Science Lush

The Lush List 8/19/15: Raw Science TV and Netflix's Project Mc2

Project Mc2 Dolls + A Netflix Show = A Winning Formula

So sorry about the pun...couldn't help myself!

But that's just because I'm excited and intrigued by the new Project Mc2 dolls, described on their Toys R Us listing as "a team of four super-smart and seriously cool girls who use their love of science and their spy skills as they go on missions for secret organization, NOV8™ (that's "innovate"!)."

For once, I'm hoping that the copy lives up to its promise. The dolls also come with experiment kits, such as the DIY volcano that comes with the Adrienne Attoms doll.  

The toy launch is accompanied by an original, live-action Netflix series of the same name, starring Ysa Panerojo ("Camryn Coyle"), Victoria Vida ("Adrienne Attoms"), Mika Abdalla ("McKeyla McAlister") and Genneya Walton ("Bryden Bandweth"). Writing credits so far include Katiedid Langrock and Jordana Arkin (Melissa & Joey, Significant Others), and the show's Executive Producers include AwesomenessTV's Brian Robbins and Shauna Phelan, both of whom have tons of experience creating content for young audiences. According to an article on Fortune.com, additional Project Mc2 content will be featured on AwesomenessTV, DreamworksTV and YouTube. 

 
Official trailer for Project Mc2 Netflix series

It's hard to believe that this STEM-oriented brand comes from MGA Entertainment, the same company that brought us the Bratz dolls. But Isaac Larian, CEO of MGA, has a personal connection to the Project Mc2 brand. He studied civil engineering at California Polytechnic State University, and according to the Fortune.com piece, was surprised to find that even now, women make up only about 15% of the class. Additionally, he was inspired by his daughter, an entrepreneur. He hopes the show and the product line will encourage other young girls to follow in her footsteps and become innovators. From Fortune.com:   

Larian thinks that by targeting girls in elementary school and early middle school, Project Mc² will impart a pro-STEM message to girls, as well as boys and families, that much sooner. The dolls are targeted to girls ages 6 through 10, while the series demo is targeted to ages 6 through 13.

“Hopefully, this is just the beginning. We’d like to expand the project even further. Because if you’re [studying STEM] and your girlfriend is doing it, and your sister is doing it, how long before everyone is doing it, and then STEM becomes cool?” Larian says.

If you're looking for an alternative to Barbie dolls or the next show for those kids who have grown out of Odd Squad or Miles From Tomorrowland, Project Mc2 is definitely worth checking out.  

h/t: Fellow Sciren Taryn O'Neill 

Raw Science Film Festival is Now Open for Entries

The 2nd Annual Raw Science Film Festival, which features films on science and technology, is now taking entries for the December 5th, 2015 event. This year's theme is "Virtual Reality." 

You can find all the entry details here, but here's an overview of the main things to know: 

• The festival accepts both fiction and non-fiction films
• Both students and professionals can submit and will compete in different categories based on a combo of length and format. 
• The festival has some very cool judges from the worlds of science and entertainment, including Bill Nix (AMPAS, “The Prophet"), Paul Hynek (Giant Studios - LOTR, Avatar), Joel Hynek (Visual Effects - The Matrix), Liz Keim (The Exploratorium), Hussain Currimbhoy (Sundance Institute), Iram Parveen Bilal (Josh, The PhD Movie) and Rick Loverd (The Science & Entertainment Exchange). Kip Thorne will judge the“Kip Thorne Gravity Award." 
• The submission deadline is November 6, 2015. 

The festival is presented by Raw Science TV, an online network that produces and distributes on-demand videos, news and original programming about science and technology. Entrants should note that according to the festival rules, all finalists and winners grant Raw Science the right to air their “Winning Entries” on Raw Science NETWORKS for 12 months. If you have exclusivity agreements with other entities, I suggest contacting the festival before entering to find out more details and find out if it's an issue. 

For more information on the festival, click here. Need some inspiration? Read about last year's winners, or watch this video of 3D Systems designing and creating the first ever Raw Science Film Festival Awards for the 2014 event and imagine it taking up some room on your shelf. 

3D Systems Creates the Raw Science Film Fest Trophy

 

 

 

Video: An Interview with Sci-Fest Founder David Dean Bottrell

Hi folks! 

