Short on time today? Welcome to a 12-second blog. Pamelia and I saw the video above yesterday as part of astrophysicist Brian Keating's entertaining and enlightening guest lecture at Dartmouth, which included a description of Brian's work measuring cosmic microwave background radiation from observing stations in Antarctica. More soon on our stellar trip to Hanover and how that led us to John Coltrane, the inside of a 150-year-old observatory, the Appalachian Trail and former New York Mets second baseman Tim Teufel. For now, click on the video and enjoy a little Antarctic slapstick.
Pamelia spent last evening in the studio creating this starry, starry sky and others.
Why Is Pamelia Painting a Billion Stars?
O.K., so maybe she won't paint a billion. Her still-troublesome neck/brachial plexus/arm problem likely wouldn't let her do so, and The Naturalist's Notebook is only so big. But Pamelia has begun inventing and experimenting with paint, paper, fabric and collage to produce an artistic rendering of the universe for a portion of this year's Notebook. (Do any of you remember an old Creedence Clearwater Revival album called Cosmo's Factory? Pamelia is turning her studio into a Cosmos Factory.)
Part of her method was to invent a multi-brush painting tool by sticking small brushes into one of those green foam blocks used in flower arranging.
She's speeding up the process. Actual stars form over the course of millions of years when particles of dust and gas collide, unite and start pulling in more particles through gravity. This eventually creates enough heat inside the new body to turn hydrogen into helium (a nuclear fusion reaction) and release huge amounts of energy. We see that energy as sunlight or starlight, feel it as the Sun's warmth, or study it through various types of telescopes, some of which see and measure things that humans can't: the X-rays, ultraviolet rays, infrared rays, gamma rays, radio waves and other forms of energy that stars emit.
If you have ever seen a photo of the Orion nebula, like the one below taken by the Hubble telescope, then you have seen a place where the aforementioned process is taking place. It's what astronomers sometimes call a "star factory." This nebula, a mere 1,500 light years away, is the star factory closest to Earth.
The Orion nebula, where stars are forming at this very moment.
As part of the sky image, Pamelia is creating a Milky Way that will lead Notebook visitors from deep space and the Big Bang to our solar system.
Not bad for a quick experiment in universe-buildiing!
Pamelia and I will be talking about stars and the Notebook over the next week in meetings at Dartmouth, Harvard and MIT. Stay tuned!
The Notebook's New Specimens I've been meaning to tell you about the black drumfish dental plate, the alligator scutes and the shark-tooth fossils. Bruce Lampright, the South Carolina naturalist who visited the Notebook last October with other advance scouts from the 2013 Family Nature Summit—a nature vacation group that has chosen to come to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park for its week of fun activities this July (not too late to sign up: http://www.familysummits.org/index.php)—generously donated to us some specimens he collected in his home state. You'll be able to see them at the Notebook this summer. Here are a few photos:
This is the lower jaw of a black drum fish. Note the unusual dental plate. Drum fish use that when crushing the shells of sea creatures they are devouring.
These circles of bones are dermal scutes from an alligator, which serve as body armor.
These are fossilized shark's teeth dating back 40 million years. Bruce says that they are from snaggletooth and megatooth sharks.
We're All Suckers for Cute Bear Cubs A friend forwarded this Canadian TV segment about tagging bears. It's a little goofy at times, but it is a rare look at the process, and the cubs—which are pulled out of the den along with their still-asleep mother!—will make you go, Awwwwww....
Mind you, if we're really looking to protect bear populations, we might want to let the bears pull us humans out of bed and fit us with monitoring collars that warn them when we're coming.
Seals On Ice I posted the photo below on The Naturalist's Notebook's Facebook page this week after Pamelia and I saw some of the seals who live near our house floating past on ice chunks. We've seen the seals do this every year, but usually a couple of weeks later in the season. Given that there was a full moon the night before the seal sighting, and that the moon affects the height of the tides, and that a very high tide might dislodge chunks of ice along shorelines, we wondered whether the timing of this event is linked to full moons. We'll have to pay attention to that starting in February 2014, right after I return home to Maine from Russia and the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Seals sunning in front of our house.
