Some of our readers may have a part-time electronics hobby, or they may even be in an industry where they order parts and build boards. Either way, if you’ve ever tried to put together your own circuit board you’ve probably figured out that some parts just can’t be made quick enough which eats into your timelines and can push back key projects.

That’s why being able to find an obsolete parts catalog online can be a huge help to you designers. NowComponents.com is able to search their own inventory along with the inventory of other catalogs and online vendors to locate those obsolete semiconductors that you thought you’d never find again.

Some lead times are 2 weeks and some are 20 weeks. Whatever your lead time, in most cases, you need to find parts now because you have a deadline to meet and you forgot to order more. That’s why I can’t help but suggest and stress that when you search through their electronic part catalog you order more parts than you need. And if the lead times are really long, you may want to order a lot more parts than you need because you never know when one of your chips will blow or boards that you just stuffed become non-working.

Check out Now Components and put it to the top of your list if you need to find electronic components that you thought you’d never be able to find again because Newark or Mouser are telling you the parts are discontinued and you need to find a suitable replacement.

The current estimated population is around 6.6 billion people and climbing rapidly. How rapid is this climb is a difficult question to answer. When considering the overall global growth rate, we reached a peak of 2.04% annual increase in the 1960s and it has been dropping since. However, any kind of rate increase from a base of 6.6 billion means a lot more people. It’s important to note that many modern industrialized countries are currently experiencing a decrease in population, but developing countries are going in the reverse direction. The rough projection for world population in 2050 is 9 billion, which almost all of this growth in less developed countries (for this projection, developing countries means everywhere besides Europe, North American, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan).

This leads to a compelling question: are there enough resources for 9 billion people? In scientific terms, what is the carrying capacity of Planet Earth?

Carrying capacity is a term used in biology to describe how much life an area of the biosphere can sustain. For example, the carrying capacity for an African savannah is evaluated on multiple levels: how many plants can grow in relation to the fertility of soil, rain, and sunlight, how many gazelles can be fed by this plant growth, and how many lions can be fed by the number of gazelles. To be more specific, if a lion can’t catch enough gazelles they will either starve to death or be too malnourished to reproduce.

The carrying capacity for human beings is way more complex because we have far more control over our environment and our life situation. Plus, when there are instances when populations of humans are hit by famine, it’s completely immoral to standby and just say “well, they are hitting their carrying capacity”. In addition to the famine, populations running low on resources are ripe grounds for social instability like terrorism and genocide.

As globalization roars around the world, more and more people will start to enjoy a higher standard and they will consume more and more precious resources. While this is happening, these people will start having less children and these “nearly developed” countries will start having population decreases like the developed world.

So, in theory, as the world modernizes the population will start to drop and our problems will be solved. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say if we can get through the transition without serious problems. “Transition” is very vague word and it’s unclear how low our population needs to go. One study projected the carrying capacity of the Earth in 2100 (assuming a modest standard of living) will be 2 billion worldwide. This figure was determined by Cornell researches by analyzing human needs for fertile land, fresh water, fossil fuel energy and a diversity of helpful natural organisms. What’s interesting about the 2 billion figure is the fossil fuel component because it’s the only non-renewable resource in that list…if you didn’t need any more proof how important alternative energy is.

Considering how difficult figuring out the carrying capacity is, let’s just go with 2 billion without talking about other studies. Trimming down the current population to a mere 2 billion in 93 years is the tallest of tall orders. Obviously we have to be ethical about this and we have to avoid policies like China’s one child rule (which has lead to female infanticide and the huge imbalance of males to females could lead to massive societal problems for China in the future), but we will have to take aggressive steps in promoting contraceptive use in developing countries and using the best technology is conserve energy, product biodiversity, protect the fertility of soil, and avoid diminishing our fresh water sources. It may also require some innovative ideas like increased immigration to developed countries and promoting international adoption instead of having biological children. I’m currently single, so raising kids is something I really don’t think about much right now but adopting children from China or Iraq has its appeal for the above reasons. Of course, a future wife and I may want to have biological children, but the decision to bring more children into this world could become very complicated in the near future. Cornell researcher David Pimental laid out the stark truth very well: “You have to take your choice. People say that they should have the freedom to reproduce. I’m sympathetic to that view. But you’re going to either lose some of that freedom, or your children and your grandchildren will lose some of their freedoms: freedom from starvation, freedom from disease. —- If we refuse to reduce our numbers ourselves, nature will find much less pleasant ways to control human population: malnourishment, starvation, disease, stress and violence.”