Going to try something new...bringing video to the blog! I've always loved writing about cool events and projects that bring art and science together, but I thought it would be fun to actually talk to some of the people who are making those projects happen. 

For my very first Science Lush vlog, I interview David Dean Bottrell, one of the founders of Sci-Fest, the first annual Los Angeles science fiction one-act play festival. The festival will launch in May 2014. An actor and screenwriter, David has appeared on BOSTON LEGAL, MAD MEN, TRUE BLOOD and iCARLY, among others. We talk about everything from his childhood comic book obsession to the challenges of bringing science fiction to an audience without the benefits of CGI. 

A word about the vlog:
Science Lush (the show) is definitely a work in progress, so thanks for going on the ride with me as I figure this all out! We'll be trying bunch of different things - sometimes I'll shoot on location, sometimes I'll be broadcasting from my super-fancy dining room studio (like in this episode). I'll also be playing around with technical stuff like sound & lighting, and maybe I'll even get a logo! I know, I know, that's just crazy talk. But the one thing that will stay the same - I'll be letting you know about cool STEAM* happenings. 
{*STEAM = Science Technology Engineering Arts Math}

One last comment...don't judge this video by the thumbnail! If you think this one is bad, you should've see the other two choices YouTube gave me!!

 

 

Has Sci-Fest piqued your interest? Here's their fundraising video: 

 

 

More info on some of the things David and I talk about: 

• Sci-Fest website: http://www.sci-fest.com
• Sci-Fest's Kickstarter campaign ends on February 28th, 2014, but you can still donate after the deadline if you are interested in supporting it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
• More on David here: http://daviddeanbottrell.blogspot.com/
• Movies we love: Children of Men, Code 46, Moon
• Authors we love: Ursula LeGuin, Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler

The full version of the cool Ray Bradbury quote David mentions: 

"Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about."

--Ray Bradbury

Science Online 2013: Science Comics

One of my favorite sessions this year at Science Online was the session moderated by Maki Naro (@sciencecomic) and Kate McKissick (@beatricebiology) on Distilling Ideas: Communicating Science With Comics. The discussion ranged from creative issues to copyright scandals to suggstions of work to check out. And in true Science Online fashion, the entire room became involved in the discussion, offering suggestions and commentary.

In a conference that focused a lot on words, it was a change of pace to talk about how a limited word count can actually help get an idea across. Tom Swanson, who did physics cartoons when he was in grad school, pointed out that this is something he often needs to explain when people pitch him ideas. After all, if it takes someone a full two minutes to explain an idea, it's going to be too complex to work in a short comic. However, when the just right words are paired with a specific image, science comics can be an efficient, powerful way to deal with hot button issues such as climate change.

Videomaker Henry Reich from Minute Physics said that he loves getting suggestions for things to explain, but not how to explain them. He said, “My job is figuring out the how part.”

And that's where the fun comes in. The majority of science comics tend to fall into two distinct categories: inside jokes for those scientists and those that educate or explain scientific concepts or ideas to the general public. Naro said that he gets inspired by everything from Neil DeGrasse Tyson tweets to articles to social issues, although most of his comics end up being about biology and space because that’s what he’s interested in.

At a time when it takes just a second to copy something and post it, all the artists in the room expressed the importance of getting permission to use their work and proper crediting. McKissick has a very clear policy posted on her blog about people using her work: 

Can I use your stupid drawings and say they're mine?

No, you can't do that.  However, you can share my stupid drawings as long as you credit me and this website. 

Wait, why do you say your drawings are stupid?

Either I'm a connoisseur of self-deprecating humor, or I'm horribly insecure. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

However, she recently found that her “Amoeba Hug” comic had been posted elsewhere, and someone else had been given credit for it. She got in touch with the site and asked that it share her original piece and properly credit it. Because someone at the site had essentially redrawn her comic, they did not have the same view of copyright and at first refused to remove it. Eventually, they took down the erroneously credited piece, but not without a lot of effort on McKissick's part.

Here's the first panel of McKissick's original:

And here's the "original" posted by the site without permission and with erroneous crediting. As you can see, it's pretty clear it's a copy of McKissick's work. 

Reich has had similar experiences with people downloading his YouTube videos, and then re-uploading them onto their own channels so that they could make money off of the advertising placed in the videos. One extreme example includes someone in Germany actually redoing his drawings and the voiceover in German with zero attribution.

