Ten Hundred Words of Science

"The thing we make is a round box with living stuff in it, and a turning thing to move the stuff..."

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 13:44:16 -0500

“

The thing we make is a round box with living stuff in it, and a turning thing to move the stuff around. The living stuff is made of really little animals, like tiny trees that live in water. We put in the stuff that the living stuff eats a little at a time, so that how much of that stuff is in the round box stays the same, and we take out the stuff the living stuff likes to make at the same same. We make the whole thing warm and put air in it to keep the living stuff happy. Sometimes the living stuff needs light, so we make the round box out of glass.

We do all this stuff because the living stuff in the round box likes to eat a bad kind of air. This is the kind of air that makes the world get hotter. When it eats this air, it turns the air into sweet food. We can turn that sweet food into a thing we can burn in our cars and use to make lights in houses.

”

- In which I describe a bioreactor using the ten hundred words.

"I’ve studied the stuff that holds our cells together; stuff that stops us from falling into pieces...."

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:38:41 -0500

“

I’ve studied the stuff that holds our cells together; stuff that stops us from falling into pieces. Some of this stuff is tiny but strong and is made and ordered by cells in our body. This stuff is found between all cells. It is found in our eyes. It is even found in our hair. As we grow old this stuff breaks down and doesn’t hold us as well as it used to when we were young.

Even though the body makes this stuff, people can make simple types of this stuff too, to hold cells together. We search for ways to use this stuff to fix the body because it is safe and is already found in the body. Cells can grow on and in this stuff. It can stick cells to cell food or cells to cell parts so that a wound can close fast. We make simple types of this stuff to control cell changes and change how the cell works with other cells. We do this by making this stuff so that it holds other stuff that controls cells. This is hard work but can save lives.

”

- Ingrid.

"More and more people are moving into houses and towns built near the woods, where the trees meet the..."

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:33:23 -0500

“

More and more people are moving into houses and towns built near the woods, where the trees meet the more open and controlled spaces we usually call home. This is a problem because trees burn pretty easily, especially during the hot, dry days that are becoming “the new normal” in this part of the world. Sometimes houses or whole towns burn down when the woods catch on fire.

For over one-hundred years we’ve tried to fix this problem by not letting the woods burn at all; we stopped all fires as soon as possible after they started. But now we understand that this approach has actually ended up hurting us, because now there are lots more dead trees, large sticks, and young trees in the woods…all waiting to burn. These things have built up over time, because there have been no small, safe fires to burn them away. Now when we have fires, they are the large, hot kind that reach all the way to the tops of the trees, rather than the small, safer kind that stay closer to the ground and take care of the woods. Although we try very hard, we can’t really stop the large fires. But if we could go back to the smaller fires we would have an easier time dealing with them, we could stay safer, and we would could less money on fire-stopping.

I study these towns near the woods, and look at what they can do to make it safer for their houses and people. There are many ideas, like taking all the big sticks and dead trees out of the woods by hand; starting small fires during safe times to clean up the woods; learning how to build homes that burn less easily; keeping the town ready so fire men and women can more easily move their huge cars and find water; and talking to one another so that if a large fire happens the town can get better again quickly, and learn how to be safer next time.

”

- Casey Metz, This is an attempt to describe my work on “fire adapted communities,” which is a fairly new concept in scientific forestry that attempts to understand how biophysical, technological, and social forces combine to affect the disaster vulnerability of communities located in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI).

"Along time ago, ice fell from the sky in large numbers in high rock areas. When lots of ice falls it..."

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:27:52 -0500

“

Along time ago, ice fell from the sky in large numbers in high rock areas. When lots of ice falls it builds up. When a lot of ice has built up in high rock areas it moves down to low areas. As the ice moves it picks up rocks and carries them. When the ice stops moving it drops the rocks in a group in front of the ice.

My work looked at the rocks moved by ice that fell from the sky in these high rock areas. I wanted to know when the last time this ice fell from the sky and moved from the high rock areas to low rock areas. This would help people to understand why less ice is falling from the sky in high rock areas today.

