Turn Place into Career Opportunity

While wondering why I sometimes see the moon in the West when I go to bed and then see a faint moon in the South, when I get up, I realized I never thought about anything like this when I lived in cities. Living with a clear sky over a wide open space in Wisconsin, I was motivated to find a book that explained how the Earth's rotation interacts with the location of the moon as the Earth orbits the Sun.

     Place has the power to influence the problems a person, animal, insect, or plant might choose to solve. For example, I remember seeing a documentary about an insect living in the desert survived on one drop of water a day. The bug figured out how to tip its body forward on a slant in order for the water that condensed on its body overnight slid down into its mouth. In a similar manner, South Africa's drought inspired a school to use overnight condensation to provide drinking water for its students.

     Researchers, living in a place where two species, coyotes that usually kill red foxes, interact in peace, observed that coyotes and foxes had no reason to compete when an area had an abundance of resources. Other researchers living in a place where mice carry the deer ticks that cause Lyme disease found the number of ticks could be reduced by providing mice with nesting materials treated with pesticide.

     Sadly, many who live in places where they have the advantage of knowing the most about a problem fail to think about solutions. In fact, they often choose to contribute to the problem. Drugs and crime go hand-in-hand from West Africa to Amsterdam and from Mexico to New York and places in between. Coal miners are not known for embracing a switch to alternate energy sources. Religious differences lead to conflict rather than peace.

     "(F)ar too many of us see the economic status quo as normal. It is not normal," writes John Hope Bryant in his book, The Memo. Then, he asks, "What are we going to do about it?" Bryant was writing about recognizing and changing poverty-prone neighborhoods, but the same can be said about political instability, gender inequality, or heating up the planet. Wherever we are, our places have large and small problems that are not normal. We are in the best place to understand these problems and to change them for the better.

   

Your Rattlesnake Bite Might Not Kill You

Millions of years ago all rattlesnakes had venom that could poison blood, damage muscles, and attack nervous systems. No more. Researchers funded by Maryland's Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that evolution caused rattlesnakes to specialize to deal with prey, such as the mongoose, that grew resistant to certain venom. Rattlesnakes began to inherit only the genes for the one or two toxins they needed.

     Mojave rattlesnakes only kept their power to cripple a nervous system. Eastern and Western Diamondbacks didn't, but they still can harm blood vessels and muscles.

     Once researchers see how a rattlesnake's toxin controls blood pressure, by blood coagulation or platelet formation for example, they might be able to use this information about physiology to reduce hypertension. Clues such as this can improve patient health and, yes, lead to a million dollar drug payoff.

     You can never predict where basic research will lead.

   

   

       

Learn to Express Ideas Orally

Global issues require students to be able to discuss matters such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, cyberwarfare, terrorism, religious and racial differences, and female rights in a well-spoken and confident manner. A public school in London decided learning to speak was as important as reading and writing and began helping students learn the basics of discourse.

     As we have seen in the presidential race in the US this year, discussing difficult topics can bring out horrible behavior that fails to lead to a solution. When I served on a jury for a criminal trial in Wisconsin last week, I was worried about my ability to get along with the other 11 jurors as we discussed the merits of the case.

      Having training in oral communication is too important to ignore. Oral communication requires students to listen to another's argument and express a differing opinion politely. It requires using research to challenge another's thinking and to defend your own position.

     Listen to or read the speeches of Churchill and John F. Kennedy to see how important word choice is. Try out new approaches in the classroom and around the dinner table, and learn the power of oral persuasion.

 

Calling All Space Sleuths

What is casting an enormous shadow on KIC8462852?

     Ever since 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been circling the Earth's sun once every 371 days. What it looks for is changes in the brightness of hundreds of thousands of sun-like stars in one part of the galaxy. Just as from Earth, we see an eclipse when the moon occasionally blocks our sun, Kepler looks for a dimming, or eclipse, caused by a planet moving in front of any of the suns it watches.

     On October 13, 2015, readers of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society saw that Yale University astronomer, Tabetha Boyajian, had spotted an irregularly shaped 20% dip in the brightness emitted by the sun, KIC8462852. Since the diameter of our sun is nearly a million miles, it would take something on the order of 200,000 miles by 200,000 miles to block out 20% of its brightness. Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, would dim KIC8462852 by only 1%. In short, whatever passed in front of this distant sun was enormous.

     Could this huge object be collecting KIC8462852's energy as Jason Wright, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, theorized and like the Dyson sphere that appears in science fiction? Less exotic explanations include: matter that has yet to come together in a planet, a gas cloud, or a comet's head.

     And what if there is alien life on the object that ventured past KIC8462852? In eight countries, the NASA-funded Wisconsin Astrobiology Research consortium of 57 scientists in the fields of geology, microbiology, chemistry, and engineering is on the hunt. The consortium looks for the records the simplest organic life forms might leave in water and volcanic environments and the roles oxygen and methane play in microbial evolution.

     William Borucki, who helped design NASA's Kepler Space Telescope at the Ames Research Center in California, found that the Earth's sun is much younger and more intense than most other stars in the universe. Than's good news for young, intense scientists looking for future work in what Borucki is convinced is a "universe...much more wonderfully complex" than he ever imagined.

             (Also check out earlier posts: "Hunt for Moon Rocks, "Who Needs International
                                                Expertise?" and "Space Explorers.")