Something else that became clear as we all were furiously scribbling down suggestions of work to take a look at was that there’s a need for some sort of science comic aggregator. There are certainly lists and blogrolls, but these aren’t really an efficient way to discover and browse science comics; a more robust database that the public can contribute to and that can be sorted by topic would be ideal. Any volunteers out there? Anyone need a challenge for a hackathon? 

If you’re interested in checking out more science comics and comic-oriented publications, here are some of the suggestions that came up during the session. If you want to search for more nuggets from the session on Twitter, look for #sciencecomics.

-Lauren Redniss’s graphic biography Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout. From The New York Times review: 

The electricity in “Radioactive,” however, derives from the friction between Ms. Redniss’s text and her ambitious and spooky art. Her text runs across and over these freewheeling pages, the boundaries between word and image constantly blurring. Her drawings are both vivid and ethereal. Her people have elongated faces and pale forms; they’re etiolated Modiglianis. They populate a Paris that’s become a dream city.

-xkcd: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

-Trinity: A graphic history of the first atomic bomb.

-Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. From the Amazon description:

This exceptional graphic novel recounts the spiritual odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute truth, Russell crosses paths with legendary thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Kurt Gödel, and finds a passionate student in the great Ludwig Wittgenstein. But his most ambitious goal—to establish unshakable logical foundations of mathematics—continues to loom before him. Through love and hate, peace and war, Russell persists in the dogged mission that threatens to claim both his career and his personal happiness, finally driving him to the brink of insanity.

-odd todd's animations for an NPR story about carbon and climate change.

 

 

The Lush List: 1/8/2013 - YouTube Science

For years, YouTube got a rap as the place to watch cats on keyboards and stupid people tricks. Funny? Absolutely. Smart? Not so much. However, there are a number of YouTube creators who are now making savvy, entertaining videos about or inspired by science...and I'm not just talking about obvious choices like snippets from the TED Conference.

Over the last several weeks while prepping for the International Academy of Web Televison Awards, which honor the best in online programming, I fell down the rabbit hole of YouTube browsing far too often. Here are just a few of the folks worth checking out. Pieces range from the educational to the wacky to the lovely...

SciShow

This YouTube channel is from creator Hank Green,who is heavily involved in several different YouTube endeavours, including executive producing The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a sassy online modernized adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Green has a bachelor's degree in Biochemistry and a master's degree in Environmental Studies, and the segments on his SciShow channel explain both basic and more involved scientific concepts. Green's casual, entertaining delivery helps the information he delivers about topics ranging from fracking to dark matter to biofilm go down easy, allowing even the science novice to walk away feeling like he or she understands something new. 

 

UltraSlo

This one's for those of you who like pretty pictures. UltraSlo features the work of Emmy Award winner Alan Teitel, who with his UltraSlo Studio, creates cool slow-motion videos of nature, explosions and random things like (false) teeth falling into a glass. Many of the videos have a psychedelic quality to them, such as this one of a humming bird, so this is the channel to check out when you feel like chilling for awhile...

 

Rhett and Link
This award-winning duo comprised of life-long best friends Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal has created or been featured in over 500 web videos, including sketches, non-scripted reality pieces and music videos. In 2009, they were musical correspondents for the Science Channel's BRINK. The wrote songs and made music videos for three episodes, including "Hello (The S.E.T.I. Song)."

Sick Science

I always wanted a science teacher like Steve Spangler. He's done a lot of things - he's a science writer, teacher, and toy designer - but you're probably most familiar with his work with candy. Yep, he's the guy who dropped Mentos into a bottle of soda and created a cultural phenomenon in the early days of online video. Luckily, he's got a whole YouTube channel, as well as a website, dedicated to bringing more wacky experiments to the public.

   

And if you feel like taking a walk down memory lane, here's the original September 2005 Mentos geyser video:

=

The Lush List: 12/4/12 Curiosity Video, End of the Universe and Space's Neighborhood Watch

STILL CURIOUS?

If you've forgotten just how inspiring the Curiosity Rover and those responsible for her journey are, take 5 minutes to watch this lovely piece created by director/photojournalist Dan Winters, editor John Aldrich and sound designer/composer Shervin Shaeri. With narration from key members of the MSL team, including Adam Steltzner, Miguel San Martin, Ann Devereaux and Allen Chen detailing their personal feelings about the rover, it's a lovely, visual journey through the life of Curiosity thus far.

