Black Hole Photo!

There's a phenomenal image going round the Internet, and it's called the first-ever photograph of a black hole.

Well, it's not exactly a photograph, not like if you pointed your cell phone camera at the moon as I did last month. A word to the wise: it's easy for a full moon to be sooooooo bright it washes out the image to be nothing more than a white circle in a black sky, instead of what my eyes could see, which was a moon with visible craters and maria in a night sky speckled with stars. Technology needs to be managed to make useful images.

And the technology managed to make that orange image of hot, bright dust and gas circling a huge black hole? Well, it was managed in a number of ways. One of the leaders of a team creating an algorithm (a set of rules) to make that image was Dr Katie Bouman, when she was a graduate student at MIT.

Here's a photo of Dr Bouman that she shared on her Facebook page.

The team working to make this image was the Event Horizon Telescope, and you can see their website at this link, which is very useful for scholars and students. If you're looking for a popular science discussion like the ones on Twitter at #EHTBlackHole or  #EyeofSauron, you'll want to go to the BBC website for a terrific article on Dr Bouman, the team, and their project. There's even a short video of her TED Talk. Here's a link!
Another good place to learn is on Dr Bouman's Facebook page at this link. Scroll down to see several posts about the project and how information from many international telescopes was used to make this image.


The Neuroscience News Website quotes Dr Katie Bouman as saying that photographing a black hole is "equivalent to taking an image of a grapefruit on the moon, but with a radio telescope." You can follow Neuroscience News on Twitter at @NeuroNewsResearch, or check out this link to read their posts on Facebook.

Happy Birthday to Us... Almost

By Claire Eamer

Last week, I was delving around in old Sci/Why blog posts, looking for a dinosaur photo to illustrate L. E. Carmichael's post on the enormous Tyrannosaurus rex unearthed in southern Saskatchewan, Move Over SUE, There's a New T. rex in Town. A few years ago, I had visited the fossil's home museum in Eastend, a small town set among the low, rolling hills of southwestern Saskatchewan's shortgrass prairie. I knew I had written a blog post about it, but I couldn't remember when.

Well, I found it. And it was longer ago than I realized. In fact, that post, Seeing the Real McCoy... er, McDino, appeared in Sci/Why's first summer, 2011. I also realized we're about to have a birthday. Sci/Why was launched in April 2011. We're about to turn eight years old! There should be cake, shouldn't there?

Not many blogs will show you this, but Sci/Why will. That is dinosaur poo!
Specifically, it's fossilized T.rex poo -- a coprolite, in polite company -- and it's the
first T.rex coprolite ever found. Here it rests safe in a display case at the museum
in Eastend, Saskatchewan. Claire Eamer photo 

The website intro (just over there on the right and up a bit) credits me with the idea for Sci/Why, but the truth is, it started because I'm lazy. A handful of us kids' science writers were at a conference when one of us said, "I think someone should set up a blog about Canadian science writing for kids." Because, you see, there's a lot of it, and it's actually very good. But a blog sounded like a lot of work -- and I'm definitely not in favour of a lot of work -- so I said, as quickly as possible, "Group blog. It should be a group blog!" (You see what I did there, eh? It's the Tom Sawyer you-will-love-painting-this-fence-for-me thing.)

And we did. And it's still going. What you are reading right now is Sci/Why blog post #436. As I write this, our all-time total page views number 436,724.

Want a few more stats? Of course you do!

Our most popular column ever, which also came out that first summer, is How big can an earthquake be? by Craig Saunders. So far it has garnered 40,586 page views, and it's in the top five columns almost every week -- especially if there are earthquakes in the news.

Another biggie from that first year is Joan Marie Galat's post, Why constellations and astronomy are important, from October 20, 2011. It has received 19,885 page views (as of this moment), and it too shows up regularly in the top five.

