May 28 Should Henceforth Be Known As Thales Day

Partial Solar Eclipse

Thousands of Chicagoans will next week to celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of science.

Thales of Miletus, "Father Of Science"

Obviously it’s pretty hard to pin down the exact date when science got its start. But the Chicago Science Fest organizers are giving the honors to May 28, because on this day in 585 B.C., a Greek philosopher named Thales of Miletus is said to have accurately predicted a solar eclipse.

"We’re taking this date, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, to celebrate the birth of science," explains Monica Metlzer from the Illinois Science Council, which is hosting the festival.

Herodotus writes that at the time of the eclipse, two kings were engaged in a battle for revenge. Hunters had killed the son of King Cyaxares of Medes, and afterwards fled to Lydia. King Alyattes of Lydia refused to return the hunters. War broke out, and raged on for five years.

As, however, the balance had not inclined in favour of either nation, another combat took place in the sixth year, in the course of which, just as the battle was growing warm, day was on a sudden changed into night. This event had been foretold by Thales, the Milesian, who forewarned the Ionians of it, fixing for it the very year in which it actually took place. The Medes and Lydians, when they observed the change, ceased fighting, and were alike anxious to have terms of peace agreed on.

Astronomers can calculate the dates of historical eclipses, so they’ve pegged the day to May 28, 585 B.C.

How Thales predicted the event, or whether that part of the legend is even true, is not clear. But he was something of a . He’s credited with discovering five geometric theorems, and is said to have used geometry to measure the Egyptian Pyramids. So maybe he used math to calculate the time of the eclipse, or he got really lucky.

However exaggerated the eclipse story, Thales attempted explained the world around him in terms of natural causes, instead of blaming monsters or angry gods. Surely that's worth having a day named after him … or at least eating a slice of cake, right?

Oof. Sadly, Science won’t get a birthday cake this year because, as the , the fire department won’t let them light 2,600 candles.

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How Delaying A Subway Train Fixes A Subway Delay

To a harried subway passenger, learning that there's a delay ahead can trigger groans, rolled eyes, or mere stoic despair. But commuters might be even more annoyed if they realized the track ahead was perfectly clear: Sometimes, the system holds a train in place to fix a delay behind it. In this 8-bit , the explains how slowing down one train can actually reduce the total delay on the line.

It all has to do with maintaining an even gap between trains. Otherwise, a small delay will swell into a large "service gap" between the slow train and its predecessor. The gap increases because the lagging trains must linger longer and longer at each platform to let the growing crowd of impatient commuters board. Pausing the train in front to let the slow train catch up helps maintain an equal spacing between vehicles and keep the system running smoothly. This same principle can prevent . As Kate Baggaley suggested in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science, "Pay attention to the car behind you, and maintain an equal distance between it and the car ahead. With a buffer, if the driver in front briefly brakes, you won’t pass the hiccup along."

So next time you hear, "Ladies and gentlemen, we are being held momentarily by the train's dispatcher," you'll know why the MTA is asking you to be patient.

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Murder Suspect Identified By DNA Left On Pizza Crust

Cheese pizza, extra DNA.

In what has been called an four people were murdered on May 14 in a mansion in Washington, D.C. At first glance, the crime appeared to be motivated by money and seemed to be random, so investigators didn’t have much information to go on when trying to identify a suspect. But then, a stroke of luck: Police uncovered a box of Domino’s pizza, one of two that was delivered to the house when the victims were being held hostage.

Forensics specialists were probably able to extract some DNA from saliva from the pizza crusts left in the box--likely a difficult task, because the suspect had set the house on fire before leaving. When they ran the DNA through the police database to identify a suspect, they found a match with Daron Dylon Wint, a 34-year-old Maryland resident. Wint has been in trouble with the law before, having been previously charged with theft, assault, and sexual assault, which is why his DNA was in the database in the first place.

With Wint as a suspect, the crime was no longer random. Wint used to work at American Iron Works, where the victim Savvas Savopoulos was CEO and president. (The other three victims were Savopoulos’ wife, son, and housekeeper.) Wint might have been fired from his job, which would have given him a motive.

Sources have told investigators that Wint has left the Washington, D.C. area and is now in Brooklyn, New York. Wint is still at large, and police any information about him or other possible suspects.