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. World Population Clock, U.S. Census bureau

2. “Way Too Many For Us” by Hillel J. Hoffmann, Cornell University Alumni News

In the previous article, the topic was Gliese 581c a Earth-like planet recently discovered. Gliese 581c is very noteworthy because this planet is located in the habitable zone of it’s “sun” (red dwarf star Gliese 581c). This means that the orbit meets the “Goldilocks principle” and it’s neither too close or too far from the heat of red dwarf sun. A lot of further research is needed to determine if 581c has other characteristics necessary for life (the presence of water has been theorized but is far from confirmed), but it has become of the most promising candidates for extraterrestrial life.

Let’s say that further tests do show an Earth-like atmosphere and large of amounts of water. We would obviously send a space probe, but could we ever send a manned mission there? Not impossible, but extremely difficult at this point because while 581c is “relatively close” it’s still 20.5 light years away (194 trillion km or 120 trillion miles) away!

This distance is extremely daunting because even at the top launch speed achieved by a space probe (the New Horizons mission to Pluto was clocked at 58,356 km/hr or 36,261 mph), it would take 379,132.96 years to get to Gliese 581c! We could launch a probe and maybe our great-(great times ~15,000)-grandchildren could analyze the data, but there is also a huge problem in that NASA is only comfortable with a lifetime of 63 years before today’s spacecraft technology will break down.

While researchers have explored in a serious matter some very exotic ways of getting there like wormholes and theoretical light-speed propulsion systems, I think it’s safe to say that we won’t be getting to Gliese 581c via Star Trek warp drive. However, more powerful propulsion systems are definitely down the road, so the commute to Gliese will probably be shortened. Regardless, it will take a long time to travel there and even microscopic cosmic dusk has a sandblasting effect that might cause serious damage and eventual long-term breakdown of the probe. A solution to that problem is that if humans were abroad, we could do the repairs necessary to keep things moving along. Repair robots could also do the job for a probe, but over thousands of years they would be just as vulnerable (even if these robots built new robots to replace themselves) and artificial intelligence does have it’s limits. This leads to probably the most feasible solution to exploring and settling Gliese 581c: a generation ship that would involve setting up a small society to live and reproduce inside a spacecraft along the long road to Gliese 581c.

Of course, this solution has its own set of unique problems. First, maintaining morale and order in this mini-society could prove to be difficult. There are stories from the Biosphere 2 project and the overall field of psychology that raise some ominous doubts about a generation ship. Biosphere 2 (Planet Earth is Biosphere 1) was an experiment were humans entered into air-tight greenhouse structure and tried to survive completely isolated from the outside. One of the biggest problems with Biosphere 2 was the psychology of humans living together in really close quarters, but the stress of not being to grow enough food is probably more to blame for the high level of tension inside. More and more studies of this nature would be needed to create a healthy mini-society for the generation ship.

The second problem would be maintaining a healthy gene pool through the years. A population of 150 would the bare minimum, but that would be cutting it close. This problem could be solved by building up a huge bank of frozen sperm and eggs, but a small population is still vulnerable to the any possible disease outbreaks and if societal breakdown does occur. The best solution would be send something like a 100,000 people that could be governed like a city. Plus, this set-up would be easily transferred to actually settling Gliese 581c as a new home. (Don’t forget the eventual goal of this ambitious mission) The serious drawback is that we would have to build an immense spacecraft, so there would probably have to be a compromise between population size and ship size.

Much more to come on intersteller travel and concepts like the generation ship. Obviously we have serious problems that we have to deal with on Biosphere 1 first, but it’s definitely something to keep on the backburner. While it’s a fun and fascinating concept to think about settling on another planet, it’s also a serious issue in case of some kind of extinction level event (ELE) that humanity can’t handle. No matter what, we can’t put it off “forever” because the Sun will become a red giant star one day. Notice that forever is in quotation remarks because that day is 4-5 billion years away. Interesting fact: the Earth won’t actually engulfed by the Sun as previously thought. Recent research has concluded that the Earth will be pushed away as the Sun enters the red giant phase, but all the water and atmosphere will be boiled away so our great-(great times ~160 million)-grandchildren will be pretty much screwed at that point.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “Stunning new planet discovery”, previous article on this blog.

