madame scientist's not-so-mad musings

2011-12-02

2011-12-02

2011-12-02

2011-12-02

Women Scientists, FTW! Passionate, intelligent, articulate, confident and amazing women tell us why nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.

Thank you, Shah Auckburaully , for the share.

Originally shared by Tom Mulcahy

Why teaching evolution is important!

Of Loxian and Other Invented Tongues. Although there are 6,500 or so existing languages, some imaginative singers and writers invent new ones. Earlier this month, the band Sigur Rós released new songs in the imaginary language Hopelandic , which is only slightly more obscure than their native tongue of Icelandic 🙂

The tradition of singing in invented languages dates back to the 12th century mystic nun and composer Hildegard von Bingen, who even designed a new alphabet for Lingua Ignota .

Although Irish singer Enya has sung in English, Gaelic, French, Latin, Spanish and Japanese, her song writer thought to add one more. Having just written in Elvish , for Lord of the Rings , lyricist Roma Ryan felt a lack of existing languages befitting Enya so she created Loxian. Helpfully, Enya’s website explains that Loxians are very much like us, “They’re looking out, they’re mapping the stars, and wondering if there is anyone else out there.” Right.

So why sing in a nonsense language? Back to Sigur Rós, whose drummer explained that this allows listeners to decide for themselves what the song means. So to all Enya fans, here is an offering in Loxian.

I don’t know what she is saying, but it makes me want to dance in a tropical thunderstorm!

For Simon Skiles , Bailey Roe , Martha E Fay , Peying Fong, Anony Mole , Shah Auckburaully , Satu-Marja Salmi

For more inventiveness, check out Slate’s culture blog: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2011/11/29/invented_languages_in_music_a_brief_history.html

http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/questions-answered-invented-languages/

Happy 176th Birthday Mark Twain! American author and humorist Mark Twain was born in Missouri on this day, 1835. The Google Doodle pays tribute to his two best loved books: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Here are some of my favorite Twain quotes:

• There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

• Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.

• Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

• I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

• Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.

• Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

• The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

• In the laboratory there are no fustian ranks, no brummagem aristocracies; the domain of Science is a republic,and all its citizens are brothers and equals, its princes of Monaco and its stonemasons of Cromarty meeting, barren of man-made gauds and meretricious decorations, upon the one majestic level!

• Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

Do you have a favorite Mark Twain quote? There are so many. Share yours here!

Occupy the Night! The first and only night blooming orchid has been discovered on a volcanic island off Papua, New Guinea. Of >25,000 species of orchids, only a handful bloom in the evening, and until now, none were known to flower exclusively at night. Botanists are very excited.

When Dutch botanist Ed de Vogel cultivated Bulbophyllum nocturnum , he was disappointed at first to never catch the blooms. But he took a plant home with him one evening. A bud began to open 2 hours before midnight, revealing an exotic purple orchid that withered by morning.

Botanists from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew (UK) and the Center for Biodiversity Naturalis in the Netherlands who made this discovery, hailed this as “another reminder that surprising discoveries can still be made”.

Orchids are pollinated by insects that are active during the day so it makes sense that the flowers bloom by day. This rare purple orchid may be pollinated by midge flies that forage at night. Why is it that only this orchid chose a nocturnal habit?

Perhaps, nature simply found an unoccupied niche and occupied it.

Read more: http://www.zmescience.com/science/biology/nighttime-orchid-29112011/#ixzz1f7ukGE6j

Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood beauty and ….inventor of spread spectrum radio?

“Any girl can be glamorous,” Hedy Lamarr once said. “All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.” But, ’40’s superstar Hedy Lamarr was far from stupid. Bored with being typecast for her looks, she turned her talents to technology.

• It was World War II and German submarines were targeting passenger cruise lines. Torpedoes could take them out, but they were hard to control. Hedy realized that radio-controlled torpedoes were essential, but radio signals could easily be jammed.

• Together with her friend, composer George Antheil, Lamarr patented the idea of random signal hopping of radio frequencies, to prevent jamming of the signal. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies.

• The Navy classified their invention as top secret, then proceeded to ignore it. Perhaps it was a culture clash..the idea that musical technology could be part of sophisticated weaponry. It was not until the patent expired that the Navy used frequency hopping in secure military communications. Subsequent patents in frequency changing, refer to the Lamarr-Antheil patent as the basis of the field, and the concept lies behind the principal anti-jamming device used today, for example, in the U.S. government’s Milstar defense communication satellite system.

Thanks to Peying Fong for being “gobsmacked” enough about this story to pass it on! Beauty and brains, For The Win!

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/27/142664182/most-beautiful-woman-by-day-inventor-by-night

Blueberries, lemons and a mother’s kiss in spring…

My muffins are really made from all these things (with apologies to Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood). When my daughter announced excitedly that she found her favorite Maryland Utz potato chips in a specialty store in Northampton, Massachusetts, my heart died a little. One more tenuous thread to tie her back home now frayed. But there are only so many vegan cutlets a girl can stomach at the campus dining hall, so she came home for Thanksgiving. That’s when we made these divine blueberry lemon muffins.

My inspiration: Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood-Summer Wine

Recipe: https://madamescientist.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/blueberries-lemons-and-a-mother-kissing-spring/