Today's Puzzler Thanks to Notebook correspondent LJ for passing along the below photos from snowy western Maine. Can you identify the animals that made each set of tracks? (And, if you live in snow country, do you have any track photos you'd like to share with us?)
Who made this track?
a) Wolf b) Fox c) Coyote
How about these?
a) Bobcat b) Dog c) Rabbit
How about these TWO sets of tracks?
a) Hare and mouse b) Squirrel and vole c) Fox and hen
More than 1,000 elephant seals were sunning on the beach.
Elephant Seals, Migrant Monarchs, Shadow Art...And a Ladder Accident
As Pamelia and I drove south along the coast from Berkeley to the University of California at Irvine last week, we stopped to study more than 1,000 Northern elephant seals at the Piedras Blancas rookery near San Simeon. More than 17,000 of the seals winter there, a startling number when you consider that by the late 1800s, the hunting of elephant seals for oil had reduced the population to about 100. (Sad to say, people back then looked at elephant seals as an industrial commodity rather than as highly-evolved mammals; the blubber of one 5,000-pound male could produce a whopping 25 gallons of lamp and machine oil.)
Can we pause to talk about the science and danger of ladders? My dad, who's 85 and very safety-minded, was climbing down a ladder at my parents' house in Connecticut the day after the recent blizzard when the two forces that make ladders hazardous—gravity and friction—conspired against him. He's lucky to be alive today.
Worried that the weight of two-plus feet of snow (soon to be sodden by an approaching rainstorm) might cause the flat roof of the garage to collapse, Dad took out the extension ladder, propped it against the front of the garage and climbed up with a snow shovel. (He is not your average 85-year-old, and to him, this was just another day of doing what he does all the time.) As he cleared the snow off, he started getting hot and decided to climb down and grab a lighter jacket from the house. He was on his way down when the foot of the ladder slipped (not enough friction between it and the paved driveway) and Dad fell (gravity at work).
Only the male seals have the elephant-trunk-like snouts, which they use to roar during mating season. (All of the seals tend to make rude belching noises.) Most of the elephant seals on the beach were either females or pups.
I'm relieved to report that my dad suffered "only" a fractured vertebra (i.e., a broken back), strained muscles and major bruising and is at home recovering. Pamelia and I have known several other people (all of them intelligent, older men, and most of them engineers and scientists, interestingly enough) who have either died or been permanently disabled in falls from ladders. In the last nine months two male friends of ours have broken, respectively, a wrist, and an arm and leg in ladder falls.
My father didn't happen to have anyone on hand to hold the ladder on the day of his fall. Pamelia and I were stranded in California by a blizzard-canceled flight, and my mom was inside, unaware he was trying to get down. He thought it would be a routine descent. I guess the lesson is, it's great to be a do-it-yourselfer, but when a ladder is involved, no matter how experienced or athletic you are, don't be a do-it-all-by-yourselfer. Scientific forces can be unforgiving.
The elephant seals have short flippers.
See those marks on the seal's belly? Those are bites from small sharks called cookiecutter sharks.
A naturalist on the beach showed us a photo of a cookie-cutter shark.
Pamelia during the first of our two visits to the elephant seal rookery near San Simeon.
Seven (of the Countless) Miscellaneous But Interesting Things We Learned On Our Trip1) Elephant-seal milk is the consistency of mayonnaise. Sea gulls hang out on the beach and try to slurp up any drops of the high-fat glop that a pup fails to catch.
2) You've got a lot less water in you as an adult than you had as a child. See photo below, from the San Diego Museum of Natural History.
This sign made me think: If your body keeps producing new skin cells even as you grow old (which it does), why does it produce new skin cells that look like old skin?
