The chinchillas will belong to the education department and will be used to help our guests learn about all kinds of different animal characteristics, from feeding to habitat and everything in between. Chinchillas hail from South America and are crepuscular rodents. The term crepuscular refers to animals who are most active around twilight. Unfortunately, Chinchillas are often used for their fur, to make coats and hats and other accessories. These two youngins will never have to worry about meeting such a fate though, as the only place they’ll be worn is possibly on a staff member’s shoulder.

The last thing to do is to think of names for the little guys. The entire staff has submitted entries and here are the top five choices:

-Coil & Spring
-Nano & Pico
-Wilbur & Orville
-Milo & Otis
-Issac & Albert

All votes will be counted by the end of the day Tuesday! Check back to find out what their new names will be!

For more information please visit our website:

http://www.mdsci.org/exhibits/davinci.html

Stay tuned for the next traveling exhibit: GPS Adventures! It finds its way here on Saturday, February 20th.

http://www.mdsci.org/exhibits/GPS.html

“We made a new version of a nanocar that looks like a dragster,” said James Tour, a chemist at Rice University who was involved in the research. “It has smaller front wheels on a shorter axle and bigger back wheels on a longer axle.”

The miniscule vehicle is about 50,000 times thinner than a human hair and is pushed along by heat or an electric field.
Spherical molecules called buckyballs made of 60 carbon atoms each serve as the big rear wheels. Due to chemical attractions, these wheels nicely grip the “dragstrip,” which is made of a superfine layer of gold rather than pavement. For the front wheels, the scientists opted for a less sticky compound called p-carborane.

Tour’s group built nanocars before with buckyballs as all four wheels, but these autos hug the road too tightly and require temperatures around 400 degrees Fahrenheit to get rolling. Nanocars with all p-carbonane wheels, on the other hand, slip and slide as if on ice, said Tours, making them difficult to image and study.

By incorporating both wheel types, the nanodragster can cruise at lower temperatures with greater agility and range of motion.

Microscopic auto-body shop
To make the new nanodragster, Tour’s team started with a previously built, off-the-shelf short axle and front wheel unit in their lab, which is sort of a nano-Monster Garage. They then chemically hooked this up to a pair of aligned hydrocarbon molecules called phenylene-ethynylene—the vehicle’s chassis. The rear axle came next and finally the buckyball wheels went on.

Once the new nanocar gets rolling, it can reach speeds of up to nine nanomiles, or 0.014 millimeters (.0005 inches), per hour, which is relatively fast for their size, said Tour.

The tiny hot rods can also do tricks. “Because the front wheels don’t stick to the surface as strongly, they’re more prone to lift up, so [the nanodragster] does seem to pop a wheelie at times,” Tour told TopTenREVIEWS.

By learning how to drive nanovehicles, Tour hopes to pave the way for small but technologically useful structures, such as electronics, that could be built atom-by-atom .

The research appeared in a recent issue of the journal Organic Letters.

msnbc.com
American Chemical Society

http://www.mdsci.org/events-calendar/events/Starball.html

Scientists from Harvard University recently demonstrated a way to catch and release light—but it’s not easy. In other words, no one will be using the new method to play a game of catch with flashlight beams anytime soon. The researchers were able to build a trap that held light for about 1.5 seconds. That may not seem like much time to hold anything, but 1.5 seconds is enough time for light from the moon to reach Earth.

Lene Hau is the physicist who led this study of how to stop and release light. Physicists study matter, energy and motion. In the case of Hau’s experiment, she had to use her knowledge of all three.

The light trap wasn’t built from normal materials. Hau and her team instead used a material called a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. This material is unusual because it does not represent any of matter’s usual states: solid, liquid or gas. It’s not even a plasma, the fourth state of matter found in high-energy experiments and on the sun.

Instead, BECs are a fifth state of matter. They exist only at the coldest possible temperatures, a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. (Absolute zero is the coldest possible temperature in the universe. It’s so cold that not even atoms can move around.) BECs are one of the strangest known materials. Solids, liquids, gases and plasmas are all made up of individual atoms. But when some materials are cooled to almost absolute zero, their atoms seem to collapse into one teeny-tiny blob, and that blob is called a BEC.

The scientists used a BEC to stop light in a way similar to the game of Gossip (also known as Telephone, or Whisper Down the Lane). It’s an easy game to play: One person whispers a message to a second person, who listens. That person then turns to a third person and passes on the message. The third person should now have the same message as the one sent by the first person (though it might be slightly different). In Hau’s experiment, the light is like the message, and the BEC is like the person in the middle — who hears the message and then passes it on.

Hau and her team fired a pulse of light into a BEC — so they had to do their experiment at very cold temperatures — and the light changed a small group of atoms. These changed atoms (called an imprint) dug a little hole for themselves in the BEC — like a footprint. The research team then turned off a control laser, which made the light’s footprint “sit” in the BEC. “It can snugly sit there for long periods of time,” Hau told Science News.

The scientists waited for 1.5 seconds and then turned the control laser back on. When they did, the trapped light pulse came out of the BEC.

Just as the message at the end of the game of Gossip might be slightly different than it was at the beginning, the light pulse was a little weaker than it was when it started. And just as the middle person in Gossip uses the memory of the message she has stored in her brain to pass the message on, the BEC uses the imprint to transmit the pulse of light.