2. “Interstellar travel”, Wikipedia entry

3. “Biosphere 2″, Wikipedia entry

4. “Sun”, Wikipedia entry

The possibility of extraterrestrial life is a topic that is endlessly fascinating. Every since the confirmed discovery of the first exoplanet, or extrasolar planet in 1995, every single discovery fell victim to the “Goldilocks Problem”. This means that they were either too hot, too cold, or giant gas planets like Jupiter.

This all changed this week when astronomers at the European Southern Observatory announced the existence of “581 c” a planet that lies within the habitable zone of the red dwarf star called Gliese 581. This means the 581 c is just the right distance from the Gliese 581 “sun”.

There are many unanswered questions about this planet that may diminish the chances for life, but this is a major step in this field. After all, Mars falls within the hospitable zone of the Sun and it’s not thriving with life. As a counterpoint, it should be noted that there is a growing possibility that Mars has life below the surface or was inhabited in the past.

With that note of caution out of the way, what would life be like on 581 c?

- Probably a rocky surface like Earth, but might be a giant iceball with pools of water. Either way there is decent chance that 581 c has a lot of water based on the theories of planetary formation.

- Average temperature is believed to be 32-104 degrees F (0-40 degrees C)

- Gravity is about 1.6 times stronger on Earth, so multiply your weight times 1.6 and that would be your weight on 581 c.

- The sun, Gliese 581 c, is very close because a red dwarf star is much cooler than our Sun. A sunny day on 581 c results in a giant red sun in the sky that would be twenty times bigger than the Moon in our sky.

- Your birthday would be every 13 days.

- There might not be a sunrise or sunset. The astronomers have concluded that it probably doesn’t rotate (not a confirmed fact, though), so the light side of the planet could be an optimal place for life to prosper under a giant red “charcoal ember” in the sky.

This is definitely one of the most exciting stories I’ve heard in a long time, so stay tuned for more on this story as scientists try to confirm the presence of water and what atmosphere this new planet has. Also, the existence of a planet of a red dwarf star (let alone a potentially Earth-like planet) was somewhat of a surprise for scientists and they have spent more time on more Sun-like stars in the past, so there’s a good chance of hearing about more Earth-like planets in the future. This adds further excitement to the story because 80% of the stars relatively “close” to Earth are red-dwarfs….so cool.

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On a lighter note, a sign of how significant this story is can be found in reports from our good friends across the big pond in England. Upon the news of 581 c, bookmakers have lowered the odds of extraterrestrial life from 1000-1 to 100-1!

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On a more romantic note, scientists at SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life Institute) quickly made plans to focus more attention on 581 c in hopes of hearing what’s playing on the radio stations on 581 c. Wouldn’t that be something, eh?

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “Extrasolar planet”, Wikipedia entry.

2. “Potentially Habitable Planet Found” by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press.

3. “Scientists find most Earth-like planet yet”, very similar AP report to the above Washington Post source (the introduction is different).

4. “Bookies give alien life good odds”, Peter Sorel-Cameron for CNN

As we are in the midst of the peak season for tornadoes in the southern half of the United States (the peak season for the southern states is March-May and the late spring-early summer in the northern states), I thought a good article would be a discussion of tornado myths.

Myth: Rivers, lakes, and mountains are safe from tornadoes.
Truth: No place is safe from tornadoes, Yellowstone National Park was hit by a tornado that did extensive damage to a 10,000 foot mountain

Myth: Highway overpasses are good shelters from tornadoes
Truth: Absolutely not. Overpasses can be extremely dangerous because there is little protection from flying debris. Plus, in the event of the direct hit, you would most likely be blown out of the overpass shelter and would in the midst of the deadly wind of debris moving 100-200 miles per hour.

