Label: Science News

May 23, 2011

Look at this amazing photograph of the volcanic eruption in Iceland over the weekend. The plume of ash when the Grimsvotn volcano erupted on Saturday shot 12 miles into the air! (Photo: Egill Adalsteinsson / EPA).

Iceland is one of the most active volcanic regions in the world, because it Is located on both the Iceland hotspot and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which runs right through it. This location means that the island is highly geologically active with many volcanoes, and eruptions occurring on average roughly every three years. For example, in the 1900s there were 39 volcanic eruptions on and around Iceland.

The Grimsvotn volcano lies under the uninhabited Vatnajokull glacier. It began erupting Saturday for the first time since 2004. This is a different volcano than Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull, which erupted in April 2010. When that happened last year, large parts of Europe’s air space were closed for five days, because of the danger that the volcanic ash could harm jet engines. Some 10 million travelers were stranded.

This one doesn’t seem quite as disruptive. So far, airports are closed in Iceland, and they are keeping a close watch on the ash in nearby Great Britain.

Eruptions often cause local flooding from melting glacier ice, but rarely cause deaths. Police closed a main road near the volcano Sunday as heavy ash fell.

There have been some amazing photographs taken of volcanic eruptions in Iceland over the years.

You can see photos like this one and read about some of the earlier eruptions in my book VOLCANOES.

May 20, 2011

When the space shuttle Endeavour blasted off this week, it was carrying an unusual cargo: baby Bobtail Squid (Euprymna scolopes). Squid are cephalopods, a group of relatively intelligent animals that also includes octopuses. These baby squid are the first celaphods to travel into space. 

NASA hopes the squid will help us understand how "good" bacteria behave in the microgravity of space. As Jamie Foster of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who is running the experiment, puts it: "Do good bacteria go bad?"

We already know that disease microbes ("bad" bacteria) grow faster and become more dangerous if they are sent into space. Salmonella bacteria were sent up on a space shuttle in 2006, and when they returned to Earth they were almost three times as likely to kill mice as normal.

So far, we have only studied harmful bacteria in space. This time, the astronauts are going to run experiments that will enable us to look at good bacteria.

The reason Foster chose these animals for his experiment is pretty interesting. Bobtail shrimp carry a whole colony of bacteria, called Vibrio fischeri in their bodies, stored in their "light organs." The squid use the bacteria to create light, which they shine out of their bodies and onto the ocean floor below. That way, they don’t have a shadow, which makes it harder for predators to see them. Isn’t that an interesting camouflage tactic?

The experiment is simple. Newly hatched squid that don’t yet have the bacteria in their light organs were placed in test tubes filled with seawater and sent up on the shuttle. Yesterday, an astronaut added the bacteria to their seawater. When they come back to earth, Dr. Foster and his research partners will study the squid and see if the bacteria grew normally, if they grew faster in a good way, or if there were problems.

People often think that the space program is only about exploration. Of course, that is an important part of why we travel to space. But an equally important aspect of space travel is the opportunity to do experiments that we cannot do here on Earth. Science that we learn in space has many spin-offs back on our home planet. We have learned all kinds of new technologies. We have learned things that have helped us to learn about diseases, to better understand the functioning of the human body (including what causes "malfunctions"), and to develop new vaccines. These little squid will take us one step further in our understanding of the nature of life, and the interaction between different species. 

Photo: GenomeNewsNetwork.org

May 16, 2011

I visited my friend Max and his family this weekend. Max is a first grader who loves to know everything he can about arachnids…..that is the scientific word for spiders. I thought he (and probably lots of my other readers!) would like this science news story about Tarantulas and how they climb safely.

Tarantulas are quite heavy, at least for spiders. They can weigh up to 1.75 ounces (50 grams), and their bodies are very delicate. So, climbing is possibly one of the riskiest things an adult tarantula can do. "They wouldn’t survive a fall from any height," explains Claire Rind, an arachnologist from the University of Newcastle, England. Rind ran a series of experiments, putting tarantulas into an aquarium, tilting it straight up, and then using slow motion microphotography to film the spiders’ feet as they held on. She also used a microscope to look at the moulted exoskeletons from her Mexican flame knee tarantula, Fluffy (yes, she saved them all!), and discovered tiny, silk-producing openings all over the spider’s feet.

She discovered that when a tarantula slips, it saves itself by shooting silk threads out of its feet to grasp the surface it is climbing. Sound like anybody you’ve ever heard of?

Photo: International Society of Arachnology

May 7, 2011

May 7 is National Train Day, and in honor of the event, I’m re-posting this blog from Carol H. Rasco, CEO of Reading Is Fundamental, Inc., America’s oldest and largest nonprofit children’s and family literacy organization.

Seymour Simon’s Book of Trains is devoured by children interested in trains…children and youth of all ages.  While it is advertised as written for ages 9-12, even pre-school youngsters love the big color pictures and some of us adults learned things about freight trains we had seen on the rails but never knew the details.  From the earliest rail cars to the obsolete cabooses to electric subways to France’s TGV with speeds of between 200-300 mph, the details are here in words and photos. 

