Gouffre de Padirac

Gouffre de PadiracWhen I was a teenager, my family went to France every summer. The different trips are all mixed up in my head. I don’t really remember which campsite memory belongs with which French castle memory. There is one visit that I do remember very well, and that’s our trip to Gouffre de Padirac.

Gouffre de Padirac is a deep chasm with a scary lift that leads to a magical fairy tale cave where you take a boat on an underground river. At least, this is how I remembered it, but according to a quick web search this is pretty much the most accurate description possible. As it turns out, Gouffre de Padirac is a bit of a mystery. Continue reading “Gouffre de Padirac”

Sunday Science Poem: People Are Organisms Too

Seamus Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist” (1966)

In honor of Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who died Friday, we’re reading “Death of a Naturalist”, from Heaney’s first poetry collection.

Haeckel_frogs_with_labelsAs the old cliché goes, children are natural scientists, and of those who do grow up to be professional scientists, their childhood obsessions reveal what kind they’ll become. Physicists grow up tinkering with radio sets (or more recently, computers), while biologists roam the woods catching frogs and snakes, or in Darwin’s case, beetles. There are exceptions, of course (and in fact, I suspect that childhood obsessions poorly predict career outcomes), but Edward O. Wilson’s childhood pursuit of venemous snakes in the Alabama swamps fits the cliché:

A swamp filled with snakes may be a nightmare to most, but for me it was a ceaselessly rotating lattice of wonders. I had the same interest in the diversity of snakes that other 15-year-old boys seemed automatically to develop in the years and makes of automobiles. And knowing them well, I had no fear. On each visit I found something new. I captured live specimens, brought them home to cages I had constructed of wood and wire mesh, and fed them frogs and minnows I collected at the hatchery.

Even after a nearly lethal encounter with a Cottonmouth as big as he was, Wilson was not deterred, and he grew up to be a renowned naturalist. Not so the boy in Heaney’s poem, whose shocking first encounter with unsentimentalized biology ends his budding career as a naturalist. Instead, he becomes a great poet. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: People Are Organisms Too”

Science Caturday: Catmouflage

Day-11-The-dog-still-thinks-Im-fur

Camouflage is an important evolutionary advantage for many creatures. This little kitty has it nailed.

Meet the Caecilians

Yellow-Striped Caecilian, Thailand (Photo Credit: Kerry Matz; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

There are three orders within the class Amphibia; Anura (frogs and toads), Caudata (salamanders) and Gymnophiona (caecilians). Caecilians are the least well-known group even though there are 184 known species with a widespread distribution in Africa, Asia, South and Central America. They have the appearance of worm-like snakes and can be small like worms or up to 1.5 meters. Caecilians can be fossorial or aquatic and below there is a video of each example. Continue reading “Meet the Caecilians”

The Art of Science: Grandma’s Sofa meets Satellite Technology

Jacob Tonski, Balance From Within, 2010-12
Jacob Tonski, Balance From Within, 2010-12

Jacob Tonski’s Balance From Within looks like an illusionist’s trick, but it’s really a clever bit of engineering, applying space-age technology to an old-fashioned piece of furniture.

Tonski, an artist who teaches at the University of Miami, Ohio, found a broken-down sofa from the 1840s, took it apart and installed a reaction wheel, a rotating device often used to reorient satellites or telescopes.  He then added a second axis to the reaction wheel, which allowed the sofa to balance, as if by magic, on one leg.

Tonski says the piece is a “meditation on the nature of human relations, and the things we build to support them.” He notes that a wide range of human interactions take place on sofas, and that they need to be solidly built to support our delicate relationships.

The sofa’s mechanism self-corrects when the piece is touched gently, but if it is pushed too far, like a relationship, it can break apart. Fortunately, the pieces of the sofa are held together with strong magnets, allowing it to be rebuilt quickly and easily, unlike a relationship. Oh, well. Metaphors are never perfect.

Balance From Within is currently on display at the FILE festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil until September 1.   You can watch a video of the sofa in motion here.

HT  to The Creators Project