users to make direct comparisons of bones. The material is appropriate for science teacher education as it illustrates how careful observation leads one to wonder about the dizzying beauty of a planet that works by bringing us one different creature after another.

VR Molecules presents dynamically and interactively the vibration and rotation modes for 24 molecules (out of a more extensive list) containing up to twelve atoms. It allows the user to create and save on his or her hard disk documents containing, much in the same way as Power Point presentations, up to 10 "pages", each featuring one or two molecules with specific parameters (viewpoint, active modes, etc.). These presentations can be made available through the Internet, with optional sound and text explanations associated with each page.The latest, augmented version of VR Molecules, called VR Molecules Pro 1.1, is available online as well as in a stand-alone version (Mac and Windows).To view a video of the award winning author, go to View VR Molecules - Chemistry Award Winner 2007 video VR Molécules est un logiciel de simulation (en ligne et en mode local) permettant de visualiser et d'explorer les modes de vibration et de rotation des molécules (24 molécules sont disponibles).Il peut tout aussi bien être utilisé par le professeur pour préparer des démonstrations en classe, intégrer des animations (interactives ou non) dans ses documents HTML, que par les étudiants pour revoir les démonstrations présentées en classe et explorer par eux-mêmes la vibration et la rotation des molécules.La plus récente version (1.12) de VR Molécules, est accessible en deux versions : en ligne et en mode local (à télécharger, pour Mac et Windows).

DNA from the Beginning is an animated tutorial on DNA, genes and heredity. The science behind each concept is explained using animations, an image gallery, video interviews, problems, biographies, and links. There are three sections, Classical Genetics, Molecules of Genetics and Organization of Genetic Material. Key features are the clear explanations of classical experiments and the excellent photographs of researchers and their labs.For information and credits on the development of DNA from the Beginning, go to http://www.dnaftb.org/dnaftb/credits.html

Here's your chance to mix chemicals without wearing safety goggles. You won't spill any acid on the spectrometer in this lab. Choose solutions from the vast database and mix 'em together till the cloned cows come home. Marvel as the chemical solutions react in real time.

The acoustics of musical instruments and the voice. The "Basics" directory introduces and explains general concepts. There are "Introduction to the Acoustics of [instrument name]", data bases, technical material, web services (including a hearing test) and a FAQ.

Educational physics applets designed to be scripted in JavaScript for use in quizzes, homework problems, and Just in Time Teaching activities. Includes applets that can be used in a wide range of classes and at different levels.

A collection of simulations and virtual labs focusing on first-year college physics. An interview with the award winning author can be found in About us at Phet Video

MecMovies is an extensive collection of examples, theory, and games designed to complement the entire Mechanics of Materials course. The software features impressive graphics and animation that are highly effective in visually communicating course concepts to students. Special emphasis is placed on developing the learner?s understanding and proficiency in basic concepts and skills through interactive exercises and games. Classroom implementation of the software has produced improved student performance and more positive student attitudes regarding the Mechanics of Materials course. To see a video with the award winning author, go to View MecMovies video

This provides text description and audio examples of various heart and breath sounds. The sounds are broken up into certain catagories. The heart sounds are divided into systolic, where you can hear aortic stenosis, mitral regurgitation, etc.., and diastolic, where you can hear mitral stenosis, aortic regurgitation, etc.. The lung sounds provide examples of cackles and wheezes.

The entry point to an extensive site concerning the nervous system and neuroscience. The site includes descriptive materials, experiments, activities, links to articles, resources for teaching neuroscience, and a listing of Internet resources related to the neurosciences.

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.

Hope Leman is a Research Information Technologist at Samaritan Health Services. She runs ScanGrants (a free, subscribable (via email or RSS) online listing of grant opportunities, prizes and scholarships in the health and life sciences and community service fields), tweets and blogs on Significant Science. At the conference, Hope will do a demo of ScanGrants.

Ernie Hood is a freelance science writer and he hosts a weekly science radio show - Radio In Vivo - at the local radio station WCOM-FM in Carrboro, NC. Ernie is currently presiding over SCONC - the organization of Science Communicators of North Carolina.

Elle Cayabyab Gitlin writes for Ars Technica, blogs and tweets. And she is always a great help to us at the conference, every year volunteering to help.

Peter Janiszewski is an Obesity Researcher (PhD Candidate) in the Exercise Physiology Lab at Queen's University, Ontario, Canada, a Science/Health Blogger at Obesity Panacea, a freelance writer, a musician, and a Twitterer.