I did this by figuring out when the ice moved and dropped the rocks. You can learn when these rocks were dropped by figuring out how many tiny pieces of a type of matter built up on a rock. Things like light come from space and hit the rocks. This caused the tiny pieces to build up. By knowing how quickly the tiny pieces build up on the rock, you can figure out how long the rock has been sitting in that position. The time that the rock was sitting in the position is the assumed to be the last time the ice dropped the rocks before the ice was gone.

”

- Daryl Kohut.

"My job is to tell the computer to do things using words a computer understands. People want the..."

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:30:21 -0500

“My job is to tell the computer to do things using words a computer understands. People want the computer to do some things for them so some part of their lives are easier, faster, or just better. My job is turning people’s wishes into words a computer can understand and do very well. Most times, there are many different ways to tell the computer what to do, and some ways are better than others. Computers will do exactly what you tell it to do, which is a good thing if you are thinking like your computer and a bad thing if you are not. Thinking about how you will tell the computer to do something can be both hard and fun. Sometimes, the words you tell the computer are not quite right, and you have to figure out why. It’s also interesting to work with other computer word people and figure out how to make our words work well together.”

- Yang. Basics of a software engineer

"Most of the time you see people using their voices to talk. Those talking voices can be written down..."

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 12:38:56 -0500

“

Most of the time you see people using their voices to talk. Those talking voices can be written down as words on paper. Then we can read those talking voices. We put those papers together and call them books.

But some people can’t hear! What do those people do? They don’t use their voices. They use their hands to talk to each other. But those talking hands can’t be written down on paper yet. How do we make books if we can’t write down talking hands?

Those people use computers to make movies of talking hands. Those movies can be shared with many other people, like books are shared with many other people. But movies are not books.

Now computers can make books too. We don’t need paper anymore. So we can put both words and movies in the computer. People can then decide to read words of talking voices, or watch movies of talking hands.

If there is a good story in the computer, kids can pick to read the story or watch the story!

”

- Adam Stone. An explanation of ASL/English bilingual ebooks (more info at www.foundinblank.com)

"My job is to look at the sun. But, I do not look at the normal light that we see every day, I look..."

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:33:16 -0500

“

My job is to look at the sun. But, I do not look at the normal light that we see every day, I look at a different kind of light which is much stronger and is used by doctors to look inside your body. The sun makes this light only sometimes and it is hard to tell when it is going to happen. It is very important to know how this light is made, because if there is a man in space when the light comes from the sun, he is going to have a bad time.

As the sun goes around, it builds up a kind of power inside it. When enough power is built up, lines of this power can go up to the outer part of the sun and let out a big sudden burst of light and hot stuff. The hot stuff can hit us and make space men have a bad time, but it can also break the space things we put up into space so that we could make phone calls and find out where we are. This is another reason why understanding these bursts is a good idea.

The kind of light that I look at is only made during these sun bursts. When the power lines break at the outer layer of the sun, tiny things are made go very very fast. Sometimes they can even get close to how fast light goes. These tiny things are pushed in all directions, but many of them go down back into the sun and hit a place where there are slightly bigger things that are all very close together. The tiny things hit into this place very hard and make it very hot, but also make the type of light I like to look at.

Because this type of light is made straight away when the tiny things hit their bigger friends, I am able to look at the light and make a good guess about how fast all the tiny things were going. This also gives me an idea about what made them go so fast, and what they did on their way down before they hit their bigger friends. If I look at enough of these bursts, I hope I will be able to make a good guess on when to give space men a warning so they have a good time in space.

”

- Aidan O’Flannagain (@Doroboro)

"It is very hard to understand how new ideas for things have made people’s life different;..."

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:28:03 -0500

“

It is very hard to understand how new ideas for things have made people’s life different; ideas and things we think of as old come from older ideas that used to be new and cool. Phones and computers are good things that have changed the world a lot, and they are all over the place, but we only sort of understand how they change they world. They change things a lot! But that change doesn’t just HAPPEN. All new ideas and things are part of a LOT of OTHER things that join up and make the world we’re used to seeing work like it does. Some of the ways that ideas and things change the world come from the way people think the world works, some come from the way people live and work together in different places, or even the way we think about the new idea and how to make it work.