Myth: You should also take cover in the southwest portion of your basement.
Truth: You are far better off hiding in a place where there is sturdy table or stairwell, no matter what part of the basement of the house. In general, hiding in a basement will protect you from injury in any situation. This myth came into being because tornadoes often approach from the southwest and it was assumed that storm would force debris towards the northeast and away from you. Actually, the southwest corner is often the least safe because most tornadoes only shift houses off their foundations in a northeast direction. The unsupported part of the house then might collapse in the southwest part of the basement where you thought it was safest! The few deaths that have occurred in basements were caused by collapse portions of the house that were ripped from the foundations, not debris from the wind which the myth was based on. As mentioned above, location doesn’t matter all that much if you can hide under the stairwell or a sturdy table.

Myth: This is by far the most common myth: opening your windows will lessen damage. If you can equalize the pressure between the interior and vortex of the tornado, your home won’t “explode”.
Truth: Even the most powerful storms have a pressure drop that a typical building can vent in mere seconds. However, your home is already destroyed by the time the maximum pressure drop reaches you. There is also zero evidence that opening windows strategically to allow wind to vent through the house will do any good. Bottom line: get to the basement and forget the windows. If you have a powerful tornado bearing down on your house, nothing will prevent catastrophic damage but being in the basement will save your life.

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Because it never hurts to refresh your memory, here are tornado safety guidelines from the National Weather Service:

- In a home or building, move to a pre-designated shelter, such as a basement. If an underground shelter is not available, move to a small interior room or hallway on the lowest floor and get under a sturdy piece of furniture. Put as many walls as possible between you and the outside.

- Stay away from windows.

- Get out of automobiles. Do not try to outrun a tornado in your car; instead, leave it immediately for safe shelter. If caught outside or in a vehicle, lie flat in a nearby ditch or depression and cover your head with your hands.

- Be aware of flying debris. Flying debris from tornadoes causes most fatalities and injuries.

- Mobile homes, even if tied down, offer little protection from tornadoes. You should leave a mobile home and go to the lowest floor of a sturdy nearby building or a storm shelter.

- Finally, if you live in a rural area that doesn’t have tornado sirens - you should definitely get a NOAA weather radio with alarm tone and battery backup. They are sold in many stores and some even have crank devices that allow you to charge cell phone batteries during long-term power outages (this is especially useful if you live in a hurricane prone area).

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “Thunderstorms, Tornadoes, Lightning” - Weather Safety Guide from The National Weather Service - PDF file
2. “Overpasses are tornado death traps”, by Chris Cappella, USATODAY.com
3. Myths and Misconceptions about Tornadoes, The Tornado Project - not a rock-solid source like a newspaper or the National Weather Service but from what I can tell, the author(s) have done their homework as they mention interviews with structural engineers so I think it’s a credible source.

Using cutting edge technology, researchers recently analyzed amino acid sequences of a 68-million year old Tyrannosaurus rex femur bone and found a remarkable similarity to between T. Rex and modern day chicken collagen fibers (a protein that gives cells structure).

This new technique uses mass spectrometry at an unheard level of sensitivity to analyze amino acid sequences (amino acids are the component of protein - DNA determines the way in which the 20 different amino acids are combined to make protein). Mass spectrometry is a technique that analyzes charged particles by comparing the amount of charge vs. the mass of the various atomic elements.

While providing more valuable evidence to further support the link between dinosaurs and birds, this new technique opens a new door to understand evolutionary relationships. Because DNA degrades after a few tens of thousands years, researchers didn’t have a way of confirming ancient evolutionary relationships but since, in the right conditions, amino acids can last for millions of years this should prove to be a valuable technique for determining the evolutionary family tree. For example, the movement of life from ocean onto land required new types of respiratory tissues and this new kinds of amino acids sequences

Another interesting about this story is that it demonstrates a movement in the scientific community towards inter-disciplinary research. The combination of molecular biology in the lab and paleontology in the mountains of Montana, but that’s where science is going as the gaps in knowledge are steadily filled.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Source:
“Protein Analysis of T. Rex Bone Finds Link to Chickens” by Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer

I want to share one of the most interesting articles I’ve read in a long time. The article had this question: how would Washington D.C. rush hour commuters react to a really good street performer? I mean, a really, really good performer like Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violinists. Instead of playing in front of well-dressed classical music ticketholders, how would Bell do on a lesser-know music venue…how about the L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station?