Here's my favorite quote from the piece, which encapsulates the sense of connection between the engineers and scientists who birthed Curiosity, but now only get the occasional phone call or pic from their kiddo far, far away:

"We get to see her in images that she takes of herself, but we won't ever touch again and we won't ever be able to fix her again." 

Mars Rover Curiosity from Mutant Jukebox - Music & Sound on Vimeo.
Photography Credits: NASA JPL, Dan Winters, David Robertson, Travis Smith

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH FOR SPACE?

NASA has a little problem...there are about 500,000 pieces of hazardous space junk orbiting the earth, and there's no trash collector scheduled for the route anytime in the near future! This debris includes spent rocket stages, defunct satellites and fragments from other spacecraft that are the result of erosion, explosion and collision, and it threatens current peacekeeping and combat satellites, as a collision between a piece of the space trash and a satellite could release more than 20,000 times the energy of a head-on auto collision at 65 mph.

So what's a government agency to do?

DARPA has created SpaceView, "a space debris tracking project that provides amateur astronomers with the means to make a difference....The vision behind the SpaceView program is to provide more diverse data to the Space Surveillance Network (SSN), a U.S. Air Force program charged with cataloguing and observing space objects to identify potential near-term collisions. SpaceView hopes to achieve that goal by engaging U.S. amateur astronomers by purchasing remote access to an already in-use telescope or by providing a telescope to selected astronomers. When a telescope that is provided by the program is not in use by the SpaceView program, DARPA will provide its use for astronomy and astrophotography." 

So in other words, if you're located where they need you to be, you might get to time-share some equipment, qualify for some fancy upgraded hardware or even receive some minor financial compensation. And of course, there's that satisfying undercover-superhero-feeling that comes from quietly saving the Earth!

Interested astronomers may learn more about the program and sign up at www.spaceviewnetwork.com. Participants will be selected based on geographic location and access to a permanent site for a telescope, among other criteria.

COLBERT'S INTELLECTUAL HYDROPLANE: BECOMING MASSIVE!

Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll hungout with Stephen Colbert last week while promoting his new book THE PARTICLE AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE: How the Hunt for Higgs Boson Leads us to the Edge of a New World.

In between Colbert's jokes about jetpacks and teleportation, Carroll attempts to explain what exactly the Higgs Boson is and why it's important.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sean Carroll
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

 

The Lush List: 10/17/12 - Hoarding, Old Spice Explosion and Endeavour in LA

So you may have noticed the posts grinding to a halt over the past several weeks. Alas, I've been spending far too much time with cardboard boxes instead of my computer. I found out mid-August that the woman who owns the house we were renting had decided to sell it, so we had to scramble to find a new place to live and then pack up all our stuff. 

SCIENCE OF HOARDING
Moving is always a pain the ass, but the fact that I'm a bit of a pack rat makes it even more challenging. And while I'm nowhere near being labeled a Hoarder, I've been known to keep a few too many nostalgic items that perhaps would be better left behind. As I was surveying the large pile of boxes now exiled to the garage at our new place for storage, it got me to thinking about why people hang onto things. Which led me to the following about the science of hoarding.

In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study done by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grantee David Tolin, Ph.D, and his colleagues at Hartford Hospital, Hartford, CT, parts of a decision-making brain circuit in patients with hoarding disorder over-activated when deciding whether to keep or throw away their own possessions, but had no such reaction when throwing away items belonging to others. From the NIMH press release:

In this case, the implicated brain areas are hubs of a salience network that weighs the emotional significance of things and regulates emotional responses and states. Hoarding patients’ severity of symptoms, self-ratings of indecisiveness, and feeling of things being “not just right” were correlated with the degree of aberrant activity in these hubs. The results add to evidence of impaired decision-making in hoarding disorder and may help to disentangle its brain workings from those of OCD and depression.

EYE CANDY: BLOW IT UP
Moving causes a lot of stress, so sometimes you just need to take a break and blow off some steam. Old Spice's "Explosion" is not scientific - it just made me laugh.

MOVING THE SHUTTLE
We got a pretty big truck to move our stuff (did I mention I like to keep things?), but it was nothing compared to the rig that got the Space Shuttle Endeavour through the streets of Los Angeles on October 12th-13th as it traveled from LAX to its new permanent home at the California Science Center. Brandon Fibbs got some fantastic pics of the shuttle which you can see here in his photostream on Flickr, and here's a pretty amazing time lapse of the Shuttle's journey. 

