Space

So Long Space Shuttle
Credit: Trey Ratcliff

NASA finalized the retirement of the Space Shuttle program with the announcement of their final resting places, with Washington DC, Los Angeles and Orlando getting real shuttles for their museums and New York getting the wooden training vessel (Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!). NASA also unveiled the Space Launch System (SLS) next generation of manned space explorations vehicles that will (hopefully) be taking us to Mars. Along the same goal, the Mars500 completed its 17 month simulated mission, complete with isolation and delayed communications as a partial proof of concept that humans can survive the trip to the red planet.

Gravity Probe B (GP-B) confirmed the geodetic effect and frame-dragging aspects of Einstein’s theory of gravity, that the Earth and other large masses swirl spacetime as they spin like a ball rotating in honey.

The Hubble successor, the James Webb Telescope barely kept its funding after it was projected to run billions over budget. We still might see further into the Universe.

China’s space race continued on its modest schedule, allowing geeks like me to vicariously enjoy the pride of its citizens as they make greater and greater strides into space.

Physics

Still No Higgs Boson Event
Credit: CERN

The world didn’t end and there’s no Higgs Boson yet, but replication of the neutrinos moving faster than light finding provided opportunity for geeky jokes like, “A neutrino and a photon walk into a bar. For 60 nanoseconds, the neutrino complains about how dark it is.” and made physicists sweat.

The LHC also found a difference in the decay rate of D-mesons that could explain why there’s so much matter in the Universe left over from the Big Bang.

By replacing one of the electrons in a helium atom with a much heavier muon elementary particle, scientists were able to get the atom to act like a hydrogen atom; within minutes the geeks at Slashdot had figured out how much less the modified atom would raise your voice.

Computer Science

IBM Watson

IBM’s Watson Computer trounced its human competitors at Jeopardy. It must be one of the greatest joys for anyone to build something greater than yourself.

MIT replicated a single synapse on a chip using 400 transistors to digitally simulate the analogue communication between neurons in the brain, with the next step to be stringing these chips together to replicate parts of the brain.

Berkeley scientists used a neat trick of having people watch videos, recording their brain waves, and then using the video to approximate what others were seeing in their mind’s eye from reading their brain waves.

Earth Science

Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature

The year marking the 150th Birthday of Climate Change Theory brought ever more support to the theory that the world is getting warmer due to human-made carbon emissions. Shortly after the sixth independent review of the “Climategate” non-story found no misconduct in August, a reanalysis of the same data (now all publicly available) partially funded by the oil industry and conducted by an outspoken climate skeptic, Dr. Richard Muller, confirmed Global Warming was happening and turned Muller into a believer.

Archaeology

The sharp-eyed, metre-long Anomalocaris.
Credit: Katrina Kenny & University of Adelade

The greatest known predator from 500 million years ago, anomalocaris, was discovered to have fantastic compound eyes.

The discovery of other raptor-like dinosaurs with feathers cast Archaeopteryx’s status as the missing link between birds and dinosaurs into doubt because there are too many candidates for the missing link.

Australopithecus sediba joined the human family tree.

A high schooler found an improved arrangement for solar cells based on the Fibonacci arrangement found in plant leaves.

Biology

African Gray Parrot
Credit: Retrolusionary

Pet parrots escaped to the wild were found to be teaching other birds to talk.

Two studies confirmed having more friend increased gray matter in parts of the brain responsible for social networking.

Roger Ebert put the smack down on 3-D movies, explaining why the muscles in our eyes and the perception of our brains cannot grok with a flat screen making 3-D demands on our perceptions.

Politics

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
Credit: Shawn Lawrence Otto

The organization Science Debate stayed strong this year and Shawn Lawrence Otto stirred up some buzz with his new book Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. Looking forward to what the organization accomplishes this upcoming election cycle.

In a year of austerity measures, science fought to maintain funding… okay, not really, more like lay down and let politicians cut whatever they wanted, but nothing was accomplished in the gridlocked house and senate.

The American Government did manage to pass the America Invents Act, intended to stop patent-trolling, but may turn out to be a gift to large corporations as it move the country to a “first-to-file” rather than first to invent standard.

Alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs.