It is a great book to use as the centerpiece for National Train Day as it reminds us:

Trains can carry

grain and gravel,

milk and machines,

cars and computers,

pipes and people. 

Amtrak turned 40 years old on May 1 and there is a timeline which might be of interest to students on the National Train Day website with the Kids’ Corner featuring the cities where special children’s entertainment will be held on Train Day along with a downloadable Amtrak Kids’ Booklet, Kids Depot featuring games and even a section to learn to fold an origami train.

Carol H. Rasko writes often about the books related to current events. You can read her stories on the RASCO FROM RIF blog. 

May 6, 2011

If you are reading this morning, click on the "play" button to watch baby hawks being born. I’ve just seen both parents standing on the edge of the nest while the first, tiny fledling squeezed out of its shell. Amazing sight to see!

Update at 10:41 am Eastern Time from Liz Nealon (Seymour is speaking in Illchester Elementary School, Ellicott City, MD this morning).

Two babies are safely hatched. I managed to grab this screen capture photo of the one remaining egg, plus a tiny baby, when the mother bird got up to clean it!

May 6, 2011

        Joey LaMountain, a middle school student in Cape Coral, Florida, was in his kayak in the Orange River when he saw something unusual - a manatee with a crab trap attached to its right flipper.  "Whenever it’d show up for air, we saw the buoy come up too," he said.

The quick thinking 12-year-old, whose mom is a volunteer at Manatee Park, grabbed his cell phone called Florida Fish & Wildlife Commission’s emergency hotline. Then he waited for divers and directed them to her exact location.

This week the manatee, now nicknamed Tang-Lee was set free - fully recovered. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission said that the middle schooler’s quick thinking was particularly important because the state has had a record 218 manatee deaths statewide after last January’s cold snap.

"It feels really, really good," Joey said.

Photo courtesy WBIR.com

April 1, 2011

The news this week has been full of stories about the young Egyptian cobra who escaped from her cage in New York’s Bronx Zoo. She even had her own Twitter feed with over 200,000 followers. I must say, that’s a bit annoying - how do I get that many Twitter followers?

The missing cobra was found yesterday, safely curled up in a corner of the Reptile House. How did I become the first person to interview the country’s most famous reptile?

I didn’t.

APRIL FOOL!

March 30, 2011

Did you ever have a hermit crab as a pet? Lots of kids do. Part of the responsibility of owning a hermit crab is making sure it has a larger shell available when it outgrows the one it came in.

What you’ve probably never seen is what happens in the wild. Researchers in Belize discovered that when one crab finds a suitable empty shell, it waits until a crowd of other crabs join it. Then they climb, piggyback-style, onto each others’ shells, in a line from largest to the smallest. Once the first crab squeezes into the free shell, then the whole line follows, right down the row.

Photograph of Hermit Crab swapping shells © www.osfimages.com

March 29, 2011

A 12-year-old sixth grader named Meeps, from Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, sent me this original poem after I Skyped with a class there. Hasn’t Meeps done a good job of capturing the feelings of numbness and loss that we have seen in the faces of people in photographs of the recent earthquakes in Japan and Christchurch, New Zealand? This is a very good piece of writing.

Photograph: Aftermath of 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California courtesy of U.S. Geological Service/C.E. Meyer

March 17, 2011

As the news about 9.0 earthquake and massive tsunami in Japan continues to unfold, we all feel so sorry for the people of Sendai and the surrounding area. Many people are still without adequate food, water or shelter, and it is winter there, with temperatures overnight going down below freezing. And now, survivors must worry about exposure to radiation from the damaged nuclear power plants. Nature’s power can be awesome, but also devastating, as we are seeing each day when we look at the news.

I was in a school speaking to students this week, and many of them asked good questions about the incredibly strong earthquake and tsunami that happened last week in Japan. As I was answering their questions, I found myself saying that in the long run, this is going to be a huge and valuable learning experience for scientists. I hadn’t really thought about it until that moment, but this earthquake, and in particular the tsunami, have been filmed in a way that we have never seen before. There have been many, many photographs and videos taken of the devastation following earthquakes and tsunamis over the years. But in today’s digital age with HD video cameras on many cell phones and digital cameras, we have footage the likes of which we have never seen before, particularly of the tsunami as it was actually happening.

I told the students that this is going to allow scientists to learn a lot about tsunamis, and will certainly help us improve the computer modeling and prediction instruments that drive tsunami warning systems around the world. 

Sure enough, today I found this AFP (Agence France-Presse) news story about the reaction of Australian tsunami researchers to seeing the footage. "I think the impact of the waves going across and spreading well inland on relatively flat terrain was something that we’ve never seen before," Australian tsunami expert Ray Canterford told AFP. He added that while scientists had made progress on predicting tsunamis since the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean disaster in which some 220,000 people died, there was still work to be done. "There has been progress but it’s very unfortunate for the...

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