Invisible Flow Dynamics

December 17, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

The flame is lit.
The images here are all from a short video, The Hidden Complexities of the Simple Match.
Images: V. Miller, M. Tilghman, R. Hanson/Stanford Univ./

By now, most people have heard about the vast amount of plastic that ends up in the world’s oceans, and how, once there, plastic bags, wrapping, toys, really all the stuff we make and use in this Age of Plastic, gets ground and beaten into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic until it is no longer recognizable as a human-made item, just a ever-tinier piece of material that is nonetheless non-biodegradable.

The flame is blown out.
Image: V. Miller, M. Tilghman, R. Hanson/Stanford Univ.

Which is one of the characteristics that makes petroleum-based plastic so very different from most other human-made utility products on the planet. It takes hundreds and thousands of years to break down the wrapping or plastic sack which we produce to be used for perhaps a few weeks or months, or even just once.

The images here show the turbulence of hot gases around a match as it is lit and then blown out – the unseen flow that takes place before our eyes, when all we see is a flame lit, and a flame extinguished.

The flame goes out. V. Miller, M. Tilghman, R. Hanson/Stanford Univ.

The flame goes out.
Image: V. Miller, M. Tilghman, R. Hanson/Stanford Univ.

Below is a map of the flow of ocean plastic around the world – researchers estimate the plastic refuse that was quantified and charted accounts for perhaps 1% of all ocean plastic. The rest is out there, getting up to all kinds of incendiary environmental nonsense – and while it’s right there in front of us, we are unable to see it.

Concentrations of plastic debris in surface waters of the global ocean. Colored circles indicate mass concentrations (legend on top right). The map shows average concentrations in 442 sites (1,127 surface net tows). Gray areas indicate the accumulation zones predicted by a global surface circulation model (6). Image/caption: Andrés Cózar et al./PNAS

Concentrations of plastic debris in surface waters of the global ocean. Colored circles indicate mass concentrations. The map shows average concentrations in 442 sites. Gray areas indicate the accumulation zones predicted by a global surface circulation model.
Click here for a larger image.
Image/caption: Andrés Cózar et al./PNAS

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/plastic-trash-piling-oceans-map-181700451.html

Flea Glasses and Hidden Spaces

October 29, 2014October 29, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Imagine the excitement of using one of the world’s first magnifying glasses back in the 16th century. All those creatures and items too tiny for examination with the naked eye would have suddenly revealed some of their secrets.

Early magnifying glasses were so popular for looking at minuscule life forms such as fleas that they were sometimes called ‘flea glasses’. The workings of bodily and natural mechanics that were once hidden by size were revealed.

Ah, well. The opportunities available today for finding hidden spaces are multitudinous. I saw these images and wanted to share them.

Wheat flowerbud, winning image in the 2014 Australian Museum New Scientist Eureka Prize for Science Photography.
Taken with an electron microscope.
Photo: Mark Talbot

It’s not just size or distance that has been revealed by new viewing methods, it’s time.

There are countless cellular processes that have been well-studied and photographed – but here’s a new option for viewing these processes in real time and in 3-D. Lattice light-sheet microscopy uses extremely rapid pulses of ultra-thin sheets of light to scan living cells.

Below, a still image from the film showing HeLa cell division.

This kind of tool can help researchers better understand the actual behavior of cells and processes, furthering understanding of how cancer cells develop, for example.

But as the new microscopes inventor, Dr. Eric Betzig, has said, there are undoubtedly many applications for this kind of vision which haven’t even been discovered yet.

Because, of course, sometimes we don’t know what we’re looking for until we find something looking back at us that wants further investigation.

HeLa division. Source: Chen et al via Science

HeLa cell division.
Source: Chen et al via Science

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/109402304″>Movie 5 High Resolution</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user33367262″>HHMI NEWS</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>

Science and Peace: CERN at 60

September 22, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Last week I had the privilege of attending a series of lectures, 60 Years of Science for Peace, held in the CERN Globe as a part of the celebration to mark CERN’s 60th anniversary. Considering we live just down the road from the Globe, I didn’t have far to travel, but it’s a nice journey to take nonetheless.

The CERN Globe, an exhibition and lecture hall.
Photo: Jean-Claude Rifflard/CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was founded in the 1950s as a research institution, but it also had a key secondary function: that of fostering cooperation and collaboration between countries that had only just emerged from World War II. It provided a place where scientists could work together across political, linguistic, cultural and national lines by sharing research goals, methodology, resources and outcomes.

People from countries that had been at war worked side-by-side. Throughout the Cold War, CERN was one of the places where lines of communication remained open across the Iron Curtain.

There have been countless side benefits and developments over the decades that are the direct or indirect result of research done through CERN, from medical advances to computer technology, but seems particularly fitting that one of CERN’s major collateral contributions was the creation of the World Wide Web as a means of facilitating communication.

Sitting around me at the lectures were rows of CERN scientists, most of whom communicate with one another in English or French – but who come from dozens of different countries around the world.

CERN at 60
Source: CERN

One aspect of life at CERN that I’ve always found interesting is that while the scale of science that goes on there might be grand, the atmosphere is relaxed and collegial. The main cafeteria at lunch time is packed, abuzz, and the long tables and close seating encourage conversation.

Having lunch at the CERN cafeteria might mean sitting amongst a few Nobel laureates, or it might not – but what is striking is how much of the casual conversation in shared languages revolves around the free exchange of ideas. And it’s all open to the public.

This is the opposite of academics toiling away in an ivory tower.