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You Could One Day Be Identified By Your Unique 'Brainprint'

A person hooked up for an electroencephalogram (EEG).

Sometimes, other people interpret your words differently than you may have intended--like you’re not on the same wavelength. Turns out that the neuroscience backs up that idea; words elicit unique neurological responses in different people's brains, according to a published in the journal Neurocomputing. This revelation could lead to a whole new way for people to securely access their devices, no passwords required.

In the experiment, researchers hooked up electrical diodes on the scalps of 45 volunteers. While the researchers read various acronyms--such as DVD, CIA--to the participants, their brain waves were recorded with an electrophylogram (EEG). Computer models then looked at the neurological responses and found key differences between individuals. When the researchers later repeated the exercise with the same volunteers, the computer was able to identify the participants based on their neurological responses with 94 percent accuracy.

The researchers think that these variations come from how words tap into subjects’ , a part of long-term memory that contains general knowledge about the world (e.g., apples are round, red, and crisp). Even if the information itself is the same, words can bring up associations that vary slightly between individuals, creating a unique pattern of brain waves as the information taps into semantic memory. What's more, semantic memory has been found to change only subtly over time, making it an interesting new biometric--a quantitative way to differentiate individuals.

Researchers have techniques to identify people by their brain waves, as New Scientist . These could be useful to help people sign into computers and other electronic devices more quickly and simultaneously, like a neurological fingerprint. Before they can become widespread in our devices, however, these scanning techniques need to become as accurate at scanning brain waves as they are with fingerprints (and more convenient, because no one wants to stick diodes on their head on all the time).

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This Futuristic Concrete Heals Itself With Built-In Bacteria

Concrete

Concrete has been a go-to building material since . It’s durable, easy to make, and relatively inexpensive. There’s just one problem: It has a tendency to crack.

There are a lot of different reasons that concrete cracks, but in general, it gets stressed either from the load its carrying, the weather, or other natural forces, and it fractures under the pressure. Regardless, cracked concrete is never something you want to see in a building, bridge, or street. At best, it’s something you want to (for your mother’s sake), and at worst, it’s a sign of a structural defect that could lead to big problems--and huge repair bills--down the road.

But concrete that heals itself is inching closer and closer toward reality. , a microbiologist at Delft University of Technology, is working on a concrete with built-in bacteria that can fill in cracks as they form.

The bacteria are packaged in minuscule pellets, which together look like a fine, white powder. These pellets contain dormant Bacillus and/or Sporosarcina bacteria, as well as their food source, calcium lactate. The powdery substances are then mixed into wet concrete before it gets poured into place. When a crack forms and water seeps in, the bacteria "wake up," and start eating the food. As a result, the bacteria excrete a , which fills in the crack and prevents the water from doing more damage (such as rusting the steel bars that are present in a lot of concrete structures).

While many forms of concrete start breaking down after 20 to 30 years, these bacteria can stay dormant for 200 years without food, the life of a concrete structure for decades past its expiration date.

Other researchers in the U.K. are working on a , and the idea of using bacteria as a (not built into the concrete) has been around for a few years. But Jonkers and his team have actually brought the concrete out of the lab and into the real world, using the concrete to . The building has already proved its resilience, cracking and quickly sealing its wounds. Jonkers hopes that eventually more buildings will be built with the biological concrete, creating structures that will fix themselves instead of degrading into fixer-uppers.

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Why Does Mold Come In So Many Colors?

Jason Schneider

The amazing diversity of colors produced by molds and other fungi can vary regionally, says Sara Robinson, a researcher at Oregon State University. Blues and greens are prevalent in the Pacific Northwest, whereas oranges are more common in the Amazon. But the raison d’être of this rainbow of melanins, carotenoids, and other pigments isn’t always clear.

Some of the species Robinson studies secrete melanins that act as weapons against enemy fungi; some lay them down as barriers that rival molds can’t breach. Other labs have found that pigments can protect fungi from ultraviolet light, temperature extremes, and free radicals.