I try to understand how a new idea or thing, like phones and computers, really WORK in real world situations, how they change the world, from the approach of someone who makes new things and comes up with new ideas. A very bright guy said that asking questions and trying to make new things is like how everyone has a way to make amazing things happen… but that same way also makes very bad things happen. My thought is Right now a lot of new ideas could make amazing things happen very soon. The US Space Team are really trying to make space cars that can go to other stars; People are changing tiny living things so that they can do anything we want. A hundred hundred hundred other new ideas. But right now the world is in trouble, because of how people have acted.

The question, then, is how do we bring these really cool new ideas into the world in a way that makes amazing things happen, to deal with the problems that are coming to a head now around the world, and to make something better for us as people together. What do these new ideas mean for the world, and also, how can I, as somehow who wants to make cool stuff, act to make a better world?

That’s the big question I think about. Inside that question, I study the way we make power and get it to people and things, and the way new ideas and new things change the way we set that stuff up. Everything we do uses power, from moving, seeing or thinking, to lighting things, making food, or flying places, and all the ways we power that stuff is joined up in hard to understand ways. So I try to figure out how new ideas for making more power or using power a lot better change everything else, and how different people will be changed in different ways, and how we can make those changes good for everyone. We have a lot of good ideas, but they don’t work very well with the way we have been making and using power for a long time, and they change things in different ways in places with lots of money like the US, than in places which don’t have a lot of money. We try to come up with new ways to join up things so that really cool new kinds of power can get to people in really good ways, and then use those new power ways in real places around the world.

”

- Studying energy infrastructure and policy.

"A little part of everything is really in every place at once, especially very little light things...."

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 09:53:45 -0500

“

A little part of everything is really in every place at once, especially very little light things. If a wall is not very thick at all and some thing can be on either side of it and the thing gets close to the wall, sometimes that thing just shows up on the other side of the wall from where it started. Tiny things like that have stuff on them that makes forces on other things. They take some of that stuff through the wall with them.

We study how little things go through walls and how to make the tiny walls that more tiny things can go through and so that they can take more stuff with them when they go. If the tiny things can take more stuff through, we can use that to make better computers some day.

”

- Enrique Cobas. My attempt at describing quantum tunneling. Electrons can tunnel through thin barriers into available electron states on the other side and carry charge with them. By engineering improved tunnel barriers we can preserve their spin polarization during tunneling and use both charge and spin to store, transport and process information in tomorrow’s computers.

"How should I live? What should I do in life? These are questions we all have to answer. Because we..."

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 09:52:24 -0500

“

How should I live? What should I do in life? These are questions we all have to answer. Because we all have to live some way or the other. Big and small questions about the right way of doing things come up all the time. And our life as a whole is always our own attempt to answer the question about a good way of living.

Still many people don’t think much about these questions. They just live like they are supposed to live. They live like they believe other people would want them to live. And believe in things that people around them believe in. So they let other people decide about their lives.

But there are some people who feel that they must try to answer these questions. Who stop and ask: Should I really believe this? Should I really live like this? And they will not go on, before they know the answer. They are willing to go deeper and deeper and spend a lot of time with these questions. In fact, they can spend their whole life trying to figure out something other people think is not interesting at all.

In the best case, these people can find new answers to life’s big questions. Answers that open people’s eyes and change the way they look at their lives. This could change the way people are living. In the best case, these answers can help all of us to live our lives better.

This is what I do for work. I try to find new ways of thinking that will make people live a better life.

”

- Frank Martela, http://frankmartela.fi/en/2013/02/philosophy-simplified-explaining-what-philosophy-is-the-up-goer-five-way/

"I work on finding good ways for people to work (or play or just get to know each other) using..."

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 12:38:42 -0500

“

I work on finding good ways for people to work (or play or just get to know each other) using computers. you might think you know all about this if you already have a lot of “friends” on your computer. but when a business is trying to help their people work together, they need to know what to do to help. they have to know whether a game is just for fun or can help people work. and when a school wants to help students learn, they have the same questions.

What I do is try things out, watch to see what happens, and explain the ways in which work or learning was done, noting especially whether it was done better or worse.

”

- Irene Greif (@igreif)

"A ‘census’ happens when we ask all the people in the land to answer some questions and..."