Republican presidential candidates fell over themselves attacking Climate Change and Evolution (and one even attacking Immunizations), and a Fox News host wondered if volcanoes on the Moon disproved Global Warming, leading to an awkward moment with Bill Nye.

On the Left, Belgian protesters destroyed a field of GM potato plants being researched for blight resistance.

Wonder

It was a great year for time-lapse videos as first someone took the photographs from the Cassini mission and merged them together into a beautiful fly-by of Saturn and its moons, a whole night at the ALMA Array Operations Site (AOS) made for Earth-bound wonder, the view from the ISS orbiting the Earth was enchanting, and, best of all, 14 years of Hubble photos showing gases jetting and expanding light years away, demonstrating just how dynamic are our night skies (see also the supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy 21 million light years away in August).

The Sagan Series took the words of the most amazing exponent of science and provided music and imagery to do them poetic justice.

The awesomely geeky and science-riddle video game Portal 2 provided much puzzling amusement.

The Royal Society put its entire history of journals online open access.

Personal Life

Stephen Hawking and Sagan
Credit: Hawking Source Image by Rob Bodman, Sagan Photo by Vicky Somma

The biggest news in our lives is the welcoming of Sagan Charles Somma to our family fold. It’s been a big change in our lifestyles, but an ever-rewarding experience as we get to enjoy a feeling of love unlike anything we‘ve experienced before.

Vicky’s photo of a Rhododendron looming menacingly over an American Chestnut sprout won the American Chestnut Foundation’s photo contest.

I made Slashdot in November, pushing this blog to a record 7,000 hits in one day and stressing me out for a week as POGO and other organizations scrutinized my data and found some glaring and embarrassing errors. Thank the Cosmos for peer-reviews.

Borders going out of business provided me an opportunity to stock up on coffee table books, the one thing for which the digital world has failed to provide an adequate replacement.

Memexplex broke 1,000 memes (all me). The tool is fantastic for what I need it for, so I’m not worried that I haven’t found anyone else for whom it’s useful.

Although I haven’t updated my resume, I quit my job with the Coast Guard and have started working in the development of applications for Food Safety labs across the nation, making my life as a Computer Scientist now a Computer Scientist in the service of science. Woo Hoo!

Life is great, so my New Year’s resolutions are pretty light. With science as my candle in the dark, 2012 can only bring more illumination.

One of the great joys of being human is our incredible powers of pattern recognition. Our brain’s ability to manifest meaningful associations out of the complex morass of sensory stimuli perpetually assaulting us is a cognitive expertise into which computers are only just starting to venture successfully. It’s what allows us to recognize faces, raed wrdos wtih smrelcabd ltretes, identify with our fellow humans, and compartmentalize the sounds, tastes, and sights around us.

The number 11 has always been my favorite whole number. Ever since I was a kid, I appreciated the way the first nine multiples of 11 are numbers that mirror the tens and ones places (in a base-10 numbers system): {11, 22, 33, 44 … 77, 88, 99}.

You can figure out the result of eleven times any two-digit number by adding the tens and ones place of the two-digit number and placing it between the two digits. For example, eleven times my second favorite whole number:

You can also do something similar when multiplying eleven against a three-digit number.

Eleven is fun.

This year, the Gregorian Calendar has been filled with 11′s in its dates: 1/1/11, 1/11/11, 11/1/11, 11/11/11. Additionally, If you take the last two digits of the year you were born and add the age you will/have turned on your birthday this year, the result will be 111. For me, this is 73 + 38 = 111.

I previously blogged about eleven focusing on the trivia associated with the number, but I’ve come to understand that eleven is a wonderful number for all the patterns we can find in it, and nowhere do these patters become more clear than in Pascal’s Triangle:

Creating a Pascal’s Triangle
Credit: Hersfold

Each row of Pascal’s Triangle sums to the set of exponents of two {1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024…}, and that’s interesting.

