Return of the prodigal poster (possibly)

It seems I am not much of a blogger, not from lack of ideas to post... but rather by the time I sit down to post about something it seems no longer relevant or someone else said it much better! Still there have been some interesting science related things going on in my life, that I thought I'd document if only in a quick bullet point list:

• This summer I had a chance to visit Boulder, Colorado and their physics department. I am quite interested in working with the T2K group so it was quite nice to be able to meet with two of the professors heading the group. Neutrinos are strange little critters, I would be more than content to while away my life trying to figure out their mysteries and their place in the greater scheme of things.
• Speaking of neutrinos, I am sure most people have heard of the OPERA groups discovery that they appear to be going faster than light. I recently joined one of the groups who will be double checking these measurements. There is a lot of work to be done so no results in the immediate future, but excited to be part of it all.
• More history of science than science itself... but I will be on a poster presented at the AAS conference in Austin on the history of UW's Manastash Ridge Observatory. MRO is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2012. (interestingly UW itself is celebrating its 150th). It has been interesting interviewing people and digging through all the old records.
• The PGRE (physics general exam for grad school) has been occupying a fair deal of my free time lately. I'll be taking it in a week. Here is hoping my usual test anxiety does not rear its ugly head and leave me with a migraine or such! Test anxiety is really the bane of my academic existence, I am not sure when it developed as I actually liked taking test in high school. I am mentally trying to convince myself that the PGRE is just a physics version of some puzzle game, since I tend to enjoy and do well on those.
• Finally watched "Wonders of the Solar System" presented by Brian Cox. Quite enjoyed it. Should probably post a full on review of it soon.

All for now and hopefully there won't be quite such a gap until my next post!

Stardust, part II

This post is way delayed, but I'll skip the excuses and get right down to it. I did finally manage to track down Professor Brownlee (see photo insert) in his office the other day. There I got to check out his cool model of Comet Tempel 1 (named after Wilhelm Tempel), it really looks like it has had some huge piece knocked off of it at some point. He showed me an animation of the satellites approach of the comet and we listened to the sounds of the debris impacting the satellite (you can find these here). I wish I had remembered to bring my camera, Brownlee's office is not the most pristine place, but there is always some neat stuff laying about (including fossils and meteorites!). As I didn't, you are left with the image and video I snagged from NASA. Also should have asked him more questions, then I'd actually have more to post about! However, I did ask where the tail or coma was, turns out when you are that close to the comet it isn't really visible. Which makes sense since it is a bit like a fog. The only malfunction/technical problem was that the satellite was only supposed to send back the images from the center of its run towards the comet (these are when it was the closest), instead it sent them all back, which meant the transmission took a lot longer and none of the scientist or technicians got any sleep that night. Not really a big deal though, all in all it was an amazingly successful venture!

One of the main things the satellite was checking out was the impact site of a man made crater (made in 2005), they wanted see what type of surface changes (if any) occurred on the comet. They were able to observe the crater and also some changes on an other feature. Actually the best way to get an idea of the whole mission is to listen to the NASA briefs (actually it will make most of my post a bit redundant!)

Stardust!

This Valentines day NASA is getting all romantic and has a date with Comet Tempel 1 (see photo, & thanks NASA). You can read all about it here. This is a continuation of the stardust mission which successfully brought back samples from another comet, Wild 2 in 2006. More news (commentary) to follow soon as I hope to track down Professor Don Brownlee tomorrow. For now I have my own date to run off to. Happy Valentines everyone!

Ancient Aliens!

A coworker recommended the History channels series on Ancient Aliens and I was all set to review it on it's scientific merits (however slim)... BUT after watching the first episode I have decided anything even close to science is so well hidden to be not worth mentioning. Let's just say I found the show more entertaining than educational. Granted, I have only watched one episode and it is possible the following ones will astound me with facts and science, but I'm not holding my breath. Note: I didn't expect any real science to back up ancient aliens, but maybe some twisted science to validate their claims. The only thing I could see is using it to leap frog into a discussion of the Earth's magnetic field (it does indeed vary in places, as well as change over time). Unfortunately I know more about the paleomagnetic field of Mars than Earth's magnetic field and am not feeling motivate to embark on a investigation mission at the current time. However, I believe the variation in the field is usually due to areas with unusually high iron content or/and magnetite. And for an interesting article on how the field changes check out: Earth's Inconstant Magnetic Field (NASA).

What I learned from at the AAS

Today is the last day of the 217th AAS meeting, and I'm playing hookey as I am at this point saturated! I had hoped to spreed out my post about the meeting over several days, however I found at the end of the day I was exhausted and was much more interested in doing a whole lot of nothing than blogging. So, instead you get the quick and dirty bullet points on my take the whole thing.

