Dinosaur Claws On Show For Our Open Day At National Museum Cardiff Last Saturday. Can You Tell Which

i think the coolest thing would be to see a new color

Joan Beauchamp Procter: her best friend was a Komodo dragon and if that doesn’t entice you to read this, I don’t know what will

Joan Beauchamp Procter is a scientist every reptile enthusiast should admire.

Joan was an incredibly intelligent young woman who was chronically ill (and as a result of her chronic illness, physically disabled by her early thirties). Her health issues kept her from going to college, but that did not stop her from studying and keeping reptiles. She presented her first paper to the Zoological Society of London at the tender age of nineteen, and the society was so impressed that they hired her to help design their aquarium. In 1923, despite having no formal secondary education and despite being only 26 years old, she was hired as the London Zoo’s curator of reptiles. Now, that in and of itself is an awesome accomplishment, but Joan was absolutely not content to maintain the status quo. Nosiree, by the age of 26 Joan had already kept many exotic pets (including a crocodile!) and knew a thing or two about what needed to be done to improve their lives in captivity. So Joan got together with an architect, Edward Guy Dawber, and designed the world’s first building designed solely for the keeping of reptiles. She had some really, really great ideas. Her first big idea was to make the building differentially heated- different areas and enclosures would have different heat zones, instead of having the whole building heated to one warm temperature. She also set up aquarium lighting- the gallery itself was dark, with dim lights on individual enclosures to make things less stressful for the inhabitants. She also insisted on the use of special glass that didn’t filter out UVB. This meant that reptiles could synthesize vitamin D and prevented cases of MBD in her charges. 

But advances in enclosure design weren’t Joan’s only contribution to reptile keeping. She was also one of the first herpetologists to study albinism in snakes- she was the first to publish an identification how albinism manifests in reptile eyes differently than in mammal eyes, and stressed the importance of making accurate color plates of reptiles during life because study specimens often lose pigmentation. She also was really hands-on with many species, including crocodiles, large constrictors, and monitor lizards. Joan had this idea that if you socialize an animal and get it used to handling, then when you need to give it a vet checkup, things tend to go a lot better. This really hadn’t been done with reptiles before. She was able to identify many unstudied diseases, thanks to her patient handling of live specimens, and by being patient and going slow, she managed to get a lot of very large, dangerous creatures to trust her. One of them (that we know of) even came to like her- a Komodo dragon named Sumbawa. 

In 1928, two of the first Komodo dragons to be imported to Europe arrived at the London Zoo. One of them, named Sumbawa, came in with a nasty mouth infection. His first several months at the zoo were a steady stream of antibiotics and gentle care, and by the time he’d recovered enough for display, he had come to be tolerant of handling and human interaction. In particular, he seemed to be genuinely fond of Joan. She was their primary caretaker and wrote many of the first popular accounts of Komodo dragon behavior in captivity. While recognizing their lethal capacity, she also wrote about how smart they are and how inquisitive they could be. In her account published in The Wonders of Animal Life, she said that "they could no doubt kill one if they wished, or give a terrible bite" but also that they were “as tame as dogs and even seem to show affection.” To demonstrate this, she would take Sumbawa around on a leash and let zoo visitors interact with him. She would also hand-feed Sumbawa- pigeons and chickens were noted to be favorite food, as were eggs. 

Joan died in 1931 at the age of 34. By that time she was Doctor Procter, as the University of Chicago had awarded her an honorary doctorate. Until her death, she still remained active with the Zoological Society of London- and she was still in charge of her beloved reptiles. Towards the end of her life, Joan needed a wheelchair. But that didn’t stop her from hanging out with her giant lizard friend. Sumbawa would walk out in front of the wheelchair or beside it, still on leash- she’d steer him by touching his tail. At her death, she was one of the best-known and respected herpetologists in the world, and her innovative techniques helped shape the future of reptile care. 

Molecule of the Day: Chloroform

Chloroform (CHCl3) is a colourless, dense liquid that is immiscible with water at room temperature and pressure. Popularised by movies and dramas, it is often cited as an incapacitating agent in popular culture.

Chloroform was used as a general anaesthetic due to its ability to depress the central nervous system, a property that was discovered in 1842. This produced a medically-induced coma, allowing surgeons to operate on patients without them feeling any pain.

However, chloroform was found to be associated with many side effects, such as vomiting, nausea, jaundice, depression of the respiratory system, liver necrosis and tumour formation, and its use was gradually superseded in the early 20th century by other anaesthetics and sedatives such as diethyl ether and hexobarbital respectively.