What’s more interesting? The digits of each row represent an exponent of eleven {11, 121, 1331, 14641, 161051, 1771561…}. It takes just a little bit of addition to see how this works for the rows with multiple-digit numbers. You have to think of each number as occupying a place value, like ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. Then you carry the additional digits up to their appropriate place. For example, row six in Pascal’s Triangle is:

So Pascal’s Triangle is a tower of powers of eleven, and the patterns within it continue. We can see the first set of diagonals going down the outsides of the triangle are all ones, and the second set of diagonals just inside this are all the natural numbers {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10…}. The third set of diagonals is Triangular Numbers, the number of building blocks needed to make triangles of increasing size:

Triangles One Through Six

The fourth set of diagonals are Tetrahedral Numbers, the number of building blocks needed to make tetrahedrons of increasing size.

Number Sets: Ones, Natural, Trangular, Tetrahedral, Pentatope

The fifth set of diagonals are Pentatope Numbers, which I don’t understand, but they sound like the number of building blocks needed to make 4-dimensional tetrahedron.

5-Cell (4D Tetrahedron)
Credit: Jason Hise

And the patterns continue! If we align all the numbers in Pascal’s Triangle up on one side, the diagonals add up to the Fibbonacci Set {1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 … 55, 89, etc, etc}, which relates back to my favorite irrational number Phi:

Fibbonacci Set in Pascal’s Triangle
(Diagonals colored, Sums Shaded Gray)

There is something fractaline about the conceptual patterns we are seeing in this numeric construction. There are triangles within triangles in the number sets. In fact, highlighting all the odd numbers within Pascal’s Triangle and zooming out far enough, we find an actual geometric fractal, a Sierpinski Triangle:

Animated Construction of a Sierpinski Triangle
Credit: Dean Moore

Powers of 10 Day celebrates the concept of exponential growth, a meditation on the size of our universe as we zoom in or out from our position within it. Powers of 11 Day seems like a good day to look at the patterns that emerge when we zoom out to look down on the big picture. There are patterns within patterns when we line up the powers of eleven in this way, beautiful symmetry, dimensions beyond our three, and geometry that echoes across the function. Our brains evolved to find patterns everywhere in the world, and this mathematical object is perfect for enjoying the immense potential of this natural cognitive proclivity within us.

Further Reading

The images of Pascals Triangle that I composed myself for this post were put together in Microsoft Excel, and you can download the spreadsheet if you’d like to play with the numbers yourself.

Special thanks to Math Forum for the best, most simplest page on the web exploring Pascal’s Triangle and the powers of 11.

In hacker slang, “Elite” is transformed into “leet” which is transformed into “1337″ which is transformed to “1331″ which is transformed into “leel” which is the highest form of elite. 1331 is 11 to the third power.

Vicky and I had the great honor of seeing Jane Goodall at American University in Washington DC this last weekend. The event was a sort of town hall meeting held outdoors in the cool fall air titled Conversation on Peace just a few days before the United Nations’ International Day of Peace.

Dr. Goodall opened the conversation with a small Dove Parade and her signature greeting in “chimpanzee.” She then explained how a “sense of urgency” keeps her going, motivated by the need to preserve our vanishing natural resources. The 77-year-old humanitarian, who founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 and was appointed by the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan as one of the institutions venerable Messengers of Peace, has spent a lifetime dedicated to conservation, not just to preserve wildlife, but also to improve the quality of life for human beings all across the globe.

Dr. Goodall told us the story of her childhood, and how she was inspired by Dr. Doolittle, and wanted to learn how to talk to animals. Later, she read Tarzan, and developed a crush on him, but unfortunately he “married that other stupid wimpy Jane.”

These stories made her want to go to Africa and write a book about it, but being a girl and with World War II taking place, people consider this unrealistic. She worked as a waitress (the host mirrored my own thoughts when she mentioned it was hard to imagine the living legend in such an occupation) saved tips to get a boat trip to Africa, where she observed the chimpanzee tribes and wrote about them. Later she met the archaeologist Lewis Leaky and served as his secretary. He sent Goodall on trips to Africa and arranged for her to work on her PhD without first obtaining a Bachelor’s degree. During her studies she got in trouble because she gave chimps names and talked about their emotions, a violation of the academic principle of “anthropodenial” as I prefer to call it.

