Exhibit A: Still fighting the Civil War, one Lincoln five dollar bill at a time.

(FYI, “Deo Vindice” is from the Great Seal of the Confederacy, and is loosely translated by our good friends at Wikipedia as “With God our Vindicator”)

Exhibit B: Showing that crazy deep emotion is not restricted to one end of the political spectrum.

Poor Hillary, getting robed like that.

Kidding aside, I’m fairly moved by the thought that there are people who have such a depth of frustration that scrawling on currency feels like the only voice they have — one may find the source of that frustration repellent or deranged, but that feeling of impotence in the face of what seems like the end of the world is something most of us have felt at one time or another (Gulf oil spill, anyone?).

(FYI, These two examples are just the ones that happened to pass through my hands during the past few months, but many more examples have been cataloged here and here, the latter being a compendium maintained by a burrito restaurant, of all things.)

Yesterday, I wrote about the comet 2009 R1 McNaught which is currently in the extreme northern sky in the early morning. By coincidence, just hours after posting it, I got an email from the amateur astronomer Anthony Ayiomamitis (the same guy who took the very cool picture of the ISS and Jupiter in the daytime), who sent me this picture of the comet he took in Greece at just around the same time that post went live:

Wow, very pretty! The solid part of the comet, called the nucleus, is far smaller than a single pixel in this image, since the comet was more than 175 million km (110 million miles) away when he took this shot. The nucleus of even a huge comet is only a few dozen km across, so at that great distance is just a tiny dot. Anthony has details on his observations on his McNaught page.

The comet looks huge — and the fuzzy part can be bigger than planets! — because what you’re seeing is gas expanding away from the nucleus. Far from the Sun that gas is frozen, and the comet is solid. But heat it up, and that ice turns into a gas, creating the comet’s coma (Latin for hair). In that gas methane, water, ammonia, and lots of other things, many of which are pretty nasty.

But why is it green?

Ah, that’s a good question (I’m glad I asked it!) and takes just a little bit of background.

When the gas suffusing out from the nucleus gets hit by ultraviolet light it becomes ionized; one or more electrons get stripped off the atoms. That’s important because the Sun is blowing a wind of subatomic particles called the solar wind, and as it moves out from the Sun it carries a magnetic field with it. This field interacts with the comet’s ions in the coma, shearing them away (this process is pretty complicated, and not completely understood). The solar wind is moving far, far faster than the comet (many hundreds of km/sec, versus maybe just a few dozen), so the ion tail points straight away from the Sun. As far as the solar wind cares, the comet is just standing still.

And that brings us to the comet’s verdant glow. That green color is real, and not just from the way the picture was made! And it’s the same reason a neon sign glows. When you have an ionized atom or molecule (or just an excited one, with an electron bumped into a higher energy state so that it can fall back down), the electron can recombine with its parent. When it does, it gives off light. The color of the light depends very strongly on the type of atom or molecule. Excited hydrogen glows red, for example, which is why so many gas clouds in deep space glow that color.

In a comet, the molecule cyanogen (CN)₂ and diatomic carbon (C₂) both glow characteristically green, which is why some comets, like McNaught, are green. And I wouldn’t blame you if you thought that these comets must be mostly made of those two molecules since the comet is so green. But, like everything in science, there’s more going on…

Some atoms and molecules emit more strongly than others. Under the same circumstances, a kilo of cyanogen would glow much more fiercely than a kilo of, say, hydrogen. It depends on some relatively complicated quantum physics — forgive me if I leave off the details — but you can think of it as one person who can yell louder than a bunch of other people combined. That one person dominates the emitted sound, even though there are lots of people in the room. It’s the same in the comet: (CN)₂ and C₂ are strong emitters, so their presence dominates the color we see. That’s not the case for every comet (some may be deficient in those compounds), but it’s certainly true for McNaught; lots of observers are reporting its strongly blue-green color.

I’ve seen quite a few green comets in my time, and while it’s a little odd to see something glowing a ghostly hue like that in the sky, it’s always lovely. This comet promises to be a good one, so if you get a chance, go out and hunt it down.

