Lab Notes

While doing research on Maria Winkelmann-Kirch for my most recent Massive article, I kept being reminded how little progress there has been for women in science today. 

When I noticed that she wasn’t given credit for the discovery of Comet 1702 H in the textbook I referenced, it reminded me of recent news stories about women in the sciences showing up in the acknowledgments for work that deserves authorship.  

Winkelmann-Kirch and her husband worked as a team. The only significant difference between them was that she did not attend a university — forbidden for women at the time. Both had discovered comets. Both could make accurate calendars and perform the necessary calculations. When the Academy of Sciences in Berlin denied her petition to take over her husband’s position after his death, all I could think about was those studies where researchers changed the names on resumes from male to female and found that hiring committees were less likely to hire the woman. Or reports that women in the biomedical sciences need to publish 2.5 times more than men to earn the same postdoctoral positions.

As a woman who became a mother during graduate school, the way Winkelmann-Kirch was treated throughout her career felt all too familiar. Today, research has shown that close to half of women leave full-time STEM work after having children — I’m one of them. I may not have been actively pushed out as Winkelmann-Kirch was, but the lack of support made it difficult to be productive with a family. 

The only difference 300 years has given us is that the sexism is sometimes more subtle. What is still painfully clear is that women and minorities can never be ‘good enough’ for a system that both actively and passively pushes them out. That needs to change. 

Dr. Stephen Hawking may have lost his voice in 1985, but he was far from finished speaking with the rest of the world. With a custom-designed computer interface, he used a single cheek muscle to navigate an adaptive word predictor and slowly type out literature that remains at the forefront of human knowledge.

Scientists have tried to directly relay brain signals to audible speech, but often come up short. One of the reasons is that the brain does not directly generate speech, but rather it instructs the movements of our vocal tract that lead to speech as an output. With this in mind, researchers from the University of California - San Francisco measured frequencies from the Ventral Sensorimotor Cortex, which is the brain region that coordinates the movement of the body parts shaping the vocal tract, to predict the corresponding motion of vocal organs called articulators - our tongue, lips, teeth, and palate. These predictions were then synthesized into a waveform of audible speech. To see how this works in action, check out this really cool video produced by the USCF Nuerosurgery team.

Using listeners from Amazon Mechanical Turk to verify  intelligibility, they found that a speaker even miming the target sentences produced sufficient data to accurately capture synthetic speech. Interestingly, the step between articulation and sound output was  generalizable between participants, indicating that a version of this technology could be used clinically to help rescue impaired speech. However, the primary measurements were taken from participants who  already had intracranial implants on their cortical regions, so unfortunately this technology won’t be available over the counter anytime soon.  

As the summer field work season draws closer, I thought I’d offer a few entirely unscientific tips for doing healthy and successful field work. Whether the upcoming field season is your first or tenth, you might be feeling pretty nervous and unprepared. That's normal! I've been in your shoes many times - so here are my top five pieces of advice to ease your mind, in no particular order:

1. Know what you should overpack and know what you can skimp on. Err on the side of bringing more food, batteries, and datasheets than you think you need, but know that you can usually get away with packing fewer clothes than you would for a normal trip. It’s the wilderness – no one cares how you look or how you smell! And honestly, wearing the same shirt and pants for five days in a row is a badge of honor in my book.

2. Allow yourself at least two comfort items. I work at high elevations in the Peruvian Andes, so one of mine is a hoodie. The other is usually a stash of personal snacks. And always, ALWAYS, have a couple of pairs of spare socks or underwear tucked away where they won’t get wet. Nothing feels better after a day in the elements than clean, dry clothing on your body.

3. Zippered plastic bags are your best friend. They’ll keep the bugs, dirt, and water away from your stuff. Other field must-haves are waterproof notebooks, permanent markers wrapped in duct tape (keep both on hand at all times!), and brightly colored flagging that you can attach to all of your stuff. You definitely will inevitably drop your pencil into a pile of leaves, rendering it near-invisible to the unaided eye. It will also be easier to find if it’s attached to a long strand of neon plastic – I promise.

