Some Study That I Used To Know

Another good parody of Gotye.

Engage Warp Drive, Mr. Sulu!

A warp drive may actually become a real thing. Permission to get a little excited.

A couple of years ago, several stories hit the internet when physicist Harold White announced that his NASA team at the Johnson Space Center had begun work on the development of  a warp drive. You can probably see how news of potential faster-than-light-speed travel might throw geeks into a Star Trek-fueled frenzy. White proposed a design that would solve the problems of the Alcubierre Drive concept. Most people have never even heard of this, much less know how to pronounce it. To really understand the basis of your excitement, you should probably understand this concept.

Miguel Alcubierre is a Mexican born physicist that specializes in numerical relativity, using computers to formulate and solve Einsteinian field equations. In 1994, Alcubierre published a paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity titled "The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity." In this paper he describes the Alcubierre Drive, a theoretical means of traveling within the framework of general relativity, and without the introduction of wormholes, that allows a spaceship to travel faster than the speed of light. This statement is a little weird considering the velocity of light speed limit as viewed by special relativity and general relativity. In the context of special relativity, the speed of light is the absolute fastest that anything with real mass can move (I'm not getting into tachyons right now) because relativistic mass increase limits massive objects to slower-than-light velocities. Put very simply, you gain mass the faster you go which then requires more energy to make you go faster. General relativity doesn't really forbid faster-than-light travel, but it does require the restrictions of special relativity locally to a region of space. Think: Speed limit on a specific section of highway. A way to get around this locality problem is the wormhole (Think: Shortcut) which, because it is providing a way to travel between two widely spaced locations in a shorter amount of time, results in an effective speed faster than that of light.

Another way to beat the speed of light limitation is to use the expansion of the universe itself. And this is what Alcubierre proposes. As the universe expands, new space is being created between two objects. Obviously, the universe is really big (biggest understatement ever) and so when we talk about expansion we are talking huge scales. But Alcubierre's theory uses this concept on a more local scale.

"The basic idea can be more easily understood if we think for a moment of the inflationary phase of the early Universe, and consider the relative speed of separation of two co-moving observers. It is easy to convince oneself that, if we define this relative speed as the rate of change of proper spatial distance over proper time, we will obtain a value that is much larger than the speed of light. This doesn't mean that our observers will be travelling faster than light: they always move inside their local light-cones. The enormous speed of separation comes from the expansion of spacetime itself."

He introduces a "simple metric" that describes a flat region of space surrounded by a warp of curved space, a "hyper-relativistic local-dynamic space. Think: A bubble around your spaceship. This bubble is driven forward by the local expansion of the space-time behind it and the opposite contraction in front of it. Like riding the wave of space-time. However, there is one huge problem - energy. This type of travel is proposed to take massive amounts of energy. As in a "a ball of exotic matter the size of Jupiter" to power it. Clearly not the best way.

Now back to Harold White and his team. Taking a closer look at the math, Whites's team discovered that the energy requirements might actually be much lower than previously thought. The answer is in the bubble itself. By making the bubble thicker and oscillating it, the amount of energy required goes from a Jupiter-sized ball to a 10 meter (32.8 feet) ball. Much much better. The team has since been using the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer to experiment with tiny warp bubbles to find evidence for the theory.

Lately - as in yesterday - White has released concept art created with 3D artist Mark Rademaker that shows a design for the type of ship that could utilize Whites refinement of the Alcubierre Drive. This concept art shows "a sleek ship nestled at the center of two enormous rings, which create the warp bubble," based on an idea by Matthew Jeffries (they guy behind the Star Trek look). If successful, a ship like this could travel to Alpha Centauri (4.3 light years away) in only two weeks!

Okay, reality time. Should you be excited about this? Absolutely! But also keep in mind that seeing this technology for real is still a long way off. So be excited, but be realistically excited.

Here's a good (but kinda long) lecture by White discussing the hard facts and some of the road-blocks behind this technology. Note: New design discussion starting at 41:51.

Miguel Alcubierre's paper:

Alcubierre, M. (1994). The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity Classical and Quantum Gravity, 11 (5) DOI: 10.1088/0264-9381/11/5/001

"The Alcubierre Warp Drive" by John G. Cramer. A really really good explanation of the paper from the University of Washington's Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics (CENPA). A source I used for a lot of the explanation above, including the reproduction of the figure from the original paper.

Here are some news stories about White's original announcement:

iO9's story "How NASA might build its very first warp drive"
Gizmodo's "NASA Starts Work on Real Life Star Trek Warp Drive"

Some new stories about the release of the concept art:

Science Alert's "NASA's design for a warp drive spaceship is AMAZING"
iO9's "Here's NASA's New Design for a Warp Drive Ship"
Sploid's "NASA's real life Enterprise may take us to other star systems one day"

Kickstart Reading Rainbow

Butterfly in the sky!
I can go twice as high!
Take a look
It’s in a book
Reading Rainbow!

If you are like me, and pretty much everyone else I know, then you grew up watching and loving Reading Rainbow. You tuned in to PBS and watched LeVar Burton share a love of reading. The show went off the air in 2009, and over its run time influenced millions of children.