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 11:33:12 -0500

“

A ‘census’ happens when we ask all the people in the land to answer some questions and then add up all the answers. One of the things that I do at work is help people to use the numbers that we find when we add everything up. In this land (‘United_Kingdom’), we ask these questions every ten years. We have been doing this for more than two hundred years.

We can use the answers to find out how many people there are: how many men, how many women, how many children and so on. The questions cover things like the jobs that people do, the houses that they live in, and the people that they live with. So, we can find out how many people do different sorts of jobs, and what different sorts of people do the same job. We also ask questions about how well people did at school, about whether they look after other people and about whether they are sick or well.

When we check the answers, we can do things like looking at the number of different sorts of people who do a job. Sometimes there are less women in some jobs than we would expect, sometimes less people who believe in different Gods, and sometimes less people with different colored skin. If we find things like this we worry that different people are not all being given the same chances.

When I said that there might be less people who believe in different Gods doing a job than we would expect, how do we know how many we should expect? We can find out by looking at how many people there are in each group in all the people, and then seeing if there is the same share in the people doing each job. If we did not ask all the people, we might just have to guess about this.

A question that I am interested in asks people about where they used to live a year ago. This lets us see how many people have changed the place that they live in, and how they have all moved about. This helps us to decide where we might need to build new schools or hospitals or other things. If lots of people with children have moved to a place, then we might need to build a new school there.

One of the most interesting things that we can do is find the answers that a person made the last time that they answered the questions, and the answers that the same person gave ten years before. We can also look at their answers from ten years before that, and ten years before that, and even ten years before that! We will only find all of their answers if they are old enough, of course. If they are younger, or if they came to this land not many years ago, we will only find some of their answers. When we look at all these answers from different times, we can start to understand how things that people did a long time ago - such as the job that they did, or how well they did at school, or what their family was like or the jobs that their parents did - might change the way that their life turned out as they got older.

We can join the answers from now and from ten years ago (and earlier) for a small group of people. You and I do not know if we are in this group. The joined up answers give a huge number of facts about a person - so many that it might be easy to work out who that person is, even though we are not told their name or where they live. That is why it is important that people do not know if they are in this small group, and also why the actual numbers have to be kept under lock and key! People who use the numbers for this small group are told what they can and can not tell other people: they must make a serious promise not to tell things that might let others work out the name of someone in the small group.

After one hundred years have gone past, all the answers that people gave can be shown to everyone. People can find out very interesting things that happened to their family long before anyone who is living now can remember.

Some of the people who run this land have said that they don’t think that we should have carry on asking these questions to all the people. One reason for this is that it takes a lot of money to ask all the people lots of questions - paper forms have to be sent to all the houses, and other people have to read all the completed forms, and type the answers into a computer. It is true that it takes a lot of money, but it is important to remember that although we ask the questions every ten years, we keep on using the answers for a long time after. A lot of the ways that we use the answers are to try to make sure that we save money at other times: such as not building a new school when there are not enough children to go to it.

If we did not ask questions of all the people, what could we do instead? In some lands, they do not ask these questions. However in those lands they usually have a computer that keeps track of people, so that they always know how many different sorts of people there are in each place. In this land, we do not have a computer like that, so we can not use it in the same way. Sometimes, we ask questions to a group of people, instead of all the people. If that group has the same share of different sorts of people that we can see in all the people, then we think that the answers would be the same for all the people. It saves a lot of money to only ask questions to a group of people. But there is a problem with this! How do we know that the group of people has the same share of different sorts of people as there are in all the people? This is part of the same problem that I mentioned above, when we worry about whether people have the same chances. We need to ask questions to all the people from time to time to make sure that we still know how many different sorts of people there are!

”

- Oliver, lecturer in Digital Information Studies at UCL; http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/people/oliverdukewilliams

A lot of my work revolves around analysing and disseminating data from the UK Census of Population. It’s possible that we won’t have another census in the UK; here I try to explain what a census is, some of the things that it is useful for, and why switching to the use of administrative data only might be problematic.

@oliver_dw

"What makes things stick together (or not stick together) and what are things made from? In every day..."