3) Monarch butterflies like Pismo Beach, California, even better than Bugs Bunny did. Until about a week ago, my only knowledge of Pismo Beach was that Bugs often made references to it in his cartoons, usually when popping out of a rabbit hole in an exotic location ("I must have made a wrong turn at Pismo Beach!"). Then I read that Pismo Beach and other nearby spots on the central California coast are the migration destinations for the millions of monarchs that live west of the Rocky Mountains. And so Pamelia and I made a stop there and saw an estimated 20,000 monarchs—some fluttering, most snuggled together on the underside of branches. The photos really don't do the place justice.
Home of the Pismo Beach monarchs.
4) Fred Urquhart was a hero. While watching a monarch documentary at the Fleet Science Center in San Diego a few days after visiting Pismo, I learned that Urquhart, a zoologist who grew up in Ontario, spent his entire adult life trying to figure out where monarchs that live east of the Rocky Mountains migrate every fall. Suffice it to say that Pamelia and I were both in tears by the time the film showed a dramatization of Urquart, after four decades of work and setbacks with his wife always at his side helping him, finally finding the migration spot, in the mountains of central Mexico. Watch the documentary if you can find it. It's called Flight of the Butterflies.
A particular grove of eucalyptus trees in Pismo Beach was filled with monarchs.
Some of the monarchs had migrated more than 1,000 miles, and none had ever made the trip before. The route is built into their genetic programming, and they make use of clues from ultraviolet light (which humans can't see), among other factors, to find their way to the destination.
The monarchs packed the undersides of the high branches.
5) Human shadow puppetry is fun. While visiting the beautiful and geologically interesting Sunset Cliffs with Pamelia and San DiegoUnion-Tribune science and technology writer Gary Robbins, I noticed that the cliffs were distorting, in funny ways, the shadows that we cast. So we started standing in silly poses. What can I say?
Sort of looks as though we were figure skating (badly).
Pamelia the pictogram.
The sandstone cliffs were aglow in the late-afternoon light when we started playing around.
How we did it.
5) The Hubble Telescope is traveling at 5 miles per second while circling 353 miles above the Earth. I think knowing those specifics helps you envision the amazing Hubble, which in the 23 years since its launch has literally and figuratively changed the way astronomers—and consequently, all of us—see the universe. By the way, the Hubble circles the planet every 97 minutes.
6) Astrophysicist/cosmologist James Bullock is as good a guy as he is an astronomer. And that's saying something. We met with James in his office at UC Irvine to talk about Naturalist's Notebook projects involving the Milky Way (in which he is a particular expert), the color spectrum and the 13.7-billion-year history of the universe. You've seen James if you've ever watched National Geographic's Inside the Milky Way or some other specials and series about space. He is the director of the five-university Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution besides being a UCI professor. You'll learn more about him and his work this summer at the Notebook.
James Bullock with us in his office. Don't even try to figure out the formulas on the white board.
7) Without little flies called midges, there would be no chocolate. If you know that, you can never really hate insects again. I learned the info at the San Diego Museum of Natural History in a show on the natural history of chocolate. Midges are responsible for almost all the pollination of cacao blossoms (bats sometimes help), which wilt if not pollinated within 24 hours.
This is how small a midge is.
This shows how cacao pods (the source of the seeds from which chocolate is made) grow on the tree.
Why it's good to keep a sketchbook with you when you're out walking: Pamelia did a fast drawing of a hummingbird we saw in the cactus garden at San Diego's Balboa Park. The bird seemed to be attracted to our orange sweaters.
Here's what she was sketching. Judging from the field guides, I think it's a female Costa's hummingbird, but please correct me if you know better.
She was not drawing on pink paper, but I took this photo in a museum theater where we were about to watch a documentary on migranting butterflies; the lighting was funky.
Any of you know what type of cactus this is? We saw it in the garden in Balboa Park.
Two long-billed curlews scoured the beach in Cambria.
