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.