Dove Parade

Dr. Goodall talked at length about her Roots & Shoots Program. The name referring to the vigilance of plant life in overcoming obstacles set before it. “Look around you,” she explained, seeds give rise to little shoots and roots that can penetrate concrete to find water, they can get around the problems we have created. My arboreal-fanatic wife wasn’t the only one who loved this analogy.

Roots & Shoots covers many projects dealing with ecosystems, animals, and people. She described the “Fences to Freedom” project for finding islands that orphaned chimpanzees can inhabit as adults, and another project that focused on children kicked out of school for behavioral problems, who are given an animal to care for as therapy. She described Dove Parades on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian border¹, and an event where soldiers standing guard over project to restore natural resources lay down their guns to help children plant trees.

Question Session

Questions came in on hashtag #askjane from all over the world. My question was related to peace, but more of a scientific curiosity:

My #AskJane Tweet

Up against more inspiring and heartfelt questions, I didn’t figure it had any chance of being answered. But earlier in her talk she did address the importance of studying chimpanzees, who we are only one-percent different from genetically and may, therefore, learn much about ourselves from watching them. Like humans, they have two sides, a violent persona and an altruistic one. “Let not the sun set on your anger” was something her grandmother taught her.

Asked about zoos, Goodall explained that there is a spectrum of places for Chimps. On one end of that spectrum we have land set aside for conservation and at the other we have laboratory animals in confinement. In between we have different types of zoos. A good zoo provides stimulation for the chimps, and allows the chimpanzee to serve as an ambassador to the humans who visit, providing stimulation and education for both the chimp and the humans.

A question about 9/11 led to an interesting story, she was in New York at the time it happened, and spent the day watching the news and calling people to let them know she was alright. She was scheduled to give a talk in Portland to students about hope and peace, and was met with the difficult conundrum of what to say to them now. What could she say on the subject with such a horrific event on everyone’s mind? When she got to the school, she related her experiences living through World War II and reminded the students that we overcame a World War and a Great Depression and we would overcome this.

When asked about the planet’s growing population, about to hit 7 billion next month, Dr. Goodall related her advocacy for Family planning in Third World countries, and how volunteers were afraid to bring the concept to villages in Africa because they are so conservative and religious and birth control is often seen as impinging on reproductive freedom. However, the villagers actually welcomed the family planning counselors and were very receptive to their teachings, wondering why they did not offer their help long ago. Goodall explained that this is because family planning is a quality of life issue–about not having a family that’s larger than you can care for.

Jane Goodall Townhall

The question came up on how she engages opponents, for example, people who say animals are here for our use or, to quote Ann Coulter, “God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’” Dr. Goodall noted this is from Genesis 1:28, and that the people who interpret the passage to mean we are to exploit the Earth are focused on the term “dominion,” but this is a mistranslation. The actual word is more like “caretaker.” The other biblical translations of the passage I found online replace the word “subdue” with “bring under your control” and “dominion” with “rule,” which imply more educational interaction with the environment and benevolence.

Jane advised that we shouldn’t make changing people’s the minds the goal, but rather we should seek to change the heart through stories. You never know when you’ve gotten through to someone, she explained, they don’t want to admit their wrong, so never say, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Instead, “tell stories.”

The most inspirational take-away from the conversation was when Dr. Goodall explained that life is a gift and we come into life with different gifts. Her gift is the ability to communicate, and we have to decide how to use our gifts. “You can’t live through a day without making some kind of impact,” she said, what kind of impact do you choose to make?

FootNotes

¹ Later, when asked about her perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by an audience member, Dr. Goodall wisely explained that she was not qualified to speak on the subject.

Far Side Cartoon Referencing Jane Goodall
Credit: Gary Larson

Further Reading

AU Ambassador’s Blog: Dr. Jane Goodall’s Townhall Meeting: A Conversation on Peace

Bush Warriors: What I Learned From Jane Goodall: A Bush Warrior’s Recent Experience

AAAnimals: Presenting Dr. Jane Goodall

10/10/10 is not only an entire power of ten more awesome than the other 99 years’ worth of 10/10 days in this century, 101010 is also the meaning of life in binary! Take a moment of silent reflection at 1010 AM, for yet even two more powers of awesomeness (within your timezone)!