4. Don’t be dumb or try to "prove yourself." Safety should come first, always. If your mental alarm bells start going off or your gut starts to knot from fear, get out of whatever situation you are in. This applies to anything from walking an unfamiliar trail out in the middle of nowhere to strolling down the street in a major city on a day off from field work. A healthy, happy, and secure field team is more important than any data. 

5. You’re probably going to cry! And that’s perfectly okay. For some reason, when we talk about doing field work it often devolves into a shouting match of one-upsmanship to tell the wildest, most ridiculous story about insane physical or mental feats we’ve accomplished (remind me to tell you about the time I wrestled an anaconda after walking 10 miles in my bare feet AND still managed to collect a secret groundbreaking dataset that will save the world!) (Kidding. So much kidding.) We forget to talk about all the ways that field work is really, really hard. Almost everyone I know has had a moment in the field where they have absolutely lost it, usually from a combination of exhaustion, fear, hunger, or just plain being stuck with the same small group of people for three weeks straight. It’s normal.

What's your favorite field work tip? Tweet me @CassieFreund and I'll share them. For the first time in seven summers I'm not headed into the field next month, and although it'll be weird, I can't wait to follow everyone's adventures from the clean comfort of my desk.

I was reading a novel with a notebook and pen waiting for me on the  table. Sitting hunched over and squinting my eyes while holding the book  with my two hands, quickly flipping through each page I went over the  first, last, and sometimes, a few sentences in the middle of each  paragraph. I finished the first chapter not knowing the name of the main  character, confused about the location, and frustrated that I didn’t  take any notes. My leisure reading experience became highly unenjoyable.  Was I seriously trying to read a novel as if I were skimming over a  research paper? The novel didn’t have subheadings or designated sections  for the introduction, methods, results, and discussion. How rude!

I found myself searching the first sentence of each paragraph to find  the main topic and then jumping to the last sentence to get the  conclusion and transition, and finally, searching the sentences in the  middle for details to put the content into context - but only when I  thought that the first and last sentences were relevant to me. Instead  of relaxing, I attempted to take out structured content from the text  with some other motive (ehm, research), leaving me utterly confused for  an entire chapter of the novel. However, when I went back to the chapter  that I rifled through in my reading, I was amazed and captivated by how  the details were concrete, significant, specific and focused, and  appealed to all the senses. The author took me on a pleasant journey.

Sometimes we just gotta relax.

Walking the walk but not talking the talk, limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (LATE) is a newly defined brain disorder that mimics Alzheimer's disease (AD). Both LATE and AD share common symptoms, but the underlying protein pathology differs between the two diseases. In AD, the two major proteins associated with disease are amyloid beta and tau, forming plaques and tangles, respectively. However, in LATE, the major protein is TDP-43, a protein linked to diseases like ALS and frontotemporal dementia.

One-quarter of people 85 and older are estimated to have LATE, meaning that they have enough TDP-43 in certain parts of the brain to impair cognition. The identification of LATE could have major implications for disease diagnosis and clinical research. 

The paleoanthropology of Asia got even more interesting this week when researchers published the first fossil from a Denisovan found outside of Denisova Cave in Siberia. Discovered in Baishiya Karst Cave (Xiahe, China) in 1980, the fossil - half of a lower jaw with two teeth - provides some of the first morphological data on the Denisovans (which are only known from very fragmentary fossils and DNA) and expands their geographical range onto the Tibetan Plateau. 

This is really interesting because some modern populations in the area have genetic adaptations to high altitude that came from interbreeding with Denisovans, but no fossils of this enigmatic hominin had been found in the area before. The specimen has been dated to at least 160,000 years old and preserved ancient proteins (but no ancient DNA) that allowed it to be linked to the Denisovans. With at least three other papers on hominin material from Asia published within the last month, we're beginning to build a more complete picture of our own evolutionary history on that continent, which is incredibly exciting. 

