Lab Notes

Like many quantities in science, we can never determine the value of π exactly, but we can approximate it. You can even estimate π yourself with candy and a piece of paper.

Start by drawing a square. Let’s make it 8.5 inches long on each side so it fills up the width of a standard sheet of office paper. Now, draw a circle with a diameter of 8.5 inches within that square. 

Now we need something to drop onto the drawing, like grains of rice or M&Ms. Begin by covering the square and circle with the objects and then count the number that are within the circle and the total number of objects. From this information, we can estimate the value of π. We can calculate the area of a circle with π r², where r is the radius (the distance from the center of the circle to the outside). Based on how we drew the circle and square, the square will have a side length of 2r, so the area will be (2r)² or 4r². 

Back to the M&Ms: to guess how many of the dropped candies will land inside the circle, we can calculate the ratio of the circle’s area to the square’s area: (π r²)/4r² = π/4. When I tried this with 100 M&Ms, I found that 78 of them were inside the circle and 22 of them were outside the circle but inside the square. This means 78% of the total M&Ms landed in the circle. From our ratio calculations, we estimated that π/4 candies would land within the circle. Now, we can compare the fraction of the M&Ms that landed in the circle to the theoretical number to estimate π. Doing so, we find π/4 = 0.78 so π is about 3.12. The actual value of π is 3.14159265…. so our result isn’t a bad approximation. If we wanted to get a better estimate, we could use a lot more M&Ms and a much bigger drawing.

Of course, counting all the M&Ms takes a long time, so using more than a few hundred M&Ms isn’t practical. Instead of actually dropping M&Ms onto a square and circle, we could write a computer program to simulate dropping thousands or even millions of candies onto a circle and square and counting them up. The computer can “drop” and count a million M&Ms in a matter of seconds. When I tried this, I found that 785,389 of the 1 million simulated M&Ms landed within the circle, leading to an estimated value of 3.141556, which is even closer to the true value of pi than our estimate using only 100 M&Ms. 

This is only one of many ways to approximate π. Nevertheless, this is a simple way to estimate π with just regular household materials.

We are excited to announce a new partnership with Two Photon, a small company that makes science art. In addition to creating enamel pins, jewelry, and other cool products, they also provide small grants for people starting new science communication projects. 

As you probably know, members of the Massive consortium write two articles for publication during their training. These first two articles are unpaid, which is where Two Photon comes in! They'll be providing grants for a small group of prospective writers with little or no previous experience to participate in Massive's science writing training. Two Photon grantees, known as Photon Fellows, will be paid for their first two training articles, which will make it possible for them to participate without doing any unpaid work. If you're interested in being one of the writers supported by Two Photon, join our consortium! You can use the code TwoPhoton to waive the fee. Once you're in the consortium, you'll find links to the Photon Fellows interest form. We're really looking forward to the articles that come out of this partnership.

We're also stocking a few Two Photon items in the Massive Science Shop! Check out the purple brain pins, Scientist necklaces, flask pins, and Science is for Everyone pins (click the giant brain picture below). And don't forget to pre-order a science tarot deck soon! All the proceeds from our shop go back into supporting our mission.

Massive and Two Photon have a lot in common: we both have small teams that appreciate science and art equally and believe science is for everyone. Thanks for supporting both of us!

We've spent the last few months getting our Kickstarter rewards shipping out to backers and prepping our tarot cards for production. Now that we've figured out the basics of order fulfillment—and let me tell you, international shipping is like opening twenty cans of worms—we're excited to take the next step forward and open the Massive Science Shop.

The first things we're putting up for sale are the Kickstarter rewards that weren't claimed by our backers. If you missed backing our campaign back in October, this is your second (and last!) chance to get one of our limited edition Women of Science Tarot Decks. We're only making 500, and over half have already been claimed by our backers. Make sure to pre-order yours before they're all gone.

In addition, we've got a regular edition of our tarot card deck, our sticker packs, and our postcard set up for sale right now. We'll put up our Women of Science posters for sale once they're ready.

But, most importantly, we want to know what you want to see in our shop. We've got a bunch of different ideas so far—books we've reviewed, oh-so-trendy enameled pins, all manners of swag sporting the Massive Science logo—and we want to know what we should focus on. Fill out the poll on our shop page to let us know what you want to see!