Nicholas Money, a fungal biologist at Miami University in Ohio, has studied how fungi cope when engineered without their normal melanin. “They’re pathetic,” he says. “Their list of disabilities is so long that it’s difficult to focus on any one problem.” Fungal melanin may have evolved to protect against enzymes produced by amoebas in the soil. Even though melanized fungi, as a rule, are heartier and more prolific than other kinds (which may explain why “black molds” have such a bad rap), there’s no evidence that these species are more harmful to humans.

Still, the variety of colors and their functions remain somewhat enigmatic. “Fungi are investing a lot of energy into producing all that pigment,” says Money. “They look beautiful and we don’t always know why.”

This article was originally published in the of Popular Science.

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Looking for Dark Matter Under A Mountain

Darkside 50

Enrico Sacchetti

A mile beneath Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain lies the DarkSide-50 detector. The three-story cylinder was built to search for our universe’s most mysterious substance: . “We know it exists in our galaxy and roughly how much there is,” says Princeton physicist Peter Meyers. “What we don’t know is what it is.” The most promising lead is --weakly interacting massive particles. If they do exist, these theoretical particles should drift through the walls of DarkSide-50’s three nested tanks and collide with atoms of liquid argon at its core. The argon atoms would then recoil like billiard balls and emit light, providing proof of WIMPs and bringing us closer to figuring out dark matter’s elusive identity.

100,000: Number of WIMPs scientists think pass through every square centimeter of Earth each second

This article was originally published in the of Popular Science.

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Will The Milky Way Get Strangled To Death?

A Spiral Galaxy

Just like lifeforms here on earth, galaxies can die. And it isn't always pretty. A published in Nature suggests that most galaxies die by strangulation.

A galaxy is pronounced dead (or quiescent, which doesn't sound as dramatic) when it stops producing stars. Star production requires the presence of gases like , which get turned into heavier elements or metals as a star forms. Researchers looked at thousands of nearby galaxies, both alive and dead, and found that while the living galaxies had a pretty even ratio of gases to metals, the dead galaxies had vastly higher concentrations of metal. The imbalance indicates that the galaxies slowly suffocated after their supply of gas was cut off, fashioning a few last stars with the remaining helium and hydrogen--just like a strangled person would slowly use up the last of his or her oxygen.

"This is the first conclusive evidence that galaxies are being strangled to death," Yingjie Peng, the lead author of the study . "What's next though, is figuring out what's causing it. In essence, we know the cause of death, but we don't yet know who the murderer is, although there are a few suspects."

The nefarious criminals in the lineup? Neighboring galaxies in crowded clusters that might be siphoning off that cool, life-giving gas for their own use. Both our Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy are active and happily producing stars... for now. But who knows what could happen in the very distant future? Both galaxies should be ready to watch their backs... or at least, their gas supply.

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You Can Go To Jail For Doing Citizen Science In Wyoming

Buffalo in Wyoming

The Internet since on Slate that a new law in Wyoming would make collecting data illegal. Illegal, that is, if you collected those samples with the intention of turning them over to a federal or state agency that could actually take action if there was a problem.

The law got its start after a sued an environmental group for trespassing on their land to obtain water samples from streams that were contaminated with E.coli from cattle dung. The samples were taken on public land, which under this new law would be illegal without explicit permission.

People caught collecting data (which includes taking photographs) on “open land” (land outside of town/city lines) now have to have written or verbal permission to be there. The problem is, the term ‘open land’ is vague, and could encompass everything from state and federal parks to privately owned land.

The law allows people caught collecting samples or taking pictures with the intent to pass them on to government agencies to be charged with “Trespassing to unlawfully collect resource data” and “unlawful collection of resource data.” That means that someone who sees a polluted waterway and stops to take a picture of it could be sentenced to up to a year in prison and/or given a $1,000 fine.

“We thought it was a flawed piece of legislation from the start,” Gary Wilmot, executive director of the Wyoming Outdoor Council told . “One of our early arguments against this was it’s very different than criminal trespass. Criminal trespass you have to knowingly be on private land. This law, you don’t have to trespass knowingly, and that’s why we saw it as so risky for wildlife researchers. We’re worried about people making honest mistakes and being guilty of this crime.”

Going to jail for trying to collect data or point out pollution violations on public lands? That’s bad. What's worse is that even if you are willing to go to jail to get those valuable samples, the data you collect can’t be used by any agency to actually prevent a violation, and the data can’t be used in court to prove that something bad happened.