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic  encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), has its first blood-based diagnostic test thanks to the efforts of Dr. Ron Davis. Dr. Davis launched the Stanford Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Research Center in 2013, after his son, Whitney, developed the devastating and debilitating illness. 

While there are an estimated 2 million people in the US living  with ME/CFS, many patients go for years without a diagnosis, which they get only after other disease possibilities have been eliminated. Dr. Davis and his team developed a nanoelectric assay, which can measure minuscule changes in energy, to test the effects of stress on immune cells and plasma. The change in electrical activity is directly correlated with the health of the sample, therefore allowing Dr. Davis' team to accurately distinguish the cells from ME/CFS patients from healthy controls. While more research efforts are needed to accurately diagnose and treat this illness in clinic, this is one of the first biomarkers for ME/CFS identified. These results from Dr. Davis' team prove that this illness is not made up in the patients' heads, but identifiable in their blood.  

The womb has long been considered a sterile environment. A baby’s debated first exposure to microbes, at birth, appears to play a critical role in postnatal immune development. Babies born vaginally, and thus exposed to the mother’s microbiome, were found to develop stronger immune systems than babies born by Cesarean-section. Raising the possibility that microbes are present in the intrauterine environment, several groups isolated microbes from placentas and fetal meconium. However, some researchers question whether the samples or reagents were  contaminated. Isolating a sterile sample from any environment would be tricky, and even more so during birth. Since the purity of the aforementioned samples is questionable, some groups are investigating how microbes might enter the uterus during pregnancy.  Could intrauterine microbes come from the reproductive tract, invasive medical  treatments, or maternal gastrointestinal stress? Others wonder what role microbes in the uterus could play in fetal development or preterm births. 

With few standing microbe-free areas of the body, a uterine microbiome seems realistic. Nonetheless, at this point, I think it’s more important to establish reliable methods for isolating pure uterine samples than to invest resources in potential effects of the microbes.  

As a graduate student, I'll take any chance I can to practice communicating my science, whether it's writing a blog post or giving a professional talk. One opportunity that I think is often underutilized or viewed as a burden is inter-departmental conferences. At times, they can feel like another annoyance to add to the pile, another abstract to throw together last-minute. If participation is lukewarm, the experience isn't at useful as it could be.

On the other hand, if you have good turnout (for both students and faculty), it can be a great experience - especially for younger students who have had fewer opportunities to practice presenting. Yesterday, our geology and climate departments held our 15th annual joint conference. With over 80 student presentations and a science advocacy panel, it was a productive and scientifically motivating day. Older students got feedback from faculty members they don't often see, first-year students realized just how difficult talking about your own research can be, and undergrads proudly displayed their first research projects. It's a much smaller conference than most, so you can spend more one-on-one time with people to really learn something new or get an idea from someone else's work.

It's one thing to know vaguely what your friends do; it's another to dedicate an entire day solely to learning more about what your colleagues are passionate about, as well as learning what people in other departments are working on. Too often, there isn't enough communication between departments, and collaborations that could be never come to fruition. Inter-departmental conferences are a great way to promote new collaborations, new ideas, and to support students at all levels.

(A tip to motivate participation: offer cash prizes if you can!) 

From the Smithsonian Institution, this is an interactive timeline *and* map of global volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and emissions since 1960. Four dimensions of geoscience! Even better, you can download the data used to generate the map for yourself.

Fair warning, though, this really got the fan spinning on my laptop. 

Recently, a team of international researchers have discovered a new human species, Homo luzonensis, in the Philippines. Their first discovery was in 2007, when they came across an unusual small foot bone - a metatarsal - dating back to 67,000 years ago. This bone was found in Cagayan Valley on the island of Luzon, on the protected lands of the indigenous Aeta people. This fossil was the earliest direct proof of humans living in the Philippines, but analysis could not determine which species of “Homo” it belonged to. After further excavation, the researchers found more strange remains from what they determined to be 3 individuals - at least two adults and one child. 