One of things that grabbed me about this article was that I have a Joshua Bell album on my iPod and he’s amazing. It made me wonder if I would have taken time out of my commute to listen to him playing a multi-million dollar Stradivarius violin.

There is a interesting section on how the human mind values things in context, so there is some science in this article. However, that’s just one section: the whole article is fascinating.

Here’s the link to the article and some hidden camera video of the subway performance: “Pearls Before Breakfast” by Washington Post staff writer Gene Weingarten.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

One of my coworkers is expecting a child later this year and we got to talking about what color her child’s eyes would be. Nobody could remember the rules of eye color inheritance, so here’s the answer for my co-worker and others interested.

For starters, it’s quite complex. There are three genes called EYCL1, EYCL2, and EYCL3 that play a large role in determining the three main phenotypes brown, green, and blue. (Phenotype is a descriptive term used to define the manifestation of genetic and environmental factors.) These three phenotypes combine to make the six main eye colors: blue, grey, yellow, hazel, light brown, and dark brown.

There are also a number of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms, pronounced “snips” that regulate the main genes. SNPs are changes in one single nucleotide letter of the DNA that affect gene expression.

These SNPs are located near genes for responsible for all sort of traits like eye and hair colors. For example, a recent study a few months ago talked about SNPs near the OCA2 gene that had effects on eye color. As the paper’s author Dr. Richard Strum told the BBC, “to use an analogy, one of the changes is like switching the light on and off, while the other is like changing the light bulb from brown to green.”

All these genes and SNPs come together to determine eye by regulating the amount of pigment produced. The main pigment in human eyes is called eumelanin. Brown eyes (the most dominate eye color in the world) contain high amounts of brown colored eumelanin. Another pigment that plays a role is the yellow colored lipofuscin.

Here’s a breakdown of eye colors and pigments:
Brown - high amounts of eumelanin
Amber or yellow - lipofuscin
Blue - a little yellow and little to none brown
Green - a lot of yellow and some brown
Hazel eyes - a combination of eye pigments that change with the amount of sunlight and clothing.
Gray - little to none of both yellow and brown
Albino eyes - gray is the color of eyes in people with complete albinism. The red eye feature that many people associate with albinos is due to the blood vessels that add a red tint. This tint can easily be augmented in the photographs because of the red eye effect.

As you can see, eye color genetics is far from straightforward. While eye color tends to run in families, it’s not unheard of two brown-eyed parents to have a blue-eyed child. To answer the original question that my expecting co-worker has: I found an interesting website that will take a shot at predicting the eye color of your future child. It’s called “What Color Eyes Would Your Children Have?”. I doubt they updated their formula for the recent discovery of the SNPs near the OCA2 gene (plus you would probably need to upload maternal and paternal DNA sequences for the SNPs), but it’s still an interesting little web application that will give you some decent odds.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

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Sources:
1. Sturm R.A. and Frudakis T.N. “Eye color: portals into pigmentation genes and ancestry.” Trends Genet. 2004 Aug;20(8):327-32. PMID: 15262401. PDF Link
2. “Genetics of eye colour unlocked”, Paul Rincon, Science reporter, BBC News
3. “Eye color”, Wikipedia entry
4. “What Color Eyes Would Your Children Have”

Today’s installment of Better Know A Scientist is Byron Roberts. He was kind enough to answer some questions via e-mail recently. Here’s the transcript.

Atoms to Zebras (AZ): Thank you for taking the time to allow us to better know you and your work. Tell us about yourself.
Byron Roberts (BR): I have a somewhat unusual history compared to many graduate students. I grew up in northern California, in Sonoma County, and graduated from high school there in 1991. From high school I went to the local junior college and took courses that pre-med students usually take in their first couple years of college. However, I wasn’t a particularly motivated student at that time, so it took me a few years before I had got enough work done in order to transfer to one of the University of California campuses (UC Riverside). Right about the time that I got accepted for transfer, I decided that I wanted to become a paramedic and work on a 911 ambulance for a couple of years while I finished college. So instead of going to UC, I applied to paramedic school and went through all of that. I had intended to go back to college right after I finished paramedic school, but back when I first got my license, paramedic jobs were hard to come by. My first full-time ambulance job consisted of 24-hour shifts, which made going to school extremely difficult. At any rate, it wasn’t until January 2000 that I was able to switch to 12-hour night shifts and get back to school. However, now I was a much more serious student. I spent another year and a half at the Santa Rosa Junior College and this time got accepted to UC Davis, to which I transferred in 2001, initially as a Cell Biology major. While I was at Davis I participated in undergraduate research, and it was there that I realized that what I really wanted was a career in scientific research and not clinical medicine. However, my research interests are still strongly driven by my past experiences in the clinical world. I graduated from UC Davis in 2003 with a B.S. in Genetics, and took a job there at the Vet School studying the molecular genetics of brain tumors in dogs (pet dogs get brain tumors that are very similar to those seen in humans), as well as developing potential therapies to treat brain tumors. In the summer of 2005 I started graduate school in New York at the Tri-Institutional Program in Computational Biology and Medicine.