I liked the pattern in these hens and chicks.
Hearst ranch cattle in front of Hearst Castle (hilltop in back).
Meteorites, Asteroids and Comets If in the aftermath of this week's Russian meteorite crash and the asteroid near-miss you're wondering about the differences between and among the types of large flying space objects, watch this video from the aforementioned Gary Robbins, science writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Answer to the Last Puzzler The photo showed parts of seed capsules, known as gumnuts, from a eucalyptus tree.
Today's Puzzler What strange type of dog did we see below in San Diego?
a) Hungarian Zsa Zsa Vizla b) Balboa Park Hoodle Poodle c) Hollywood Paparazzi Hound
What would you call this?
We arrived in late afternoon at Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, on the east side of San Francisco Bay.
Welcome to Pixar, Berkeley and the Fun Frontier of Astronomy
Pamelia was sitting on the hotel bed when she read the sentence aloud: "The 1960s had revolution in the air in music and politics, but arguably the most lasting change was the emergence of a new way of seeing the planet."
Those words, written by scientist Neil Shubin in his new book, The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People, seemed particularly appropriate as we settled into our room in Berkeley, a block from the University of California campus. Berkeley and Cal were at the epicenter of that 1960s cultural revolution, and today Cal scientists are (as they have been for more than 80 years) at the forefront of discovering new ways of seeing both our planet and the universe. Moreover, the "lasting change" Shubin was citing—that is, the widespread scientific acceptance that the Earth is covered by continental plates that constantly move and collide, and that "old" land is swallowed up and "new" land created along mid-ocean volcanic ridges in a sort of geological conveyor belt—explains how California developed its wrinkled, mountainous, earthquake-prone landscape.
Some of those ideas had been around for years, but in science as in other fields, new ideas aren't always immediately welcomed. Pamelia and I were hoping that on our visit to Berkeley—and neighboring Emeryville, home of Pixar studios—we would find scientists and artists willing to collaborate on some of our own new ideas.
In a plaza outside the Steve Jobs Building sits large model of Luxo Jr., one of the two table-lamp stars of Pixar's famous 1986 animated short of that same name, and now the symbol of the company. As you can see, Luxo Jr. lights up at night.
As you know from my last post and Facebook postings, we traveled from Maine to California to meet with experts who might collaborate with us on Naturalist's Notebook initiatives that merge science, nature and the arts in creative, educational ways. I'm happy to report that every person we have met with on the trip—from a funny, inventive authority on music and sound effects and paper theater to a top science writer to renowned astrophysicists to a primate researcher to a distinguished professor of literature—has come on board. They're excited and so are we. And in the Bay Area we added one of America's foremost astrophysicists, Cal professor Alex Filippenko, and an animation whiz from Pixar, Dan McCoy—both of them wonderful people on top of being experts in their field—to our efforts to inspire and enable people of all ages to embrace a love of learning and share in the discoveries at the frontier of knowledge.
Steve Jobs designed a large open space in the main HQ building to encourage interaction and creativity among the entire Pixar staff.
The last time I'd set foot on the Berkeley campus was in February of my senior year of college, when I was temporarily living in the Bay Area and writing my honors thesis for a school back East. I was allowed to use the Cal library to do some research. My recollection is that Berkeley felt a bit wilder and scruffier then than it does now; someone in fact told me before Pamelia and I drove up here from the San Diego leg of our trip that she would be eager to hear if I felt that Berkeley had become a "Disneyfied" version of its old radical self.
Pamelia with Dan McCoy, one of the wizards of Pixar. Dan (who once worked for NASA) was most recently the supervising technical director of the Oscar-nominated short La Luna, which was shown in theaters before Brave. He showed us a range of sketches, storyboards, sculptures, script pages and—I'm running out of S-words here—screen clips that illustrated the entire creative process behind Brave. Those banners hanging in the background have images linked to Brave.