The Los Angeles Times. Video by Bryan Chan.

While the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, the future permanent home for Endeavour, is being built, the shuttle will be on display in the Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion, opening on October 30, 2012.

The Lush List: 8/14/12 - Language Intelligence and Curiosity Rover Update

Reading List: LANGUAGE INTELLIGENCE by Joe Romm

I stumbled across a review from John Cook on SkepticalScience.com for this new book written by physicist and Climate Progress blog editor Joe Romm. When the title of a book includes the phrase "Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln and Lady Gaga," you know there's something intriguing going on inside the covers (and no, I don't mean shenanigans between Lady G. and the three gentlemen).

LANGUAGE INTELLIGENCE is about rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion. Back in Shakespeare's day, rhetoric was a key part of an education. I've had the good fortune to study Elizabethan rhetoric with master teacher Armin Shimerman. It's amazing how once you start to explore the various rhetorical devices utilized by the Bard, his work comes to life in a completely new way. Incredibly useful for an actor.

While rhetoric is no longer required study, it makes complete sense that a blog dedicated to "getting skeptical about global warming skepticism" would find a book about persuasive communication to be an important read. Understanding how to, as Cook puts it, "[harness]  the power of language to craft compelling, memorable and emotionally engaging communication," is a very useful skill. Cook's thoughts on how scientists might apply the information in the book to their work caught my eye, and that's what made me want to call attention to it on ScienceLush:

For science communicators, I believe the most important lesson is the use of metaphors. Scientists are trained to think in the abstract while in general, people think in metaphors. It’s a “Scientists are from Mars, people are from Venus” kind of thing. People conceptualize and make meaning of the world using analogies and metaphors, which transform the abstract into the concrete. Consequently, we take more notice of messages and remember them better when metaphors are used.

I'm a perfect example of an audience that's hungry for good science metaphors. As y'all know, I'm not a scientist, I'm just intensely interested in science, how it affects our understanding of the world around us, and the areas where science and creativity co-mingle. I love plays, art, music, etc. that have been inspired by scientific discovery, and I constantly find myself wanting to dig deeper, to really understand the theories behind the creative work. Therefore, I'm extremely grateful to those who can communicate about science using metaphors in such a way as to help me feel like I've cracked the code and gained some small measure of understanding about the topic at hand.

I'll be adding LANGUAGE INTELLIGENCE to my list o'books to read this summer. In addition to helping one decipher Shakespeare and rebut those who deny climate change, I have a feeling that a better understanding of rhetoric might come in awfully handy during a presidential election year...

 

Cartoons, Sex and Music

While I'm talking about science communication, I wanted to draw attention to this post from science illustrator Emily Coren on Nature.com's SoapboxScience guest blog. She writes about the connection between the public's understanding of science, their resulting support for it, and the key role that plays in the funding of the work. Her suggestion:

Use mass media to communicate science to the public. We have science research generating vast amounts of new information about our world, and an entertainment industry producing huge volumes of content that is consumed by the public collectively creating our culture. Why not start pairing them to work together?

She includes examples such as "Yakko's Universe" from ANIMANIACS and this totally nutty cartoon about Narwhals, and then calls for "science placement" in television shows, much like product placement. I'm excited about the organizations and creators who are already actively engaged in the fusion of science and entertainment, such as The Science & Entertainment Exchange, which is dedicated building a bridge between science and the Hollywood community. YouTube also provides an outlet for the meshing of science and entertainment, with channels such as SciShow and MinutePhysics.

 

Curiosity Update: Surface Operations Begin

This update on the Curiosity rover from MSL engineering operations team member Jessica Samuels uses a combination of animations and some of the amazing pictures that have come back to update us on what's gone down so far and what's up next for our favorite rover.

 

During my NASA Social adventure, Samuels spoke to us about what the first month or so of Curiosity's life on Mars might look like. The first priority would be making sure Curiosity was healthy and that all systems were in order, followed by loading the new software that would turn Curiosity from a flying machine into a surface chemist. Samuels anticipated that they'd really get into the science of the mission about a month after landing. 