Finally, all of this wouldn't be possible without the incredible support of our Kickstarter backers. They proved that people really want to see more imaginative representations of science exist in the world. Their support has not only helped us not just bring this one project into existence, but also helped us lay the groundwork to continue realizing new projects like it in the future. To all of our backers: thank you!

Helia Bravo Hollis was a plant researcher in Mexico, one of few women working in biology in the 1930s. Two species of plants, Ariocarpus bravoanus and Opuntia bravoana, were named to honor her.

She died in 2001, just before her 100th birthday. I'm a huge fan of hers because Latina women are underrepresented in the history of science and because I love desert plants. Also, mid-century field clothes were pretty cool. She did all her fieldwork in a skirt!

Hamilton was a software engineer before the position was even existed—in fact, she's the one who coined the term. She was one of the first people who distinguished software engineering as a legitimate field worthy of respect.

In the 1960s, she led the team that developed the in-flight software for the Apollo missions. Her team's hand-written software played a critical role in landing the astronauts of Apollo 11 on the moon, one of the first times a computer was trusted with the real-time execution of a mission-critical task.

Poly- and  perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs) repel both oil and water. So, as Anna Robuck wrote last fall:

"...PFASs are everywhere: fire-fighting foams, nonstick cookware like  Teflon, stain-resistant carpet, water-resistant clothing, food  packaging, compostable plates, some cosmetics, and other consumer  products that repel oil, grease, or water." 

They're ubiquitous, and because of that, they end up in our bodies. Now, the European Food Safety Authority says that humans can tolerate approximately...*pulls out adding machine*....99.9% of what they've been exposed to in the past. 

In respone to this news, Robuck shared her thoughts: 

 "Ugh. Add this to the very-recent news that the US will refuse to set drinking water limits for these compounds. 

My family lives near DuPont HQ, and some back of the envelope  calculations suggest they (we) are drinking the weekly limit suggested  in your link over the course of about three hours."

My favorite part of the science I do is field work. I fell in love with the study of geology because of all the field trips my classes took to mountains, road-side outcrops, and sand dunes on Lake Michigan, and the time spent wading in rivers and lakes. I never imagined, though, that I would spend my graduate studies crawling around underground in caves! I had been in so-called "show caves", like Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. But, they didn't prepare me for the thrill (and scariness) of crawling and climbing through the remote and unmodified caves central to my fieldwork.

My fieldwork in caves consists of cave monitoring, where we frequently visit the caves and measure their CO2 levels and temperature, and collect water from inside the cave to analyze back in our lab. We monitor the caves in the modern climate system, so we can better understand what they might be able tell us about past climate. The cave pictured here is Waipuna Cave in New Zealand's North Island, where we have cave deposits that serve as climate archives for the past 30,000 years. I've learned to love caves for both the awesome science they allow me to do, and their beauty. How can I not be inspired?

We asked our community whether or not the partial shutdown of the federal government, which has stretched into its second month, was having an impact on their research. One of our members is a former USDA researcher and helped illustrate the consequences of the shutdown on the government's scientific research. They asked to remain anonymous, citing limits on unauthorized statements imposed on scientists by the administration.

When it comes to agriculture research conducted by the USDA, they told us how a shutdown means the living things are not getting regular care. Plant research is often seasonal and so certain experiments need to be done at set seasonal times. If the few personnel allowed on station aren't capable of watering everything. Plants and insect colonies which aren't cared for could die. As a result, year-long projects could be irreparably lost.

Volcanoes of New Zealand are important figures in Māori (New Zealand's indigenous people) culture. When European exploration of New Zealand began in the early 1700's many places and landmarks were renamed, replacing their original Māori names. One such name change was Mount Taranaki, a volcano central in Māori legends with other mountains in the Tongariro National Park. Taranaki was renamed Mount Egmont by a Dutch explorer in 1770, and was taken by the British Crown in 1865. In 1986, Mount Taranaki (then Mount Egmont) was officially renamed "Mount Egmont or Mount Taranki" by the Lands Minister at the time, although the New Zealand Geographic Board had unanimously voted to return its name to Mount Taranaki months prior. In December 2017, eight iwi (people or nations of New Zealand) Taranaki officially signed an agreement with the Crown to begin the process of giving Mount Taranaki legal personality, meaning Mount Taranaki would have legal ownership over itself. Upon legalization, Taranaki will join Te Urewera and the Whanganui River, both of which have had legal identity since 2014.

