Netsurfer Science 03.14

The romantic idea of lost cities hidden in the clouds is fascinating to everyone. Mondo Maya deals heavily with that notion but also attempts to connect these rediscovered cities to today through the art, language, and culture of the descendants of the Mayans who originally inhabited these mysterious places. Start with the stunning section on Palenque, of which renowned researcher Linda Shele wrote, "If you understand Palenque, you can understand anything the Maya ever did". Of course Mondo Maya is a magazine, a glossy quarterly in this case, generous indeed with the content provided online, with nothing crumbling or hidden about its fascinating contents. The major sections of the site comprise archeology, nature, daily life, history, handicrafts, legends, and Maya notes. Each is an absorbing adventure enriched with wonderful illustrations and excellent writing. No single paragraph can possibly do this place justice, so put on your hikers, grab a backpack, and enter here for a grand adventure.
http://www.mayadiscovery.com/ing/default.htm

EARTH SYSTEMS
No matter where you go, there you are

New Commission to Protect The Oceans

Half of all new buildings in America are going up in coastal areas. That staggering figure is but one indication of the growing burden on marine environments. The Pew Charitable Trusts have set up a commission to study America's oceans and connecting waterways. Members will submit a report with recommendations to Congress in 2002. The Pew Oceans Commissions Web site gives a good introduction to the areas of inquiry: coastal development, unintended fishing impacts, pollution, climate change, aquaculture, and invasive species. The site's Oceans Facts page is swimming with fascinating trivia, i.e., what's the most valuable wild animal on earth? (Hint: it grows up to ten feet long, weighs up to 1500 pounds and swims up to 55 mph): The bluefin tuna, valued at up to $90,000.
http://www.pewoceans.org/index.html?fl

Salmon and the Northwest

In Open Spaces magazine, writer Roy Hemingway navigates the remarkable life journey of the Pacific Northwest salmon. Born in a freshwater creek, matured in the saltwater ocean, we follow several breeds of the species as they return to their birthplaces to spawn, then die and serve as food for hatched young. The article decries the near-loss of the natural salmon habitat and the earnest, but largely ineffective, efforts to restore it. While a touch on the ecosentimental side in places, Hemingway is never ham-fisted in blaming any one culprit. Rather, he considers the cumulative effects of logging, farming, ranching, mining, damming, road building, and urbanizing activity.
http://www.open-spaces.com/article-v1n1-hemmingway.php

COMPUTING AND ENGINEERING
Open the pod bay doors, Hal

Supersonic Submarine

How does London-New York in an hour, via supersonic submarine sound? What, you ask, happened to drag, that old enemy of anything trying to move very fast in a dense medium such as water? One way around it, as this New Scientist article tells us, is to exploit cavitation, normally something naval folk want to avoid, because it's noisy, wasteful, and damaging. In typical New Scientist style, this article examines the new ideas with flair and journalistic excitement while mindful of the facts. Under the right conditions, a single bubble or supercavity can form around a moving object lowering drag and thus increasing speed dramatically. Achieving those conditions in water, however, is formidably difficult. During the Cold War, Russia experimented with superfast torpedoes that used a rocket motor to achieve very high speeds aided by a region of supercavitation around the torpedo. More recently, US researchers have broken the sound barrier in water (that's 5400 km/h, Folks!) with fired projectiles designed to undergo cavitation, an idea that's being used in developing a mine clearing gun. While military and civilian applications look intriguing, clearly there's a lot of work yet to be done, so you might as well hold off on ordering that underwater Concorde ticket for the moment.
http://www.newscientist.com/features/features_224813.html

Practikal and Impractikal Rocketry

Ever tag along to a meeting of the local rocketry club? These people tend to be a combination of McGuyver, Isaac Newton, and Daffy Duck, and their weird-genius image won't be contradicted at this excellent introduction to amateur rocketeering. The heart of the Web site are plans for rockets one can build (according to these people, Este's kits are for wimps) and various and sundry accessories for rocket construction, such as fly-away launch lugs or pyro-release connectors (we recommend that you don't try the Rocket Dog). There is also a primer on rockets and their history from Thiokol (a must for beginners), a section of biographies of famous and not-so-famous rocketeers, a photographic gallery of both personal and historical rocket photos of some successful and not-so-successful launches, and a links list of amateur and "professional" (such as NASA) rocketeering resources, organizations, plans, and Usenet groups. A fine introduction to rocketry and a glimpse into the not-so-sane world of the rocketeer.
http://www.fortunepaint.com/rockets.htm

ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away

PBS's Space Station Site

As three astronauts move in and set up shop on the International Space Station, some excellent science reporting has graced the world's front pages. Last December, PBS launched a two-part documentary reaching back to the station's origins in the cold war Reagan era. While the PBS Web site is not the place for the latest news, it offers some good supplementary information and links, especially about the NASA, the Russian and, to a lesser extent, the Canadian, and European contributions. And the virtual reality tour of the station is something you won't get in the newspaper.
http://www.pbs.org/spacestation/

Early Greek Astronomy

Ancient Greece was, without doubt, the nest of modern Western thinking. Right up to the present, even the mythology of that time and place makes daily appearances in our culture, in the form of fictional characters, horoscopes, and celestial mapping. Greeks tried to comprehend and explain the facts of what they observed in the sky, most often attributing events and content to the gods of Olympus, giving sense to, for example, the sun's movement across the sky. The struggle to explain how the heavens move is well documented at these two sites. Greek mythology is the springboard, but author Robert Tiess draws in several religious traditions and traces parallel themes over thousands of years. Ellen Brundige is more focused on early Greek scientists.
Triess: http://rtiess.tripod.com/myt1.htm
Brundige: http://www.neaccess.net/~jbgenest/mirabilibus/gr-ast.html

MATHEMATICS, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY
42

JHT Heat Transfer Picture Gallery

The Journal of Heat Transfer, a publication to help mechanical engineers understand the processes of natural and forced convection, boiling, and combustion, has taken images from a series of exhibits shown at several meetings of the International Mechanical Engineering Congress of photographs which display various thermal processes and experiments, and placed them online for your enjoyment and enrichment. The result: a series of hauntingly beautiful pictures which can be admired in their own right; science-based art, so to speak. The images are enlargeable and have descriptions of the particular processes involved. You don't have to be an engineer to appreciate them.
http://www.me.utexas.edu/~heatran/pgallery.html

Superconductors

Nope, sorry to dash your hopes, but this is not about young baton-wielding musical prodigies. Instead it's about "following the path of least resistance", the phenomenon that occurs when materials allow the flow of electricity virtually without resistance. Superconductors represent one of those delightful areas in science with potential big money payoffs and where discoveries have often stood theory on its head, confounded experts, and yielded perhaps more than a fair share of Nobel prizes to their investigators. This site, authored by electronics engineer Joe Eck, is a wonderful way to explore the subject. It's not flashy, but it is attractive in a simple way and endlessly informative. Eck maintains a very able 'layman' level but connects through hypertext links to other places and further details. Its seven superlative sections provide a highly readable survey of the entire field. As well there's an invaluable page of links to additional superconductor information. This labor of love - no banner ads or visit-our-sponsor blandishments, how nice, although there is an offer to provide rudimentary superconductor fabrication and testing services - is a must visit for those with an interest in this important field in materials science.
http://www.superconductors.org/index.htm#top#top

ARCHEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY
What is past is prologue

Oceans of Kansas

Okay, an ocean in Kansas is not what first comes to mind when considering the world's great bodies of water. Nonetheless, during the late Cretaceous (75 to 85 million years ago), the Western Interior Sea covered vast inland areas of what is today North America. It left chalky sediments about 600 feet thick filled with the fossilized remains of marine species which inhabited the warm shallow waters of this long lost ocean. Mike Everheart, Curator of Paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas has created this large, richly illustrated, and user-friendly Web site to showcase the prehistoric marine reptiles that once frequented his home state, the most notable (or, at least, the biggest) of which were the mosasaurs. There are dozens of illustrated articles on the creatures and on the digs to discover and preserve them, which are studded with hyperlinks to paleontology pages both in and outside of the site. A geological time scale and a Kansas geological map help place the fossils in the proper perspective. Five stars.
http://www.oceansofkansas.com/

Fundy Geological Museum

Put together an area rich in important fossils and minerals, an imaginative program, and professional geological expertise and what do you get? One correct answer certainly is Fundy Geological Museum in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. Near here the immense and powerful tides of the Bay of Fundy expose new fossils every year. Rock formations some 200 million years old are now surrendering their buried treasure of fossils for the careful scrutiny of professionals. One of the most exciting finds is the 1986 discovery of a large collection of over 100,000 pieces of fossilized bone from ancient crocodiles, dinosaurs, lizards, sharks, and primitive fishes, as well as 12 skulls and jaws of trithelodonts, rare reptiles closely related to mammals. An especially interesting feature of the museum is that it is putting the power of the Web to work in reaching out to connect us with the work of scientists attempting to understand the past. An example is a project due to start next year using a Web camera to view scientists cleaning and uncovering a prosauropod dinosaur. You've always wanted to see that, admit it. Here's your chance!
http://museum.gov.ns.ca/fgm/lab/lab.html

Franck Goddio Society

Founded by, um, let's see now, we know, we have it, Franck Goddio, this is a high-tech underwater exploration outfit that first attracted attention with the discovery of the ancient city of Alexandria and Napoleon's lost fleet. The Society uses deep diving submersibles and modern detection equipment for its exploration work. The Web site is a treasure trove of information and pictures about these exploits and more recent finds, including the deep-water discovery of the East India Company ship The Royal Captain, which sank in the Philippines in 1773. Members get most of the best spoils, including a higher resolution picture library, a newsletter and so on for $30 US annually, but there's still lots to see and read for visitors.
http://www.franckgoddio.org/

Netsurfer Recommendations

Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the cover or title to order the item at a hefty discount from Amazon.com and Beyond.com and send a few pennies our way as well.