All that is looking pretty bleak, but there is hope. As Justin Pidot, an assistant law professor, wrote in the : ”Anyone with a passing familiarity with our Constitution will recognize that the Wyoming law is unconstitutional.”

Pidot explains that the law violates the supremacy clause of the Constitution, because it directly contradicts aspects of federal Clean Water Act which to help enforce the act. According to Pidot, the law also violates aspects of the First Amendment, including the right to petition the government.

It will take time to change the law, and in the meantime, researchers and concerned citizens in Wyoming will have to ask permission, not forgiveness.

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Nepal Hit By Another Large Earthquake

Aid Distribution

Nepalese people carry disaster relief kits on May 5, 2015, 10 days after the first major earthquake struck.

Just over two weeks ago, a large earthquake , killing people, and literally . This morning, the earth moved again, the shaking reaching a substantial magnitude of 7.3 on the .

Today's quake was larger than the many aftershocks that have rattled the region since the April 25 quake (also known as the Ghorka quake), and it was centered in a different place. The earthquake a few weeks ago started about 50 miles northwest of Nepal's capital, Kathmandu.

April 25 Quake

USGS

The star shows the epicenter of the April 25 earthquake.

Today's epicenter was about 50 miles northeast, almost exactly between Kathmandu and Mount Everest:

May 12 Quake

The epicenter of the May 12 earthquake is marked with a star.

An epicenter is the location on the earth's surface directly above the place where the earthquake started. The spot underground where the earthquake started is called the focus, which in this case was about 9.3 miles underground--a relatively shallow depth for earthquakes. Because shallow earthquakes are so much closer to humans and the buildings we erect, they tend to cause at the surface than earthquakes that occur .

If you're thinking that the proximity of the two earthquakes in terms of time and location suggests that there might be a connection between the two, you would be correct. Today's large earthquake is being classified by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) as an aftershock of the previous quake. Last week, the USGS suggested that there might be this week, though there was only a 1 in 200 chance that an earthquake with a magnitude above 7 would occur.

When the Ghorka quake occurred, it ruptured a large section of the crust under the Earth's surface. That 'crack' headed east, ending just west of the area where today's quake started, making it that the stress of the previous earthquake helped this one along.

The area has a notorious history. The site of the largest earthquake in the region, the 8.0 magnitude Nepal-Bihar earthquake in 1934, and killed over 10,600 is located to the east of today's earthquake.

So far, 42 people are and over 1,000 people were injured in today's earthquake. The tremors caused to flee from parliament and the public to take refuge in the open air of the streets.

Rhita Doma Sherpa, a nurse, "I am very scared and I am with my two sons. The school building is cracked and bits of it, I can see they have collapsed...It was lunchtime. All the kids were outside. Thank god."

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After Major Nepal Earthquake, Himalayas Drop Several Feet

Himalayas

Moving a mountain is considered about as possible as emptying an ocean with a teaspoon. Sure, over time, the rocky peaks of a mountain can be worn down and moved by millions of years of weathering and erosion, but moving it in one fell swoop? Impossible.

Or not. In the aftermath of the , scientists at the German Aerospace Center looked through data collected by the Sentinel-1a satellite, finding that part of the Himalayas dropped close to 5 feet. It's an interesting discovery, because in the broadest terms, the tectonic plate containing India is pushing into Eurasia, and the collision is slowly pushing the Himalayas higher.

So, why the sinking feeling? Tim Wright, a professor of satellite or the science of measuring the earth, told that usually, part of the Indian plate containing Kathmandu is being pulled underneath the Eurasian plate, while the Himalayas are getting "squashed" upwards between the two.

"Now, during the earthquake itself, what happens is the opposite," Wright said. When the pressure between the plates gets to be too much, there is dramatic movement along cracks in the Earth's crust called fault lines. That movement creates an earthquake, like what happened a few weeks ago. When all that energy was released, the portion of land getting dragged down sprang back up, and the part getting squashed upwards relaxed, kind of like a rubber band snapping after being pulled too taut.