Both those posts address topics that turn up again and again in the news and in the school curriculum. But Shar Levine's piece on the Eleanor of Aquitaine Sundial is a bit more off the beaten track. Still, it has earned 9,393 page views and counting. And Helaine Becker's rant about American children's publishers shying away from the topic of evolution, A Call to Arms -- and Flippers, Too, has almost as many page views. In fairness, Helaine in full rant is always entertaining.

The big hitters in the page-view stats are the older columns, since they've had time to be discovered again and again. But some of our more recent posts are doing very well indeed. Adrienne Montgomerie's Iceman CSI: Tales from a 5300-year-old man, which dates from October 2016, has more than 2000 page views. So do several of Jan Thornhill's immaculately researched and beautifully illustrated posts. Check out her Colourful Wood: Spalting Fungi from last year to see what I mean.

Over the past eight years, we've had writers come and go as their interests and time constraints changed. Usually there are about eight or nine regular contributors, and a few more people who send in a blog post when they have time. We try to update the blog every Friday -- but we remind ourselves that the world won't end because we've missed a Friday. This should be fun -- for us and for you. We hope it is and continues to be. Happy Blog Birthday to all of us!

Yours fondly, Claire (and the rest of the Sci/Why crew)

Move Over SUE, There's a New T. rex in Town

Photo by Claire Eamer

by L. E. Carmichael

Of all the dinosaurs in all the world, SUE the T. rex might be the most famous. The most complete T. rex skeleton ever found, SUE is likely also the most well-traveled. Her bones, or at least casts of them, have been displayed all over the world. The casts I saw in Nova Scotia came with bilingual displays written in English and Arabic!

But there's a new king of the dinosaurs in town, and his name is Scotty.

Named after a bottle of Scotch the scientists toasted his 1991 discovery with, Scotty is only 65% complete, compared to SUE's 90%. But he stands out for another reason - as far as we currently know, he's the biggest carnivore ever to walk the earth.

As any forensic anthropologist will tell you, there's a certain amount of instinct and guess-work involved in reconstructing height and weight from nothing but bones. But measurements of Scotty's femur (the long, heavy bone from his thigh) suggest he was in the ballpark of 19,500 pounds - almost a ton more than SUE.

He was also a senior citizen - at approximately 28 years old, Scotty lived longer than any other T. rex we currently know about. And he was a tough old dude, surviving a broken rib, fractured tail bones, and an infected jaw. Those injuries showed signs of healing, meaning they likely weren't his ultimate cause of death.

Now that Canadian palaeontologists have had a chance to study him, Scotty will be making his public debut at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum this May.  No word yet on whether he'll be joining his cousin SUE on tour!

An Iceberg of Women in Science

Grace Lockhart was the first woman in the whole British Empire to graduate from a university. It was 1874 when she got a science degree up at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada, but it was almost another 50 years before all women got the right to graduate or even to attend classes in Canada (and the UK). Nicaragua started allowing women in university about 100 years before that and Italy started about 700 years earlier. Once women could graduate, they still usually didn’t get credit for their discoveries and inventions. But that didn’t stop some of the brightest female minds from contributing to human knowledge and technology.

We hear little bits now, often in form of stories about the wives who innovated beside their husbands, brothers, and employers, did the field work, catalogued all the specimens, built the telescopes, designed the experiments, or crunched the data. The information is coming out now. Slowly.

Blockbuster films like Hidden Figures, memes that give credit where it is due, and announcements of “all female firsts” like the space walk this month led by Kristen Facciol,

a female flight controller from the Canadian Space Agency give us the sense that there is a whole iceberg of information waiting to be revealed about female scientists throughout history.

scientist: "does everyone here know what Watson and Crick discovered?"
me from back of room: "Rosalind Franklin's notes"

— Robby Kraft (@RobbyKraft) May 3, 2016

My high school science teacher 30 years ago taught me about Madame Curie’s experiments with radiation, but that was the only thing I’d ever heard about a woman doing science. It’s getting easier to learn more about women doing science throughout history: buy books about them; watch movies about them; ask questions about them at the science centre; ask teachers about them. The more interest we show, the more answers will get shared.