Now, LeVar is trying to kickstart a new generation to fall in love with reading. Literally. He has started a Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to bring back the beloved show. And this time, he hopes to add to the experience with the array of technologies not available back when the show stared in 1983, like tablet readers and a Reading Rainbow app.

So if you are looking for a good Kickstarter to back you should consider this one. The minimum pledge is only 1 dollar.

But you don't have to take my word for it...




See the great Kickstarter page at: "Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere."

Also, here's an NPR All Things Considered interview with LeVar:
"Burton Calls On 'Star Trek' Fans To Bring 'Reading Rainbow' To The Next Generation"

A "Space Oddity" on the ISS

Remember when Chris Hadfield did the first ever space-to-Earth musical collaboration in 2013? Chris really knows how to bring space to the masses! And today, upon reading stories at IFLScience and  HuffPost Tech UK, I was reminded of his video where he managed to improve the classic David Bowie song 'Space Oddity' by singing it aboard the International Space Station (ISS), montaging epic visuals along the way. He was given permission to host the video for one year, and that year is almost up. So I thought I would post it so that you could have a last (or first?) look at it before it goes. Enjoy!

A Bunch of Chemistry Jokes

Here are a bunch of chemistry jokes. You are welcome.

I'm a Broccoli and I Look Like a Tree!...

An oldie but goodie.

(via Raw for Beauty, but if anyone has the original source please let me know so I can update)

Deadbeat Dads: Hatching Plasticity in Glassfrog Embryos

I have recently emerged from the all-enveloping cocoon that is data analysis and presentation writing. Powerpoint, Photoshop, and JMP have been in charge of my waking hours for the past couple of weeks. But now I am free! Is that daylight and springtime I see? If you’ve been following the Facebook page then you will still have received the occasional sciency goodness, but now it’s time for me to get back to blogging.

This week a new paper published in Proceedings of The Royal Society B about baby glassfrogs caught my eye. There are more than 100 species of neotropical glassfrogs (Centrolenidae) and more are being regularly discovered. Glassfrogs are so called because of the transparent skin on their venters which allow for the observation of their internal organs. Dorsally, they tend to be green with various yellow, white, blue or red markings, with some species even reflecting light in the infrared spectrum. These frogs live high in the trees that overhang mountain streams in Mexico, Central, and South America. They make high peeps or whistles, and in some species, a single individual will initiate a chorus.

Glassfrogs are also known for their parenting skills, which seems ubiquitous across the taxon. Females lay small clutches of eggs several meters above the water on rocks or vegetation. The male will then take charge of egg maintenance, sometimes caring for multiple clutches. The male will hydrate the eggs (“hydric brooding”) in order to moderate water balance and prevent dehydration, modifying this behavior in response to weather conditions. When the eggs hatch, the tadpoles fall into the water. But sometimes a new female will show up and the male glassfrog will forget all about his clutches and he’ll take off with her. So what happens to all of his abandoned eggs?

The behavior exhibited by the males offers an excellent opportunity to study parent-embryo interactions. Early life stages in most animals are often the most vulnerable and, as such, parental care of eggs has evolved independently in many species. The term “hatching plasticity” can encompass a wide variety of these survival methods employed by embryos to increase their survivorship such as hatching early to escape danger or delaying hatching to remain in safety. Embryos can alter their rate or sequence of development. The environment and/or parental care than have both direct and indirect effects on these processes.

The authors looked at the brooding behaviors of male Fleischmann’s Glassfrogs (Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni), specifically how embryos respond when their fathers are no longer around to hydrate them. Nightly, the researchers monitored male territories and egg clutches along stream transects near San Gabriel Mixtepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. They conducted a male-removal experiment where they displaced 40 males from their clutches and then monitored embryo survival, development and hatching time compared to the clutches of 50 attending males.

The researchers found that removing fathers significantly reduced the amount of time until hatching, with no effect on embryo survival. They found that, on average, there was a 21.2% reduction in the duration of the embryonic period for the male-removal group. This early hatching appeared to be a response to the deteriorating conditions without the fathers rather than the parent directly altering hatching time. These unmaintained eggs lost thickness (a measure of hydration) but not integrity (the egg capsules did not degrade over time) or rate of development. The neglected embryos simply hatched at a less mature stage of development. However, hatchlings from the male-removal group were significantly smaller and had fewer, less developed gut coils, the latter illustrating that age had a significant effect on development. The observed hatching plasticity was found to be due to embryos actively hatching at different developmental stages; the neglected embryos hatched at a less mature stage.

This is one of the first studies to demonstrate that embryos can time hatching to cope with variation in parental care, employing adaptive strategies to cope with these variations. The embryos are responding to their deteriorating egg environment, a dehydration-induced hatching if you will. They increase their likelihood of surviving by responding to their changing environment. A nice example of within-species coevolution.


Delia, J., Ramirez-Bautista, A., & Summers, K. (2014). Glassfrog embryos hatch early after parental desertion Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281 (1785), 20133237-20133237 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.3237


And a nice little write-up over at Science called "When Dads Go Missing, Frogs Start Hatching"


(image via Tropical Herping)