Geeking Science: Ancient Arts and Crafts in an Electronic Age

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I need art to stay sane. Right now, as mentioned earlier this month in my Magical Words post, I’m not doing any. But I need to get out in the soil and garden, break out my silks and embroider, stain my fingers with ink, and smear clay over the world in one huge mosaic. I need to do it soon.

And now I have scientific backing about how important it is!

In a computer age, where things are measured in the nanosecond and the end-product is somewhere on the interwebs, having something that slowly grows, where you can gain skill and measure the difference with your own eyes and fingers, is calming in a way a computer game never can be. We are built for slightly repetitive tasks where we gain improvement and have a product at the end; basket weaving and gathering herbs are just two examples.

Crafts heal the mind and body, fighting depression and social anxiety. According to research, the benefits include:

relaxation; relief from stress; a sense of accomplishment; connection to tradition; increased happiness; reduced anxiety; enhanced confidence, as well as cognitive abilities (improved memory, concentration and ability to think through problems). (Luckman, 2018)

Basically crafting is a form of mediation, giving similar results including reduction of stress and fighting inflammation. Moving the fingers to create something that requires concentration, but not thought, gives the brain the time out desperately needed to decouple from the brain weasels presenting scenarios of disaster. 

“Playing” with arts and crafts provides the body something to do while the brain is relaxing. And the brain relaxes best, interestingly enough, when it gets used in a new way. Working in crafting involves:

many different areas of your brain. It can work your memory and attention span while involving your visuospatial processing, creative side and problem-solving abilities. (Wilson, 2015)

I could use some of that in my life right now. Mediation, relief from stress, and increased happiness. Maybe I do have time to break out the pins and needles.

 

Biography

Luckman, Susan. “In Our Brutal Modern World, Science Shows Our Brain Need Craft More Than Ever”. The Conversation. 2018 July 28. (last viewed 1/26/2019: https://www.sciencealert.com/modern-life-is-brutal-here-s-why-craft-is-so-good-for-our-health)

Wilson, Jacque. “This is your brain on crafting.” CNN. 2015 January 5. (last viewed 1/26/2019: https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/25/health/brain-crafting-benefits/index.html)

Geeking Science: The New Horizon and the Old Sexy

Image created in a Meme generator by Erin Penn

Our relationship with the International Space Station has moved into old married couple stage. Sexy new ideas, exciting discoveries, touches of imagination, lust of exploration, all are distant thrills of yesteryear. That doesn’t mean the relationship is over. Like an old couple, we check in periodically, encouraging those involved in our space exploration relationship to keep the long hours in the endless night. The pains of old equipment and the housecoat covered in solar dust isn’t exactly a candlelight dinner, but starlight is always there.

While we keep looking for the new thrill, like the furthest distant world ever visited by spacecraft which the New Horizon just passed and will be sending information back to us for the next 20 months (talk about long download speeds! – more about all this New Sexy here), we shouldn’t ignore this amazing relationship and responsibility we share with the world. The information gathered by the years and decades of operation will help us settle the great beyond.

If you don’t already have NASA bookmarked, go here.

I would also recommend joining the Planetary Society, a non-profit group supporting space exploration around the globe by government agencies, non-profit groups, universities, and commercial endeavors.

Space and the International Space Station may not be the New Sexy, but sometimes the best thing in the world is curling up by the fire with a good friend and sharing what is happening in our boring every-day lives. Especially when it involves Dragons. 

On Sunday, the Dragon module from the Space Station returned to earth with the newest scientific research. The experiments brought back by the Dragon include:

    1. The Design of Scalable Gas Separation Membranes via Synthesis Under Microgravity – An environmental experiment to remove excess carbon dioxide from the air. Useful for space exploration AND could maybe lead to developments which could reverse some of the carbon load damage here on Earth.
    2. Three-D printer-recycler – Turning waste plastic into filament for three-D printing. Cutting down on space debris, making every pound put into space worthwhile, and providing versatility once there. As with everything space-worthy, constant testing to make it the most robust product possible also translates to Earth uses in other harsh environments.
    3. Virtual Reality – This particular experiment is testing how astronauts react to and perceive microgravity. Long-term space use could mean we will be visiting Ultima Thule instead of just our cameras. Earth use includes helping people suffering vertigo and other perception issues.

More details about the experiments can be found at space.com: Some Strange Science Will Launch Into Space This Week for NASA (November 13, 2018) and throughout the web.

 

Image acquired from NASA – (the original blog post related to this has been deleted)
The SpaceX Dragon cargo craft is pictured moments after being released from the Canadarm2 robotic arm.

Geeking Science: Trees and Oxygen

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Ever have a Homer Simpson “d’oh” moment? I guess everyone has. I had a big one, like facepalm, “why did not I never realize?” moment while driving.

Everyone goes on and one about how important trees are to Earth’s oxygen cycle, protecting the Rain Forest, preventing clear cutting, all that jazz. And I’m driving along thinking, why are trees so important? I mean, any open green space is great, right? I could see lots going by at my perfectly legal 65 miles-an-hour set on cruise control. The highway had tons of grass on the central reservation between highway lanes and on the verge to my right. As far as the eye could see.

Then a tree pops up.

“D’oh.”

Three-D. Trees go up. Grass is just a little bit on the ground, but trees go up hundreds of feet in some cases.

That’s how trees win the best oxygen-producer prize. They simply have more surface area to work with. It’s not just “square foot”, but “cubic foot”. A 20 by 20 area produces 400 with grass, add 100 up (adjusted to 50, since trees are not quite as efficient) and suddenly it is 20,000.

