On a cool summer night, you might see fireflies glow. What you may not know is that fireflies are key to discovering new drugs too. Fireflies glow through a process called bioluminescence. In it, there are molecules that combine with energy and give off the green glow. Scientists are using those molecules and attaching them to cells to learn more about how these cells work. Following the glowing molecule is like watching a person in a darkly-lit room who has a glow stick. You know exactly where they are. The same goes for the part of the cell that has the glowing firefly molecule attached to it.
Now, fireflies are not the only species that glow. There are worms that glow along with the anglerfish, which you’ve seen in major movies. There are also deep-sea shrimp that glow. Out of all those organisms, the deep-sea shrimp has the most disturbing use of bioluminescence. When shrimps feel threatened by a predator, they vomits a glowing goo from their mouth to scare them off. That is a very effective means of bioluminescence!
All in all, bioluminescence is one of the tools that animals have. Nature provides some excellent ways to see things in the dark, which scientists borrow for discoveries. As you can see, the light from fireflies is a small beacon during the summer, but also for the discovery of new medicines.
Star Trek has lots of cool technologies that have become a reality. There are invisibility cloaks and Tractor beams being made right now. And cellphones are like communicators and replicators are 3D printers. But, what we could all use is a transporter. This way we would not need to drive or go to an airport, we could just beam over to where we need to go and come back. Sounds wonderful!
Well, I spoke to physicist Lawrence Krauss, who is also the author of The Physics of Star Trek. He told me that a transporter takes us apart bit by bit. “In order to make you you, we need to put you back together atom by atom,” said Krauss. That sounds easy. But there is some bad news. There is a law in physics, in quantum mechanics, that tells us that the more we know where an electron is located, the less we know about how fast it is going. This is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
To build a person atom by atom, we would need to know where each atom goes and how fast it is moving. But quantum mechanics says that we can’t know both of those things well. We can know one well, but not the other. So making a transporter would break the laws of physics.
Getting into a transporter would be a one-way trip. You might not like how you turn out.
So the short answer for “can we make a transporter?” is, “no.” We would be breaking the laws of physics to do so. And, we mustn’t do that.
No picnic would be perfect without ketchup. But ketchup has this habit of taking its sweet time when leaving the bottle.
There are several ways to get ketchup out of the bottle.
- Stick a knife in it and scoop it out.
- Hit the bottle at the neck (where the 57 is located).
- Skip it and use mustard instead.
But there is a better, scientific way:
Shake the bottle.
Ketchup is made up of tomato pieces, water, vinegar and spices. And, it is the arrangement of the tomato pieces that give ketchup a structure and cause the flow of ketchup to slow down.
Scientists would call ketchup a thixotropic yield stress liquid. The yield stress part means that it takes force for the ketchup to move. This is why we have to hit the bottle to get it out. The thixotropic means that the ketchup has the ability to “remember.”
Once someone has used the ketchup bottle, the ketchup inside “remembers” it and will flow faster afterwards. This means that the second person that gets the ketchup bottle will have an easier time getting the ketchup out then the first person to use it.
What is going is on is that the tomato particles in the ketchup get rearranged after the first use and can easily flow passed each other the second time.
So how do you get ketchup to flow faster? If you are the first person with the ketchup bottle, then shake it. But, if you are the second person, don’t worry; you won’t have long to wait. The ketchup will flow real easily.
So, next time you are at a picnic, let someone deal with the ketchup bottle first. It is polite and scientifically a better way to reduce the wait.
Something is happening to honeybees! They are turning into zombie bees, or zombees.
There is a tiny fly that is injecting its eggs into the honeybee along with a parasite, and the parasite is taking over the honeybees’ behavior. The bees fly around erratically and walk around awkwardly. You can say that it is the flight of the living dead.
Scientists are asking all of us to look out for bees that act strangely and report these sitings on their website: Zombeewatch.org. If you see something, say something. So far zombie bees have been found on the west coast in California and Washington state and on the east coast in Pennsylvania and Vermont.
Honeybees are important to us because they pollenate many of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables we enjoy. Without honeybees, there would be no honey too. Americans eat over 400 million pounds of honey every year. If bees go away, we will need to eat foods that are wind pollenated like corn and wheat.
Honeybees make our lives a bit sweeter and here is one way all of us can help to keep them buzzing.