While chloroform has been implicated in several criminal cases, its use as an incapacitating agent is largely restricted to fiction; the usage of a chloroform-soaked fabric to knock a person out would take at least 5 minutes.

Chloroform is metabolised in the liver to form phosgene, which can react with DNA and proteins. Additionally, phosgene is hydrolysed to produced hydrochloric acid. These are believed to cause chloroform’s nephrotoxicity.

Chloroform is often used as a reagent to produce dichlorocarbene in situ via its reaction with a base like sodium tert-butoxide. This is a useful precursor to many derivatives. For example, the dichlorocarbene can be reacted with alkenes to form cyclopropanes, which can be difficult to synthesise otherwise.

Chloroform is industrially synthesised by the free radical chlorination of methane:

CH4 + 3 Cl2 –> CHCl3 + 3 HCl

It can also be synthesised by the reaction of acetone with sodium hypochlorite in bleach by successive aldol-like reactions:

Why do men have Adam's apples. It's so sexy but seems so unnecessary

It basically is unnecessary lol

It’s not that only men have Adam’s apples, women do too, but it’s less prominent. An Adam’s apple is just a piece of cartilage that protects your larynx (the voicebox) directly behind it. As boys & girls go through puberty, our voicebox grows which:

1. Causes our voice to deepen 2. Pushes the cartilage further forwards

In boys, the larynx grows in size significantly more which therefore pushes forward the evident bump of cartilage we like to call an Adam’s Apple.

#🐌 #snail #pet #smallfriend #hyperlapse #timelapse http://ift.tt/1OF6qKr

Book Lovers Day - Free Aeronautics e-Books from NASA

Quieting the Boom

The Shaped Sonic Boom Demonstrator and the Quest for Quiet Supersonic Flight.

Download it HERE

Elegance in Flight

A comprehensive History of the F-16XL Experimental Prototype and its Role in our Flight Research. 

Download it HERE

Probing the Sky

Selected National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) Research Airplanes and Their Contributions to Flight.

Download it HERE

Cave of the Winds

The huge Langley Full-Scale Tunnel building dominated the skyline of Langley Air Force Base for 81 years (1930–2011). Explore how the results of critical tests conducted within its massive test section contributed to many of the Nation’s most important aeronautics and space programs.

Download it HERE

A New Twist in Flight Research

A New Twist in Flight Research describes the origins and design development of aeroelastic wing technology, its application to research aircraft, the flight-test program, and follow-on research and future applications.

Download it HERE

Sweeping Forward

Developing & Flight Testing the Grumman X-29A Forward Swept Wing Research Aircraft.

Download it HERE

Thinking Obliquely

Robert T. Jones, the Oblique Wing, our AD-1 Demonstrator, and its Legacy.

Download it HERE

The Apollo of Aeronautics

The fuel crisis of the 1970s threatened not only the airline industry but also the future of American prosperity itself. It also served as the genesis of technological ingenuity and innovation from a group of scientists and engineers at NASA, who initiated planning exercises to explore new fuel-saving technologies.

Download it HERE

X-15: Extending the Frontiers of Flight

X-15: Extending the Frontiers of Flight describes the genesis of the program, the design and construction of the aircraft, years of research flights and the experiments that flew aboard them.

Download it HERE

Ikhana

Delve into the story of the Ikhana, a remotely piloted vehicle used by NASA researchers to conduct Earth science research, which became an unexpected flying and imaging helper to emergency workers battling California wildfires.

Download it HERE

NASA’s Contributions to Aeronautics, Volume 1

This first volume in a two-volume set includes case studies and essays on NACA-NASA research for contributions such as high-speed wing design, the area rule, rotary-wing aerodynamics research, sonic boom mitigation, hypersonic design, computational fluid dynamics, electronic flight control and environmentally friendly aircraft technology.

Download it HERE

NASA’s Contributions to Aeronautics, Volume 2

Continue your journey into the world  of NASA’s Contributions to Aeronautics with case studies and essays on NACA-NASA research for contributions including wind shear and lightning research, flight operations, human factors, wind tunnels, composite structures, general aviation aircraft safety, supersonic cruise aircraft research and atmospheric icing.

Download it HERE

Interested in other free e-books on topics from space, science, research and more? Discover the other e-books HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Science Fact Friday: Tetrodotoxin, ft. a small gif because I’m avoiding my real obligations. Why does tetrodotoxin not affect its host? More studies need to be done but at least a few species possess mutated sodium ion channels. The tetrodotoxin can’t interact efficiently with the altered channels.