Jayme Corbell, another veteran of our conferences, got her PhD in chemistry at Duke and now works at Catalent.

Jonathan Lifland is the Media and Communications Manager at PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and is on Twitter

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Ok, see counselor Troi firing her phaser?

You see this kind of thing all the time on film in scifi. Whether it's Star Trek, Star Wars, or pretty much anything else, energy beams fired from future weapons are visible. Usually someone will point out that in fact laser beams are not visible in this manner. To see light, it has to reach your eyes. This is clearly not possible when all the light is actually traveling down the beam path. You can see this in action with laser pointers - only the spot where the light hits and diffusely reflects is visible. The path is not.

Writers of TV shows usually explain this by saying that the beam is not strictly light, but some stream of particles that slightly emits to the sides along its main path. While this has its own problems, at least it acknowledges the issue.

But what's even more interesting is that in fact there are already automatically particles present along the beam path in the atmosphere. Some of them are sizable particles like dust, others are individual atoms and molecules. Generally they don't scatter much light, but if the light is intense enough then the small amount they do scatter is enough to see. And so you have a visible laser beam. Here's one in my lab:

The beam scatters off the air and you can actually see it as a straight line. Apologies for the terrible camera phone picture, I really need to get a classy camera that can take nice pictures. This is not actually a laser I'm working on, so honestly I'm not sure which variant of frequency-doubled Nd:something laser this is. Probably Nd:YLF.

This is used to pump an infrared ultrashort-pulse laser with a repetition rate of 1 kHz. This can itself be focused to a point in the air, which becomes visible as a little stationary spark as the intense beam ionizes the air. This produces a 1 kHz buzz which can easily be heard by the unassisted ear.

I have to say it's a nice job perk that I can see old science fiction tropes come to life pretty much every day. :)

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It's not often that I regret having a cell phone that is just a phone, but this is one of those occasions-- I stopped by my publisher today to talk about marketing and publicity, and record a video for the web, and got a stack of finished copies of the book, hot off the presses. If I had a cell phone camera, I'd post a picture, but I don't, so you'll have to settle for a plain-text "Woo-hoo!"

On an only vaguely related note, our cultural activities in NYC will include some college hoops, as there's a preseason "tournament" taking place at Madison Square garden tonight. Syracuse vs. Cal, and UNC vs. Ohio State. Not a bad double bill for November basketball.

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Imagine cutting retractable doors in the side of a 747 airliner, installing a 17-ton telescope, and flying to the stratosphere to solve one of astronomy's greatest puzzles. That's what NASA and the German Aerospace Center plan to do with a cutting-edge airborne observatory named SOFIA.

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Ethan at Starts With A Bang did a nice post the other day on an old chestnut - why you can't touch your toes if you're backed against a wall.

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There are not going to be too many more of these:

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In the comments on one of my posts, someone pointed me towards Stephen Crothers, who gives the following argument (in a nutshell) as to why black holes cannot possibly exist:

1. General Relativity is our theory of gravity, which relates the curvature of space to the gravitational acceleration of objects.
2. This theory only works in certain regimes; it breaks down at the point of singularities.
3. A black hole, as predicted by Schwarzschild, is a singularity.
4. Therefore, since singularities are forbidden by General Relativity, there is no reason to think that black holes exist.

(You can watch his video here, or read his full argument here.) Therefore, he argues, astronomers are wasting their time looking for black holes, since their existence isn't even a physical prediction.

Talk about not seeing a forest for the trees. The "singularity" is not essential for a black hole to exist. Honestly, it isn't important at all whether there's a singularity or not. All that matters, in the real world, is that something is both massive and compact enough so that, within a certain radius, light cannot escape from it. That is the astrophysical definition of a black hole.

So, do they exist? Definitely. Where do you look for incontrovertible proof? The center of the galaxy! There are no two ways around it; there is definitely a black hole there.

How am I so sure? The above image shows the center of our galaxy. There are many, many stars orbiting the central point where the arrows are pointing. We have tracked these orbits over more than a decade, thanks to the UCLA Galactic Center Group. Here's a screenshot of their results.

From the motion of these orbits, we can figure out what the mass of the object they orbit around is. It turns out to be over 2 million times as massive as our Sun. And yet, we don't see any light coming from that point. We don't see a white dwarf, we don't see a neutron star, we don't see any object at all.