However, not everyone is convinced by this discovery. They argue that there is not enough evidence that this is a new species of human, especially because the fossils were all broken or heavily worn down. They claim more tests need to be done before naming a new species. 

The interdisciplinary team has already used all the non-destructive tests available including 3D analysis and x-ray imaging to distinguish the different morphological characteristics, but further analysis is still needed to learn more about this species’ behavior or biology.
This discovery reaffirms how important the islands of Southeast Asia are for understanding the evolution of our species. Within the last few decades, the number of different known species from human fossils has almost tripled. As researchers work to unearth the diverse roots of our family tree, what will they find next?

"Exercising at night will give you better results", a New York Post headline reads, a dubious extrapolation of an experiment in mice. But on Twitter, one account makes the context clear in only two words: IN MICE.

I just stumbled upon the account @justsaysinmice and it has already become my favorite account on Twitter. 

Mouse studies are incredibly useful to test scientific hypotheses in whole mammals, but it is no secret that many findings in mice do not translate to results in humans. Suggesting that they do is not only a perversion of the scientists' own claims, but is also irresponsible to the public. And this, as the creator of @justsaysinmice, James Heathers, notes in an illuminating Medium post explaining the philosophy behind the tweets, is what leads to public erosion of trust in scientific breakthroughs. 

Lack of trust in science is at the very heart of climate change denial and the anti-vaccine crusade, so Heathers is mitigating this one headline at a time by discerning when a study was done in mice. And I, for one, think it makes a big difference. 

When you hear the phrase “love spot”, I’m sure the last thing you think of is the common housefly. However, did you know that 15 different families of fly, including the mayfly, have a male-specific region of the eye called “love spots”? This region of the eye is highly specialized for motion detection and small-area targeting, and is most heavily utilized by males as they aerially pursue females during mating rituals. Talk about romantic. In some species the love spots are visible to the naked eye. The males have large eyes that are connected, whereas females have eyes that remain separated by other tissues. 

Also, there are some stark differences in pigment between the male and females in some species, such as the horsefly. How do we know that the male love spots make them more adept at motion sensing? Measurements of the photoreceptors of the eye using small electrodes measures a difference in speed of 60% between male love spots and the corresponding female region of the eye! It’s thought that the structure of these love spots was then used in other fly families to become what are known as “Killer Spots”, which are found in both male and female and are used in predation.

A new study where a group of scientists in China have inserted a human gene involved in brain development into monkey embryos has made headlines.

While this research has led many scientists and ethicists to condemn this act as an "ethical nightmare", the scientists who performed the study have expressed their solemn interest in better understanding  human evolution. This experimental approach is not the first of it's kind - recently scientists have also created animal chimeras by injecting human brain organoids into the brains of rodents. But why are we more sensitive to human-monkey chimeras?

The conversation about the consequences of this research on the monkey's intelligence has received the most attention. It is easy to believe that inserting a few human genes (particularly those involved in brain development) will make the animal smarter and more human-like, but we have to acknowledge that despite being highly genetically similar, there are millions of differences that  makes monkeys, monkeys and us, humans. The real question is, how many human genes does it take to make a monkey no longer a monkey but a human? Food for thought. 

In multiple sclerosis (MS), the fatty sheath that wraps around axons, called myelin, is damaged. However, there are currently no approved treatments for Multiple sclerosis patients that focus specifically on myelin repair, and current treatments only slow disease progression rather than halt it entirely. Drugs that focus on increasing the level of thyroid hormone promote myelin repair, but are unusable due to their extreme side effects. However, a few days ago a paper came out in JCI Insight that utilised a drug called Sob-AM2 to enter into the nervous system and selectively increase the level of thyroid hormone. This resulted in myelin repair and improvements in movement in three mouse models of MS, without side effects. This has huge implications on the future of MS treatment and it has the potential to change how we treat patients living with MS.  

