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| Lake Vostok: You Can't Get There from Here |
| Very Cool Bugs |
| Extreme Sea Level Change |
| Beyond the Weather: What Satellites Can See |
| Lemelson Center Invention Features: Quartz Watch |
| Space Day |
| Throwing Light on Astronomy |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| SimScience, Computer Simulations of Real Phenomena |
| Old Cemeteries, Arsenic, and Health Safety |
| At Virtual Lab, the Only Laws are the Physical Ones |
| Fabulous Ruins of Detroit |
| New York Tenement Museum |
| Art Crimes: Canvasses with Rivets |
| Fading Ad Campaign |
| Space Race Viewed Through Vintage Toys |
| Counting How Many People Have Ever Lived |
| Scuba Diving Explained |
| Essential Principles of Economics: A Hypermedia Text |
| Anthropology Glossary |
| The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project |
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EARTH SYSTEMS
No matter where you go, there you are
Lake Vostok: You Can't Get There from Here
Life, it seems, won't be denied - at least here on Earth. It arises and thrives in what seem to us to be the most hostile environments, in places characterized by sulphuric atmospheres, total darkness, massive water pressure, high temperature, and extreme drought. One of the most inhospitable places on the planet is playing a siren song for astrochemists, though. Some 2.5 miles below the Antarctic ice lies Lake Vostok, last exposed to Earth's air perhaps 10 million years ago. Its standing as the most remote place on Earth may well also make it the most pristine environment - perhaps similar to recurring ice ages going back a half billion years. Vostok's ecosystem could be analogous to environments on bodies in our own solar system - Jupiter's ice-bound moon, Europa, for instance - where life of some sort may have sprung up. The question: how does one study Lake Vostok, without introducing contaminants - even "benign" foreign material - into the environment? You'll need Acrobat Reader (a very useful free download) to read this fascinating academic paper on the quandaries that scientists face in confronting the past right here in the present, or the extraterrestrial world three miles beneath our feet. We wonder, too, how much of a model this discussion is for venturing into the independent ecosystems of space.Lake Vostok workshop: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/vostok/
Acrobat Reader: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/main.html
From the moment we saw the first insect drawing, this site just jumped off the screen at us. It's an excellent example of what clean, well organized Web sites should look like. Forgetting for a moment the implications of what we're about to say, this site was obviously put together by someone who is really into bugs. And why not? The planet is literally crawling with bugs. There's enough diversity in the bug world for The Smithsonian Institution to have 30 million of them in its collection. Each of the 14 insect groupings, or orders, are represented, first with a literal translation to English of their name and then a rogues' gallery of photos (with links to larger photos if the first shot of a dung bug, for instance, isn't enough to satisfy you.) And, if you want to get a little buggy with your photography too, there's a complete primer on what equipment to use and how to use it.
http://www.insects.org/
Call us crazy, but on the face of it, the idea of global warming doesn't sound all that bad. Our reviewer lives in a locale that gets moderately rough winters - and the older he gets, the more he dreads them. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. The rapid warming of the Earth's surface, postulated by many scientists, and still quite controversial, could have many serious consequences. What happens when portions of the polar icecaps melt and raise the level of the oceans? Take a look for yourself at some extreme examples through the use of ETOPO5 topographical data. Since ETOPO5 knows the lay of the land, so to speak, a little mathematical manipulation graphically shows what's left if sea level falls 140 meters or rises 65 meters. Here's a hint for vacationers. If we ever get a 65 meter sea level rise (and even the worst of the global warming scenarios don't show anywhere near this much of a rise), a Florida vacation is out. In fact, all of Florida is out (of sight and underwater).
http://fermi.jhuapl.edu/globe/
Beyond the Weather: What Satellites Can See
When weather satellites aren't looking at the weather what do they see? As it turns out, a lot of things. Among other tricks, the infrared sensors that are normally calibrated to show cold clouds can be tweaked to pick out hot spots like volcanoes and forest fires. And polar orbiting weather satellites, much closer to the ground than their geosynchronous cousins, can see visible details with remarkable clarity. This would all be a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it, were it not for the NOAA Operational Significant Event Imagery Server. Fresh photos every day of a very changeable Earthhttp://www.osei.noaa.gov/
COMPUTING AND ENGINEERING
Open the pod bay doors, Hal
Lemelson Center Invention Features: Quartz Watch
Somewhere, buried in a closet near an old dial telephone, television set with detent tuning and our slide rule, rests the last watch we actually had to wind - or, in our case, had to reset all the time because we forgot to wind it! Today, what's on your wrist probably gets its accuracy from the vibrations of a quartz crystal, cut into a miniature tuning fork and vibrating 32,768 times per second. It's the quartz crystal's remarkable ability to vibrate at a set frequency, no matter what the temperature, that makes it so perfect for time keeping. The first quartz clock was invented over 70 years ago. Scratchy photos from the period show it taking up the better part of the corner of a room from the floor almost to the ceiling. What makes the quartz watch story so fascinating is the long string of independent discoveries, inventions, and refinements that have allowed it to shrink onto your wrist.http://www.si.edu/lemelson/Quartz/index.html
ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away
http://www.spaceday.com/
If working nights is the stumbling block between you and astronomy, you just haven't looked closely enough. The Sun, our nearest star, is incredibly complex and easily observed during the day. Unfortunately, most of us are "blinded by the light" (thanks Bruce). Get beyond that and the Sun has surface features that are observable both from the Earth and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), orbiting in space. Of course, we know that the Sun provides heat and life here on Earth, but changes in the Sun's makeup also affect the propagation of radio transmissions, atmospheric drag on satellites, the Aurora Borealis, and even cause power blackouts. With the Internet, you can see the Sun in a whole different light.