Eugene Lim was one of my first graduate students at the University of Chicago. We violated Lorentz invariance together (it’s not as dirty as it sounds), and he’s since gone on to think about bubble collisions and eternal inflation at prestigious places like Yale, Columbia, and Cambridge.

But Eugene always cared about other things in addition to physics, and today he’s bringing us a guest post about a heart-wrenching topic: education in Haiti in the aftermath of their devastating earthquake. Not content to agitate for support from the comfort of his computer, Eugene is actually hopping on a plane this weekend to spend a month teaching math at a poor rural university. Here’s his introduction, and we hope to have a follow-up post after he returns from his travels.

———-

On Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 4:53pm, a massive quake hit Haiti, killing an approximate quarter of a million people, injuring another quarter of a million, and causing massive infrastructure damage. Today, more than five months later, as the news cycle has moved on, Haitians are still pulling themselves out of the disaster, with 1.5 million people still homeless.

Fondwa is the 10th Communal Section of Leogane situated about 60 km south of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, near the epicenter of the quake. It is a rural community with big dreams, the peasants banded together in 1988 to form the APF (Association of Peasants of Fondwa) to create a model community, not just with the aim of providing basic services but to empower the people of Haiti by providing them with the education and knowledge to improve their own lives.

One of their amazing achievement is the founding of a university, the University of Fondwa (UNIF) in 2004 in the mountains of Haiti, offering majors in Management, Agricultural Engineering and Veterinary Science — skills necessary for a rural community to survive and thrive — with about 40 students from all over Haiti. They graduated their first class last year.

The quake destroyed all the buildings of UNIF : the main building, the dorms and the lecture halls. Remarkably, classes continued after the quake, first in tents, and hopefully soon in temporary shelters. Final exams were given and graded, and the new semester began on schedule, May 5.

I met the founder of the University, Fr. Joseph Phillipe in New York a few weeks ago (he also founded Haiti’s biggest microfinance bank, FONKOZE, but that’s another story) — a series of hopeful email inquiries inspired by the watching a documentary about Fondwa led to having coffee with him in uptown New York City. Despite the challenges that his community is facing, he was full of energy, focusing on what to do for the future. I was impressed. I told him I want to help out.

I told him I wanted to volunteer to teach in UNIF, but I was not sure what I need to do. He said “We are waiting for you in Fondwa.”

This week, I am headed down to Fondwa to teach math for a month. I was told to be prepared to be caught unprepared. Internet permitting, I hope to post a follow-up to this when I get to Fondwa with more pictures from the ground.

A month is not exactly a long time. But I hope that any help is better than no help at all — they are short on teaching staff after the quake. Personally, I have been inspired by humanitarian groups like Doctors without Borders and Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health. I can’t save lives as a doctor, but I can teach! A long term hope is to be able to build ties in Fondwa, and perhaps do this on a yearly basis. I believe that academics have a lot to contribute in making this world a better place beyond hanging out in our ivory towers.

I asked Fr. Joseph what else I can do to help, he said “Tell your friends about us, and ask your friends to come too”.

Sean has kindly allowed me to use this blog to publicize the plight of the community at Fondwa. They are still trying to get basic services in. Their main needs are monetary donations, temporary housing, clean water and volunteers! They are especially looking for long term volunteers for six months of longer. They are also looking for a President for UNIF — I am serious — if you are interested or know anybody who might be interested, email APF below.

If you like want to volunteer, the best way is to contact APF directly at apf222@aol.com or go to the APF homepage. If you like to donate directly to APF click on the link to my blog for the bank information. If you want help out Haitians to help themselves : support Fonkoze’s microfinancing efforts by helping out here.

Do you remember when They Might Be Giants famously covered a 1959 children's song called 'Why Does The Sun Shine?' It begins like this:
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
I thought I'd start the morning with a bit more detail 50 years after the original... At temperatures over 13 million K, the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium produces much of the sun's power. Every second, ~ 4.4 Mt of matter is converted to energy by way of thermonuclear reactions in this star's core, and (following Einstein's mass-energy equation) that's a rate about 30 trillion times higher than our yearly use of all primary electricity and fuels on planet Earth. (And no, I haven't come up with a new tune yet...)