• Women are definitely represented in Astronomy, and this includes some of the top positions. In fact though the diversity in general is not perfect, it is a lot more so than I expected, especially compared to Physics. (This topic probably deserves a post of it own one of these days)
• There is a limit to the number of poster/talks one can hear before it all turns into gibberish. Coffee, food and jumping jacks do help extend that limit.
  
• Volunteers at the conference are an interesting bunch; ranging from undergrads and grad students to amateur astronomers and retired techies.
• The best posters and talks in my opinion were not the ones that answered all the questions but left me with brand new ones. I especially liked the talk by Nathan Kaib on "Sedna and the Evolving Solar Neighborhood". Though I do admit solar system formation and Oort cloud is going to win before stars in my book almost any day! (Yes, personal bias.) BUT I was quite interested in a poster on planetary nebulae which is a topic I usually don't get overly excited about.
  
• Zodiacal light, here is a topic I hadn't really thought much about previously but now I will. (Though I have always thought space dust was cool)
  
• Space missions need more funding, there is some amazing science we could do if only we could get the budgeting.
• Education and outreach, both need more status.
• I'm a sucker for neutrinos (there was very little mentioned at the conference)... need to get back in gear with my own research.
  
• Volunteering was fun, but I wish I could have made it to more talks.Still I really enjoyed doing the tech support.
  
• All in all Astronomers are an interesting and friendly bunch.

And that is all for now, a bit jumbled of a list I admit. I'll try and be more coherent in the future! Also not sure why the photo looks so pixelated, it doesn't in the original (though it is a wee blurry as I was avoiding the flash as I didn't want to blind everyone).

When astronomers gather...

Today marked the beginning of the 217th AAS meeting (American Astronomical Society), and since it is being held in here in Seattle and I'll be presenting a poster, I'll be attending. Better than that, I'll be volunteering! And even better!! I'll be posting about my thrilling experiences! (at least that's the plan). All I have to report so far is that I believe I made a sighting of Nobel laureate John C. Mather (pictured on right).

And as they want me back there at the ungodly hour of 7 AM tomorrow, I'll keep this short. Until next time!

It's alive, it's ALIVE!!

So after much mulling about starting one of these, I've done it... I have created a BLOG! Probably quite horrific; my monster will now be stumbling across the internets, throwing my random thoughts on life, the universe and science at the unsuspecting. Mainly I hope to share my love for SCIENCE!!, my annoyance at occasional bad science in the media and documentaries and how I feel (yes, it is all about me) about stereotypes of scientist. Oh and my occasional adventures as a junior scientist (basically meaning I don't have a Ph.D, ... yet).

So let's begin with a quick explanation on my catchy blog title...
Coming up with a title has been a long arduous journey in which I have driven countless people (actually more like 2) and my cat crazy. The difficulty was to come up with a catchy title that would sum up me and my blogs hand-wavy yet sciency objectives, preferably in under half a dozen words. Eventually, I turned to wikipedia for help. I had decided what I needed was a clever way of saying "random thoughts". Well, thoughts form in the brain and have something to do with electrical impulses traveling along the nerve fibers, or axons, from the neurons to other neurons, so after reading up on axons, the human brain, etc. I stumbled across the term "Nodes of Ranvier". [Side note: some wiki articles really geared towards experts in a particular field rather than interested laymen] Now maybe it is just me, but that's one catchy name*. The nodes are basically little gaps in insulation across the axon where a small voltage difference is created. This causes an action potential and allows the electrical impulse to leap across, basically speeding up the travel time of the electric impulse (or nerve impulse), the process is called saltatory conduction. Basically I am picturing little sparks of thoughts leaping across the tendrils forming the thought highways of my brain. Below is part of wikipedia description on saltatory conduction

"because the cytoplasm of the axon is electrically conductive, and because the myelin inhibits charge leakage through the membrane, depolarization at one node of Ranvier is sufficient to elevate the voltage at a neighboring node to the threshold for action potential initiation. Thus in myelinated axons, action potentials do not propagate as waves, but recur at successive nodes and in effect "hop" along the axon, by which process they travel faster than they would otherwise. In summary, the charge will passively depolarize the adjacent node of Ranvier to threshold, triggering an action potential in this region and subsequently depolarizing the next node, and so on."

On that note adiue and good night!

*it seems I am not the only one that thought this was a catchy name, seems there was a Christian metal band from South Dakota who decided it would make a great band name.