SOHO real time images: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html
Sun: http://www.sel.noaa.gov/solar_sites.html
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Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe
The Mysteries Within: A Surgeon Reflects on Medical Myths MATHEMATICS, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY
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SimScience, Computer Simulations of Real Phenomena
Computer simulations are something almost embedded into our everyday life, used for recreational purposes or for more serious pursuits. SimScience uses computer simulations to explain real phenomena, such as fluid flows, or properties of cell membranes, or why a dam cracks, or searching for links between crumpling a piece of paper and earthquakes. Don't think of this simply as a site with Java simulations. It offers much more, and for every level of knowledge, from beginner to advanced. Every topic is enriched by QuickTime movies, or sound files, links, and every kind of information useful for understanding. This site might now pump up the adrenaline like a flight simulator, but it's every bit worth the visit.http://www.simscience.org/
Old Cemeteries, Arsenic, and Health Safety
We continue to be amazed by how one thing leads to another in quite unexpected ways. Take, for example, the effect of the American Civil War on today's cemeteries and cemetery workers. Around the time of the War Between the States, there was little choice in the matter of preserving a body. There was ice and there was arsenic. Arsenic became the active ingredient in embalming fluids of the day. Soldiers charged with preserving and returning the bodies of men killed in action went home themselves with a new skill and knowledge of arsenic-based embalming fluids. Formulae varied greatly, ranging from as little as four ounces per body to as much as 12 lb. The effect, though, is long lasting, because arsenic doesn't break down - something that can't be said for coffins of the day. Arsenic was outlawed for this use early in the 20th century, largely because of concerns about mortuary workers' health. But, even non-alarmist estimates for some cemeteries put at least 400 lb. of the stuff in close proximity to the ground water. We find the subject interesting, and think there's some potential there for a fascinating site with relevant graphics. Too bad the paper doesn't take full advantage of the medium; just the same, you might be surprised by how the subject carries you along.http://www.waterindustry.org/arsenic-3.htm
At Virtual Lab, the Only Laws are the Physical Ones
If you're searching for a place to conduct scientific experiments without threat to yourself, or your family, or the entire world, the Virtual Lab is the site for you. Here, provided you have a Java-enabled browser, you'll be able to do experiments in all fields, ranging from astrophysics to thermodynamics. Experimenting in the "Energy and Environment" field, for example, will bring you to the community of Salmonville, where your task will be to give people more electric power as the town grows, while keeping the environmental impact to a minimum. Treehuggers we may be, but we appreciate how neatly the experiment distils the balance. The Virtual Lab is a that chemistry set you got for your birthday when you were 12 - on a grand scale.http://jersey.uoregon.edu/vlab/
ARCHEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY
What is past is prologue
http://www.bhere.com/ruins/home.htm
Think of them, this site urges, as "urban log cabins", those tenements on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Whether you call them pioneers or refugees, the residents moved into these buildings on arriving in the United States, primarily from Europe. More than 10,000 people lived at the site of this exhibit, 97 Orchard St., between 1870 and 1915. Click on a room in the Urban Log Cabin link to find out who they were. The building was boarded up in 1935 for over 50 years, fortuitously preserving much of its original decoration and architecture. The Excavation page presents some of the recovered artifacts, including 13 layers of wallpaper. But the magical attractions here are the QuickTime VR movies of the two focal apartments, belonging to the 1870s' Gumpertzes and the 1930s' Baldizzis.
