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Items by Alexis Madrigal
Wired News: Top Stories
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Garage Invention Turns Restaurants Into Power Plants
Fetched: January 8th, 2009, 2:41am CST by Alexis Madrigal
A garage inventor has built a new generator that converts a restaurant's used deep-fryer oil into electricity and hot water, and he says it could shave hundreds of dollars a month off your average Mickey D's utility bill.
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Video: New 3-D Fly-Through of Supernova Remnant
Fetched: January 6th, 2009, 3:52pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
You can virtually fly through a supernova remnant in this video, courtesy of a new high-resolution data visualization from MIT astronomers who presented the research at the American Astronomical Society meeting.
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Milky Way Now 50 Percent Larger, Astronomers Discover
Fetched: January 6th, 2009, 6:24am CST by Alexis Madrigal
New, more precise measurements of the Milky Way indicate that it's 50 percent more massive and spinning 100,000 miles an hour faster than previously thought. Scientists presented the discovery at the American Astronomical Society meeting.
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Pink Iguana That Darwin Missed Holds Evolutionary Surprise
Fetched: January 6th, 2009, 6:24am CST by Alexis Madrigal
A pink iguana overlooked by Charles Darwin turns up on the Galapagos Islands. The iguana's color isn't the only thing that distinguishes it from other iguana species: New research shows that it separated from the others genetically 5 million years ago, much earlier than most Galapagos species.
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From Salon to Salad: Hair Makes Good Plant Fertilizer
Fetched: December 30th, 2008, 4:39am CST by Alexis Madrigal
Plants do just as well with human hair as a source of nitrogen as they do with manure or synthetic natural-gas-based fertilizer. A new study shows lettuce and wormwood thrive when cubes of human hair from salon waste are buried in the soil.
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Top 10 Green Tech Breakthroughs of 2008
Fetched: December 29th, 2008, 4:25pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
2008 was both a great year and a tough year for green technology. Here are 10 of the biggest breakthroughs during the past 12 months.
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Nation's First 'Underwater Wind Turbine' Installed in Old Man River
Fetched: December 23rd, 2008, 3:30am CST by Alexis Madrigal
The first ever dam-less hydro-power plant splashed into the Mississippi River this week, after its giant turbine got the OK from government regulators.
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High Times in Ag Science: Marijuana More Potent Than Ever
Fetched: December 23rd, 2008, 3:30am CST by Alexis Madrigal
The THC content of marijuana is nearing 10 percent, setting a record for pot potency, reports the Department of Justice. Maybe this will settle that long simmering argument between you and your buddy, Nate.
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Surfers Rejoice: Some Extreme Waves Getting Bigger
Fetched: December 19th, 2008, 10:11pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
Some of the biggest waves in the Pacific Northwest are getting even bigger, according to research presented Friday at the American Geophysical Union meeting. Scientists don't know why the waves have grown, or if wave heights in other parts of the world are increasing, but the big waves are a potential threat to coastal areas.
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HD Eruption Video Gives Clues to How Volcanoes Work
Fetched: December 19th, 2008, 10:11pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
A high-definition video of an eruption shows new details of how volcanoes work. Scientists are learning about the mechanics of eruptions by connecting a frame-by-frame analysis of the video with seismic recordings.
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Google Shutters Its Science Data Services
Fetched: December 19th, 2008, 3:18am CST by Alexis Madrigal
Google quietly shuts down its fledgling scientific data service that would have helped scientists handle terabyte-size datasets. The move comes as a surprise to scientists who had been testing the service.
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Could the Electric Grid Support Far More Wind and Solar?
Fetched: December 19th, 2008, 3:18am CST by Alexis Madrigal
The U.S. power grid could likely handle much more than the 20 percent analysts have said is the maximum it could support without having technical problems, according to new research presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting.