Catching Cold
Peter Davies
Michael Joseph; ISBN: 0718143493

The killer flu of 1918 might seem like ancient history, a tragic postscript to a terrible war, except for the fact that it might happen again, and almost has. World wide, 21 million was the official death toll, but in reality the count probably was much higher. Included in the victims were more Americans than died in all the wars Americans fought in the 20th century. Peter Davies doesn't want us to sit back comfortably in our new millennium medical smugness and discount the flu. Periodically, he recounts, the virus goes on a kind of gene swapping, mutating rampage, emerging not as some pest dangerous mainly to the sick and weak but as a lethal, indiscriminate, and highly infectious scourge. He recounts how it almost happened in 1997, prevented only by frantic medical detective work and the killing of chickens by the millions to arrest the spread of the newly emerging virus. It was a near-run thing and there is no guarantee that the next strain of killer flu will not escape such early efforts at quarantine. Yet this is not a clinical expose. Davies' well-written book is a human story, of the victims, and of the people who fight this still little understood disease that kills widely, hugely, and regularly.

MEDICINE, BIOLOGY AND ZOOLOGY
It's alive! It's alive!

Locomotion and Respiration in Marine Air-Breathing Vertebrates

Richard Cowen from University of California at Davis has written a thought-provoking article on the relationship between air breathing, locomotion, metabolic level, and evolution in aquatic vertebrates, specifically by examining how bodily distortion during locomotion affects breathing in different species. Modern lizards and amphibians, because of their lateral motion while walking or running cannot move and breathe simultaneously. This is why they can move very fast in short bursts; an aid in 'ambush hunting' or escape (their three-chambered hearts are actually more efficient for this sort of activity), but denying them the sustained high locomatory performance of birds and mammals (Cowen calls this 'Carrier's constraint'). But what about aquatic mammals and birds? How do they avoid this constraint, as they breathe only occasionally and spend extended time and activity under water? How did these creatures evolve and adapt to aquatic life? The author examines both living and extinct species, such as modern cetaceans and ichthyosaurs, citing the fossil records, and suggests possible solutions (especially 'leaping') to how prehistoric air-breathing marine vertebrates escaped Carrier's constraint. A fine article for those with an interest in marine paleontology, which would have been even better with some illustrations.
http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/ichthyosaur.html

Phantom Limb Sensation

Pain, any type of pain, is by definition a bad feeling. But, what if you suffer from pain coming from nowhere? The phenomenon of 'phantom limbs' has been well known since the US Civil War. Briefly, phantom limb sensation is a subjective sensation - arising from one's own nervous system - that an amputated limb is still present. It can range from the belief that you're wriggling your missing toes through an itchy ankle to an elbow so excruciatingly uncomfortable painful that it exceeds the pain of the amputation itself. Aside from helping patients manage the phantom pain better, learning more about this phenomenon brought a deeper knowledge of the mechanisms that regulate the brain. If you want to know more about it, this site is a excellent place to start.
http://www.macalester.edu/~psych/whathap/UBNRP/Phantom/homepage.html

Information about Prosthetics

One of the discoveries about the phantom limb phenomenon is that a person suffering from it earns a not inconsiderable potential benefit. That person will likely have fewer problems succeeding with a limb prosthesis. Surprisingly, prostheses are as old as history. We know only of amputations in prehistory, but that old civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome left us hints about the use of limb prostheses. Now, prostheses can be built in many shapes and they are becoming increasingly sophisticated, in an effort to offer a fully functional replacement of the original limb. There are, for instance, special pivots for amputees who play golf, and costs can for the most complex computer assisted varieties can vary 20-fold from the basic models. You can learn more about prostheses and amputations at the site of the Northwestern University Prosthetic-Orthotic Center.
http://www.nupoc.northwestern.edu/pros.html

World Health Organization's Annual Report

You'd have to have been living under a petri dish to have missed the growing alarm since 1997 about microbes' increasing resistance to antibiotics. This year's World Health Organization report, 'Overcoming Antimicrobial Resistance', cautions that "the window of opportunity is closing", and that public policy must work in concert with medical researchers and providers to prevent emergence of untreatable, worldwide infectious epidemics.
http://www.who.int/infectious-disease-report/