http://www.wnet.org/tenement/
Art Crimes: Canvasses with Rivets
Cities paint sentimental scenes denoting civic pride on the sides of buildings. Advertising puts cultural icons on brick facades in Brobdingnagian scale. Yet the real masters of art on grand mortared and riveted media - graffiti artists with more urgent messages - still risk arrest and defacement of their works. Art Crimes preserves their works and honors the masters in urban centers around the world. The site includes a glossary, bios, serious analyses, and even employment opportunities. Writers, as the best are called, take pride in individuality, masked in large part by the dramatic loss of scale in the translation to the online medium; art rivalling the scale of Guernica can't really get the viewing it deserves on canvasses as small as most monitor screens. Selected detail photos would be an appropriate enhancement, and certainly help to preserve work that is always at risk of eradication. Still, these are serious artists, with much more to say than many artists who have the good commercial sense to vandalize only canvas. We'll ad a caveat here that's not normally necessary in NSS: Graffiti is, as the authors note, risky art and proud of it; you may find language and images that offend.http://www.graffiti.org/index.html
The arty images of Michael Jordan and his Nike ads are only the latest incarnation of the static urban commercial. In earlier times, buildings in New York urged passersby at West 147th Street in Harlem to consider Omega Oil "For Sun Burn, For Weak Backs, For Stiff Joints, For Sore Muscles, For Athletes. Trial Bottle 10¢." Omega Oil was in business from February 3, 1870 through April 2, 1924. Such is the information at the Fading Ad Campaign, one artist's crusade to preserve New York City's vintage mural ads on building brickfaces before they disappear forever. Site author Jump's mission is double-edged. Found in 1986 to be HIV-positive, he embarked on this quest, saying, "It has become a metaphor for survival for me since, like myself, many of these ads have long outlived their expected life span. Although this project doesn't deal directly with HIV/AIDS, it is no accident I've chosen to document such a transitory and evanescent subject. Of the hundreds of ads I've photographed, many have already been covered up, vandalized, or destroyed. But still many silently cling to the walls of buildings, barely noticed by the rushing passersby." He's researched some of the works, but Jump, like Detroit's Boileau, is an artist with an intuitive appreciation of his subject's significance in history and the blossoming field of commercial archeology.
http://www.frankjump.com/
SCIENCE AND ART
Puttin' on the Ritz
Space Race Viewed Through Vintage Toys
Toys are mirrors of their times, reflecting technology and culture. What about the space race? Many toys reflected the evolution in rockets, spacesuits, and astronauts, not to mention toys that foresaw space bases, beginning in the 1960s. This Web site puts on display a large and interesting collection of these vintage toys - along with toys and model kits available for sale. You'll see the evolution in rockets, starting from early 1960s models up to the Saturn rockets and the Apollo missions. It's a different way to look at events in our recent history. (We quake in our boots at the thought of what Pokemon say about us.)http://home.att.net/~g.ruboyianes/mpc.html
MEDICINE, BIOLOGY AND ZOOLOGY
It's alive! It's alive!
Counting How Many People Have Ever Lived
If someone tells you that 75 percent of the people who had ever been born are alive right now, would you believe it? This isn't a simple question to answer, mainly because no demographic data are available for 99 percent of the span of the human stay on Earth. But, someone has tried to make a guess, more or less scientifically, of how many people have ever lived. You might not be entirely satisfied with the answer on this Web page, but that's sort of the point; the message is really to convey the variables, not the results. There are also links to sites related to population growth and demographics. The answer to the burning question? It is at the bottom of the Web page.http://www.spiritone.com/~orsierra/rogue/popco/data/everlivd.htm
The sole member of the NSS Scuba Diving Department expected to learn about scuba diving when he visited here, but he hadn't really appreciated that diving was only one component in this site. So, he wasn't really startled to read that fish have no eyelids but he was intrigued to learn that the part of the nervous system that controls breathing is located in the mid-brain, also known as the brain stem. He learned also that 130 feet is the maximum depth in recreational scuba diving, a depth originally adopted by the US Navy because it gave navy divers about 10 minutes of bottom time on compressed air; going any deeper on air made no sense to the Navy because the time available to do useful work was simply too short. This site, based on a 1997 book, is great if you're a recreational scuba diver - and an even greater spot if you have some interest in the history, mechanics, and scientific reasoning behind many aspects of diving in general and scuba diving in particular. In addition to dispelling many common myths about scuba diving, it offers easily understood numerical examples of how to manually calculate the dive times and depths a scuba diver must track when performing multiple dives in a single 24-hour period.
http://www.mtsinai.org/pulmonary/books/scuba/sectiona.htm
ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, ECONOMICS, AND GEOGRAPHY
All that we see or seem
Essential Principles of Economics: A Hypermedia Text
This site provides the reader with an incredible amount of information in the area of economic theory and history; in pre-Internet era, we'd likely have had to carry ten to twelve books to cover the wide range of topics that this site has to offer. Fundamentals of Marxist economics, you say? No problem! Just click on Karl Marx and all the labor surplus theory headings and away you go. Or perhaps a more historical perspective of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and the use of land, labor and capital as production inputs? Just click on "Economics: A Reasonable Dialog". Clearly not all topics can be covered in the same depth as the original authors' work. If, however, you're interested in getting a very good general overview of some of the fundamental tenets of economic theory, history, and the general principles behind capitalism, Marxism, and so on, this is your Web site. One more thing about this Web site: its author realizes that not everyone is going to invest the time to go through all the material. To this end, he's pointed readers to a list of prerequisite recommended chapters that give the reader the best understanding of the subject matter.http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/prin/txt/EcoToC.html
About as plain as a page can get, lacking even a heading, without even a single link - internal or otherwise - this glossary of anthropology terms is still a pithy little reference for nonscientists who enjoy rooting through cultures of the past and present. It has the most edifyingly brief definition of catastrophism that we've ever seen, and appropriate nods to everything from linguistics to a proton magnetometer. This is no expert's reference, but to help you get through a scholarly anthropology site, it's a dandy little resource.
http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/glossary/glossary.html
SCIENCE LITE
Where are you, Mulder?
http://www.twinkiesproject.com/