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:28:02 -0500

“

What makes things stick together (or not stick together) and what are things made from? In every day life, there are many ways to make things stick together and many things to make things from. What happens, though, when things get really, really small? I study how things stick together and the things themselves in the smallest space we know how to make.

It turns out we need only three forces to explain all sticking together (or not sticking together) and only around 20 different things. Could we figure out a way to make this number of forces even smaller, maybe one or two forces? Can we make the number of things smaller? To study this we run small things into each other when they are moving almost as fast as light, and watch what comes out.

It also turns out this things running into each other when moving as fast as light happens to be close to the situation as at the start of time. So, on the side, we also study what the world might have looked like then.

”

- J. Hobbs

"‘Air Distillation’ For my job, I turn air into the different parts that make air up. We..."

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:22:25 -0500

“

‘Air Distillation’

For my job, I turn air into the different parts that make air up. We make the part of air you can breathe, and two parts of air you shouldn’t breathe, because your body can really only use the one part that you can breathe. All three air parts are used for lots of things, so it’s good that we can make the air parts go away from each other. So, how do we do that?

Well, first we suck the air into a thing that turns around and around really fast. Turning around so fast makes the air get hot. The hot air goes through a big box that has cold air parts coming out of it. The cold air parts make the hot air get colder, and the hot air makes the cold air parts get warm enough to do things with them.

The air is cold after going through the box; so cold that it’s almost wet like water. The cold wet air goes into the bottom of the thing that makes the air turn into its parts. Here’s where it starts to get hard. The part of air you can’t breathe go away from the rest of the wet air parts because it needs to be colder than the other wet air parts to stay wet. So, it turns into a really light air part that goes to the top of the thing that makes the air parts go away from each other and leaves through the box we talked about.

As the light air part you can’t breathe leaves, the wet air parts still stuck in the thing that makes the air parts go away from each other fall down until at the bottom, the air part you can breathe turns into very cold wet stuff.

Here’s where it gets way harder. A little bit of the light stuff you can’t breathe goes through a thing under the wet stuff you can breath. Since the light stuff you can’t breathe is warmer than the wet stuff you can breathe, it makes the wet stuff you can breathe turn into light stuff you can breathe. The light stuff you can breathe then goes out of the box we were talking about. The light stuff you can’t breathe that was going under the wet stuff you can breathe gets colder than it was because the wet stuff is very cold. So the light stuff you can’t breath turns back into the wet stuff you can’t breath, and goes all the way to the top of the thing that makes the air parts go away from each other, and falls down to the bottom. The falling down makes it turn back into light stuff you can’t breath, but the falling also makes the wet stuff you can breathe much colder so it stays wet longer until there’s lots of it.

Everything in the world can be turned into wet stuff, or really light stuff. You just need to know how hot or cold to make it. The stuff that a car is made out of need a lot of hot to make it wet. The stuff you breathe just needs a lot of cold. Most stuff that is like the stuff we breathe, you know the really light stuff that you usually can’t see, needs a lot of cold to make it wet. That’s how ‘distillation’ works.

”

- Brandon, Michigan.

Air Distillation Technician

"I study what makes up space and time by imagining what happens when very small things hit each..."

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 08:16:57 -0500

“

I study what makes up space and time by imagining what happens when very small things hit each other. It turns out that very different forces act the same when you look at them in the right way. It is funny, but the least strong force brings together heavy things and really only acts (in a way we can watch) on big things. The strongest force that we know about keeps together the middle of the smallest things we can see. It is so strong that it can really only act on things very close together — if you pull too far, it just makes new things that are close together. It turns out that the thing carrying the least strong force acts just like a pair of the things carrying the strongest force.

This job of imagining what happens when very small things hit each other used to be very hard and would take a long time. Part of the reason is because we are talking about the chances of things happening. We have made it easier by cutting the big problem into lots of easy little problems that we fix and carefully stick together. This way of doing things has a strange name but it means something nice: the chances of things happening always adds up to one.