Samuels also talked with us about the team's plans here on Earth for coping with the sliding Martian day. For the first 90 days, aka "sols" of the mission, the team will be on Mars time, following the Red planet's 24 hour, 40 minute long day. This means that eventually their Earth days and nights will be reversed. In addition to coffee, survival mechanisms include heavy blackout curtains in the surface mission control area. And of course, there's an app to help keep track of the time! Alas, you won't find Mars Time in the iTunes store - it's only for internal mission use.

 

Curiosity Rover: Driving Lessons on Mars

Now that we all know that Curiosity is officially safe on Mars, I wanted to share a few things I learned and experienced at JPL during the three days I spent there.

While I've never particularly enjoyed driving, maybe it's just because I never had the right vehicle. Don't get me wrong - I'm very fond of my zippy little Corolla. But I think I could finally get really, truly excited about a road trip if I were commanding my own rover.

During a panel over the weekend, Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada said that Curiosity has "Better suspension and more ground clearance than any car you can buy on the market. If we had to, we could drive over an obstacle the size of this table." Check out the shot below for reference.

Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada, SAM Deputy Principal Investigator Pan Conrad and
MAHLI Principal Investigator Ken Edgett

We didn't actually destroy any furniture while at JPL, but during our visit to the Mars Yard, we got to see the "Scarecrow," a stripped down version of Curiosity, go through its paces. Here's a quick video took of the Scarecrow showing off it's rock climbing skills.



The Yard is one of the two locations used for practice runs with the rover, helping the team understand more about both the hardware and the software used to command it.  I talked with rover driver Matt Heverly, who gave us a quick Drivers Ed course. Thanks to Tristam Sparks for capturing a portion of it on video...



Heverly told us, "One of the things I love about this job is the fuzziness. The nature of exploration includes unknowns. We use both engineering data and intuition to decide if we can safely go where the scientists would like us to go."

In this closer look at the rover's wheels, you'll notice some holes. Heverly explained that just like on Earth, Martian sand dunes have no real features. Reference points are needed for the rover to orient itself, so Curiosity has to create it's own. And that's where the holes come in, leaving a pattern in the sand as Curiosity rolls over it.

Fun fact: The original version of the wheels had "JPL" stamped in them, but apparently NASA wasn't thrilled about leaving JPL tracks on Mars. However, if you know anything about Morse code, look closely at the pattern of dots and dashes...

[Need a hint? This post on Wikipedia spells it out for you. Pun intended.]

NASA Social: Curiosity Rover Landing

What's the next best thing to going to Mars?

Being at Mission Control when the Curiosity Rover lands on the Martian surface!!

I am incredibly stoked to report that I'll be taking part in NASA Social, a program that gives special access to specific NASA events to a group of folks active on social media. I've been chosen to be part of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, and will spend 3 rockin' days at the Jet Propulsion Lab from August 3rd - 5th learning about the program, touring JPL, and witnessing the final prep for and landing of the MSL Curiosity rover. I cannot imagine what it's going to be like to be present when the first signal of the rover's landing is detected by JPL mission control, but rest assured, I'll be tweeting the hell out of it!! So stay tuned to @tamarakrinsky at 10:31 pm PDT on August 5th.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be doing a lot of reading and research in prep for the event (I don't expect to become a rocket scientist overnight, but I'd like to be able to at least ask the scientists some intelligent questions). Expect ScienceLush to be astronomy-heavy for a bit, as I pass along the tidbits of my Googling to you, dear S'lushees.

And that starts right now, with the fantastic video CHALLENGES OF GETTING TO MARS: CURIOSITY'S SEVEN MINUTES OF TERROR. In the vid, scientists detail the harrowing final minutes of Curiosity's journey from when it hits the Martian atmosphere to contact with the planetary surface. This phase of the mission is called EDL - Entry, Descent and Landing - and involves six different vehicle configurations, 76 pyrotechnic devices and an insane number of calculations and adjustments that all need to take place without help from Mission Control.

And why are the scientists letting the rover do this final leg of the journey on its own?

Because they don't have a choice. It takes approximately 14 minutes for signals from Mars to reach Earth. Which means that by the time we here on the Blue planet start receiving information about the EDL phase, Curiosity will already be on the surface of the Red planet...hopefully in functioning form.

Thank goodness I'm not a nail biter...though I might need to have a serious stash of M&M's on hand...