The History of Exploring Powers of 10

Begin with the 1957 book Cosmic View, The Universe in 40 Jumps by Dutch educator Kees Boeke, which used illustrations and text to zoom out from a girl holding a cat, inexplicably sitting next to a blue whale. The linked website has all the illustrations and text for exploration.

Cosmic View

The 1968 Eva Szasz film Cosmic Zoom was an animation contemplating the size of our Universe inspired by Boeke’s work:

The 1977 short film Powers of 10 by Charles and Ray Eames conducted the same exploration as Cosmic Zoom, but began its journey in Chicago and used photography where possible (they also have a Powers of 10 Day Kit for sale for instructors looking for activities):

Narrated by Morgan Freeman, the 1996 IMAX film Cosmic Voyage takes the same exponential path, but with the benefit of computer animation:

My favorite is the intro to the 1997 film Contact based on the book by Carl Sagan, which used radio broadcasts to (inaccurately) illustrate where the viewer was in the Universe:

Today, we don’t just passively consume, we interact. So check out this Scale of the Universe flash demonstration (for a total mind-frak, click on the Wrong Version link after playing with the real one (the Swirly Version is nice too)).

Scale of the Universe

Finally, experience the incredible resolution, detail, scalability, and interactivity of going outside and enjoying life.

Happy Powers of 10 Day!

You can also queue up Carl Sagan’s Cosmos to enjoy, of which the complete series is available on Netflix instant watch and on Hulu.

Carl Sagan Portal

The National Ignition Facility went online, focusing the power of numerous high-powered lasers on a single point to produce the environment inside a star… but then we didn’t hear anything else about it. Space Shuttle Discovery took a bat to space clinging to the external fuel tank. Scarlet Knight became the first robot to traverse the Atlantic ocean autonomously. A 7.3 billion-year-long race between photons ended with a photo-finish. Everquest 2′s 60 terabytes of log files provided a wealth of data to behaviorists. An octopus in a California disassembled a valve at the top of her tank to flood the aquarium with 200 gallons of seawater. Mysteries solved this year include the 1908 Tunguska explosion being caused by a comet and DNA evidence proving the death of the Czar’s daughter Anastasia. The LHC smashed the world power record and had its first particle collisions. Best of all, They Might Be Giants released their awesome album Here Comes Science.

Steven Colbert Rocks

Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill Credit: NASA

It was a great year for science-supporter and genius satirists Steven Colbert. After a write-in campaign caused his name to win naming-rights to a new room on the ISS, NASA responded by asserting their right to name the module themselves and considered naming the toilet after Colbert, but eventually deciding to name the treadmill “Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill” (C.O.L.B.E.R.T.). The satirist also got a diving beetle, Agaporomorphus colberti, named after him.

The Flu Pandemic

H1N1 Glass Sculpture

Credit: Luke Jerram

The H1N1 virus (aka. Hamthrax) turned the whole world into a laboratory and revived interest in Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. A vaccine was out less than a month after strains were provided to clinics. It became a full-scale pandemic in June, has claimed 11,500 lives as of December 25th, and the strain will define future flu bugs for years to come.

Diet, Exercise, and Intelligence

2009 added to the already strong body of evidence linking diet and exercise to cognitive function. With research on rats appearing to show that active rats grow neurons capable of handling stress, a study finding that it’s exercise, not fitness, that improves body self-image, fatty foods affecting exercise performance and them triggering long-term memory formation. A nutrition program in China boosted student performance and students who ate fish twice a week achieved higher intelligence scores. Exercise is linked to better cognitive function in older women, improving kids’ academics, and aerobic activity keeping the brain young.

President Obama

President Barack Obama

Without a doubt, the most positive development in science for the year has been the election of President Barack Obama. After a stellar first week, it seems as though the American Government is treasuring science more than it has in years. With the Solar Decathlon on the Washington Mall, a Middle East Science Envoy, establishment of National Lab Day and Computer Science Week, and most recently the Educate to Innovate STEM initiative, there’s good news on the science front in politics every month. One of my favorites has been the appointment of America’s CIO Vivek Kundra, who is ushering in a new era of government transparency with data.gov and the Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research. The stimulus bill included a great deal of funding for scientific research and education which may be tracked at recovery.gov and the science-specific spending at Science Works for US, and although the money funding science won’t be spent quickly, it will have the effect of strengthening America’s position as an innovator years down the road.