For a mass that large, you will have a black hole if that mass is confined to a sphere of a diameter of about ten million kilometers. That isn't hard, considering we have many, many stars that we know of where an entire solar mass is confined to a diameter of about ten kilometers. (These are neutron stars.) If you up the mass, the neutrons at the core will eventually collapse under the tremendous pressures, and collapse farther. There's a well-known upper limit to how massive a neutron star can be, and it's less than three solar masses, much less two million.

So you can argue about whether singularities violate General Relativity or not until you're blue in the face. It doesn't have a damned thing to do with whether any light gets out of your ultra-dense, massive object. And that's what we call a black hole, and it exists. Don't believe it? Then tell me what's going on at the galactic center.

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Do not try this at home unless you are a certified physics teacher. Try not to think about what all the crap is in this guy's microwave. And do wear goggles. The really interesting part is after five minutes. That's where the science starts.

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There's a little bit of buzz burbling around over Al Gore's scientific goof during a Conan O'Brien interview. Discussing geothermal energy, he said the following:

It definitely is, and it's a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy -- when they think about it at all -- in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot ...

Of course the interior of the earth is extremely hot, but not that hot. It's several thousand degrees rather than several million. If the earth were several million degrees it would be a rapidly diffusing cloud of metallic vapor. Even the center of the sun is only perhaps 13 million degrees C.

But I'll let him slide; pretty much everyone blanks out from time to time. And it gives us a chance to do a little thinking about just how much thermal energy is in the earth.

First of all, just because something is hot doesn't mean you can squeeze energy out of it. You can only squeeze energy out of temperature gradients - you need something hot and something cold. This is why we can't just set up a temperature-to-energy machine in the desert and have free energy. In your car, for instance, you need both the heat of the burning gasoline and the much cooler ambient temperature from the outside air via your radiator to turn the hot gasoline vapors into forward progress. Power plants frequently have large cooling towers for that very reason. It's not the energy of the hot substance, it's the process of moving that heat to a cooler place that creates useful work. Think of it in the same way as water flowing downhill can turn a paddlewheel - it won't work unless the water starts off high and ends up low.

But that's not a problem here. The interior of the earth is hot and the exterior is much colder. The difference in temperature is such that the efficiency of heat-to-work conversion could be near 100% in theory, though in practice it would be much lower. And we're not likely to run out of geothermal heat any time soon. As a slightly wild Fermi calculation, assume that the earth is uniformly iron at 3000 C. The specific heat of liquid iron is about 611 J/kg K, so cooling the earth to room temperature this yields about 1.8 million joules of energy per kilogram. Multiply by the mass of the earth, and the total energy content might be in the neighborhood of 10^31 joules. The total energy consumption of the world's human population is in the vicinity of 5e20 joules per year.

Divide out, the earth's geothermal energy could support that consumption rate for about 21 billion years. We're not likely to use it up.

So why isn't it in widespread use? After all, every nation has domestic access to it - all you have to do is drill straight down. The main problem is that the temperature really doesn't start getting ramped up until dozens of miles down. Drilling a hole that deep and pumping water (or whatever) down and up is technically unfeasible. Geothermal is at its best at those places which are close to geological activity that brings the heat closer to the surface. Volcanic and other geologically active locations often do very well with geothermal power. Iceland in particular produces vast quantities of usable energy from the internal heat of the earth. Most other places are much farther from the hot regions of the earth's interior and geothermal is correspondingly much more difficult to get.

Sadly Al Gore's hopes for geothermal as a major clean energy technology are probably futile until deep drilling develops into a much more mature form. It would be nice if that happened; the energy to be tapped is pretty close to inexhaustible.

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The latest news from the USGS/Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program Weekly Volcano Report ...

Highlights (not including Mayon) include:

• Strombolian eruptions and small pyroclastic falls at Arenal in Costa Rica.


• 3 km / 10 000 foot ash plume from Bagana on Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea.


• Rumbling noises, ~4.5 km / 14 000 foot ash plumes and incandescence were all reported coming from Fuego in Guatemala.


• Steam-and-ash from Popocatepetl near Mexico City reached 7.4 km / 24 300 feet.


• Satellite images of Shiveluch revealed a large thermal anomaly - the new lava dome - along with multiple ash plumes reaching up to 5.5 km / 18 000 feet.
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