Geometry applied to ecology.

Geeking Science: Building Memories

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Hop on Pop. I read and read and read as a kid. And when I became old enough to babysit, my sisters made me read Fox in Socks over and over and over again. Mostly as a torture because I had problems with the tongue twisters and it would set the three- and five-year olds giggling. The limit imposed was three children books after being tucked into bed, otherwise we would have made the parents read all night. They gave us such power: allowing us to choose two of the books to be read.

In a recent article on Edutopia, The Neuroscience of Narrative and Memory, bedtime stories are linked with memory. Children want to hear the stories over and over again because they learn how to predict things … successfully! Basic scaffolding learning – do something easy, with a good reward, and go from there. Eventually children apply the predictive ability to things they never been exposed to before.

In addition to teaching predictability, bedtime narratives also teach the narrative format, which in turns provides the memory network with an organized frame to remember things: inciting incident, problem, resolution, ending.

“Hey, little Erin, tell grandma about the trip to the zoo.” 

“ummm”

“What did we do first?”

“We gots in the car.”

“Then what?”

“We wented to the zoo. There were elephants and monkeys and a butterfly park where we ran.”

Grandma nods, smiling. “That sounds like fun.”

“It was. Except when I dropped my ice cream. But daddy got me another.”

“Tell grandma why you dropped the ice cream.”

“The peacock scared me.” My eyes grew large. “They have the peacocks in the lunch area!”

Grandma laughs, clapping her hands.

“After that we went home. Oh, and had pizza. It was the bestest day.”

From the narrative format instilled through nighttime story reading, parents teach how to tell stories and share experiences. With a little prodding, children learn how to explain things to others and include all the important details. A very useful skill in adulthood on providing instruction on how to do a task at work, breaking down an accident in the house and how to avoid it in the future, and dozens of other activities where knowing how to arrange things into a beginning, middle, and ending is essential.

Reading to children at bedtime isn’t only about teaching the love of reading, but a host of memory skills as well. That is pretty geeking cool.

Geeking Science: Nori

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My love of sushi and my budget are often at odds now my favorite sushi chef has retired from the local buffet. He was amazing, offering dozens of versions of fresh sushi, and snuck me sashimi on the side. Three plates of sushi for all-you-can-eat buffet prices. The new guy isn’t nearly as good; now the sushi is worth what I pay for it with no sashimi at all. The result is still better than pre-made grocery-store-bought crap so when I need a fix I return to the buffet.

(If you ever want to buy me food, fried chicken and good sushi – at different meals – are the way to my heart.)

Today’s geeking science is about how the sushi craze nearly didn’t happen, how science discoveries belong to the entire world, and how strange and wondrous life forms are.

The full article is available on Ars Technica: “How an unpaid UK researcher saved the Japanese seaweed industry” by Esther Inglis-Arkell, posted November 19, 2017.

Nori, wonderful, tasty seaweed – perfect straight or wrapped around vinegar-soaked rice with a bit of fish, was impossible to cultivate. Japanese farmers every year would put out bamboo and rope frames and wait for filaments to form and grow into large plants. No seeds, no flowers, no saplings, no transplants. Spontaneous generation, or so it seemed. Some years were better than others.

In 1951 production stopped. Spontaneous generation no longer occurred.

Americans didn’t feel the pinch since the Kawafuku Restaurant in Los Angeles, CA didn’t put sushi on the map until the 60’s, where it spread first throughout the urban centers by the 80’s, and finally to Chinese buffets in small Southern cities by the 90’s. But the Japanese lost a favorite food.

On the other side of the world, Kathleen Drew-Baker just completed a path to discover something wondrous. Fired from her teaching job because of the sin of marriage, she became a research assistant (in modern speak, unpaid intern). Common practice of the day required women to be released when they marry so they could pay proper attention to their husband’s careers instead of a day-job; more accurately women were expected to resign and then, if teachers, continue to work unpaid. But that is a different post not related to the scope of this blog.

Back to the amazing Kathleen Drew-Baker. She was poking around with a seaweed that grew in Wales used by locals for bread and soup. The seaweed grew during the winter months, seemingly by spontaneous generation. She looked for spores, thinking fungi. But the spores she found led to a pink sludge growing inside shells during the summer months.

The seaweed led a double-life, during the winter as a leafy green seaweed and the summer as a pink sludge hanging out inside a shell. Like a caterpillar and butterfly without cocoon stage to mark the difference.

Being a scientist she published the discovery in Nature on October 29, 1949 through a paper entitled “Conchocelis-Phase in the Life-History of Porphyra umbillcalis (L. Kutz)“. (Yes, she was allowed to publish under her own name. She wasn’t living in medieval times; she just wasn’t allowed to make a living at being a scientist or teacher.)

In Japan, a scientist ran across it and thought, maybe that applies to the Japanese seaweed too. He looked. It did.

No longer restricted by unpredictable spontaneous generation, the Japanese farmers have gone big business, industrialized farm on the seaweed. Temperature control, testing different shells, maximizing light. Each and every stage of the double-life growth cycle tested and maximized for production. Production on a scale large enough to feed not only a growing Japan, but the rest of the world’s love of sushi.

Cool side note: Every year Uto City holds a festival honor of Kathleen Drew-Baker.

To read the full article (explaining the controls used to maximize nori growth – because who wouldn’t want to know that?!?) go here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/how-an-unpaid-uk-researcher-saved-the-japanese-seaweed-industry/