Knitted Brain

It's accurately knitted. Yes, they're serious.

(via The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art)
(Hat tip: Sandra)

Walk (and) Score

When I visited my family in southwest Michigan a few weeks ago, the first thing I noticed was the twangy, excruciatingly-long-A accent. The second thing I noticed: Everybody was fat, and, despite the fact that my hometown spans a maximum of about two miles, the lanky members of the high school cross-country team were the only residents using the sidewalks.

That’s a shame. The average resident of a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood weighs 7 pounds less than someone who lives in a sprawling subdivision, according to one study done in Washington. And walking of course cuts down on driving, and thus car accidents and carbon emissions.

So just how walk-able is your neighborhood? I just found a fabulous site, www.walkscore.com, that will rate it based on its proximity to nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. (Unfortuantely, it doesn’t take into consideration other factors that make walking more attractive, such as the width of the streets, crime stats, topography, or public transit.)

My old haunt in southwest Michigan: 49/100

My current Greek ‘hood in Queens: 95/100 (Score!)

Capturing the Small

For 33 years, Nikon has sponsored a "Small World Photomicrography" competition, what they call "the leading forum for showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope."

The official judging for the 2007 contest took place on May, and now website visitors may vote for their favorites among the top entries. Winners will be announced this fall.

The site also showcases winning entries from previous years. They are certainly beautiful, and certainly complex. At right, the 3rd-place winner from 2004: Differentiating neuronal cells (actin, microtubules, and DNA), by Torsten Wittmann at The Scripps Research Institute.

The deadline for entries in next year's competition is April 30, 2008. First prize gets $3000 toward the purchase of Nikon equipment.

Sweet Tea: Update!

So, a funny coincidence (one of my favorite redundancies of all time) led me to the personal email address of Justin Stimmel, interactive artist and the brains behind that sweet tea map I wrote about earlier today. Turns out that he designed the map for a graphic design project using Flash, and the data was completely made up! As he explains:

Yes I did make the map, and sadly it is fake. I grew up in Arlington, VA...but I went to school at NC State. Several times a year I would make the drive up and down I-95 to DC. After a while I began to plan my rest stops based on whether or not I thought they would have sweet tea. Obviously, I'm a big fan. This went on for a year or two and developed a mental sweet tea map. I was studying graphic design at the time and we had an assignment to graphically map something of interest. Most students choose things like mitosis or the cycle of water, but I knew exactly what I wanted to 'map'. Because it was a student project, and I didn't want to actually contact every McDonalds in VA, made up the data based on my experiences.

Was is more interest, at least to me, is that I did that project in 2004, and it's sat on my personal domain, with no updates, and no visitors for three years. I'm not sure how it suddenly reached the blogosphere, but it's been a welcome spike in visitors.

(Go ahead, visit his site and contribute to that spike.)

Sweet Tea

Whoa, here's a crazy-interesting way to visualize the Mason-Dixon line: map the location of restaurants that sell sweet tea.






















Yellow dots are restaurants serving sweet tea; black dots don't serve it.

From EightOverFive:

The following is a nonscientific investigation into the relationship of Sweet Tea availability and the separation of northern and southern cultures in the United States. An interesting phenomenon exists somewhere in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The northern and urban areas of the state do not generally offer sweet tea in the most restaurants, where as it is a staple beverage for the southern part of the state.

Hat tip: Dave

Ouch!

Neurophilosopher had a great post yesterday on the history of trepanation, the skull surgery that's been performed in one way or another since prehistoric times. The money quote:

In his treatises on surgery, Paré also described “trepanes or round saws for cutting out a circular piece of bone with a sharp-pointed nail in the centre projecting beyond the teeth,” and another trepan with a transverse handle. The mechanical cogwheel trepan (above left) was invented by Matthia Narvatio in Antwerp in 1575. The cogwheel was connected to a second wheel which rotated a circular saw that cut through the bone. This instrument was used much in the same way as a modern hand drill - held in one hand and cranked with the other.

Warning: Not for the faint of heart!

Well-rounded

Einstein's general theory of relativity proposed that the all-encompassing blanket of space-time is warped, ever so slightly, by massive objects like the Earth. Al's theory was, you know, pretty genius. Still, so far there's been no way to measure these tiny distortions and actually prove his predictions. But a NASA/Stanford team of physicist- engineers might have finally found this proof.

In April 2004, the team launched the "Gravity Probe B"—a satellite-laboratory that contains the world's most precise gyroscopes. The satellite has been in orbit ever since, and the researchers are now starting to make sense of the data it collected. (Interestingly, the probe was first proposed in 1960, but funding and technological hurdles kept it from ever getting off the ground.)

To refresh your memory, a gyroscope is basically a wheel that's mounted within a ring so that it's free to spin in any direction. When the wheel is spun quickly (and in the absence of any pesky friction), it will keep its original plane of rotation no matter which way the ring is turned. Since gyroscopes always maintain equilibrium, they're used by experimentalists to define a fixed direction in space.

Gravity Probe B holds four super-accurate, 3-D gyroscopes, so accurate that they could detect a movement the width of a human hair from 20 miles away. Each gyroscope is made up of a spherical mass, about the size of a ping pong ball, spinning in a -271 degree-Celsius chamber of superfluid helium. The spheres are the most perfectly rounded objects ever made by hand—if blown up to the Earth's size, their biggest imperfections would form mountains only eight feet high.

If Newtonian physics is right, then the gyroscopes within Gravity Probe B should always point in the same direction. But if Einstein's relativity is correct, then the slight curvature of space should cause the spin axis of the gyroscope to change by a tiny, tiny bit (we're talking a difference of .0018 degrees in one year). As I mentioned, the data's still being analyzed...but preliminary results show the balls are indeed drifting. Way to go, Al.

Hat tip: Clive