So today I’d just like to tip my hat to the work of an organization that does more than just research the fundamentals of physical world: Truly open discussion and communication between people of vastly different backgrounds and beliefs is one of the best means of immunizing against misunderstanding and prejudice, whether intellectual or otherwise.

Atlantis, Past and Future

June 30, 2014June 30, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

On the shoreline of the Welsh coast near Borth, violent winter storms caused remnants of an ancient kingdom and forest to emerge from the sea, lending some physical evidence to underpin the area’s deluge myth of Cantre’r Gwaelod, a sunken realm and forest long said to lie beneath Cardigan Bay.

The remnants of the Borth forest. Photo: Keith Morris/LNP

The remnants of the Borth forest, preserved for thousands of years beneath layers of peat, sand and saltwater.
Photo: Keith Morris/LNP

The Cantre’r Gwaelod legend says that the low-lying kingdom was lost to floods when a maiden neglected her duties and left a well unwatched. The well overflowed, inundating the land. Another version features a wastrel prince who allowed the floodgates to remain open and the sea to flood the city. It’s said that the watery church bells from the lost city can be heard echoing across the sea in times of danger.

In FutureVoices, a collaboration between climate scientists, game developers and writers, a deluge myth of a different kind is being created. FutureCoast is a part of the project that imagines daily life in a not-too-distant future via ‘geocached’ artifacts called ‘chronofacts’, which contain messages and voicemails from various locations.

A ‘chronofact’ object.
Image: Eric Molinksy/WNYC

A sort of online game/scavenger hunt combination held during a period this spring, FutureCoast alerted participants to the presence of an artifact, and invited those who found the artifacts to make recordings of a standard type of voicemail, but imagining themselves facing daily challenges in a future undergoing major climate change, sometime between 2020 and 2065.

The project aims to inspire people to think about their future selves in a changed world, and to make concrete choices today on improving that world.

In most of our ancient deluge myths such as Cantre’r Gwaelod, the flooding and loss of the kingdom is blamed on humans behaving badly rather than the real culprit: climate change.

Today, current climate change is the result of humans, behaving badly.

FutureCoast is one of many warning bells, one that floats out across future seas.

From an illustrated children’s book, Cantre’r Gwaewold.
Artist: Sian Lewis

Reading the World

May 12, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

By nature, humans generally like to share what they know – at least, they like to share parts of what they know. The very form and manner we choose to visualize what we know in a way that can be shared with others says a lot about how we see the world.

Tree of Knowledge

For example, one of my ongoing favorite phylogenetic trees, OneZoom, chooses fractal swirls, branches on the tree of life that rotate into ever smaller tendrils, ever closer detail. To me, this reflects our modern ability to see creatures, objects, energies, that are ever smaller. There’s no end to how small we can go.

But visualizing knowledge in the form of branching plant limbs and trees is nothing new.

The Petroleum Tree (1957), an illustration of petroleum uses.
Via: Slate

There’s a beautiful book out, The Book Of Trees by Manuel Lima, that takes a look at the roots of all these trees.

We pick other illustrations, other approaches, but the tree is an old beloved standard. It’s like we’re hardwired to depict knowledge, any kind of knowledge, in some kind of plant or tree-like form.

Given our roots, and given how important trees are to human life, I suppose it’s only natural. What would our visualisations of knowledge look like if we’d only ever seen desert, or rocks, or shallow pools of water?

Tree of virtues and vices (1121)
Via: Papress

Let’s Play Big Data

April 23, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Turbulence – artwork based on algorithms and hand-drawn systems to create computational and natural system visualisations.
Artist: Owen Schuh via DataIsNature

The other day I overheard a student next to me on a flight say, “I can remember the words to almost every song I’ve ever heard more than once or twice – if only the legal cases I need to learn were set to music, I could remember them all.”

Optimistic, I know, but maybe not so far off.

Appeal to the brain’s pleasure center and learning becomes as easy as humming a well-known tune.

Along the same lines, researchers have been turning to crowdsourced data processing to work through big data conundrums. Offer a means of pleasurable participation for data entry, such as a game platform, and citizen scientist gamers will come.

Cancer Research UK worked together with game developers to create a smartphone game that would help them outsource a large backlog of genetic micro-array data garnered from thousands of breast cancer patients over the years. The result was Play to Cure: Genes in Space, which is basically a space shooter game in which the player finds the best path through an obstacle course, shooting asteroids and mapping successful escape routes.

A sample of genetic micro-array data. The analysis involves identifying the areas where the dots are at their most dense.
Source: Gamasutra

The possible paths, however, are actually maps of genetic micro-arrays, and the players game solutions are uploaded to the Cancer Research UK database for processing. After one month of use, gamers worked through data that it would have taken researchers six months to process without assistance.

The game version of the original data, with possible paths marked through the denser areas. Source: Gamasutra

The Genes in Space game version of the original data, with possible paths marked through the denser areas.
Source: Gamasutra

Another game, Geo-Wiki, deals with processing data on cropland cover and land use. From the Geo-Wiki site: “Volunteers review hotspot maps of global land cover disagreement and determine, based on what they actually see in Google Earth and their local knowledge, if the land cover maps are correct or incorrect. Their input is recorded in a database, along with uploaded photos, to be used in the future for the creation of a new and improved global land cover map.”

The ‘game’ is a quick image/response competition. The platform can be expanded to include further agricultural and land-use data from users, which is then reflected in other projects that support better environmental monitoring.

The power of crowdsourcing is phenomenal, and I think we are just at the beginning of putting these tools to use outside of purely commercial marketing strategies. Having tried out both games, and having tried out the Geo-Wiki game, I think what’s still missing is that the games have to work on their own, as stand-alone games, for them to be truly addictive – and useful on a larger scale.

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