The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago is like a walk through time—a time when removing part of a patient’s skull for “therapeutic” purposes was considered normal.
Wired.com has an inside look:
From graphic paintings of childbirth to a vast collection of often-ghastly tools of the trade, the Surgical Museum is a morbidly fascinating journey into the blood-spattered beginnings of modern medicine. After a look at these hair-raising exhibits, you might remark that while the United States may be in serious need of health care reform, at least we have anesthetics and the germ theory of disease.
Click over to Wired.com for a photo tour of the museum.
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A giant cylinder will splash into the water off the coast of Scotland next Spring, all in the hopes of harnessing the energy of waves and converting it to electricity.
Engineers are still tweaking the marine power converter, according to Reuters:
Dwarfed by 180 meters of tubing, scores of engineers clamber over the device, which is designed to dip and ride the swelling sea with each move being converted into power to be channeled through subsea cables.
The sea snake, as it’s called, is being developed for the German power company E. ON and represents a serious investment in marine power, which is considerably more costly than offshore wind power. A push by regulatory agencies to slash emissions has companies taking a closer look at marine power these days—and apparently these so-called snakes have the potential to capture a decent share of the energy market:
The World Energy Council has estimated the market potential for wave energy at more than 2,000 terawatt hours a year—or about 10 percent of world electricity consumption—representing capital expenditure of more than 500 billion pounds ($790 billion).
E. On is hoping the current project in Scotland will fare better than their fist foray into marine power—a commercial wave project in Portugal that flopped after one of the partners ran out of cash.
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Image: flickr / Wonderlane
No one is quite sure what caused bizarre 600-mile-long tubular clouds to form above a small Australian town. But because the fluffy white rods, known as Morning Glory clouds, can move up to 35 miles per hour, they can pose a problem for airplanes flying through the area.
Wired reports:
A small number of pilots and tourists travel there each year in hopes of “cloud surfing” with the mysterious phenomenon.
Similar tubular shaped clouds called roll clouds appear in various places around the globe. But nobody has yet figured out what causes the Morning Glory clouds.
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Image courtesy of Mick Petroff
Even the most casual readers of science news may have come across a few phrases that get used over and over, to the point of becoming extremely annoying.
So Wired took it upon itself to compile an entertaining list of the top five worst science cliches—and called DISCOVER out for employing one of the dreaded phrases (along with pretty much every other science publication).
Here’s a few excerpted entries from the list, compiled by Betsy Mason:
1. Holy Grail: To me, this is the mother of all bad science clichés, the worst offender. And I recently learned I have back up on this opinion from the venerable journal Nature which has literally banned scientists from putting holy grails in their papers.
2. Silver Bullet: No more silver bullets, please. Apparently they are really only meant for werewolves, witches and the occasional monster…. Things that are not silver or magic bullets: antioxidants, carbon capture, disk encryption, GM crops, vitamins, and carbon dioxide mosquito traps.
3. Shedding Light: Why must everything always be shedding light on something else? In addition to the light I shed on dark matter in 2006, light has also been shed on virtually everything you can think of… Googling “shed* light” + science OR scientists OR research returns 6.66 million hits.
Thanks, Wired, for shedding some light on the shifting paradigm of science journalism, and filling in that missing link on our never-ending quest for media’s holy grail. Now all our field needs is a silver bullet (or a revenue model that actually works).
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Is our universe just one of many parallel worlds? Do these universes operate under different laws of physics? Are we actually living inside a computer simulation? All of these questions will be discussed in a luminary-packed panel discussion coming up this Saturday at the second annual World Science Festival, which DISCOVERmagazine.com will be covering throughout the week. The panel, titled Infinite Worlds, is already sold out, but we happen to have two of the highly sought-after tickets, and we’re going to give them away through our first Twitter-based contest.