I mentioned the Oscars right? These were the first ones Pamelia and I had ever seen in person.
I suppose that to some extent I did, but Pamelia and I loved wandering the town and the hilly campus, looking at the redwoods, watching the birds, seeing all the bear statues and painted footprints, and listening to students making comments to each other such as, "I'm still trying to figure out which direction the rings of Saturn spin..." and "I was reading Stephen Hawking..." and "I would go to WAR over Doritos..."
As darkness fell, we bid farewell to the Monsters, Inc., characters Sulley (left) and Mike.
The photos here are showing you some of the sights we saw, but scarcely begin to reflect the richness of the visit. In a few minutes we will be heading south along Route 1 to see elephant seals and find a place to celebrate Pamelia's birthday. However, we'll still be thinking about our Cal-Pixar experience.
At Cal we met with one of America's foremost astrophysicists, Alex Filippenko (center), who also happens to be a wonderful guy and an amazing teacher. Students have voted him Cal's Best Professor a record nine times, and he has been named the national professor of the year.
Cal's cool astronomy T-shirts combine the school's landmark campanile with Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night.
We found Mars—inhabited by Martians!—on Berkeley's Telegraph Ave.
Smart choice in wine? This bottle greeted us when we arrived at our Berkeley hotel, which had a Cal theme.
Even the art in our room had a brainy theme.
Pamelia took time to pose with some of the many bears at Cal, whose teams are known as the Golden Bears. (In the interest of good taste, I will spare you the photo of the red Stanford-logoed urinal in the public men's room at our hotel, a typical Cal tribute to its archrival.)
A flock of cedar waxwings was fueliing up on berries on campus.
We climbed one of the Berkeley hills to try to visit the botanical gardens (closed for the day) and the Lawrence Hall of Science (open and delightful), Pamelia saw this four-inch leopard slug on the path.
Outside the Lawrence Hall of Science is a large model of DNA. Those silvery pipes are the tk. The plastic connectors .
Less than 24 hours after seeing our first Oscar, we were looking at our first Nobel Prize, the one for physics that Ernest Lawrence received in 1939.
A sign in an empty lot in Berkeley.
A wall on the corner of Telegraph Ave.
Answer to the Last Puzzler As several of you correctly responded, the plant in the photo was witch hazel.
Today's Puzzler The photo below shows parts of seed pods from a common California tree that in fact is an invasive species, having been introduced from Australia during the Gold Rush of the mid-1800s. What type of tree is it?
What tree produced these?
a) coastal redwood b) palm c) eucalyptus
Pamelia and I visited the Salk Institute, a biological research center founded in 1960 by the legendary Jonas Salk that is home to multiple Nobel winners. It was designed by the brilliant architect Louis Kahn, whose unusual personal story (he kept three separate families, with a wife and two mistresses) you may recall from the movie My Architect.
The Notebook Heads to California
As you know if you follow The Naturalist's Notebook's Facebook page, Pamelia and I are in California meeting with top scientists, naturalists and creative artists for Notebook installations and collaborations. We aren't even halfway through the trip yet but have already had so many great meetings with so many smart, inventive people that our brains are whirring nonstop. You'll be learning more about all of these collaborators (and ones we're scheduled to see in the days ahead) at the Notebook this year, and also on Facebook and the blog.
We began our trip in San Diego, and not because of the sunny, 70-degree weather. Though its climate gets most of the attention, San Diego should be better known as one of the world's leading centers of scientific research and innovation, especially in biotechnology. We are lucky enough to be friends with Gary Robbins, who covers science, technology and defense for the San Diego Union-Tribune, and he has opened doors for us at some of the top institutions in the area. (Those of you who were in Maine last summer may have seen Gary's engaging talk at the Asticou Inn as part of the MDI Biological Lab's Science Cafe lecture series.) We've seen researchers working with unimaginably small subatomic particles and mind-bogglingly sensitive superconductor sensors and talked with an astrophysicist who's studying the overwhelming vastness of the universe and and its origins 13.7 billion years ago. We've delved into oceanography, moon missions, primate research and even how the digital revolution is affecting how children learn.
