tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-238228272008-06-17T17:27:39.141-07:00Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-62653243281650399672008-06-17T16:34:00.001-07:002008-06-17T17:15:41.983-07:00

This morning while walking I noticed a European honeybee on a mustard flower. Mustard is not a native California plant, although it has become extremely widespread. On the California poppies nearby, a different kind of bee was busy, a large black bumblebee with yellow stripes. I wondered if the bee was as native as the poppy to my Northern California farm. It took some sleuthing to come up with

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-24302167058453836492008-05-08T10:12:00.000-07:002008-06-17T17:27:39.175-07:00

While walking at Mountain View's Shoreline Park I came across a type of land snail I had never seen before. At first I thought it was a common European Brown Snail that was somehow bleached white or covered with some kind of salt deposit. Shoreline Park is, after all, at the shore. But after close examination I became convinced that this was a different type of critter altogether. It was

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-80358773578054920752008-04-16T08:01:00.000-07:002008-04-29T16:39:45.221-07:00

I had lunch yesterday with Steven Benner. The last time we talked had been in August of 2007, and the discussion centered around his work in synthetic biology -- creating DNA strands with 12 nucleotides instead of 4, and proteins with more than 20 amino acids. This time, he was here for the Astrobiology Science Conference to talk about life on other planets. But he took the time to visit

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-91676721523170700232008-04-15T08:07:00.000-07:002008-04-17T08:25:48.476-07:00

When Larry Walters attached 42 helium-filled weather balloons to his lawn chair in 1982, he became briefly famous, shortly after his arrest for violating federal airspace in a non-airworthy craft. Landing in power lines and causing a 20 minute blackout in Long Beach, California, he survived rising 16,000 feet in the air (he had planned only 100), and ended his 45 minute flight alive, but was

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-53955936548733073132007-08-07T07:43:00.001-07:002007-08-07T11:31:41.568-07:00

This weekend I got to meet with hundreds of amazing people at the O'Reilly/Nature/Google event called Science Foo (short for Friends Of O'Reilly). The discussions in the conference rooms were fascinating, but the discussions one-on-one or in small groups during breaks were even better. Some of the attendees I had met before, or even known well, such as Theo Gray, Chris Dibona, Sergey Brin,

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-90123259837888325242007-05-02T07:00:00.000-07:002007-05-02T08:40:30.166-07:00

A good friend of mine is fond of describing the Global Positioning System as a device that depends on special relativity to work. He is correct of course — without the corrections for time dilation the system could not function. But the implication that it is the only such device he knows of is wrong. A compass also depends on relativity to help us navigate. Most people are aware of the

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1155766030216180182006-08-16T14:39:00.000-07:002006-08-18T08:23:06.960-07:00

A friend of mine suggested at lunch that the money spent on the war in Iraq might buy a lot of solar panels. So how many solar panels would $307 billion (at the time of this writing) buy? My 5 kilowatt system, installed, with inverters and mounting, cost about $50,000 before government rebates. At that cost, we get 6,145,956 houses powered by solar energy. And another house gets solar for

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1155592436777103002006-08-14T14:53:00.000-07:002006-08-16T07:18:16.713-07:00

When airline passengers were told on August 10th, 2006, that they could no longer bring liquids aboard airplanes, the fear was liquid explosives. Most people can probably name one liquid explosive -- nitroglycerine, or more properly glyceryl trinitrate, or propane-1,2,3-triyl trinitrate. Ramzi Yousef used contact lens solution bottles filled with glyceryl trinitrate to blow up a Boeing 747

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1149885361953330422006-06-09T13:35:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:36:17.726-07:00

Yesterday I had lunch with Harold McGee. He is the author of the classic book on the chemistry of cooking, titled "On Food and Cooking". Lunch was great -- we ate with the head of Google's many cafes, and with the chef, the Google doctor, the Google nutritionist, and some special guests. The conversation was about food, chemistry, writing, the ten years of writing and research that

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1146495804715218552006-05-01T08:03:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:15:12.610-07:00

I took a long walk the other day with my friend the Google Doctor, and we watched a Sceloporus occidentalis guard his territory on a sunny rock. Commonly known as the "Bluebelly" lizard, or the Western Fence Swift, the sighting led to a discussion of a remarkable protein in the blood of the lizard, and an interesting ecological relationship between the lizard, the western black legged tick

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1146262563463300122006-04-28T15:15:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:15:37.686-07:00

Researchers Zheng Cui and Mark Willingham, and a team of eight others, have discovered a strain of mice that are immune to cancer. When cancer cells are injected into the mice, they are destroyed. But even better, mice that have established tumors are completely cured by injections of white blood cells from the cancer resistant strain. Highly aggressive cancers and very large tumors were

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1145770066260734452006-04-22T22:27:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:16:02.243-07:00

Yesterday I went to the Maker Faire in San Mateo. The publishers of Make magazine pulled together a whole bunch of gadgeteers and inventors to show off their projects at the fairgrounds. There were propane flame cannons booming away, plug-in Prius conversions, and a supercomputer built from recycled PCs. Yahoo! had a large booth, and the Wondermagnets booth was demonstrating my Gauss Rifle.

