Legos help nanotechnology August 31, 2009

*Editor’s note*: I admit this isn’t high art, but it shows just how useful playing, creativity, and having at least a little bit of artistic flair can be in solving some of life’s big mysteries. Okay, on with the article completely reposted from Physorg:

A tiny white ball is release into a Lego board with peg pieces, immersed in a tank filled with glycerol to help researchers visualize what happens at nanoscale in microfluidic arrays. Credit: Will Kirk/JHU

Johns Hopkins engineers are using a popular children’s toy to visualize the behavior of particles, cells and molecules in environments too small to see with the naked eye. These researchers are arranging little LEGO pieces shaped like pegs to re-create microscopic activity taking place inside lab-on-a-chip devices at a scale they can more easily observe.

These lab-on-a-chip devices, also known as microfluidic arrays, are commonly used to sort tiny samples by size, shape or composition, but the minuscule forces at work at such a small magnitude are difficult to measure. To solve this small problem, the Johns Hopkins engineers decided to think big.

Led by Joelle Frechette and German Drazer, both assistant professors of chemical and biomolecular engineering in the university’s Whiting School of Engineering, the team used beads just a few millimeters in diameter, an aquarium filled with goopy glycerol and the LEGO pieces arranged on a LEGO board to unlock mysteries occurring at the micro- or nanoscale level. Their observations could offer clues on how to improve the design and fabrication of lab-on-a-chip technology. Their study concerning this technique was published in the Aug. 14 issue of Physical Review Letters.

The idea for this project comes from the concept of “dimensional analysis,” in which a process is studied at a different size and time scale while keeping the governing principles the same.

“Microfluidic arrays are like miniature chemical plants,” Frechette says. “One of the key components of these devices is the ability to separate one type of constituent from another. We investigated a microfluidic separation method that we suspected would remain the same when you scale it up from micrometers or nanometers to something as large as the size of billiard balls.”

With this goal in mind, Frechette and Drazer constructed an array using cylindrical LEGO pegs stacked two high and arranged in rows and columns on a LEGO board to create a lattice of obstacles. The board was attached to a Plexiglas sheet to improve its stiffness and pressed up against one wall of a Plexiglas tank filled with glycerol. Stainless steel balls of three different sizes, as well as plastic balls, were manually released from the top of the array; their paths to the bottom were tracked and timed with a camera.

Bug glaze and other ancient pigments August 31, 2009

Egyptian leather

The August 10th Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was filled with science and art discoveries.

Marco Leona of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was able to analyze the color of a fragment of leather from an ancient Egyptian quiver. The discovery that the color was madder, a red dye, is the earliest evidence for the complex chemical knowledge needed to extract the dye from a plant and turn it into a pigment, Leona reports. This means that four thousand years ago Egyptians had already mastered the process of making madder.

The find is some 700 years earlier than any previously known use of madder, which became highly popular in the Middle Ages and provides many of the red shades and glazes in the work of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

“Tracing the use of organic colorants offers a way to follow trade routes, identify relations among archaeological objects, detect forgeries and attribute works of art,” Leona wrote.

Leona refined a technique called Raman spectroscopy, which relies on the scattering of light to study materials. That process is not generally suitable for studying madder or some other dyes, but Leona enhanced the result using tiny metal particles that could amplify the findings and detect even very low levels of chemicals.

In addition to tracing madder, he was able to identify as kermes the red in the painting “St. John the Baptist Bearing Witness,” from the workshop of Francesco Granacci in the early 1500s in Florence, Italy. Kermes was a dye made from the bodies of insects and was common in Europe before the importation of cochineal from the New World.

And the red color in the Morgan Madonna, dated at between 1150 and 1210, turned out to be based on lac dye, which originated in Asia and may have been imported to southern Europe by Muslim traders.

This is the first documented example of lac dye in European art before the 15th century, according to Leona. He noted that this sculpture was originally housed in the French region Auvergne, which borders Provence, where commercial records from a few decades later record importation of lac. The French artist who created this wooden sculpture may have been one of the first Europeans to use Lac, an insect-derived pigment.