And because you know I'm all about the Art as well as the Science, here's an interview KPCC's Patt Morrison did with producer/dirctor John Beck. The video is garnering quite a li'l following on YouTube: since its posting on June 22nd, the video has racked up approximately 678,000 views. In addition to directing the video, Beck also composed the music, which greatly adds to the sense of drama.

In the interview, Beck talks about his desire for the film to capture the vulnerability of the risk-taking inherent in the undertaking. When putting the piece together, he said he thought about what it would be like if he were sitting in the movie theater watching the story of this mission.

I am a bit of a comment voyeur, and my favorite one from this radio interview is from "sandor", who excitedly urges JPL to get the video into movie theaters, where (s)he suggests it should play as a preview before all of the summer blockbusters. I actually think it's a great idea - it's a great way to draw attention to the space program and inspire both kids and adults to embrace math and science. After all, as sandor so eloquently puts it, "Do it! You're landing on flipping Mars again."

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll tell you more about the NASA Social experience, but for now I'll leave you with a resource for a detailed mission timeline. Check out Spaceflight 101's MSL Landing Special - thanks to @susanbellfilm for passing it along.

 

The Lush List: 7/5/12: Higgs Boson, Mysterium Tremendum and Internet Celeb Commercials

Higgs Boson Sweetly Explained

Big news in the science community this past week about discovery of the Higgs boson particle [general readers may be more familiar with this as "The God Particle,' a term that raises the hackles of many scientists]. While the folks at CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), are being cautious and saying it's too soon to know for sure, the discovery is exciting physicists around the globe.

And just what is this li'l particle that's making them jump for joy? As THE NEW YORK TIMES describes it:

According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass...Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.

So yes, it's a big friggin' deal!

Still lost?

For those of us who want to know more but don't have a string of letters after our name or spent most of science class flirting with the guy behind us, Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample explains what a Higgs boson is, how Cern physicists are looking for it, and why it matters if they find it. And he does it all with very sophisticated tools: ping pong balls, sugar and a cafeteria tray. After watching, I wasn't sure if I should go bake cookies or dig out my set of paddles and get ready to serve...

 

The Grateful Sounds of the Universe

I am definitely NOT a Deadhead. In fact, my musical taste (or lack thereof) could almost be described as the complete opposite of the Grateful Dead: Jersey rock (think ROCK OF AGES soundtrack), Top 40 dance tunes and Broadway musicals. However, when I read this post on Open Culture about Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart's latest project, I finally found a set of tunes for which I'd be willing to take a road trip.

On his new record MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM, Hart used "cosmic sounds" composed in outer space to create the tracks. As described on the site:

To make music like this, you need some unusual collaborators. Hart went to NASA, Penn State, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with scientists like George Smoot, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Mather. They helped convert light, radio waves, and other electromatic radiation into sound waves that Hart and his band could put to musical use.

For a sampling of "the songs our universe sings," you can watch below in the recording of the Madrone Studios performance in San Francisco on 4/4/12. Gotta love it when a musician kicks off his set explaining that the piece he's about to play is based on "the sounds of the sun and some very deep star clusters."

Just have to give a shout out to Open Culture, which has the tagline "the best free cultural and educational media on the web."  They constantly point me to coolness that I find myself wanting to share with y'all. If you like what I write about here, they are definitely a site to check out.

 
Internet Celebs in Commercials

As you may remember, I'm a big fan of well-done commercials (especially when I see them online instead of in the middle of my favorite TV programs). All sorts of creatures have been utilized in the selling of things, including scantily clad celebrities, gekkos, and funny ladies with headbands dressed in all white. But lately, internet-age celebs have been cropping up in commercials. And I don't mean YouTube stars - I mean the folks who actually created YouTube.

London agency Albion made this film for Code Club, a startup that teaches children coding after-school. In the spot, three savvy kids interview prospective employees for Code Club, including Tim Berners-Lee, YouTube founder Chad Hurley, Skype's Niklas Zennstrom and Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane-Fox, founders of LastMinute.com, among others. And they're not exactly impressed...

The spot reminded me of the ad from Best Buy which debuted during the Superbowl. It features the inventors and Silicon Valley folk who are behind li'l things like the camera phone, Instagram and Square. It's quite a change from their 2011 Superbowl campaign, which featured Justin Bieber and Ozzie Osbourn.