AZ: Explain to the readers your general area of research?
BR: In order for our hearts to be effective at doing their job of pumping blood throughout our bodies, they need to function in a certain way. The four chambers of the heart need to work together in a concerted fashion. Also, the heart can’t beat too slowly; otherwise the needs of the various organs and tissues won’t be met. But the heart can’t beat too fast, either, since a heart that is beating too fast won’t have enough time to fill up with blood between beats. The mechanical pumping action of the heart is regulated by an electrical system within the heart. In order for the various parts of the heart to work together, and with the correct timing, electrical impulses must originate in a specific region of the heart and then be conducted throughout the rest of the heart in a specific pattern and in the proper amount of time. Many people aren’t aware, especially on a day-to-day basis, of this electrical activity that’s going on in the background to keep their hearts pumping correctly, but it turns out that this electrical activity is very complex. Even within individual cardiac cells there are a fairly large number of components that must work together to produce the correct electrical series of events. And on top of that, there are billions of cells in a human heart that must work together, adding additional complexity! The people in our lab use computers, in addition to doing wet-lab experiments, to study different aspects of electrical activity in the heart. In particular we are interested in arrhythmias, which are abnormal (and sometimes lethal) electrical conduction patterns in the heart. By learning more about the mechanisms by which arrhythmias arise, better treatments (and prevention) for a wide range of cardiac conditions can hopefully be developed.

AZ: What is your area of focus?
BR: I’m still in a very early phase of my work, but I’ve become extremely interested in what are referred to as reperfusion arrhythmias. When blood flow is cut off to a region of the heart (as during a heart attack, when one or more coronary arteries become blocked) or to the entire heart (as during some surgical procedures which require the heart to be stopped temporarily), changes occur in the tissue that is not being perfused (i.e. tissue is being deprived of blood flow): the cells aren’t getting glucose that is needed to make energy required to carry out work, the inside of the cells become too acidic, etc. When you restore blood flow (the blocked coronary artery is reopened or bypassed, or the heart is restarted at the end of surgery) and the tissue that was previously deprived of a fresh blood supply is reperfused, you might expect everything to return back to normal. However, in some patients, the opposite occurs: the heart actually gets sicker. The affected region of the heart might not be able to pump as strongly anymore, or severe electrical disturbances (arrhythmias) may occur. There has been progress on this problem in the past, and there are certain things that many people agree are happening when these reperfusion arrhythmias occur. But it appears that the causes of the problem have not been completely worked out yet, not to mention that there still appears to be room for improvement in devising therapies. I hope to be able to make some progress in this arena.

AZ: What led you to your current position?
BR: Back when I was working as a paramedic, a lot of what I did revolved around monitoring cardiac electrical activity, as well as treating emergent cardiac problems. I monitored the ECG (an ECG gives a “picture” of the heart’s electrical activity as seen from the surface of the body) in probably the majority of my patients. In addition, some of the most powerful tools at my disposal acted directly on the heart: either drugs or electrical therapy to “reset” the heart in cases of extremely severe cardiac arrhythmias (the familiar paddles that are used to shock patients when they’ve experienced a cardiac arrest). My first exposure to reperfusion arrhythmias came when I was in paramedic school. We had to spend a couple of days doing a rotation in the cardiac cath lab, where images are taken of the coronary arteries, or procedures such as an angioplasty to unblock a coronary artery using a miniature balloon are performed. During one of the angioplasty cases that I was watching, almost immediately after the coronary artery was reopened, all of these extra irregular heart beats (called ectcopy) appeared, and shortly thereafter the patient went into cardiac arrest. The team was able to shock that patient and get the heart restarted, but I remember thinking, “Whoa, what just happened there?” At that time someone explained to me why reperfusion arrhythmias occur, and I came away thinking that the whole mechanism was already worked out. But recently I learned that the whole puzzle is not in fact solved, and now I’m working on this interesting problem that I have seen directly affects real patients.