Art historians knew that the dark red dye, extracted from a resin that the tiny lac insect (Kerria lacca) secretes onto trees to protect itself, was popular in 15th-century Renaissance art, but the Morgan Madonna pre-dates those pieces by about 3 centuries. Leona identified the dye from a 25-micron-wide glaze sample about half the thickness of a human hair. Art historians believe that Lac may have arrived in Europe from India through North African traders.

The protein that makes pearls so pretty August 28, 2009

From MSNBC:

The iridescent beauty of pearl and nacre, the material found inside the shells of clams, oysters and other mollusks, would likely be impossible without two new proteins recently discovered by Japanese scientists.

The discovery could allow for the production of larger pearls in less time.

Pearl and nacre, also known as mother of pearl, have been used as decorations for millennia. In recent years, scientists have discovered the physical structure responsible for their valuable iridescence, the minerals that make up those structures, and the proteins that hold those minerals together.

Read on for more.

iStock photo

Make your own ecosystem August 28, 2009

Friday’s weekend project: make your own found terrarium.

From Design*Sponge (who knew interior design could get so science-y?):

What you’ll need:

- Empty clear glass jar with screw on lid
- A handful of scavenged moss with some extra soil attached
- A plastic bag

1. Keep an eye out for moss freely growing in your neighborhood. Even in New York I found some growing in between the cracks of the sidewalk with 3 minutes of looking. Just scoop a handful up and put it in a plastic bag on your way home.

Read on for full directions.

found terrariums

Diagramed flowers August 27, 2009

It’s prettier than it sounds. From Bioephemera: there are illustrator Macoto Muriyama’s delicate diagrams of flower structure. Muriyama says,

Generally, a plant is considered to be a being that has an organic form. However, that is just one of the aspects because along with their organic form, a plant possesses a contradictory element of geometric/mechanical structure. By highlighting the later, the plant’s out-of-the-ordinary form is revealed, and in it, a different kind of attractiveness can be found. (source)

H. annuus by Macoto Murayama

Read the full post.

Mental illness in the spotlight August 27, 2009

From NPR’s Talk of the Nation, The Tony award-winning musical Next To Normal portrays a family struggling with mental illness and the treatments offered by modern psychiatry — with rock songs about Valium and bipolar disorder.

Listen to the show.

I just have to add my own two cents: I’m putting this show in the science and art category because in a way this play is an analysis of different popular treatments for mental illness. It’s not just scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for two hours; from what I’ve read it really does try to provide a (musical) analysis of mental illness and its current treatments.

Best science visualization videos August 26, 2009

Some of the most impressive images in science are produced when researchers take numerical data and represent it visually through modeling and computer graphics. The Department of Energy honored 10 of this year’s best scientific visualizations with its annual SciDAC Vis Night awards, at the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing conference (SciDAC) in June. Researchers submitted visualizations to the contest, and program participants voted on the best of the best. From earthquakes to jet flames, this gallery of videos and images show how beautiful (and descriptive) visual data can be.

More from WIRED.

Giant origami dinosaur August 26, 2009

Origami dinosaur comes to life Aug. 25: Tokyo’s Dinosaur Expo 2009 sponsors the creation of an origami dinosaur made with 25 square yards of paper.

Video report from Msnbc.com.

Paper magazine will publish video ad August 25, 2009

From BBC News:

The first-ever video advertisement will be published in a traditional paper magazine in September.

The video-in-print ads will appear in select copies of the US show business magazine Entertainment Weekly.

The slim-line screens – around the size of a mobile phone display – also have rechargeable batteries.

The chip technology used to store the video – described as similar to that used in singing greeting cards – is activated when the page is turned.

Each chip can hold up to 40 minutes of video.

The first clips will preview programmes from US TV network CBS and show adverts by the company Pepsi.

They will appear in 18 September editions of the magazine distributed in Los Angeles and New York.

Read more

Zombie battle plan August 25, 2009

WordPress has been wonky today, so I apologize for the short and perhaps oddly-appearing posts.

A team of mathematics professors and students has figured out a mathematic model for how to survive a zombie attack.

Here’s the spoiler: strike early and often!