We're Back!

After a summer hiatus involving lots of science for all of us (chemistry courses, trips to the Galapagos and other exciting sciency places, knee surgery amongst a few of our adventures this summer), the Catlin Coverslip is back in action.

Send us any interesting ideas/stories you find and we'll share them here with everyone who is interested.

Balloon flight into near space

Via OpenCulture

In June, a group of San Francisco-based designers and engineers launched a balloon into near space, capturing the flight with two cameras that went along for the ride. Two hours into the flight, and at 80,000 feet of altitude, the balloon gives up the ghost and comes crashing back down to Earth. It all happens around the 2:20 mark of the video, and the images are … um … out of this world. Amazingly, all of the equipment onboard survives the fall – cameras and all – thanks to the parachute.

I am impressed. It only takes two hours to reach 80,000 feet of altitude? That's about twice as high as where commercial aircraft fly. Why did the balloon burst? Heat? Cold? How did the rate of acceleration vary during the climb?

Near Space Balloon Flight, shot with HD HERO cameras from GoPro from Kevin Macko on Vimeo.

Inevitable, I guess.....

Researchers at the University of Arkansas have found evidence of what we all probably thought was inevitable - genes implanted into canola plants have "escaped" and found their way into the wild population. Canola plants growing at the side of a road were found to have pesticide resistant genes present in their DNA, and some even had a combination of resistance genes that is not available commercially. This, rather worryingly, proved that different GM crops were intermixing with each other and both contributing to wild plants.
Ironically it seems that we have now entered into a genetic arms race with ourselves, as weeds are becoming resistant to our control methods via genes that we introduced into the environment to help eliminate undesirable plants. In what could be considered something of an understatement, the graduate student who conducted the research said "Things can escape from cultivation, and we need to be careful about what we stick into plants".

July 4th is a Chemistry Holiday

It's just not July 4th without fireworks, and fireworks are all about chemistry!

I'm attending a chemistry workshop in Connecticut and have science on the brain (anyone else out there spend their Independence Day deriving the Nernst equation??), so July 4th brings to mind the science behind fireworks.

• Check out this NOVA website for a neat description of the anatomy of a firework.

• Here's a C&E News article about environmentally friendly fireworks
  
• While watching the show tonight, you can figure out which chemicals are in the fireworks, based on color. Here's a nifty chart correlating which compounds produce which colors:

Color	Compound
Red	strontium salts, lithium salts lithium carbonate, Li2CO3 = red strontium carbonate, SrCO3 = bright red
Orange	calcium salts calcium chloride, CaCl2 calcium sulfate, CaSO4·xH2O, where x = 0,2,3,5
Gold	incandescence of iron (with carbon), charcoal, or lampblack
Yellow	sodium compounds sodium nitrate, NaNO3 cryolite, Na3AlF6
Electric White	white-hot metal, such as magnesium or aluminum barium oxide, BaO
Green	barium compounds + chlorine producer barium chloride, BaCl+ = bright green
Blue	copper compounds + chlorine producer copper acetoarsenite (Paris Green), Cu3As2O3Cu(C2H3O2)2 = blue copper (I) chloride, CuCl = turquoise blue
Purple	mixture of strontium (red) and copper (blue) compounds
Silver	burning aluminum, titanium, or magnesium powder or flakes

Why does John Bonham sound so sweet on drums?

Apologies for the lack of recent updates - usual end of year business. Whilst catching up on email, I came across a link sent to me by an old school friend who went on to do a PhD in Pyschology. It is a fantastic podcast by Jarvis Cocker (English musician, frontman of the band Pulp) about how we perceive music and its evolutionary significance. He does this by transporting the listener to the recording session in which Led Zeppelin laid down the famous drum intro to the song "When the Levee Breaks" from their 4th album.
For me, it doesn't get any better than combining cognition, evolution and Led Zeppelin...... Click here to listen to Jarvis's dulcet Yorkshire tones describing how sound is created and subsequently processed in the ear and brain.

Conditioned Taste Aversion Protects an Endangered Species

I just read a tidbit about this project on the Smithsonian website and dug up the research article to learn more. Here's the gist:

The northern quoll, an endangered marsupial native to Australia, is doing itself no favors by eating the tasty but poisonous cane toad, an invasive species that is rapidly moving into the quoll's habitats. As the toads move into quoll territory, the quoll population crashes. The toads are so pervasive that removing them from the environment isn't a feasible way to protect the quolls.

A recent research project found that conditioned taste aversion might be a useful way of preventing the quolls from eating the toxic toads. Scientists painted dead toads with a nauseating, but safe, chemical and fed them to quolls, who learned to associate the ensuing tummyaches with eating the cane toads. Released back into the wild and tracked with radiocollars, these toad-smart quolls lived five times as long as toad-naive quolls, presumably because they were now smart enough to not eat the toxic toads.

Conditioned taste aversion is well-known learning paradigm in neurobiology research, but this is the first time I've seen it suggested as a mechanism for preserving native populations when an invading population cannot be eradicated from the environment. Neat!

Weird and Wonderful Mammals I and II: The Hispaniolan Solenodon and the Slow Loris

The Solenodon: A very weird mammal

Inspired by a recent senior project that involved working on documenting endangered species in the United States, I thought I would start a series of posts about the rare and unusual animals that few people have heard of, starting with the Hispaniolan solenodon. Its name sounds more like that of a dinosaur than a mammal, and that is pretty appropriate - it is thought that this furry little sniffing machine has changed very little in the last 75 million years and something similar to its current form co-existed with the dinosaurs. They are found, as the name suggests, on the island of Hispaniola and are threatened by deforestation in Haiti. There is a great video of the solenodon here.

What makes it particularly unusual (and therefore eligible to be featured under the title of this post) is the fact that it is the only mammal that can inject venom through its teeth (any type of venomous mammal is fairly rare - platypuses have poisonous thumbs and slow lorises produce an allergen in their armpits and I'm sure there are probably a few others). For those of you unfamiliar with slow lorises, you might enjoy their response to being tickled.....

Left: The slow loris has allergenic armpits - it licks up the allergen then bites potential attackers.


Below: How does a slow loris react to being tickled?