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WiSci Event Tonight: Fossil Cities in the Distant Future
Fetched: December 18th, 2008, 5:59am CST by Alexis Madrigal
Wired Science live event TONIGHT in San Francisco: Reporter Alexis Madrigal will be interviewing geologist Jan Zalasiewicz about what the human race's mark on the planet will look like 100 million years from now. Join us from 7 to 9 p.m. PST at Swissnex, located at 730 Montgomery Street.
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World Coal Reserves Could Be a Fraction of Previous Estimates
Fetched: December 18th, 2008, 5:59am CST by Alexis Madrigal
The world could have far less coal to burn in the coming decades than previously estimated, according to a new model from a Caltech engineer. The new data could transform the climate models that scientists use to estimate future global warming.
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Oil Not the Climate Change Culprit — Coal Is the Real Bad Guy
Fetched: December 18th, 2008, 5:59am CST by Alexis Madrigal
New climate change projections presented Wednesday at the American Geophysical Society meeting support the idea that oil is not the worst global warming culprit. Coal is the real bad guy, and emissions are just a blip in comparison.
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Dark Energy Could Be Einstein's Cosmological Constant
Fetched: December 17th, 2008, 1:18am CST by Alexis Madrigal
New data from the X-Ray Chandra Observatory sheds light on dark energy, the enigmatic stuff that makes up almost three quarters of the universe. It appears dark energy has some weight -- and it looks a lot like Einstein's cosmological constant, which Einstein thought was an error.
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Drillers Accidentally Create First Live Magma Observatory
Fetched: December 17th, 2008, 1:18am CST by Alexis Madrigal
Drillers on Hawaii's big island who were working on a geothermal energy field hit an unexpected live magma chamber that could offer geologists insights into the poorly understood process of how the Earth's crust is formed.
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Sun Induces Strange 'Breathing' of Earth's Atmosphere
Fetched: December 15th, 2008, 11:14pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
Satellite measurements have revealed a rhythmic expansion and contraction of the Earth's atmosphere that scientists think is caused by solar activity.
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Lightning-Storm Gamma Rays Could Harm Air Travelers
Fetched: December 15th, 2008, 11:14pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
Gamma rays discovered in lightning storms could be intense enough to give air passengers radiation sickness, according to new research presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
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Oil Consumption to Drop for First Time in 25 Years
Fetched: December 12th, 2008, 4:44am CST by Alexis Madrigal
Oil use is slated to drop for the first time since 1983 when the collapse of oil prices hobbled biofuel research for decades. This time around may be different, with Barack Obama as president rather than Ronald Reagan.
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MIT: Your Meteorologist Needs an Army of Drones
Fetched: December 12th, 2008, 4:44am CST by Alexis Madrigal
A swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles could soon be the newest tool in your heretofore always-wrong meteorologist's toolkit.
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Dog Unto Others: Canines Have Sense of Fairness
Fetched: December 8th, 2008, 10:05pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
Dogs know when they're getting the short end of the stick, according to new research out of the Clever Dog Lab in Austria. When a dog doesn't get the same reward for doing a trick as another dog, he's less likely to perform the behavior when asked again.
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Food vs. Fuel: Saltwater Crops May Be Key to Solving Earth's Land Crunch
Fetched: December 4th, 2008, 11:20pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
Crops that thrive in salt water could alleviate the tension between food and biofuel farming. The salt-loving plants could grow in 480,000 square miles of land that is unfit for regular crops.
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Cancer Stem Cells Might Not Be Supervillains After All
Fetched: December 4th, 2008, 4:44am CST by Alexis Madrigal
The theory that a few cancer stem cells are responsible for tumor growth may not be as solid as scientists believed. A new study in mice showed that as many as one-fourth of cancer cells can contribute to tumor growth, not just a tiny fraction of stem cells.
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How to Use Neuroscience to Become Your Avatar
Fetched: December 3rd, 2008, 5:35am CST by Alexis Madrigal
Watching video through virtual-reality goggles of a mannequin's body while you look down at your own can trick your brain into believing the mannequin's body is yours. Swedish neuroscientists find that threatening the mannequin's body with a knife caused a physiological response in the person watching the video, indicating they have taken psychological ownership of the other body.