”

- —

John Joseph M. Carrasco, Theoretical High Energy Physicist

A stab at describing my study of gauge and gravity scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory. Specifically the fact that the scattering of gravitons (the carrier of the gravitational force) is completely described by a double-copy of the scattering of gluons — the force carrier responsible for binding quarks together to form protons, neutrons and ultimately the nuclei of atoms.

http://twitter.com/jjmc

http://www.stanford.edu/~jjmc

"We are all made of the same tiny stuff, but every one of us has small changes to that stuff that..."

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 07:11:35 -0500

“We are all made of the same tiny stuff, but every one of us has small changes to that stuff that makes us different. Sometimes those changes, which are there from when we first come into the world, cause problems. They can make different parts of us not work well. I study one of those changes that causes a problem in the brain. People with this change can’t make an important tiny brain-thing. In everyone else, this really tiny brain-thing helps the tiny parts of our brain decide what to make. If our brain can’t make the right things, at the right time, we can’t think very well! I want to understand how this tiny brain-thing controls what gets made in the tiny parts of our brain. Maybe if I figure that out, I can help the people who don’t make the tiny-brain thing so that they can think well anyway!”

- Gabrielle, a graduate student interested in science communication, tweeting here and blogging here.

"All living things need stuff called ‘DNA’. This stuff tells living things how to get..."

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 06:06:05 -0500

“

All living things need stuff called ‘DNA’. This stuff tells living things how to get built. But it changes fast in some living things, and slow in others. Why? My job is to figure this out.

To do my job, I get lots of this stuff out of different animals, read it using big box full of many parts, then use computers to guess how fast it changes. Once I know how fast it changes I try and figure out why it changes that fast. By looking at the stuff in a LOT of animals, and by looking carefully at how the animals live, I have started to understand what makes ‘DNA’ change. So, we now know that this stuff changes a lot faster in animals that are small, have a lot of children, and die quickly.

This is a pretty fun job. When I’m not figuring all this stuff out, I work at telling students how to do all of this too.

”

- I am Rob Lanfear, an evolutionary biologist in Australia. My website is www.robertlanfear.com, and I am @RobLanfear on twitter.

"Many animals live in groups larger than families. Sometimes those groups are very very large. They..."

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 18:03:52 -0500

“Many animals live in groups larger than families. Sometimes those groups are very very large. They can be hundreds all together. I study how animals act in group. Each animal does not have a complete sense of what is going on in the group. They can only sense what they can see, hear and smell. They can only do that close around them. But the whole group, even large groups, do the right thing at the right moment. How is that possible?
I try to understand how they do that and imagine how to build computers that can act in group in the same way. I also imagine how groups of computers and animals could work together.”

- I’m José Halloy on twitter @jhalloy

"I study tiny flying animals that bite people. These tiny flying animals make some people sick. To..."

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 10:28:01 -0500

“

I study tiny flying animals that bite people. These tiny flying animals make some people sick. To help, I study things (like Off!) that keep these tiny flying biting animals from biting people. Sometimes these things (like Off!) Sometimes these things (like Off!) make people smell bad, make them bad to eat, or make the tiny flying things sick. I want to know what things in the tiny flying animals sense Off! and how that tells the animal that a person smells bad or is bad to eat.

I also just want to know more about how these tiny flying animals think and eat and live and find people to bite.

”

- https://twitter.com/elephantsinjune
http://incubator.rockefeller.edu/?cat=8

"After high school, I decided what I learned was not enough so I wanted to do more school. So I went..."

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:23:23 -0500

“

After high school, I decided what I learned was not enough so I wanted to do more school. So I went to a bigger, harder, more well known school to learn more about the tiniest parts that make up everything that is in the world and in space. I spent most of my time learning why they do what they do, how they get along with each other, and how they form and cause both the normal and the very cool things we see and use every day.

And to change things up and keep my mind always interested, I also took classes in reading and writing. The books I read and movies I watched were all made by people from the cold upper part of that large area across the even larger body of water to our right. The land of blue eyes and light hair. I wanted to study their works because I grew up in the same part of the world and wanted to stay reminded of their way of life.

”

- Lucy, graduate from the University of British Columbia with a B.Sc. in Chemistry (focusing on organometallic chemistry) and a Minor in Scandinavian culture.

This was the best way I could come up with to explain chemistry and Scandinavia… and post-secondary education.