Technology timesuck

60-second science from Scientific American explains how a new nanotechnology can help sop up oil spills.

This kills me, because several weeks ago I read an article in Conscious Choice Magazine about the use of human-hair mats to clean up after oil spills. Human hair is efficient at soaking up oil and is a bountiful resource. Hair salons produce plenty of hair "waste" that can be used for the project.

Yet somehow, we act as if only persistent scientific research and technological development is going to save the world. Why not look at the natural resources in front, or in this case, on top of you? Humans don't have to build everything from scratch. There are plenty of ingenious mechanisms at play in nature anyways. All it takes is observation and creativity to use them in novel ways.

Emergence in Astronomy

What happens when astronomers have too much data to sift through? They put it in a Galaxy Zoo.

When you (read: anyone) register to Galaxy Zoo, you can browse through pictures from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and classify individual galaxy types: spiral, elliptical or merging, and the orientation: clockwise or counter-clockwise. So if you're an accountant on your lunch break, why not classify some galaxies in your free time? If you're browsing the internet on your iPhone - classify some galaxies. You might even discover something interesting and end up with your name on it - like Hanny's Voorwerp.

The universe is so mind-boggingly huge that thousands of galaxies can be observed in a tiny swatch of sky. To get a sense of this, extend your arm directly in front of you and hold up your pinky finger. At one arm length, the width of your smallest finger covers about one degree in the sky. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, shown above, covers about 1% of the area on your pinky nail and contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. SDSS works on imaging about 25% of the sky - covering an area about 100,000 times the size of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field! It's called ultra deep for a reason; SDSS will not be collecting enough light to peer that deep into the sky. However, it is estimated that at least one million galaxies will be imaged by Sloan.

What a great time to harness the collective power of the internet. Galaxy Zoo recruits people, no matter what profession or creed, to participate in science. The website describes some of the motivation behind this. For me, this process is intriguing with respect to Emergence.* One example of emergence is the curious ability for a large group of people, making individual guesses, to arrive at an average answer that is very close to the precise answer - even when there was no collaboration or discussion among them. Galaxies are not the easiest artifacts to classify. With nondescript distant fuzz balls, how close can you really get? Physical orientation, gravitational lensing, and the simple tendency of nature to defy thin-lined classification schemes can all pose a problem. The most exciting thing is that the powers of emergence can help us move forward in exploring the universe. When you click on a galaxy classification, the scientists don't know the answers beforehand. We have only to trust in the power of emergence to find something close to the truth.

On a lighter note, check out the Galaxy Zoo Blog. According to the project leaders:

At last count, Galaxy Zoo had 141,960 volunteers. Here are some other things that we are bigger than:

- The entire nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines
- Chris’s hometown, twice over
- The entire student population of the Universities of Michigan, Illinois, and Texas, combined
- The Italian Army
- …and 30 American Astronomical Societies.

* Refer to the Emergence episode of Radiolab I mentioned in an earlier post

Minor updates

I finally got around to creating a personal page for myself, added to the links at right. It includes a lot of little life tidbits (such as my reading wish list). Most of all it is intended to chronicle the research I'm doing here at Columbia.

Also added at right is a link to Radiolab.org. Check them out! I highly recommend the episode Emergence as a starting point.

Enjoy!