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The First Aid? Iceman May Have Dressed His Own Wounds
Fetched: December 2nd, 2008, 4:24pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
The 5,000-year-old iceman may have been his own doctor, according to a new analysis of his intestinal tract. Bog moss used to dress wounds as recently as the 20th century may have gotten into the digestive tract of Otzi the Tyrolean iceman, after being used to stanch a wound and then getting stuck to his fingers by blood.
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Give Thanks? Science Supersized Your Turkey Dinner
Fetched: November 25th, 2008, 10:56pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
The size of the average American turkey has more than doubled in the last 80 years, at the expense of flavor. The corn, potatoes and likely everything else on your plate this Thanksgiving has also changed significantly since the Pilgrims sat down with Wampanoag Indians, and even since Lincoln invented the holiday in 1863.
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How Biology and Technology Shape Sex and War
Fetched: November 22nd, 2008, 3:58pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
The authors of the new book "Sex and War" talk with Wired Science how biology and technology have shaped violence and war in the past and likely will in the future.
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Excerpt: Science Defines Future of War
Fetched: November 22nd, 2008, 3:58pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
The future of war is filled with poison gas, germ warfare and nuclear weapons. Each technological change shapes the risk calculations of our primate brains.
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Gallery: The First Decades of Seeing the Unseen
Fetched: November 21st, 2008, 8:25pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
: Photo courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtWhat are the social consequences when science allows us to see things that had previously been invisible?
Scientists have revealed microscopic life, nanoscale molecules and galaxies billions of light-years away. These images have revolutionized the disciplines in which they were made, but they also transformed the public's imagination, giving common people new things to think and dream about.
The intertwined social, scientific and artistic impacts of 19th century photography is the subject of a new exhibit, Brought to Light Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900, at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art.
This gallery looks at some of the more astounding images and stories from the exhibit.
Left:
Hermann Schnauss, Electrograph of a brass wire gauge, 1900 As the men of industry attempted to harness electricity for profit, the public — which knew electricity primarily as lightning — had to be persuaded that this powerful, invisible force was something to invite into their homes. Electrographs like this one, produced by exposing a photographic negative with electricity, helped the public visualize and understand the mysterious electromagnetic waves that scientists were discovered populating the air."This is a moment where [scientists] are trying to harness electricity for practical purposes, but the general public was kind of skeptical," said Corey Keller, curator of the Brought to Light exhibit. "Their experiences with electricity were generally through lighting, which they knew could burn things down and kill you, if you weren't careful. So a great deal of time and money was spent trying to make electricity understandable and approachable."
: Photo courtesy SFMOMAIn the early history of photography, capturing motion was out of the question. The photographic negatives of the time were not sensitive enough to light to be exposed over the short time periods required to capture fast action.
"If you look at 19th century cityscapes, you would think that Armageddon had taken place. You don't see any people," Keller said. "It's not that they aren't there, it's just that they don't show up because they walked through too quickly."
But by the end of the 1870s, more sensitive negatives brought motion within reach. Edward Muybridge was one of the first photographers to take advantage of the new abilities.
In this photo, we see one of Muybridge's motion studies: two men boxing in jock straps. Historians note that despite the scientific trappings, Muybridge's work was just art; it did not produce good scientific evidence about bodies' movements.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMAThe ability to capture motion in photography opened up a previously invisible source of scientific data. Etienne-Jules Marey was a scientist trying to understand biomechanics, or the motion of the body, and he used photography to acquire information he couldn't get any other way, as in this photograph of a man on a stationary bicycle.
"What happens in this picture is that each split second exposure is layered on top of each other, so you get the sense of the full arc of the motion," Keller said. "And he's put a piece of tape down the arm and torso and the leg where the joints articulated, so as the leg went around and around the whole pedal stroke is outlined."