Search this blog for “women” and you’ll find several posts. A Mighty Girl regularly posts stories and cool posters about female scientists and inventors and all kinds of other interesting women, both old and current. Brain Pickings has great stories about women in science, as does scientificwomen.net, and you’ll find great summaries on YouTube, too. Take a look around, then tell others the cool things you learned.

---

by Adrienne Montgomerie
photo from Pixabay

Science Communication Workshops March 6 at York U

Are you a science student, a budding journalist, or a member of the wide community of citizens interested in science? Here's a Sci/Why blog post for families with youths and teens rather than very young children.

There are two workshops happening that will be of great interest to you, on Wednesday March 6 at York University in Toronto. As York University Faculty of Science announced today on Twitter:

Communicating research findings to the media and wider public in a way that is accurate and captures their interest can prove tricky. How do you stay in control of the story and where does real and imagined fake news fit in?

Two free events open to the wider community on Wednesday, March 6 will explore those issues further with experienced journalists, communicators and a scientist – “Issues and Challenges in Science Communications” and “Communicating Science in the Age of Fake News.”

You can read all about these two public events by clicking the link here, at York University's website. Admission to either event is free, but seating is limited, so contact them to make sure there will be room for you to attend.

These workshops are not only for university people, but for students learning about science communication, and for people in the wider community. “Issues and Challenges in Science Communications” takes place from noon til 2pm, and “Communicating Science in the Age of Fake News” will follow that evening from 6 to 8pm. Either or both of these discussions among experts might be of great interest for students and their parents. If you're a youth interested in sciences or journalism, or the parent of one, these workshops might be just what you need.

And for those people not in the Toronto area, contact your nearest university or community college to see what is happening where you live. If there are no public science events planned in your area at present, that's your opportunity to ask for one. Talk about what you and your friends need, whether it might be Science Summer Camp, citizen science water sampling, or info sessions for high school vocational options. You'll be amazed what can be arranged in your own district. Even a high school, library, or recreation centre can help you. Some speakers will visit isolated communities in person, while others will visit by Skype and internet chat forums.

Science is not something that happens only in universities -- and even when it does, that kind of science is STILL meant to benefit all of us.

Muskrat Encounter

by Joan Marie Galat

I often think how time spent in nature is interesting and different, not only from season to season, but also in different types of weather. Varying conditions bring new, and sometimes surprising, outdoor experiences. One mild winter day, I spotted this muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) crossing an Alberta country road between two swampy areas. I pulled over to have a look. To my surprise, the animal turned, walked over to my vehicle, and took a good long look at me through the open window.

It was fascinating to see his long toes up close. So that's how they dig into mud banks and build underwater tunnels! They also build houses, called push-ups, out of mud and cattails, bullrushes, and other aquatic vegetation. I could see why his rubbery-looking tale makes such a great rudder when navigating through water. Muskrats can stay underwater for up to 20 minutes. Their lips close behind the incisors, allowing them to chew underwater. Like beavers, muskrats may slap the water with their tails to warn of danger.

Muskrat: Ondatra zibethicus

This muskrat did not seem too concerned about possible danger. In fact, he walked beneath my vehicle during our encounter. (The last photo shows how my photography was impacted when I realized he was under the car.) As I turned off the engine and unbuckled to look out the opposite window, he finished inspecting the vehicle's undercarriage. Popping out, the muskrat resumed his waddling walk towards the frozen water.

Experiencing nature in winter may lead you to surprising encounters. Even if you don't spot animals, you might see signs of their presence. Look for tracks, paths, and depressions in the snow, where animals may have bedded.

If the weather is going to keep you indoors, check out Dot to Dot in the Sky, Stories in the Clouds. While waiting for your ideal day, you can discover the science of how different types of weather occur. You'll also find tales and folklore from around the world that reveal how ancient cultures first explained rain, thunder, wind, frost, and snow. You might even find a few tips for predicting the weather, so you can plan your next nature visit!

Dot to Dot in the Sky, Stories in the Clouds

Book Trailer (1 minute, 48 seconds.)