Two Photon and Massive partnered up to fund science writing training for a small group of new writers. We were thrilled to have over 100 applicants, though we wish we could fund everyone! We ended up with 12 Photon Fellows, each with their own perspectives and areas of expertise. Look out for their articles coming soon. 

Photon Fellows

Adriana Romero-Olivares

Ana Maria Porras

Ashlei Milligan

Carina Seah

Claudia Lopez

Elaine Shen

Fiona McEnany

Ive Velikova

Jose Liquet y Gonzalez

Lucie Descamps

Mackenzie Thornbury

Shalise Couvertier

On the 128th sol (Martian day) of its mission, NASA's InSight rover, using its seismometer pictured above, has captured evidence of an earthquake on Mars. Er, uh, a marsquake. 

Hell yeah. "Marsquake" is the name of my garage band so this will only be a windfall for me. 

In terms of rumble, this is a rather small seismic event (NASA notes that if this had happened in Southern California it would barely register on any given day against any of the many small shakes that happen every day). Read more about the event here at the Jet Propulsion Lab/NASA website. 

Still waiting for a marsnado. 

I work in microbiology and biochemistry research. A student in my lab (her name is Anna) is investigating how Bacillus bacteria can be used to fight off the fungi that cause serious diseases in plants. This concept of biocontrol (using biological control agents instead of chemical pesticides) is a bit of a hot topic in research right now, and an industry selling biocontrol products is beginning to bloom. This can make it feel like a new idea, an innovative form of subtle environmental engineering, to use bacteria to control insect and fungal pests.

A recent re-reading of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, reminds me that the idea of biocontrol is far from new.

Carson's book is credited as having kick-started the environmentalist movement, as it laid out in painstaking detail the damage we were doing to our environment by our over-use of pesticides (especially insecticides). Carson could see the incredible scale of loss inflicted on our ecosystems, the reduction in what we now call biodiversity, and she lamented the “campaign for mass chemical control…another symptom of our exaggeratedly technological and quantitative approach”.

At the very end of Silent Spring, Carson wonders if there is another way to treat the insect pests that plague our farms. She describes how Bacillus bacteria were used to kill off insect pests as early as the 1910s and 1930s! Support for these “natural” approaches to pest control waned after chemicals like DDT were discovered, as new technological solutions were thought to be inherently better than any nature-based interventions.

Now I hope that we are returning to a more ecological view of pest control; maintaining a robust and diverse ecosystem to keep pests and pathogens in check, this time armed with deep scientific knowledge about how biocontrol works. After all, as Carson said:

“For the microbes include not only disease organisms but those that destroy waste matter, make soils fertile, and enter into countless biological processes like fermentation and nitrification. Why should they not also aid us in the control of insects?”

Silent Spring and the rest of Rachel's writings on the environment are available from all good bookshops, online or otherwise. 

Numerous institutions have their postdoctoral fellows and administrators returning this week from the National Postdoctoral Association Annual Meeting (April 12-14) in Orlando, Florida. 

The meeting was a perfect balance of career development sessions, interactive workshops, and opportunities for meaningful networking, with presentations including "Did They Really Just Say That?! Responding to Bias at Work", "NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowships: Strategies for Success", and mealtime meetups for general or specific groups. The poster viewing session had us furiously scribbling down ideas to bring back to our respective campuses such as PENNView, a postdoctoral diversity initiative to expose Mid-Atlantic doctoral candidates to research at the University of Pennsylvania. Another poster by Ralph J. Hazlewood shared their successful methods for increasing postdoc engagement and attendance at Vanderbilt University. I know I speak for many attendees when I say I'm excited to share what I have learned and improve the postdoc experience! Hope to see y'all at the 2020 meeting in San Diego. 

A new study has been spurring headlines recently, as scientists have shown restoration of cellular activity in post-mortem pig brains, hours after they have died. 