Oh, yeah, and we've gone to the beach and explored tide pools and stared at the ocean. It's essential, I think, when you're on the California coast to regularly study how the sun sets.
I'll get back soon to our ongoing science-stories-of-the-year countdown, the latest news on our 13.7-billion-year interactive timeline installation at a school in Connecticut, the Puzzler quizzes, and other blog features, but for now, here's a peek at some of what we've been seeing and doing. Our next stop will be Berkeley.
After a great meeting at the San Diego Zoo with bonobo researcher Debbie Sandler, we stopped to see the capuchin monkeys. Thanks to Gary for this shot, which captures the spirited attitude the capuchins were displaying. Whenever I see a capuchin I think of the movie Night at the Museum, in which one gleefully tormented Ben Stiller.
We spent more than an hour studying and discussing bonobos—which are humans' closest relatives genetically—with Debbie and two of the staff members. We have had a bonobo skeleton at the Notebook for the last three years; you'll be learning more about these amazing animals this season.
Pioneering research oceanographer Jules Jaffe of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has invented all sorts of devices for studying the seas, including cameras that photograph the most minute life forms. This is a picture of some of Jules's extraordinary zooplankton photos. Jules helped design the optical system used to locate the Titanic.
At the San Diego Air & Space Museum, where we met with education director (and author and space-program expert) Francis French, we saw the command module from the Apollo 9 space mission.
The stone teddy bear on the campus of the University of California at San Diego.
The UCSD's Geisel Library is named after Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, who is honored with this statue.
A pelican joined us in watching a boogie boarder ride the waves at Wind an Sea in La Jolla (just a few blocks from Mitt Romney's California home, by the way).
We also saw ospreys—that is, Osprey tiltorotor aircraft, which are a hybrid between a helicopter and an airplane and served as a reminder that San Diego is also one of the U.S.'s biggest Navy and Marine hubs.
No, that's not Dorothy's house atop the engineering building at UC San Diego. As mentioned on Facebook, it's an art installation by Do Ho Suh. Here's a view of it from the office of one of the people with whom we met, Seth Lerer, the dean of humanities (and an acclaimed writer and literature professor and expert on digital literacy) at UCSD.
We went inside the crooked-house artwork, where standing up straight isn't easy. I actually felt queasy after a few minutes.
This sculpture of a breaching gray whale outside the Birch Aquarium echoed the real gray whales currently offshore here.
Astrophysicist Brian Keating showed us some of the sensors his group uses to detect cosmic microwave background radiation that is just now reaching us from the Big Bang, 13. 7 billion years ago. Brian does a lot of his work at a telescope array in Chile's Atacama Desert, the driest place in the world.
Flamingos at the zoo.
Gary took us to Mister A's, a rooftop restaurant from which you can see the entire city and watch airliners come in surprisingly close to downtown. With all the air bases around, the roar of jets is a recurring stanza in the San Diego sound track.
That's Gary on the right, during a tide-pooling trip.
The organization dates back to the 1970s, when it was launched by the National Wildlife Federation.
Coming to Acadia and Bar Harbor: The 2013 Family Nature Summit (and More)
With the wind chill here on the Maine coast hovering around minus-20 to minus-30, let's think about something warmer: summer, for instance, or today's weather forecast on Venus (800 degrees under a heavy cover of toxic sulfuric clouds), or maybe just South Carolina.
In October a naturalist from South Carolina—let's call it the Palmetto State, which sounds warmer—emailed Pamelia and me and asked if he and a group of location scouts from a group called Family Nature Summits might stop by The Naturalist's Notebook during their visit to Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. His name is Bruce Lampright and he attached photos of yellow alligators and a roseate spoonbill just to give us a feel of the nature at Brays Island Plantation, the former cotton, indigo and rice plantation where he works.