AZ: What did you want to do when you were growing up?
BR: When I was a kid, I loved to take apart and tinker with all sorts of machines, and later computers. By the time I was in junior high, I had decided that I wanted to work with with computers and/or robots. But later my interests turned more to biology and medicine, so by the time I was half-way through high school I decided that I wanted to become a physician. I guess I’ve landed somewhere in between: using computers to tackle medical problems.

AZ: What do you enjoy most about your work?
BR: I get to continually learn new things about how nature works, and I get to work on a problem that was largely of my own choosing. Being a graduate student means that your time can be relatively free of rigid structure, and it requires a lot of reading, which is something that I love to do.

AZ: What is the most challenging aspect?
BR: Figuring out which questions to ask. There are always lots of questions that can be asked, but I need to formulate my questions in a way that is specific enough to make them scientifically tractable.

AZ: What’s on the horizon in your line of work?
BR: I’m still in the early phase of my program, so my next steps will be to finish courses and take my Advancement to Candidacy Exam.

AZ: Any advice for students interested in your field and science in general?
BR: Communication is an important part of science that I think is too often overlooked. Whether it’s writing or public speaking, try to get feedback from your colleagues after you’ve given a talk or written something. My two pet peeves (actually, I think I have a lot more than just two!) are presentations that have not been targeted to the audience correctly, and presentations that are comprised of disjoint pieces of information that don’t tell a cohesive story. The latter is especially easy in this age of PowerPoint where people tend to put lots of pretty pictures or huge amounts of text onto their slides. My personal feeling is that even if you feel like you’re “dumbing down” your presentation too much, there will probably still be a sufficient number of people in your audience who will appreciate it and actually get more out of your talk or paper than if you had done otherwise.

Many thanks to Byron. For more information on his work check out the website for the Tri-Institutional Program in Computational Biology and Medicine and the Cardiac Electrodynamics Laboratory. Stay tuned to learn more about his and for more chances to Better Know A Scientist (index).

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

In a previous article, the topic was the plaques attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. This post is about another cosmic message in a bottle, the Voyager Golden Records. As of this writing (March 18, 2007), the probes Voyager 1 and 2 are 101.957 AU and 82.529 AU from Earth. Depending on language use, “AU” or “u.a.” stands for Astronomical Unit, the distance of the semi-major axis (half of the major axis, the longest diameter of an eclipse) of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. The value of an AU unit is 149,597,870,691 +/- 30 m, about 150 km, or about 93 million miles. This puts Voyager 1 & 2 at about 9.5 billion miles (15.3 billion km) and 7.7 million miles (12.3 billion km) from Earth.

Aboard these two probes is a golden phonograph record that contains sounds and pictures from our planet. Below is a picture of the Voyager craft, at the center of the picture you can see the cover of the 12-inch Golden Record.

The cover is a instruction sheet for playing the record that is written in binary code and the spin movements of a hydrogen atom as the timing basis. This far more sophisticated message in a bottle presents has serious limitations as an effective way to communicate with intelligent life. Even if DJ Little Green Man is smart enough to figure out how to scratch out some tracks from this album over the alien airwaves, they may not have the visual or hearing abilities to process the sights and sounds, let alone understand what it’s on it.

Here’s here’s larger image of the cover diagram via Wikipedia’s Wikimedia feature.

However, it’s still a romantic idea and as President Jimmy Carter’s printed message on the record said: “We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”

Here’s links to content if you are interested:
Images
Greetings in 55 languages
Music
Sounds of Earth

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. Current location data from the probes Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and last years launch of the New Horizons mission: Spacecraft escaping the Solar System”, Heavens Above website
2. “Astronomical Unit”, Wikipedia entry
3. “Voyager Golden Record”, Wikipedia entry