The turn of the millennium was not kind to the snakes.

Herpetologist Chris Reading and his team have been counting snakes through their own surveys and looking at population data going back to 1987 to see what’s happening to snake populations. The alarming findings, to be published soon in Biology Letters, indicate that most of the species studied saw a great decrease in population, with the greatest loss between 1998 and 2002.

Reading’s team monitored 17 different species in different climates—including snakes from Europe, Africa, and Australia—to try to get a global picture. Eleven of the 17 declined sharply over the study’s two-decade-plus period, with some declining as much as 90 percent. Five remained more or less stable. Only one saw a population increase, and a very slight one at that.

“All the declines occurred during the same relatively short period of time and over a wide geographical area that included temperate, Mediterranean and tropical climates,” write the authors. “We suggest that, for these reasons alone, there is likely to be a common cause at the root of the declines and that this indicates a more widespread phenomenon” [Guardian].

Last month, we saw other scientists point the finger at climate change as a reason for lizard declines; with the snakes Reading and his colleagues are being more cautious, simply ringing the alarm bells that snakes could be in danger around the world. The proximate cause is likely to be less abundant prey or a changing habitat, such as less available cover in which snakes can hide. Given the widespread nature and the timeline, however, climate patterns can’t be ruled out.

The year when many of the snake declines began – 1998 – raises the question of whether climatic factors might be involved, as very strong El Nino conditions contributed to making it the hottest year recorded in modern times [BBC News].

The real trouble is going to come in sorting out just how many snakes, or which ones, are in great danger. Because, frankly, they’re hard to count.

More data may or may not bear out the pattern, says ecologist Rick Shine of the University of Sydney, who was not part of the study. “The jury is still out on whether or not there is a general crisis here, but the reports are alarming” [Science News].

Related Content:
80beats: Lizards Can’t Take the Heat, But Are They Really Going Extinct?
80beats: Weird Blind Snakes Drifted With Continents And Rafted Across Oceans
80beats: Uncle Sam: No More Snakes on Planes, Already
Discoblog: When Animals Invade, Part II: Pythons Taking Over South Florida

Image: Wikimedia Commons

One musky Calvin Klein fragrance isn’t just making humans go Rawr. When sprayed on rocks by zookeepers and field researchers, the cologne Obsession for Men draws big cats like cheetahs and jaguars. They cuddle against it; they take long sniffs, savoring it longer than they do their meals; they may even track it down from half a mile away.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, spraying perfume on zoo exhibits is something of a trade secret among zookeepers–sniffing out the foreign scents keeps the cats curious and active in captivity. In 2003, Pat Thomas, general curator at the Bronx Zoo in New York, conducted a smell test with his jaguars. The cats certainly didn’t turn up their noses at Estée Lauder, Revlon, or Nina Ricci, but Calvin Klein’s Obsession kept them sniffing the longest, keeping them engaged for about eleven minutes.

During the seven years after Thomas’ test, the scent’s secret feline attraction has helped big cat researchers to observe the animals’ behaviors in the wild and conduct conservation population studies. In one jaguar survey in Guatemala, scientists sprayed the cologne on rags placed in front of their motion-sensitive video cameras. Researchers’ biggest difficulty is getting their hands on the stuff, which runs for about $60 per bottle and is hard to come by in the rain forest. The Bronx Zoo keeps its supplies up by taking donations of the smelly stuff.

Fragrance-designer Ann Gottlieb, who worked on Obsession for Men, described the scent to The Wall Street Journal:

“It’s a combination of this lickable vanilla heart married to this fresh green top note—it creates tension,” she says. The cologne also has synthetic “animal” notes like civet, a musky substance secreted by the cat of the same name, giving it particular sex appeal, she adds. “It sparks curiosity with humans and, apparently, animals.”

Me-ow.

Related content:
Discoblog: Love Potion Number 10: Oxytocin Spray Said to Increase Attraction
80beats: A Gory Aphrodisiac: Spiders Feast on Blood to Get Their Sexy On
Science Not Fiction: Eleventh Hour: Funky Pheromones
Cosmic Variance: Eau de Stilton

Image: flickr / Cinz / 03ahmed