In addition to the Himalayas dropping, the area of Nepal near Kathmandu rose by about the same amount (roughly 5 feet). But the adjustment isn't likely to last too long. The dragging and squishing processes that Wright mentioned haven't stopped because of the earthquake. They're still being driven by the slow convection current of the deformable rock (think ) that makes up the Earth's mantle. Hot material rising and cooler material falling inside the mantle pushes the tectonic plates against each other, like bits of flotsam on the top of a boiling pot of soup. As the process continues, the area of the Himalayas that sank will get squashed back into place, and Kathmandu will settle back down.

More data is still being gathered, so researchers still aren't sure how other areas (including Everest) might have changed in the aftermath of the quake. Sensors on the ground indicate that the area near Kathmandu might have , but collecting that information is incredibly difficult, as many of those sensors can't be accessed remotely. In a disaster zone where infrastructure is scarce or damaged, getting to those remote outposts before the information is overwritten (something that occurs every few weeks) will be a challenge.

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Silver Makes Dead Bacteria Act Like Zombies

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Chemists in Israel have discovered the walking dead of the microbial world. It turns out that bacteria slayed by silver can even after they're dead as a doornail.

Silver has been used as an antimicrobial agent for centuries. Bacteria absorb the silver particles, which is toxic to the cells. Unlike antibiotics, bacteria cannot develop a resistance to silver.

In the experiment, researchers exposed Pseudomonas aeruginosa to silver nitrate. David Anvir from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says he and his colleagues observed the dead bacteria acting like sponges, soaking up silver. The dead bacteria were then introduced to a solution of living P. aeruginosa, and the zombies released their silver to achieve equilibrium, unleashing a microbial massacre. “It worked even better than our expectations,” Anvir says. “It’s a new, previously unrecognized mechanism of how an antibacterial agent kills.”

Some killjoys--err, researchers--have said that “zombies” is technically a misnomer. Peter Chivers from the University of Durham tells that calling the bacteria “zombies” implies reanimation, though the microorganisms are conclusively dead. I wouldn’t be too sure though--dead bacteria that can kill other microbes sound a lot like zombies to us.

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Crater Wall Collapsing Into Lava Lake Creates A Beautiful Explosion [Gallery]

Last week, we showed you what happens when a . But that only raises the question, what happens when more rocks fall into a lava lake? Kilauea is here to sate your curiosity.

The Hawaiian volcano, whose lava flows just a few months ago, is now capturing attention for its lava spurting out in a different location--its summit. In the middle of Halema'uma'u Crater, a lava lake has been steadily rising since April 22, spilling out onto the crater floor last week.

That's exciting enough, but on Sunday, part of the crater wall managed a perfect slam dunk into the lava lake, throwing fist sized globs of lava 280 feet in the air and creating an impressive plume of ash. Check out the gallery above for pictures of the explosion and lava lake.

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Smart Plankton-Like Particles Could Swim Upstream In The Human Body

Smart nanoparticles in hydrogen peroxide solution

From to based on frog’s skin, the natural world has long been an inspiration to engineers. For those designing implantable medical devices, incorporating elements of the natural world has been even more challenging. Now an international team of physicists has developed microparticles that move like microorganisms in the body and are able to swim against the flow of bodily fluids. The researchers hope that this technology could be used to unclog arteries or deliver drugs to specific parts of organs, according to the published today in Science Advances.

This researchers have developed biomimicking particles, but self-propulsion has caused a problem in the past. To make these particles, the researchers wrapped hematite, an iron-based mineral, in a thin, pale polymer. Under regular conditions, the particles simply float when they’re in a solution. But if the particles are exposed to blue light, the hematite conducts electricity and, in a bath of hydrogen peroxide, starts splitting the oxygen from the hydrogen. The result is a chemical gradient on which the particle can flow, irrelevant of the direction the solution is moving, called persistent random walk. In the natural world, parasites and marine plankton move in the same way through the body and ocean respectively.

Clearly, these particles can’t yet be used in the human body, because the human body lacks pools of hydrogen peroxide and blue light. But the researchers are confident that, as they continue to fine-tune this technique, it could be used in various medical applications. “If you can design particles that can feel their environment, and you went one step further into 'smart' particles that could direct themselves towards specific organs, you could think of particles that swim against the blood stream to fix clogged arteries," said lead author Jeremie Palacci, a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, in a . Though he also added that this type of application is "clearly further down the road."

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