European Butterflies

Nothing fancy here, just a gorgeous gallery of hundreds of European butterfly and moth species, arranged by genus. Each page has multiple images, male and female wing shots, and descriptions of typical habitats, range, flight periods, and larval host plants. The multi-page section illustrating butterfly metamorphosis is useful for those who seek these animals in the wild or who simply wish to increase their knowledge of the process, and there are sections on tropical butterflies and on the butterflies of southern France, both with enlargeable thumbnails. Order CD-ROMs of butterfly photographs, and there's a butterfly links list from around the world.
http://europeanbutterflies.com/indexUS.htm

ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, ECONOMICS, AND GEOGRAPHY
All that we see or seem

Semiotics for Beginners

Semiotics is one of those abstruse sounding terms that impresses more than it should perhaps, amounting to nothing much more, or should one say much less, than the study of, or theories of, signs - but signs in the large sense as in words, pictures, sounds, gestures, and more. Here are the origins of the field and the scholars who advanced its cause and helped define and enlarge it, and a whole pile more in this work by Daniel Chandler, who wrote it originally for his students at the University of Wales. It's not necessarily an easy topic to grasp and beginners might be tempted to wonder if it's all a clever academic put-on. Still. at heart the topic struggles with the sense of meaning that signs impart, their form and their content, through contents that includes chapters on signs, modality and representation, paradigms and syntagms, metaphor and metonymy, codes, intertextuality, strengths of semiotic analysis, criticisms of semiotic analysis, DIY semiotic analysis, a glossary, suggested reading, and semiotics links. If all this interests you, well then. there's lots to keep you thinking, reading, and wondering about here. We do note a conundrum about the design of the site, which features a spiral notebook format. Is this a sign of rooting the content in the familiar, comfortable physical world of the printed page, or is this an indication of shying away from the new medium of the hypertext format? Well, that's the trouble with reading semioticians!
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

RESIDUE
We can't be sure what else is out there

United Nations University Lecture Series

The United Nations University provides a framework for bringing together leading scholars to tackle pressing global problems of major concern to the United Nations. The four current programs are peace and governance, environment, science and technology, and development. Among other activities, the University (UNU?) sponsors public lectures on these topics and puts up many of these on this Web site. Here are 18 lectures on a range of topics by well-known experts, including a discourse on the Gaia Theory by James Lovelock, The Impact of Technology on Human Rights by C.G. Weeramantry, a judge on the International Court of Justice, UN Reform from the Standpoint of the United States by Benjamin Rivlin, NGOs: The People's Voice in International Governance? and Climate Change: Is It a Positive or Negative Process? These are serious lectures by serious, knowledgeable people, but they are public lectures, intended to be understood fairly widely, and for the most part the language is accessible to intelligent people.
http://www.unu.edu/unupress/lecture-index.html

Trial FX

Falling into the category of where applied science meets the legal profession, Trial FX is a firm which manufactures very high quality, hand-drawn medical illustrations for use in trials. Their Custom Exhibits are large (30" x 40") mounted posters showing trauma, injuries, and remedial surgical procedures in great detail, using paintings, photographs, and x-ray images. Online samples include a head gunshot wound, a foot amputation, and a compound fracture of the elbow, with incorrect vs. correct surgical fixation (the malpractice settlement here must have gone through the roof!). They also produce custom video computer animations of medical conditions and surgeries, samples of which, unfortunately, cannot be viewed on-ine. While these fine images are certainly beyond the price of students and teachers (the posters run between $400 to $700 and the videos are about $800 per three-minute segment), as dramatic visual aids they are hard to beat, especially if you have a jury to convince.
http://home.earthlink.net/~trialfx/index.html

CONTACT AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

Netsurfer Science Home Page:
Subscribe, Unsubscribe:
Frequently Asked Questions:
Submission of Newsworthy Items:
Letters to the Editor:
Advertiser and Sponsor Inquiries:
Netsurfer Communications:

http://www.netsurf.com/nss/
http://www.netsurf.com/nss/subscribe.html
http://www.netsurf.com/nss/nsfaq.html
sci-pressroom@netsurf.com
sci-editor@netsurf.com
sales@netsurf.com
http://www.netsurf.com/

CREDITS

Publisher: Arthur Bebak Editor: Judith David Contributing Editor: Production Manager: Bill Woodcock Netsurfer Communications, Inc. President: Arthur Bebak Vice President: S.M. Lieu	Writers and Netsurfers: Jason Alderman Jonathan Baum Kate Brown Davide di Lazzaro Craig Kott Michael Luke Elizabeth Rollins
NETSURFER SCIENCE © 2000 Netsurfer Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. NETSURFER SCIENCE is a trademark of Netsurfer Communications, Inc.