This wasn't just to create beautiful pictures; Marey was on a committee in France to improve the ergonomics of the newly popular bicycle.
"So by studying the motion of the leg, he would have been able to improve the engineering of the bicycle," Keller concluded.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMAWhile forward-looking scientists like Marey were using photography to understand, for example, how animals moved, as in this photo, others were less enthused about this new technology.
In particular, photographers' ability to capture images beyond what the human eye could perceive called into question an important tenet of 19th century science.
"What's amazing is that this is a moment where empirical observation in science is the most important thing, that idea of objective observation. And this kind of photography proved how completely useless a human observer was," said Keller. "So you end up with this photographic data that cant' be corroborated in any other way. It exists independently of any kind of perceptual experience."
Technology's ability to capture detail and motion more accurately than our eyes has only accelerated, of course, as anyone who has seen incredible ultra-slow-motion YouTube videos can attest.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMAWhen William Roentgen announced his discovery of X-rays, a photo of his wife's hand accompanied his paper as it made its way into the scientific community.
Over the next few years, images like this one of a skeletal hand with the ring came to symbolize X-rays. Practically, the hand is relatively flat and therefore easy to X-ray, but it was the aesthetics and grim-reaper symbolism that Keller said hit a nerve with the upper classes.
"It became fashionable to have an X-ray portrait taken of your hand," she said, calling attention to x-ray hand portraits of the last tsar of Russia and his wife.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMAThe discovery of X-rays also touched off a lower-brow commercial craze. Within three months, DIY X-ray kits were available on the market. Photographers, who had access to most of the tools needed to make the images, began to train this new form of light on just about anything that might be beautiful.
"They were X-raying everything just to see what it looked like," Keller said.
One stunning example is this X-ray of a foot in a shoe from 1897. In fact, the connection between X-rays and extremities has remained strong. Even into the 1960s, shoe stores kept X-ray machines in their lobbies, both as marketing tools and to help their salesmen fit their patrons' feet correctly.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMAThroughout the second-half of the 19th century, photographers strived to unite the camera with the telescope. The moon, in particular, held a lasting fascination for astronomers and artists alike.
Imaging the moon, after all, was an immensely difficult task. The Earth rotates and the moon is actually a relatively faint object. It wasn't until John Adams Whipple and George Phillips Bond figured out how to rotate their camera ever so slightly to cancel out Earth's movement that simple images of our only satellite became possible.
What's interesting is that despite the fascination with creating pictures of the moon, like this striking image created in Spain, the images didn't add much for science beyond what detailed drawings could already do.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMAIf you wanted close-up photos of the moon any time before the Apollo missions, you were pretty much out of luck. Unless, of course, you built incredibly detailed plaster models of lunar craters and then snapped carefully lit pictures of them. And that's exactly what an engineer and astronomer did in 1874 to tremendous acclaim.
James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer, and James Carpenter, then at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, released a hugely successful book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, illustrated by their incredible moon mock-ups. The august journal Nature gave the book a rapturous review.
"No more truthful or striking representations of natural objects than those here presented have ever been laid before his readers by any student of Science," the reviewer wrote.
But what's really appealing about the images isn't their "truthfulness" but their "truthiness."
"Astronomers were perfectly aware of what they were looking at," Keller said. "But they felt that because they were photographed, it added a layer of authenticity to the undertaking that simple drawings didn't have."
: Photo courtesy SFMOMAAt the other end of the scale of size from the moon, other photographers were pushing their discipline into the microscopic realm. They had to devise new emulsion chemistries and types of equipment to capture clear images of tiny things.
Leading the charge was Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch, who worked to overcome any challenge that scientists threw at him. Unfortunately, he died during social unrest in France in 1871, and his images lay in a photographic archive until Keller brought them to the US for the exhibition.