Summiteers will pass The Tarn, at the foot of Dorr Mountain, if make the trip from Bar Harbor to the Notebook.
Pamelia and I had never heard of Family Nature Summits—it turns out to be a hugely popular annual event for all ages launched by the National Wildlife Federation in the 1970s—but we welcomed Bruce and a wonderful group of other amateur and professional naturalists to the Notebook one Friday night and had a GREAT time. The naturalists had flown in from all parts of the U.S. to see what daily activities they might schedule for the 2013 Family Nature Summit, scheduled for this July. (Answer: loads of great activities.) I'm inserting photos (above and below) of an event postcard, which explains the Summit better than I can. We're eager to see the Summit folks again when they and the 200 or more other participants take over the Atlantic Oceanside Hotel in Bar Harbor and spend a fun week exploring the trails, mountains, shoreline and other features of Mount Desert Island.
It's not too late for you to sign up for this beloved, multi-generational event, which has become a tradition in many families. Some people have taken part in it every year for more than 30 years. Check out the website at http://familysummits.herokuapp.com.
The week-long event will include a wide range of activities every day.
Here are some of the photos that Bruce sent along to the Notebook blog to warm up our 26-below-zero wind-chilled nights. He or his fellow photographers shot all of them in South Carolina:
Some of South Carolina's wood storks. That species is the only type of stork to breed in North America.
A roseate spoonbill, photographed by renowed nature photographer Dr, Gene Cox in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Roseates use their distinctive bills to forage for small fish and invertebrates in shallow coastal ponds and marshes.
These are yellow alligators by a freshwater pond on Brays Island Plantation, a former rice, cotton and indigo plantation that is now an ecodevelopment. If you look closely at this shot by Dr. Tracy Wilkins, you'll spot three yellow-bellied slider turtles.
Had to throw in this shot I took last week, showing a Maine alligator, made of clouds at sunset and being attacked by a light spear.
A Brief History of Wind Chill I was curious so I looked it up. Antarctic explorers Charles F. Passel (a geologist) and Paul Siple (a geographer) developed the concept of the wind-chill factor in the 1940s. Both men were part of Byrd expeditions. As noted on Wikipedia, the initial scale "was based on the cooling rate of a small plastic bottle as its contents turned to ice while suspended in the wind on the expedition hut roof, at the same level as the anemometer."
This is the modern wind chill table, which has been in use for more than a decade.
Here is an interesting summary of the wind-chilling tale, written by Steve Roark, from the Forestry Division of the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, in a post on claiborneprogress.net:
"The original [wind chill] formula used to determine wind-chill temperature was developed from research done in the 1940s. To determine rates of heat loss, scientists sealed a thermometer in a plastic bottle of water and timed how long it took the water to freeze under a variety of wind speeds and air temperatures. The freezing times were later converted into a chart of temperature equivalents. The problem was that the whole point of wind chill is how it impacts your comfort, and the thermal properties of a plastic bottle do not resemble those of human flesh.
One of the frozen footprints we followed when hiking up to naturalist Bernd Heinrich's western Maine cabin last week in minus-11-degree wind chill.
"To resolve this, a scientist named [Randall] Osczevski literally stuck his head in a refrigerated box with sensors on his cheeks until his skin temperature came close to the freezing point. His reasoning was that any attempt to revamp wind-chill should start with the face, which is the most exposed part of the body, and therefore most vulnerable to frostbite. In 2000 Osczeyski created a mathematical model of heat transfer in the human face and tested it with volunteers who braved fierce strong winds in a wind tunnel.
"The result is a gentler wind-chill that you now get with the forecast. A 20-degree day with a 10 mph wind now has a wind-chill rating of 9 degrees instead of 3. It turns out that there is not much difference between the old and new formulas at low wind speeds, but at higher speeds the new formula is quite a bit warmer. The Weather Service has adopted the new calculation method, and so less teeth chattering temperatures are given.