This has prompted some irresponsible headlines suggesting that these brains were "kept alive", a conclusion the authors themselves did not make. Rather, the authors showed that they could restore the electrical and metabolic activity of some brain cells and promote dilation of blood vessels. But should we consider this "alive?" 

The conversation about what counts as "alive" in a brain has been interesting. If we are to take this paper and consider electrical and metabolic activity in brain cells "live brains", we are forced to be consistent and conclude the same about cell culture and brain organoids, both of which can produce brain cells with electrical and metabolic activity.  

I was delighted to learn about Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, a fascinating intersection of art and science. It's a book, first published in 1814, that orders, classifies, and names 110 colors and provides examples of where they can be found in the natural world.

The Public Domain Review shares a short history of origins of the book:

The book is based on the work of the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner who, in his 1774 book Treatise on the External Characters of Fossils (translated into English in 1805), developed a nomenclature of colors so as to offer a standard with which to describe the visual characteristics of minerals. Clearly taken by the idea, some three decades later the Scottish painter of flowers Patrick Syme amended and extended Werner’s system. In addition to the mineral referent, for each of Werner’s colors Syme added an example from the animal and vegetable kingdom, as well as providing an actual patch of color on the page to accompany the words. While Werner found a suite of 79 tints enough for his geological purpose, now opened up to other realms of nature, Syme added 31 extra colors to bring the total to 110.

I love how this book dances back and forth between science and art. At the same time that it's trying to order and classify colors in a rigorous way, it's also making subjective associations between those colors and the natural world. I think it also tells a larger story about the close relationship between science and art, and how our ordered scientific knowledge emerges out of our subjective observations.

You can see the entire original book on the Internet Archive, or purchase a copy of the book for yourself from the Smithsonian.

Sydney Brenner died yesterday. That's him on the right, standing next to James Watson at the Asilomar Conference, 1975. I don't want to write a proper eulogy, because they've been done (here's a good one). It'll do to say that he was a scientist of a stratospheric status. I sometimes thought about him when I was in grad school and kept being surprised that we were both working in science at the same time. It was like reminding myself that a myth wasn't myth at all but real flesh and blood, like someone casually remarking that there were dragons in the parking lot. He won a Nobel Prize in 2002, rightfully so, but it should've been his second. He was a fulcrum of 20th century biology, a peer of essentially every famous biologist of the '50s, like Rosalind Franklin and Watson and Crick. 

A lot of the focus from Brenner's career has been on his introducing Caenorhabditis elegans, a cute little flatworm into the biologist's repertoire. (It's okay, usually people just say "see el-uh-gans".) It should! He won a Nobel Prize for it. C. elegans was a great idea -- they're easy to work with, you can store them in the freezer (something you can't do with fruit flies or mice, other neuroscientist favorites), and they have a very low, very specific number of neurons -- 302. No more, no less. That makes them easy to study, easy to grow and maintain, and easy to learn on. If you walk into a C. elegans lab you might be lucky enough to see a scientist sitting at a microscope, plucking their own hairs off their arm or their eyebrows to use as hooks to pick up tiny worms. This is absolutely true. 

It's astonishing to think about but Brenner should have already won a Nobel Prize by the time he actually got one for C. elegans. He was one of the last living members of the Phage Group, a collection of molecular biologists who used bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, as models to discover the most basic fundamentals of genetics -- how DNA works, how proteins are made, and what the genetic code is. Earlier this week we published an article about Elisa Izaurralde, who worked out how messenger RNA (mRNA) gets distributed around the cell. Sydney Brenner invented the idea of mRNA more or less out of thin air. The idea is that mRNA acts as a temporary copy of the information encoded in DNA. A cell uses that copy to make a protein, instead of reading directly off of DNA. In the early 1960s there...wasn't much in the way of concrete evidence to support this idea. Brenner (and a few others, including Francis Crick) knew at the time that there was DNA, and there was protein, but there was something in the middle that was missing. They stuck RNA in the middle. Just like that. 