Finding new ways to control light might pave the way for the development of technology that uses light to store and transmit information. Researchers have been working on ways to stop and release light for years, but the Harvard team says its approach is better in some ways than attempts in the past. Another physicist, Irina Novikova, who works at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., said that Hau’s work is a “beautiful demonstration” of how it is possible to catch light for a long period of time before releasing it

sciencenewsforkids.com

Scientists previously thought the taste of bubbles comes from the bubbles bursting on the tongue — but that idea may have to change, says Charles Zuker. A neuroscientist, or a scientist who studies the brain and nervous system, Zuker is now at Columbia University in New York. He and his team of researchers studied the nervous systems of mice to understand how the tongue tastes carbon dioxide, which is the gas that makes up the bubbles.

In the experiment, five different groups of mice were genetically engineered to be missing one taste sensation. (“Genetically engineered” means the researchers were able to turn off the switches for certain tastes by altering the responsible genes.) The mice in one group were bred so that they could not taste sweet. In another group, the mice could not taste sour. In the other three groups, the mice could not taste umami, or salty or bitter.

When the scientists gave carbon dioxide gas to the mice, the nervous systems of the rodents in four groups responded to carbon dioxide. But for mice that could not taste sour, their nervous systems did not show any sign of tasting carbon dioxide.

This tipped off the researchers to the connection between sourness and bubbles. When the scientists turned off the sour taste in the mice genes, they also turned off the ability to taste carbon dioxide.

The scientists then zoomed in on the sour taste. Animals like mice or human beings are able to detect different tastes by using taste buds, located near the surface of the tongue. A taste bud is a group of 50 to 150 cells called taste receptors. (Under a microscope, this bundle of cells looks a little like a big bunch of bananas.) The tips of the taste receptor cells pick up tastes in the mouth, and then send that information to the brain.

When they studied the cells that detect sourness, Zuker and his colleagues found a protein, attached to the sour-sensing cells, that is crucial to the process of tasting carbon dioxide. When carbon dioxide comes into contact with this protein, the protein knocks off particles called protons. These protons, in turn, stimulate the sour cells.

So when a mouse — or person — drinks a fizzy drink, there’s a one-two punch. First, the protein knocks off protons. Second, the protons stimulate the sour-sensing cells —and the brain says, “Hey! That’s a taste!”

That may seem like a lot of work to get from a can of soda to a taste — but the science of the senses is anything but simple. Taste “is a very challenging system to study,” Alexander Bachmanov, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, told Science News. “Everything is very small but very complex.”

sciencenewsforkids.org
photo: J. Chandrashekar et al./Science AAAS 2009

Team WorldFirst has stepped it up a notch and has created the first Formula-3 car (with a top speed of 145mph) made almost entirely of vegetables.

The steering wheel is made of carrots, the bodywork crafted from potatoes, and it has a soybean seat. In addition, all lubrication is provided by plant-based oils and greases. It also includes a biodiesel power plant, which can operate off chocolate extracts or vegetable oil.

The car is not legal in the Formula-3 racing circuit due to its chocolate-based fuel. However, the team’s project manager, James Meredith, has other goals in mind for the vehicle. He said:

It’s been very exciting working on the project and important for our team to develop a working example of a truly green motor racing car. The WorldFirst project expels the myth that performance needs to be compromised when developing the sustainable motor vehicles of the future.

The vehicle is not made out of raw vegetables. Instead, their fibers and chemicals are broken down and reformed into usable compounds.

The process is not new. It’s similar to the way George Washington Carver used peanuts to create a vivid form of blue paint — by mixing a certain type of peanut extract with sulfuric acid. And in the 1920s, Henry Ford built prototype car components (dashboards, doors, passenger compartments, etc.) out of hemp-derived plastics.

Forget drinking a glass of milk at the end of the race, I’m gunning for the gear knob, which is reportedly made out of cherries. Yummy!

geek.com/daily telegraph.com

The particular drug in question is called ketoprofen and is basically the equivalent of ibuprofen for humans. In India, some farmers give ketoprofen to their cattle to reduce pain and swelling. Unfortunately what is helpful to cattle certainly is not helpful to vultures. Vultures are essentially nature’s janitors. They prove to be quite handy (or beaky?) when an animal dies so that the farmer does not have to worry about disposing of the body. They’re serious, too! A large group of vultures could take care of a carcass in about 20 minutes.

Scientists found out the hard way that certain cattle drugs are quite detrimental to vultures and birds in general. Because of a lack of knowledge, three vulture species are near extinction. Luckily more and more research is being done and now laws are being passed in India making it illegal for farmers to give their cattle ketoprofen.

Just a gentle reminder not to give your Excedrin to the cat (or any pet for that matter). You never know what will happen and it might not be pleasant!

Also keep an eye out for the Blue Moon this evening. When two full moons happen in the same month, the second is called the “Blue Moon.” This astronomical phenomenon is truly special because we have not had one since 1990 and will not have another one for another 18 years! To be a little more specific, Blue Moons happen every 2.5 years or so, but NYE Blue Moons are fare more rare (we’ll see the next one in 2028). So no matter what your plans are for the evening, be sure peek towards the night sky and take in the history. Do not expect the moon to actually be blue, though. The name has nothing to do with the color of our celestial neighbor. Here in Maryland, the moon should be nearly right above us and is expected to be quite brilliant. Yet another great reason to stay up past your bedtime this New Year’s Eve!

Happy Holidays!

cbc.ca