"For the record, the normal temperature of the skin is 94 degrees F. Exposed skin becomes uncomfortable when it cools to around 59 degrees, and painful at 50 degrees. Below that skin temperature it starts to become numb, and under certain conditions, frostbite can occur within minutes. Skin freezes at 23 degrees."
Biggest Science Stories of the Last Year (Cont.) What was the most significant science news in 2012? On we go with the blog's countdown of Discover magazine's top 100 stories:
discover cover
39: The heated debate over changes in the so-called psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. In the view of some critics, the new edition of the book—which, in Discover's words, "influences everything from insurance reimbursements to legal definitions of mental illness in court"—excessively lowers the thresholds for diagnosing some forms of that illness, including ADHD and depression, potentially leading to more diagnoses.
38:The creation in labs in both Europe and the U.S. of artificial DNA, suggesting, according to Discover, "that the earliest life on Earth did not necessarily rely on DNA or its cousin, RNA [to give genetic instructions to growing cells], since other molecules also perform the same tricks."
37: The discovery that Titan, the largest of Saturn's many (arguably as many as 62) moons, "has a global ocean buried beneath the icy surface," as Discover puts it. The revelation came from information gathered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. (Those of you wishing to travel to this moon might check out Kurt Vonnegut's sci-fi classic The Sirens of Titan.)
Titan, one of Saturn's many moons.
36: The launch of the Human Connectome Project, which aims to map all the connections in the human brain.
35: The success of a Russian scientific team—after 20 years of drilling through 12,366 of ice—in reaching Antarctica's Lake Vostok. Vostok is one of 250 lakes buried under Antarctic ice (it has been sealed under the ice for 15 million years) and researchers hope to discover whether any microbes have been living in the lake. If they have, it increases the possibility that life could exist in ice-buried oceans on other planets or moons, such as Jupiter's moon Europa and, of course, Saturn's moon Titan.
34: The development at MIT of a mathematical technique to substantially speed up data networks. The beneficiaries will include not just computer networks but also GPS devices and MRI scanners.
33: The unearthing of a small room in Guatemala whose walls were covered with astronomical tables and calculations. This "Mayan astronomy office," as Discover calls it, referenced "dates 2,000 years into the future, showing the Mayans were quite confident that the clockwork of time would keep going just fine."
32: Progress in the fight against cancer, based on genetic researchers' identification of cancers by their mutation types, rather than by the part of the body in which they originate. This approach leads to more targeted treatments. Scientists in the Cancer Genome Atlas project have found, for example, four genetically different types of breast cancer, including one that "resembles ovarian cancer and so could be treated similarly." Says a lead scientist on the project, Ramaswamy Govindan, "Lung cancer will turn out not to be one disease but dozens."
31: The acceleration of the melting of Arctic Ice, which shrank to its smallest size in recorded history in the summer of 2012. It was 18 percent smaller than the previous record, set in 2007.
The shrinking Arctic ice.
30: The construction of an ultra-high-speed supercomputer designed to make use of the complex laws of quantum physics. The computer is so small it is encased in a gap between carbon molecules in a diamond.
Keep Those Birds Fed! Just a reminder that as cold as we feel in this harsh weather, small birds have it a lot tougher and need to take in as many calories as they can to survive. So load up the feeders.
The evening grosbeaks were out in force (as were pine grosbeaks and redpolls) when we reached Bernd Heinrich's cabin.
Answers to the Last Puzzlers 1) The fish in the photo is an Eastern brook trout. 2) The world's only two "double-landlocked" countries are Uzbekistan and Leichtenstein.
Today's Puzzler Last week a naturalist friend in Oregon sent this photo of a plant blossoming outside her home. What type of plant is it? Hints: It is known as one of the few large plants to blossom in winter's chill, and the plant's name includes a woman's name.
Can you identify the plant?