The Future

We know that having fat friends increases our chances of being fat too, suggesting a social-pressure factor in obesity. So maybe it isn’t such a surprise that emerging research indicates that mental illnesses spread through social networking sites and that open-source communities foster groupthink.

While newspapers struggle to find a way to survive in the digital age, are universities next to die as people are able to self-educate online? A rift in an Ethiopian desert will eventually become a new ocean. Children born today have good chances of living to see the year 2100, when they may get to see the fantastic glory of full-grown hybrid Chestnut trees being reintroduced to America today.

American Chestnut

My Favorite Articles from 2009:

David Hume (1711 – 1776)
Credit: Scottish National Portrait Gallery

On this day, 233 years ago, the philosopher David Hume, author of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which rejected intelligent design in nature, died in what was a milestone for atheism. The religious population watched Hume’s last days closely, incapable of believing that an individual could die rejecting the idea of god and fully expecting him to recant in his final days. Instead of recanting, David Hume played cards up until his last moment of life (Schmidt, 2006).

References:

Schmidt, James (2006). Making Man in Reason’s Image: The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Humanity, Recorded Books, LLC.

So this year I’d like to introduce everyone to Esther Dyson:

Esther Dyson Credit: Esther

Dyson attended Harvard at the age of 16, was reporting for Forbes at 25, and was analyzing technology stocks for Wall Street by the age of 30. She co-established the publication Release 1.0, which continues today as Release 2.0 and sells for $130 a single issue. She has backed some of the best start-ups online, including Flickr, del.icio.us, and many others.

She was chairwoman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and boardmember of the Long Now Foundation, blogger for the Huffington Post, and columnist for the New York Times. At the time of my writing this, Esther Dyson is living just outside of Moscow, training to be a cosmonaut.

While TV talking heads ramble on their mostly-wrong predictions, Esther Dyson is a futurist who has put her money where her mouth is. Her article for Wired Intellectual Value, where she talks about companies needing to post content online for free and have to rely on other methods to make money off it, is so much common sense today, but she made the prediction in 1995. Esther Dyson may not be a name the average person will recognize, and that’s because instead of focusing on being famous like so many modern pundits, she has focused on being right.

Esther Dyson Patch Always Make New Mistakes Credit: Gisela Giardino

Isaac Asimov Credit: Rowena Morrill License

An interesting fact about Asimov and other great minds like Richard Feynman, was that they were supporters of reforming the spelling of English words. Asimov argued that the inconsistent and non-phonetic way we spell words in English contributes to illiteracy in American children.

Why don’t “comb,” “tomb,” and “bomb” rhyme/rime? Why do “they,” “say,” and “weigh” rhyme/rime? Our children don’t have difficulty learning to read and write because they are lacking in intelligence or proper study-habits, they have difficulty because they are learning a spelling system maintained by idiots.

Here’s a fantastic video illustrating the preposterousness of English spelling (ht oranchak).

The Spelling Society works to raise awareness of the problems caused by the irregularity of English spelling and improve literacy through spelling reform.

CNN making the boneheaded decision to dump its science unit, the Origin of Blue Eyes fitting another interesting piece of the human origins puzzle into place, and “Dwarf Planets” becoming “Plutoids” earn an honorable mention for science news in 2008, and the Large Hadron Collider will make next year’s top 10 list, when it starts working properly.

Here are my picks for the best science developments in 2008:

1. The Svalbard Seed Vault in Longyearbyen, Norway went into deep freeze, preserving the world’s seed collections against any number of threats, from Global Warming to regional environmental damage. The vault is a monument to prescient thinking, an Ark for weathering our current environmental storms.

Svalbard Seed Vault

2. Once numbered at less than 100,000, a recent census found 125,000 western lowland gorillas found living in the Republic of Congo. Although still listed as “critically endangered,” the numbers show that conservation efforts do work, and that similar actions must be taken for other primates around the world.
3. The Interior Department officially listed the polar bear as a threatened species, acknowledging melting sea ice as the culprit, but without taking any position on Global Warming.
4. The first Photo of an Exoplanet was confirmed from two photographs taken by the Hubble Space telescope in 2004 and 2006, a Jupiter-mass object that orbits the star Fomalhaut every 872 years.