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1145631131314226542006-04-21T07:51:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:16:23.036-07:00

Yesterday I got to ride in Ian Wright's electric supercar, the Wrightspeed X1. In 3 seconds, we went from stopped to 60 miles per hour, and kept accelerating. By the time 8 seconds had gone by, we were moving at over 100 miles per hour. My stomach tightened, my fingers gripped the tubular steel frame for dear life, and we kept accelerating at nearly a full G. Finally, we slowed down, turned

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1145151151977990422006-04-15T18:32:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:17:02.063-07:00

Levers do it. Pulleys do it. Ramps, transformers, gears, megaphones, and wheelbarrows do it. Even screws do it. Match impedance, that is. Impedance is the opposition to the flow of energy. If you try to lift your refrigerator, you will experience an opposition to the flow of energy. The refrigerator will just sit there, and you will get tired. The ability of your muscles to lift the weight

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1145024567090567672006-04-14T07:22:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:17:33.126-07:00

Yesterday the folks from Space Island came to Google to give a presentation. These folks are raising money to build space stations, using shuttle external fuel tanks. They plan to rent space in the stations to manufacturers, researchers, and tourists, and to build solar power satellites, and other orbital construction. The presentations were much too slick for the tech-heavy Google crowd,

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1144680052599640392006-04-10T07:40:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:18:00.006-07:00

Tiny plankton called coccolithophores remove carbon dioxide from the air. They make little shells of calcium carbonate from CO2 and when they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and make the sediments from which limestone is formed. They are also an important food source for many other creatures in the ocean, including most of what we catch and eat. But the CO2 that they can't scavenge

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1144612521603111242006-04-09T12:55:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:18:24.283-07:00

Because the bathroom scale is always just sitting there, and I am a curious person, I weigh myself before going to bed, and then again in the morning. I find that I lose about 1% of my body weight by sleeping. If one third of my day is spent sleeping, and I want to lose 20 pounds, it would seem that the easiest way to do so would be to sleep for three days straight. Eve Van Cauter has been

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1144537618397988302006-04-08T16:06:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:18:48.116-07:00

When plants make oils, they prefer kinky molecules. Molecules that are straight can pack together into dense solid clumps, while kinky molecules stay liquid. What makes the molecules kinky are cis double bonds. Most of the bonds between carbon atoms in fats and oils are single bonds, because most of the carbons are saturated with as many hydrogen atoms as they can hold, and they only have

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1144421393468854262006-04-07T07:49:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:19:08.456-07:00

Al Gore came to Google today, and gave a very slick and well presented talk about Global Warming, presenting in a neat package what is known and accepted by scientists about the subject, and what needs to be done right away. This talk is the basis for a documentary about the subject, coming out next month. Part of the talk concerned the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) in the oceans,

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1144246512285479012006-04-05T07:15:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:19:35.323-07:00

Carbons like to form bonds with angles of 109 degrees, like the bonds in diamonds. It takes energy to force the bonds to form more acute angles. The highest strain energy of any organic compound available in multi-gram amounts is found in cubane, a molecule with eight carbons in a cube shape, where all of the bonds are 90 degrees. In the early 1980's it was pointed out that cubane's very

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1144174543764395962006-04-04T11:15:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:19:57.196-07:00

Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA with Francis Crick in 1953, came to Google to talk to us about his current work on the genetic basis of autism. He talked first about the events of 50 years ago, a talk he had previously given to the Commonwealth Club. He then talked about his work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on autism and genetics. He didn't mention

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1144125119267532202006-04-03T21:31:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:20:35.896-07:00

I bought six of these wonderful little radio controlled airplanes, the Air-Hog Aero Ace. They are barely bigger than my hand, and fly for 10 minutes on a charge. Great fun, although I am a really lousy pilot, having had no time to practice. The foam body crashes into things and simply bounces back unharmed. And they are only $30 each, complete with the radio control transmitter. What makes

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1144033688453971172006-04-02T20:07:00.000-07:002006-06-10T18:21:12.316-07:00

Dr. Robert Ross has been studying abdominal fat and mortality. There are two components to abdominal fat. Subcutaneous fat lies just below the skin, and it is the fat you can pinch with your fingers. But it is the visceral fat, the fat located behind the abdominal muscles, that is the major risk factor in cardiovascular disease. Visceral fat is associated with insulin resistance and

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1143937135593487262006-04-01T16:18:00.000-08:002006-06-10T18:21:48.570-07:00

Bones are made of calcium phosphate, a molecule made when phosphoric acid combines with calcium. So one would think that phosphoric acid in the diet would be good for bones. Or maybe not. Phosphoric acid combines in the digestive system with any calcium it finds, and binds tightly to it, making the calcium unavailable to the body. Since calcium is needed in many important functions, when

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23822827.post-1143819942894491252006-03-31T07:45:00.000-08:002006-06-10T18:22:19.476-07:00

Herbert Benson believes in the power of prayer. He has reason to -- he's been studying it scientifically for years. In a recent study, he and co-author Charles Bethea looked at whether there were any effects that could be traced to people undergoing surgery who had others praying for their speedy recovery without complications. The study divided 1,800 patients into three groups. Six hundred

Simon Quellen Fieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16571839929777720861noreply@blogger.com