Science, Art and everything in between?

Plate showing The Black Mountain Moth, The Frosted Yellow, The Netted Mountain Moth, The Common Heath, The V Moth, The Bordered White, The Grey Scalloped Bar, The March Moth, The Spring Usher, The Mottled Umber, and caterpillars. Taken from ‘The Genera of British Moths’ by H. Noel Humphreys. Published 1860 by Paul Jerrard & Sons.

My new favorite: fluorescent crystals at the side of a test tube. 

Something new was made what crystallized on standing. Previously I could only make this compound as a powder and I was unable to grow crystals from it, since it’s nearly insoluble in everything, but now, with a little trick these nice crystals formed what are highly fluorescent and look great.  

The bottom picture is cropped from the upper photo. 

Look, instead of spending the day messing around on the internet looking for a last minute reprieve, you really need to be out there finding something special for the one you love.  But in the meantime, take a quick science break through space and time to learn a few odd facts about the human heart.  What is the connection, for example, between deep space and human anatomy?  Begin with the etymology of meteor, a word largely unchanged from its Ancient Greek roots.  Similarly, the word aorta has changed very little since it was coined by no less an authority than Aristotle to describe the largest artery exiting the heart.  Both used the Ancient Greek root aeirein: the word Aristotle formed was aorte meaning literally what is hung up came from the verb aeirein meaning to lift, heave, raise.  In the case of meteor, it meant after, up, over.  Here, it indicates the both the location and function of the aorta-to lift blood up and away from the heart. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!  Now turn off your computer and go find some chocolate!

Wow, you guys really like butterflies!

A little late, but as promised, here are a few more of the specimens from Moths and Butterflies of the United States East of the Rocky Mountains by Sherman Denton.  I also did some research and found the answers to some of your questions and a little bit more about the author of this book.

The Denton family were world-famous butterfly collectors and sellers.  They perfected methods of mounting and preserving butterflies, and their work touched off a butterfly fad during the late nineteenth century.  Sherman Denton’s papers and part of his butterfly collection are now at the Wellesley Historical Society.

keepyourhandsbusy asked whether they had to kill specimens for each copy of the book. Unfortunately, yes.  Historians estimate that around 50,000 butterflies were harmed in the making of this publication. Yikes.

idratherbesailing asked whether these are severed butterfly wings.  Not exactly, but they are made from severed butterfly wings.  The printing process used to produce them involved pressing the butterfly wings onto a gummed paper so that the scales would stick, and an image of the butterfly would remain.  I didn’t realize this when we published the previous post about this book, but smithsonianlibraries has a great explanation of this process on their blog, and they even mention this exact publication.  Plus, they have a field notebook produced this way.  Go take a look!

Any other questions for us?  You can always reblog or ask, and we’ll try to find out.  We’re librarians - it’s what we do.

Best,

HAPPY DARWIN DAY! 

Glassed-in DNA makes the ultimate time capsule

IF YOU must preserve messages for people in the far future to read, Blu-ray discs and USB sticks are no good. For real long-term storage, you want a DNA time capsule.

Just 1 gram of DNA is theoretically capable of holding 455 exabytes – enough for all the data held by Google, Facebook and every other major tech company, with room to spare. It’s also incredibly durable: DNA has been extracted and sequenced from 700,000-year-old horse bones. But conditions have to be right for it to last.

"We know that if you just store it lying around, you lose information," says Robert Grass of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. So he and colleagues are working on ways to increase DNA’s longevity, with the aim of storing data for thousands or millions of years.

They began by looking at the way information is encoded on a DNA strand. The simplest method treats the DNA bases A and C as a “0” and G and T as a “1”. Of course, any damage to the DNA leaves holes in the data, so the team used an error-correcting technique called a Reed-Solomon code. This includes redundant blocks that can be used to reconstruct garbled bits of data.

They also tried to mimic the way fossils keep a DNA sequence intact. Excluding all water from the environment was key, so they encapsulated the DNA in microscopic spheres of glass.

To test how long this storage system might last, they encoded two venerable documents, totalling 83 kilobytes: the Swiss federal charter from 1291, and the Archimedes Palimpsest, a 10th-century version of ancient Greek texts. DNA versions of these texts were kept at 60, 65 and 70 °C for a week to simulate ageing. They remained readable without any errors (Angewandte Chemie, doi.org/f23gmf).