What we know:

• Dr. Jiankiu He, a scientist in China claims to have edited the genome of two human embryos, which were then implanted and given birth to by their mother as twins, dubbed Lulu and Nana.
• Dr. He says he edited the CCR5 gene, in order to provide the embryos with resistance to HIV infection. Jiankiu He says he did this because the father of the twins carried HIV. A version of CCR5 (CCR5-Δ32), mainly found in Northern European genomes, is known to confer immunity to certain variants of HIV. 
• Based on Dr. He’s presentation at the 2nd International Summit on Human Gene Editing this week, one of the two embryos did not have all its cells edited, as a result it is not clear that this baby will have resistance to HIV. The other embryo has only a single-copy of CCR5 edited (humans have two copies of all genes), and the resulting edited gene is not yet known to confer resistance to HIV. It is possible that neither of the two babies will have resistance to HIV. It would certainly be unethical to test this!
• There are other ways, such as sperm washing during IVF, to prevent HIV transmission from father to off-spring.
• Dr. He also detected an “off-target” edit, i.e. another region of the genome that was edited by the CRISPR technology used. He suggested that this was unlikely to result in any adverse medical outcomes.
• He’s experiment was performed in secrecy. His former employer has denied involvement in the trial. 
• The informed consent form used by Dr. He appears to be misleading in terms of the risks involved.
• Dr. He claims to have followed the recommendations of the US National Academies report on human gene-editing. However, his trial doesn’t seem to have followed several of these recommendations (highlighted below) and may yet ignore others. 

• Dr. He says he’s in the process of submitting a scientific manuscript for publication.
• His experiment drew immediate criticism in China, with over a hundred scientists signing a letter decrying his work as unethical.

What we don’t yet know:

• The role of He’s collaborator, Michael Deem, a professor of bioengineering at Rice University in the US.
• There are media reports of a PR firm hired by He, but there’s no clarity about the role of this firm.
• As of now it is still unclear which research institutions, which medical doctors, and which hospitals were involved in this project. 
• The funding for the trial is still unclear. It appears to have been funded through He’s personal funds as well as funding from the Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commission according to the clinical trial registration in China. The commission however has claimed to have never funded this project. 
• Documents showing ethics approval from the Shenzhen HOME Women’s and Children’s Hospital appeared on social media. However the hospital seems to have lodged a complaint suggesting this form was forged. We need to learn more about the ethics and approvals pipeline followed by He. 
• Dr. He has pledged to follow up with the health of the babies for the first 18 years of their life, however there is no information about who would be involved in this effort, nor what kind of tests this will involve, or how the results would be reported.
• We do not yet know if the edits on the genome of the two babies will have any adverse effects. Some scientists have suggested that the method He used to screen the embryos for off-targets were insufficient. We will just have to wait and hope the babies do not suffer due to the editing. 

From Nature:

Researchers from MIT have flown a plane powered by an ‘ion drive’ for the first time. The drive uses high powered electrodes to ionise and accelerate air particles, creating an ‘ionic wind’. This wind drove a 5m wide craft across a sports hall. Unlike the ion drives which have powered space craft for decades, this new drive uses air as its accelerant. The researchers say it could power silent drones.

Check out this video featuring Steven Barrett, the researcher who led the team:

This first flight made it about as far as the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk. While it seems infeasible for passenger flights, it does have the potential to create a new class of small, silent, and clean drone aircraft.

In the US, food regulation is split in two. As they put it, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates most "food or food additives" in the US, including the production, packaging, labeling, and sale of food besides meat and poultry. Meat and poultry are regulated by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The USDA regulates the production, slaughter, and sale of all meat and meat products. These agency's joint decision on cell-based meats will treat these new products as different things at different points along the process of turning cells into meat.

The FDA will oversee the growth and production of cells. At harvest time, when the cells are collected to be turned into meat, regulation will transfer to the USDA. The decision can be seen as a win for the companies that make cell based meat, which advocated for a similar set up in a letter to the White House in August.

To learn more about the growing field of cellular agriculture, read Massive's free report on the state of this research.

Last month the scientific exploration ship Nautilus has discovered the largest deep-sea octopus nursery, with over 1,000 octopus. 

"We went down the eastern flank of this small hill, and that's when - boom - we just started seeing pockets of dozens here, dozens there, dozens everywhere," King told National Geographic.

