Mixed Colours: an interview with Brian and Roger Eno

picture from play.google.com

Now that we're all stuck at home, this is a good time to explore some interesting podcasts.

Brian and Roger Eno worked together on Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, which was released in 1983 as a soundtrack for a movie that became the documentary about the first Apollo moon landing, For All Mankind.  They haven't released a new album together since.
 

Bob Boilen interviews them for NPR's All Songs Considered: Roger And Brian Eno Reveal How They Made Their Tranquil New Album Together 

Both albums are are Ambient Music, which Brian Eno has said "must be as ignorable as it is interesting."  I like to listen to Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks when I am working and it is too quiet.  Ambient music makes for nice background sound that doesn't demand my attention the way most types of music do.

Advice from Astronauts

Some book suggestions from Odin

When I was young I wanted to be an astronaut - that didn't happen.  But I still like reading about all things to do with Space.

Here are three excellent books about the challenges of people going to space:

• Endurance by Scott Kelly who spent a year on the ISS
• An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield, another ISS astronaut
• Packing for Mars by Mary Roach about the difficulties we'll face in planning a trip to Mars

Scott Kelly also wrote an article for the NY Times on dealing with isolation: 

I Spent a Year in Space, and I Have Tips on Isolation to Share Take it from someone who couldn’t: Go outside.

The Weight | Featuring Robbie Robertson and Ringo Starr| Playing For Change | Song Around The World

 

Wordclouds of Chemistry Texts

After stumbling across a post on One R Tip A Day about building Wordclouds using R, I thought I would try it out myself.  I have been subjecting my undergrad chemistry students to R, so this seemed like a good opportunity to use R for a little fun.  I decided that it would be interesting to look at some old chemistry books.  I picked three works from Project Gutenberg:

• The Sceptical Chymist (1661) by Robert Boyle
• Elements of Chemistry (1789) by Antoine Lavoisier
• An Elementary Study of Chemistry (1905)
• by William McPherson and William Edwards Henderson

The Sceptical Chymist (1661) Robert Boyle

Elements of Chemistry (1789) Antoine Lavoisier

An Elementary Study of Chemistry (1905) McPherson and Henderson

It's no surprise that Boyle's wordcloud is so different from the other two.  The influence of Alchemy was still quite strong in 1661, and Boyle's vocabulary reflects this.  It is perhaps more interesting to see how similar Lavoisier is to McPherson and Henderson despite their being 116 years apart.

Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier were both instrumental in developing modern Chemistry, William McPherson was a chemistry professor at Ohio State University and one of the chemistry buildings there is named for him.

I adapted Paolo's code from  Wordclouds using R. You will need the R packages tm, wordcloud and RColorBrewer. I downloaded the books as plain text from Project Gutenberg and saved them in a directory called chemtxt.


library(tm)
library(wordcloud)
library(RColorBrewer)

#reads all files in the directory chemtxt
chemtexts <- Corpus(DirSource("chemtxt/")) 


book <- Corpus(VectorSource(chemtexts[["boyle.txt"]])) 
book <- tm_map(book, removePunctuation) 
book <- tm_map(book, tolower) 
book <- tm_map(book, stripWhitespace) 
book <- tm_map(book, function(x) removeWords(x, stopwords("english"))) 


# format as a dataframe with words and their frequencies 
book.tdm <- TermDocumentMatrix(book) 
book.m <- as.matrix(book.tdm) 
book.v <- sort(rowSums(book.m),decreasing=TRUE) 
book.d <- data.frame(word = names(book.v),freq=book.v) 


#color scheme 
pal2 <- brewer.pal(8,"Dark2") 


# uncomment this line to save wordcloud as an image file #png("wordcloud_boyle.png", width=600,height=600) 


#I picked just the 60 most frequent words 
# to show ALL the words in the wordcloud use max.words=Inf wordcloud(book.d$word,book.d$freq, scale=c(8,.2),min.freq=3,max.words=60, random.order=FALSE, rot.per=.15, colors=pal2) 
dev.off()

What is public science, and why do you need it?

Image via Wikipedia

Did you use a browser to zoom around on the internet today? Have you ever been vaccinated? If you answered yes to either of those questions, your life has already been made better through publicly-funded science in America. Public science is basic scientific research funded by governments, and just in America alone it's led to breakthroughs in everything from medicine to clean energy. But now public science is under threat. Here's why — and why we can't afford to lose it.

The Science Fiction blog IO9.com has a nice overview on the value of basic research funded by the US government and some of the myths about science funding.  Don't rely on know-nothing blowhards who tell you the US should cut funding for science.  Check it out.

What is public science, and why do you need it?

Animated sheet music - So What

So What

via Kottke.org Animated sheet music

Nano "Motor" Powered by Chemistry

We have been hearing about nanotechnology in the media and in science fiction for a long time now.  I have always been a little skeptical  about how realistic an idea "nano-machines" are.  This new research has me rethinking that skepticism.

A communication published online in Angewandte Chemie describes what you could call a working nano-motor.  Ayusman Sen and his coworkers at Pennsylvania State University have prepared little spheres less than a micrometer across - one side of the sphere is gold and the other side is silica (SiO2).  On the silica side they have attached a Ruthenium compound known as a Grubbs Catalyst.  The Grubbs Catalyst reacts with alkenes which are the "fuel" for the motor.

Image via Angewandte Chemie

When they place their motor-particles in a solution containing norbornene, the catalyst group on the silica side of the particle polymerizes the norbornene, and the amount of unreacted norbornene molecules on the silica side of the particle decreases.  This causes a concentration gradient - the concentration of norbornene on the gold side is higher than the concentration of norbornene on the silica side.

It is this difference in concentration of "fuel" molecules that makes the particle move.  Osmosis involves solvent molecules moving from a region where concentration is low, to a region where concentration is high.  As a result, solvent molecules flow around the "nano-motor" from the silica side (less norbornene - because the Grubbs cayalyst polymerized it) to the gold side (lots of norbornene).  And this causes the particle to move in the opposite direction.

Professor Sen anticipates that eventually you could redesign his nano-motor to use a "fuel" like glucose and doctors could use it in the bloodstream to repair damaged tissue.  Just like something out of Fantastic Voyage.

Image via Wikipedia

Self-directed microspider could repair blood vessels - New Scientist

Original research article:  A Polymerization-Powered Motor  DOI: 10.1002/anie.201103565