*The Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in Biology - Horace Freeland Judson

I've been thinking about a question for my fellow scientists lately:  What's one paper that you always use to contextualize your work, that you wish you could share with everyone because you just think it's SO DARN COOL?

Mine is "Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities." I love this paper because the authors came up with the 25  places on earth with the highest concentrations of plant and animal species. They argue that in an era of very limited funding for  protecting nature, focusing mainly on these regions will return the most bang for our conservation buck. And this paper is super relevant to my work because I study forests in the Tropical Andes, home to 45,000 plant  species. Nearly half of these (~20,000) can only be found in this hotspot.

There are hotspots for animal enthusiasts, too! The island of Madagascar - home to multiple lemur species, the fossa, and the so-ugly-it's-almost-cute aye-aye - is a prime example. There are now 36 hotspots, with eleven new ones added in the past two decades. Scientists, nature lovers, world travelers: is your favorite place on the list? Shout out at me about your favorite papers and hotspots on Twitter and I'll share your replies!

Philosophers and researchers have long searched for estimates of pi, from approximations using the golden ratio to the famous fraction 22/7. One such estimate was accidentally discovered by French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon – Buffon for short. He asked a simple question: Suppose a needle of a particular length is dropped onto a wooden floor with evenly spaced boards of the same width. What is the chance that the needle crosses a crack between the boards? 

The angle of the needle determines how likely it is to have crossed the crack: with a smaller angle between the needle and the cracks, it is easier for the needle to land without crossing one. So, the solution to the “Needle Problem” relates the sine function to the needle’s angle, drawing a curve where the needle will always cross the crack. The area under this curve is compared to the rest of the area the needle could have landed, estimating the chance the needle crossed a crack. The resulting ratio relates the length of the needle, the distance between the needle and the crack, and pi – a simple shuffling of variables yields an estimate of pi.

Now, if you were to drop a needle on a wooden floor yourself, it would take you thousands of attempts before you could reasonably calculate pi. That's because the ratio mentioned above is in the case of infinite attempts – in the real world, we are limited to the number of times we can drop a needle. Researchers at the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign developed a simulation to virtually drop needles and estimate pi. On this Pi Day, try it out to see how close you can get to pi using Buffon’s Needle.

When I started studying to become a particle physicist, I noticed that π appeared not only in math courses, but also in almost every subject covered in each physics class. From the coil of a spring to the properties of light, pi shows up again and again, no matter what. To celebrate Pi Day, I want to take you on a brief quantum journey.

In the early 1900’s, quantum mechanics was arising as a way to explain the mysterious behavior of elementary particles, such as photons and electrons. That's when researchers came up with the concept of wave–particle duality, the idea that particles could behave as both indivisible pieces of matter and astonishingly, as waves. A fundamental fact of nature.

A wave can be thought of as a repeating oscillation. Picture a clock. Every 60 seconds, the hands complete a revolution and covers a 360 degree angle, or, in units of radians, 2π. 

The period of the rotation would then be 60 seconds, and the angular frequency, corresponding to the angular displacement per unit time, would be 2π divided by 60 seconds. So, even if the clock’s hands are following a circular path, their movement can be described by a wave.

Elementary particles like electrons, photons, and quarks have all the properties of waves, like wavelengths and angular frequencies. It is natural to find the number pi in many equations within the quantum mechanics framework that describe the behavior of these particles.

The Heinsenberg uncertainty principle is a beautiful example of the consequences of the particles' wave-like nature. It essentially states the curious fact that we can't simultaneously measure both the position and velocity of a particle . The more accurate the measurement of either of the two variables is, the more uncertain the other one gets. In fact, exact position and velocity have no meaning at all in the quantum realm. Although the implications of this principle are extremely complex, the equation that describes it is a very simple one that depends, you guessed it, on π. 

From the circumference of a circle to quantum mechanics, pi plays a crucial role in our understanding of nature.