This Tweepstakes is called The Multiverse in 120 Characters or Less—it’s the Twitter-twin of our video contest series Science in Two Minutes or Less, which challenges people to create videos that explain the Big Ideas in science in no more than 120 seconds. (The first contest was String Theory in Two Minutes or Less, and the submission period for the most recent contest, Evolution in Two Minutes or Less, just ended.) The Twitter version is much the same: Your job is to send us a tweet explaining the workings and/or significance of the multiverse theory in no more than 120 characters. Why 120 characters if a tweet can use up to 140? Well, to designate your tweet as a contest entry, you must begin it with a 20-character string—sci120 @DiscoverMag (include a space after the g)—leaving you with 120 little opportunities for brilliance. Entries can be straightforward scientific, poetic, philosophical, creative, didactic, funny, or otherwise.
Whoever sends the best explanation of the multiverse theory (judged by our entirely subjective, deeply secretive process) by midnight tomorrow, EDT, wins the contest and the two tickets. The event is in downtown Manhattan on Saturday at 8pm and despite its subject, we will not be able to use multiverse magic to teleport people there. But we encourage you to enter even if you don’t live close by—you’ll get bragging rights plus a chance to give a great present to a friend who lives in the New York area.
For more context on the multiverse, see our recent story Science’s Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory. If you have any questions on the contest, email webmaster@discovermagazine.com. Good luck, and remember to use this 20-character string at the beginning of your tweet/contest entry: sci120 @DiscoverMag (including a space after the g).
Doctors and zombies find themselves on the opposite sides of most issues, so the world would be well advised to take notice of one question where they entirely agree: We need more organs.
More than a hundred thousand people are on the waiting list for organ donations, and 19 die each day because they can’t get an organ in time. Fortunately, scientists are working hard to find ways to create them—including growing them in the lab. Others are using polymers to help regenerate key tissues, and researchers have even tried growing organs in a healthy person’s body. Now, the latest buzz over organ generation comes from Japan, where scientists claim they have grown a spare chimpanzee pancreas in a sheep’s underbelly.
To grow the organ, Jichi Medical University’s Yutaka Hanazono used “sheep-based chimera organ technology,” a method that implanted chimp stem cells in a sheep to grow an extra pancreas. Hanazono claims this is a much better way to grow organs than trying to grow them in test tubes.
Scientists say it’s going to be a good 10 years or so before they will take human stem cells and grow human livers, hearts, pancreases and skin. For now, the extra pancreas could only really help out a diabetic chimp.
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Image: flickr/ Alvaro Herreras
Get the full story behind the caption in the 80beats post, No Tarzans Here: Earliest Humans Quickly Lost Their Ape-Like Climbing Abilities.
Readers: Think you have what it takes to make a LOLScienz cat? Send your best efforts (on any science-y topic) to estrickland@discovermagazine.com.
Photo: flickr / Robert Couse-Baker
Used rubber tires and discarded glass have been recycled into asphalt for some time. Now, add old electronics to the creative, eco-friendly ingredient mix for the production of new road materials.
Researchers in China have developed a process to recycle electronic hardware into a material that makes “high-performance paving material that is cheaper, longer lasting, and more environmentally friendly than conventional asphalt.”
Where most people see a global environmental crisis, the research team in China saw opportunity. Electronics are discarded by the millions of tons every year, and they contain toxic metals that make disposal difficult, hazardous, and controversial. The researchers report in a new study, however, that electronic circuit boards also contain glass fibers and plastic resins that would strengthen asphalt paving.
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On the off chance that you’ve ever had a yearning to hear what Neanderthal music sounded like—assuming you’ve even considered whether they made music—you should absolutely click here to hear a sample of jazz composer Simon Thorne’s 75-minute-long reimagining of Neanderthal music. If you have the patience to listen to the nonsensical beginning, then you’ll get a chance to enjoy the ancient-style chanting towards the end. Thorne initially thought it would be impossible to imagine what Neanderthals listened to, but he took on the unusual project and did his best to create a song that would evoke sounds from a Neanderthal’s life.
While the National Museum Wales commissioned the song to accompany an exhibit featuring Neanderthal tools and teeth, it might actually serve a bigger purpose in knocking down the misconception that Neanderthals were dumber than early Homo sapiens. Thorne told the BBC, “Every culture has language and music, so we can probably assume that [Neanderthals] had some kind of music too.”
Later this year, the music will be performed live when four singers with stone instruments go on tour. Can you say, “Rock on”?
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