Planet Orbiting the star Fomalhaut Every 872 Years

5. Closer to home an Electron was filmed for the first time, riding on a light wave after being pulled away from an atom.



6. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) was signed into law, which bars discriminating against people based on their genetic information concerning health insurance and employment.
7. The Phoenix Lander proved conclusively the existence of water on Mars, and kept us on the edge of our seats with its electrical problems and issues getting soil samples into its ovens for analysis.

First Images from the Phoenix Mars Lander

8. Craig Venter’s organization synthesized an entire bacterial genome from scratch, the second of three steps toward JCVI’s goal of creating a fully synthetic organism.
9. Working models and computer simulations of the Antikythera device revealed the Greeks were using a very sophisticated astronomical calculator, which was also capable of predicting eclipses and the Olympic Games 2,100 years ago.



10. My personal favorite development for this year was Science Debate 2008, which successfully got the presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to answer questions about science, and, even more amazingly, brought the scientific community together into its most effective lobby, which is like herding cats.

Science Debate 2008

Other News Sources Take on the Year in Science:

• Discover Top 100 Stories of 2008
• Discovery 10 Stories You May Have Missed in 2008 (But Shouldn’t)
• Science’s Breakthrough of the Year
• CBC News 2008: The Year in Science
• Live Science Top 5 Incredible Science Discoveries of 2008
• Charlotte Examiners Top 10 Science Stories of 2008
• TIME’s Top 10 Scientific Discoveries
• NPR Science Friday The Biggest Science Stories of 2008
• National Geographic TOP TEN NEWS STORIES: Most Viewed of 2008
• New Scientist News review 2008: The year in science
• New Scientist Most extreme news stories of 2008
• Wired Top 10 New Organisms of 2008

Does the economy have you down? The stress of the holidays getting to you? Tired of getting off work at 5pm to find its dark outside and you missed the daylight?

Then cheer up! As of today (in the Northern Hemisphere) at 12:04 UTC (8:04AM EST) the days will grow longer and the nights shorter until the summer solstice, when the trend reverses.

The Winter Solstice

Lots of cultures around the world have celebrations this week, and have been doing so since humans started keeping track of the seasons.

Of all the creatures who had yet walked on Earth, the man-apes were the first to look steadfastly at the Moon. And though he could not remember it, when he was very young Moon-Watcher would sometimes reach out and try to touch that ghostly face rising above the hills.

He had never succeeded, and now he was old enough to understand why. For first, of course, he must find a high enough tree to climb.

Arthur C. Clark, 2001

The act’s goal was to bring “American education to levels consistent with the needs of our society,” and contained ten titles designed to improve the nation’s schools. These included prohibiting federal control over curriculum, administration, or personnel; provide $295 million in low-interest loans to college students; $300 million in assistance for science, mathematics, and foreign-language instruction; and $18 million in research into how to use television and radio for educational purposes.

On January 12, 1961 Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his State of the Union address, called the act “a milestone in the history of American education.” Today, President-Elect Barack Obama’s website notes the importance of the act in improving national security, space programs, economic growth, and innovation for the second half of the 20^th century.

The 109^th Congress in February 2006 introduced the 21^st Century National Defense Education Act, but never made it to committee, possibly due to the beuracratic burden some argued it would place on public schools. The 1958 act was also not without controversy, as when 20 colleges and universities refused to accept funds from it in protest of the act’s requirement for loan recipients to take a loyalty oath to the United States, which contradicted the first title.

Despite these controversies, it is the spirit of the act that deserves reflection as we face the threats of terrorism and economic hardship, the idea that all our problems are best fought with a well-informed, highly educated public:

The National Defense Education Act recognizes that education is a national unifying force, and it regards an educated citizenry as the country’s most precious resource. Its ten Titles are designed to motivate the discovery of intelligent and talented young men and women and stimulate them to devote themselves to the sciences, foreign languages, technology, and in general to those intellectual pursuits that will enrich personal life, strengthen resistance to totalitarianism, and enhance the quality of American leadership on the international scene. – Arthur S. Flemming

Google has a timeline of news stories about the act in books, newspapers, and academic journals.