Another interesting tidbit: Animals with tetrodotoxin can lose their toxicity in captivity. It is suspected that the animals accumulate the toxic bacteria as a side-effect of their diet. After several years of captivity on a tetrodotoxin-bacteria-free diet, the bacterial colonies living in the animals die, residual toxin is cleared from the system, and the animal is safe to handle.

The code that took America's Apollo 11  to the moon in the 1960's has been published

When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent it.

They came up with a new way to store computer programs, called “rope memory,” and created a special version of the assembly programming language. Assembly itself is obscure to many of today’s programmers—it’s very difficult to read, intended to be easily understood by computers, not humans. For the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), MIT programmers wrote thousands of lines of that esoteric code.

Here’s a very 1960s data visualization of just how much code they wrote—this is Margaret Hamilton, director of software engineering for the project, standing next to a stack of paper containing the software:

The AGC code has been available to the public for quite a while–it was first uploaded by tech researcher Ron Burkey in 2003, after he’d transcribed it from scanned images of the original hardcopies MIT had put online. That is, he manually typed out each line, one by one.

“It was scanned by an airplane pilot named Gary Neff in Colorado,” Burkey said in an email. “MIT got hold of the scans and put them online in the form of page images, which unfortunately had been mutilated in the process to the point of being unreadable in places.” Burkey reconstructed the unreadable parts, he said, using his engineering skills to fill in the blanks.

  “Quite a bit later, I managed to get some replacement scans from Gary Neff for the unreadable parts and fortunately found out that the parts I filled in were 100% correct!” he said.

As enormous and successful as Burkey’s project has been, however, the code itself remained somewhat obscure to many of today’s software developers. That was until last Thursday (July 7), when former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to GitHub, the code-sharing site where millions of programmers hang out these days.

Within hours, coders began dissecting the software, particularly looking at the code comments the AGC’s original programmers had written. In programming, comments are plain-English descriptions of what task is being performed at a given point. But as the always-sharp joke detectives in Reddit’s r/ProgrammerHumor section found, many of the comments in the AGC code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references.

One of the source code files, for example, is called BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE, and the opening comments explain why:

About 900 lines into that subroutine, a reader can see the playfulness of the original programming team come through, in the first and last comments in this block of code:

In the file called LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.s, it appears that two lines of code were  meant to be temporary ended up being permanent, against the hopes of one programmer:

In the same file, there’s also code that appears to instruct an astronaut to “crank the silly thing around.”

“That code is all about positioning the antenna for the LR (landing radar),” Burkey explained. “I presume that it’s displaying a code to warn the astronaut to reposition it.”

And in the PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.s file, which is described as “the keyboard and display system program … exchanged between the AGC and the computer operator,” there’s a peculiar Shakespeare quote:

This is likely a reference to the AGC programming language itself, as one Reddit user . The language used predetermined “nouns” and “verbs” to execute operations. The verb pointed out 37, for example, means “Run program,” while the noun 33 means “Time to ignition.”

Now that the code is on GitHub, programmers can actually suggest changes and file issues. And, of course, they have

Ernst Mach, Chuck Yeager, and supersonic flight

Today is the 70th anniversary of the first supersonic flight. On 14 October 1947, Air Force Captain Charles Yeager piloted the experimental Bell X-1 plane named Glamorous Glennis and “broke the sound barrier,” reaching what scientists call “Mach 1.”

Yeager’s historic flight came thirty-one years after the death of Ernst Mach, the Austrian physicist and philosopher whose research on sound particles remained obscure until aviation capabilities began to approach the speed of sound. Mach lends his name to Mach numbers, used to describe faster-than-sound travel, and Mach angles, which measure the angle of the shock waves caused by flight. In addition to his work with sound, Mach’s rejection of Newton’s ideas on space and time influenced Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Image credits: 1) Chuck Yeager next to experimental aircraft Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis, 1940s. US Air Force, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 2) Ernest Mach from the Journal of Physical Chemistry, Volume 40, 1902. H. F. Jütte. Uploaded by Armin Kübelbeck, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 3) Chuck Yeager at Nellis Air Force Base on the 65th anniversary of his flight, 14 October 2012. Master Sgt. Jason Edwards, US Air Force, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Your pocket Constitution

The amazing Khizr Khan was onto something with his pocket U.S. Constitution - and our Labs team went ahead and made an app for that. Understanding the U.S. Constitution is an app that allows you to view the articles and amendments of the Constitution, and then links you to scholarship relating to each specific section. It’s free for iOS and Android. Keep fighting the good fight against “alternative facts.” 

More here: http://labs.jstor.org/constitution/