science

Scientific proof I am colder than Dave, originally uploaded by zannect.

The infrared camera at the Boston Museum of Science says so. Look how cold my nose and hand are! (Blue=coldest, white=warmest, red=mid-range.)

Dave and I went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History yesterday to check out the special exhibit "Sea Creatures in Glass". The HMNH is most famous for the Glass Flowers, an incredible collection of botanical models made in glass.

The sea creatures and the flowers were all made by a father-son team, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, in Dresden, from 1887-1936. They are so detailed and accurate it's hard to believe they aren't real. They worked from specimens and drawings, and built over 3,000 models. It's well worth a visit when you're in the Cambridge area!

We also checked out the fossils, the preserved specimens, and the rocks and minerals. The museum is very old fashioned in some ways--there are halls and halls of slightly moth-eaten taxidermied animals in antique glass and wood cases--but is also really up to date--one of the other special exhibits was on climate change. A friendly staff person pointed out this neat photo op, of a right whale and a porpoise skeleton:

And finally, they have a preserved specimen of one of my favorite fish, the Coelacanth, aka the living fossil:

It's just so weird! I love it. I've been fascinated by them since I first read about them in the fourth grade.

Full set of photos on Flickr!

I've been thinking a lot about Mars lately.

I recently finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars). The three books explore the colonization of Mars over 200 years. A major theme is the science of colonization, and the environmental impacts, but much of the story also explores the societal implications of colonizing Mars and of some major advances in science; the way a new society and culture grow out of a combination of Earth cultures, (and how this is pushed along especially by the "First Hundred" colonists, all scientists); and how a new political framework is developed. The books follow several major characters' lives in great detail, so another major theme is relationships and how they change over time and as people grow. It's also an exploration of the capitalist economic structure and what alternatives could be developed, one of my favorite themes of the book. It's a fascinating series and I highly recommend it even if you don't usually like science fiction.

Robinson starts the books in 2026 as the mission is getting ready to depart Earth. As I was reading the series, the Phoenix Mars Mission launched. I've been checking in occasionally on the mission's Twitter page. Unfortunately, we are many years behind the technologies described in the book (these were written in the 1990s), but it was really cool to be reading along, picturing Mars, and then have pictures of the real planet in the daily news. And of course, a major section of the books deals with the availability of water on Mars, and it has just been confirmed that water (well, ice) actually exists on Mars. And, one of my someone on my shift at the food Coop is a rocket scientist who helped design the scoop that Phoenix is using to pick up Mars dirt. So cool.

All this has made me a little sad that I didn't more seriously pursue my childhood dream of being an astronaut. I'm four inches too short, so that, combined with my terrible vision, probably would prevented me from getting very far. And I'm not sure I have the patience to be an astronomer. But then news like this comes along, and as much as love public health, I kind of wish I was working on Mars instead. I'll just have to content myself with reading astronomy blogs and daydreaming that somehow humans will be able to visit Mars as tourists in my lifetime.