Tyrannosaurus rex’s closest living relative is the chicken, so take a moment tonight to savor the flavor in that context.

Turkeys and Other Birds are Dinosaur Descendants Credit: Yo Soy

More evidence for why that turkey you are eating tonight probably tastes a lot like dinosaur can be found here.

Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Credit: Vidiot

Eleven is an unbalanced number, a prime number we cannot count to on our hands; yet, there is a fractal-like nature to 11, a number whose first digit represents the second digit to the power of 10. The same holds true for single digit numbers multiplied by 11, such as 22, 33, 44… 99. We use a base-10 number system because we have 10 digits on our hands, a society using base-11 would need one extra digit on one hand. They would be asymmetrical beings.

Kurt Vonnegut Credit: mike dialect

Such a society, as implausible as it sounds, would fit perfectly in Kurt Vonnegut’s SF universe. In his book Galapagos human survivors of an apocalypse stranded on the island evolve flippers and become aquatic, in Slapstick mutant siblings become super-geniuses through incest (hi ho), in Timequake a temporal hiccup forces everyone to relive the last decade over again exactly as it happened before, in The Sirens of Titan all of human history is the result of alien race’s manipulations to produce a replacement part for a stranded robot, and in Slaughterhouse-Five a WWII soldier becomes unstuck in time, traveling back and forth to points throughout his life, including a point where he is an exhibit in an alien zoo. Vonnegut indisputably wrote science fiction, but took issue with being categorized as such. Still, he praised the genre for bridging the gap between C.P. Snow’s two cultures:

But listen–about the editors and anthologists and publishers who keep the science-fiction field separate and alive: they are uniformly brilliant and sensitive and well-informed. They are among the precious few Americans in whose minds C.P. Snow’s two cultures sweetly intertwine. They publish so much bad stuff because good stuff is hard to find, and because they feel it is their duty to encourage any writer, no matter how frightful, who has guts enough to include technology in the human equation. Good for them. They want buxom images of the new reality.

Born on 11/11/1922 or 19221111, I’d like to suggest “Powers of Eleven Day” to celebrate Kurt Vonnegut’s legacy. This coincides perfectly with the fact that 11/11 is also Veterans Day, as Kurt Vonnegut was a WWII veteran who survived the Bombing of Dresden as a POW, and the fact that Veterans Day takes place on the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I, which occured at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

Fun facts about 11:

Centered Decagonal Numbers

M-Theory

Undecagon

11-cell hendecachoron

From School House Rock The Good Eleven by Bob Dorough:

Powers of eleven (via quadibloc)
   2                                          121
   3                                         1331
   4                                        14641
   5                                       161051
   6                                      1771561
   7                                     19487171
   8                                    214358881
   9                                   2357947691
  10                                 2 5937424601
  11                                28 5311670611
  12                               313 8428376721
  13                              3452 2712143931
  14                             37974 9833583241
  15                            417724 8169415651
  16                           4594972 9863572161
  17                          50544702 8499293771
  18                         555991731 3492231481
  19                        6115909044 8414546291
  20                      6 7274999493 2560009201
  21                     74 0024994425 8160101211
  22                    814 0274938683 9761113321
  23                   8954 3024325523 7372246531
  24                  98497 3267580761 1094711841
  25                1083470 5943388372 2041830251
  26               11918176 5377272094 2460132761
  27              131099941 9149993036 7061460371
  28             1442099361 0649923403 7676064081
  29           1 5863092971 7149157441 4436704891
  30          17 4494022688 8640731855 8803753801
  31         191 9434249577 5048050414 6841291811
  32        2111 3776745352 5528554561 5254209921
  33       23225 1544198878 0814100176 7796309131
  34      255476 6986187658 8955101944 5759400441
  35     2810243 6848064247 8506121390 3353404851
  36    30912680 5328706726 3567335293 6887453361
  37   340039485 8615773989 9240688230 5761986971
  38  3740434344 4773513889 1647570536 3381856681