: Photo courtesy SFMOMAEven as they solved technical challenges, the photomicrographers faced social resistance. The idea of representing a specific living thing instead of a generalized abstraction of an organism forced scientists to let go of long-held notions about their discipline.
"Prior to the 19th century, the scientific illustrations tend to represent a type, an ideal. So if you were going to do a picture of a flower, for example, the illustrator would look at 20 flowers and then take the common features and make an ideal flower," said Keller. "So, if that particular one happens to have a defective petal or something peculiar to it, you never really know: Does that photograph substitute then for that type of flower in general, or does it only represent that one specimen?"
While it may have posed a challenge for scientists of the 19th century, it's the unique nature of each photograph taken during this early period that wows us, even now.
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NASA Test-Fires Next-Gen Ejector Seat
Fetched: November 21st, 2008, 7:54pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
NASA test-fires its next-generation ejector seat, sending flames shooting into the Utah desert. Designed to get the crew of the space shuttle's replacement as far away from the launch vehicle as possible in case of an emergency, the motor delivers half a million pounds of thrust, expelling nearly all its fuel in just three seconds.
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Fake Lunar Photos Sent Astronomers Over the Moon
Fetched: November 20th, 2008, 11:28pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
Mocked-up photos of models of the moon's surface in the 19th century were widely acclaimed for their authenticity, and inspired astronomers to do better with the real thing.
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Physicists Find Dark Matter, or Something Even More Strange
Fetched: November 20th, 2008, 6:18am CST by Alexis Madrigal
Physicists have detected electrons over Antarctica that could be the first ever direct evidence of the mysterious dark matter that scientists say makes up 20 percent of the universe.
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Grandfather of Microphotography Rediscovered
Fetched: November 19th, 2008, 6:14pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
A set of long-lost photographs of microscopic images, among the first ever taken, has resurfaced at a museum in San Francisco. These beautiful microphotographs mark a turning point in 19th-century science from idealized illustrations to real images of individual specimens.
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X-Ray Discovery Sparked 19th-Century DIY Craze
Fetched: November 18th, 2008, 7:28am CST by Alexis Madrigal
After the discovery of the X-ray in 1895, princes and paupers X-ray everything within reach "just to see what it looked like." The curator of a new exhibit on early scientific photography at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art explains in this multimedia slide show.
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Biofuel Startup Strives to Meet Obama's Green Ambitions
Fetched: November 17th, 2008, 2:52pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
For President-elect Barack Obama's plans — which call for millions of new green jobs — to work out, dozens of green tech companies will need to rapidly scale up. The most promising, like the biofuel-making synthetic biology startup Amyris, are marching steadily toward getting to market, but will they arrive in time to save the economy?
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Alt Energy Is Expensive, but Coal May Soon Be Worse
Fetched: November 14th, 2008, 11:46pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
An EPA panel's ruling that blocks a Utah coal plant from expanding, coupled with a court order to set a nationwide standard for carbon dioxide emissions, may make coal plants more expensive to operate than alternative energy installations.
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Live: Join Our Wired Science Video Chat
Fetched: November 12th, 2008, 2:48pm CST by Alexis Madrigal
Live, at 11 a.m. PST, ask Wired Science reporter Alexis Madrigal your questions about Mars Phoenix, developing world technology, goat farming or whatever other science questions you have.
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Mars Phoenix Lander Runs Out of Juice
Fetched: November 11th, 2008, 10:50am CST by Alexis Madrigal
After five brilliant months of science, the Mars Phoenix Lander has frozen beyond repair on the Martian arctic plain.
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Solar Rig Brings Green Ice to Margaritaville
Fetched: November 11th, 2008, 10:50am CST by Alexis Madrigal
An ice maker that runs on solar power could bring refrigeration to poor and rural areas. At a cost of $1,000, the ice maker could be used to refrigerate medicines or food in the developing world.
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Boldly Goat Where No Lawnmower Has Gone Before
Fetched: November 11th, 2008, 10:50am CST by Alexis Madrigal