The results suggest that data in DNA form could last 2000 years if kept at a temperature of around 10 °C. The Global Seed Vault in the Arctic could preserve it for over 2 million years at a chilly -18 °C, offering truly long-term storage.

Grass would like to store all the world’s current knowledge for future generations, but it’s far too expensive to generate DNA at present. It cost around £1000 to encode the 83 kilobytes, so doing the same with Wikipedia would run to billions. Instead, Grass suggests that we focus on what future historians might want to read. “If you look at how we look at the Middle Ages, it’s very influenced by what information has been stored,” he says. “It’s very important that we get a relatively neutral documentation of our current time and store that.”

Hidden Human Computers

Dozens of African American women worked for NASA as expert mathematicians from the 1940s to the 1960s and almost no one knows about it. Segregated within NASA facilities in Hampton, Va., well-educated Black women used slide rules and pencils to do the calculations for flights by astronauts John Glenn and Alan Shepherd.

Image: Melba Roy, NASA Mathematician, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1964. Credit: NASA/Corbis

That this history is little known makes it ripe for research by collaborators Lucy Short ’15 (St. Louis) and American studies professor Duchess Harris, whose grandmother, Miriam Daniel Mann, was one of these extraordinary women.

Their collaboration began when Professor Harris invited Short, an American studies major, to join her in researching the human “computers,” as these women and their White women counterparts were known.

Professor Harris found this project compelling not solely because of her grandmother’s work, but because, “I am the descendant of enslaved Africans who became the first free Blacks in America. Because of them, I am here.”

They applied for and received a student-faculty research grant that supported travel to Hampton, home of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, now known as NASA’s Langley Research Center. There they met with local collaborator Margot Lee Shetterly (a Black descendant of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and daughter of retired NASA engineer Robert B. Lee) as well as historians at the Hampton History Museum and at NASA. They also visited the archaeological site of the Great Contraband Camp, a community of freed Blacks.

In 1831, Virginia enacted anti-literacy legislation to prevent the education of slaves and freedmen. But in the 1860s, thanks to the efforts of educator Mary Smith Peake and sympathetic generals at nearby Fort Monroe, former slaves had their first opportunities to obtain an education, culminating in the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University), which became the alma mater of Booker T. Washington and scores of other Black educators and leaders. The Black women who became the computers at NASA were required to first take a course at Hampton.

“While we were touring NASA, Mary Gainer, the center’s historic preservation officer, pointed out a building used by the computers,” says Short.  Professor Harris asked, ‘Is that where my grandmother would have worked?’

“‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s where the White women worked. The Black women were in another building about a mile away, on the other side of the gate.’” These were women calculating the trajectories for America’s first manned space flights—segregated in a building with few amenities at a research center built on the site of the former Chesterville plantation.

The interconnections of the computers, the plantation, pioneering educational efforts, and a community of freedmen interested the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, which provided a grant for Shetterly, Short, and Harris to expand their study. This grant was followed by a sustainability grant from Macalester, which allows further exploration of this unsustainable, segregated way of life.

Short is continuing the research as part of her senior honors project, which focuses on Black feminism. Another product of this work is a digital archive, Human Computers at NASA, developed in collaboration with the Macalester Library.

Orion and the Horse-head in Infrared

This wide image of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex features the Flame nebula (NGC 2024) and the Horsehead nebula (NGC 2023). In this infrared image, the Horsehead can be seen on the bottom right as a small wisp of gas protruding from the complex. The colors in this image do not represent visible light because it was imaged with the Spritzer Space Telescope - which can only see infrared light. As a result, scientist must map temperatures to colors. Cooler objects, such as the dust of the nebulae, appear green and red and hotter objects appear more blue. Astronomers are essentially “shifting” the infrared light into the visible spectrum.

Photo Embroidery by Maurizio Anzeri

On March 25-27, Tony-nominated choreographer Karole Armitage will premiere a site-specific dance production in the Museum’s Hall of Ocean Life. The piece confronts the perfect storm of environmental problems that the world faces and its cultural context.