It's wonderful to hear the un-self-conscious enthusiasm of these researchers as they discover the nursery.

Follow along with the Nautilus on Twitter and their ship's ongoing livestream.

This is a great piece:

“In 1983, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared the Bunker Hill Mine and smelter complex the nation’s second-largest Superfund site. The agency has been a presence in the valley ever since. Today, after 35 years and almost $900 million in cleanup costs, Bunker Hill’s tailings heap still oozes 400 pounds of toxic metals a day into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River. Tundra swans still flap and stagger in the marshes. After picking up more mine waste downstream, the river dumps almost 400 tons of lead and 700 tons of zinc into Lake Coeur d’Alene every year.”

Meanwhile, in England, extremophile microbiologist and Consortium scientist Dr. Rose Jones is figuring out how to clean up toxic mining waste with microbes.

Our microbiome, the collective genomes of the microbes that live inside our digestive systems, has been linked to multiple facets of our health, from cancer to depression and everything in between. However, before you go recommending one probiotic over another, you might want to read ahead.

Large studies have revealed significant variation between the gut microbiome of both healthy individuals and those with health conditions, making it hard to identify associations between the gut microbiome and a person’s health. However, thanks to two recent studies (one in Amsterdam and one in Guangdong, China), the reasons for this variation are now clearer. The two studies showed that both ethnicity and geography are key factors in determining the gut microbiome. It gets even more complicated: most of the current knowledge about the connections between the microbiome and health come from studies of European and North American populations.

This new research highlights the importance of being careful when applying data about the gut microbiome to different groups of people: clearly, one size does not fit all. However, researchers still don’t know why differences in the gut microbiome are associated with ethnicity and geography. We’ll need to untangle the influence of genetics, cultural norms, and diet if we want to develop personalized microbiome-based treatments.

Purple sea urchins are eating all the kelp in California. But in Pittsburgh, hundreds of miles from the ocean, we order them in the mail.

They arrive wrapped in wet newspaper with pieces of seaweed to snack on. We keep them in tanks, next to some sea star buddies, and study how they grow skeletons. When we're done, we bleach them (the university considers them a biohazard) and save them as extremely fragile decorations.

💀 You can estimate a person’s age from their skeleton (specifically, from how many/which bones have fused growth plates) — and the more skeletal bones you have, the better your age estimate! 

🧛🏼‍♂️ Bioarchaeologists recently excavating a 17th-18th century cemetery in Poland have found graves of “suspected vampires” — people the locals interred with iron sickles or with rocks under their chins, to keep them from rising and feeding on the living. 

🔪 Paleoanthropologists have found cut-marked Neanderthal bones at a number of Neanderthal sites. The placement of these marks suggests that individuals were dismembered and de-fleshed — a likely indicator of cannibalism. 

👻 Happy Halloween! 🎃

One of the most famous volcanoes of New Zealand is Mount Ngauruhoe, which some may recognize as Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings. The largely accepted translation of its Māori (New Zealand's indigenous people) name is "throwing hot stones," characterizing its active volcanism. Ngauruhoe isn't actually a volcano on its own, but rather a cone of the larger Tongariro Volcanic Complex, which resides in the Tongariro National Park.

Ngauruhoe is a stratovolcano, which means its built of alternating layers of lava and ash. The type of lava that erupts from Ngauruhoe cools and hardens relatively quickly after eruption and piles closely around the volcano, a behavior that gives Nagauruhoe and other stratovolcanoes their iconic cone shape.

Recent studies suggest Ngauruhoe began forming 7,000 years ago. There is a long Māori verbal record of eruption activity and 60 events since written records began in 1839. Ngauruhoe was erupting roughly every 9 years until its last eruption in 1975. Today New Zealand-based research teams actively monitor the seismic and chemical activity of Ngauruhoe. 

The short answer is no. Our planet's changing climate did not cause Florence to form, but it's definitely not making things any easier. Because of increased air and water temperatures, hurricanes can carry more rain onto land than they used to. That makes flooding an even more pressing threat. In addition to being wetter, hurricanes are also larger: a brand-new (not yet peer-reviewed) analysis released yesterday showed that the diameter of Florence is 50 miles (80 km) larger because of the influence of climate change. Analyses completed after landfall will have more information about how warming temperatures are influencing big storms, but for now, scientists will continue to watch and wait.