The meteor news just don’t quit. Back in April reports flooded in from around the Midwest about a massive fireball lighting up the night sky. Now the meteorite that caused it has a name (Mifflin), a face, (see above), and a back story. Read the rest of this entry →

Mark Hammergren, of the Adler Planetarium, dispenses pretty quickly with the idea that a comet could have caused the Great Chicago Fire. But he’s quick to bring up a different episode, 100 years ago, when a comet fragment may indeed have scorched the earth. In 1908, over Tunguska, Siberia, a massive explosion and airburst leveled a huge area of remote forest. Scientists believe it was probably a meteoroid or large comet fragment that blew up in the atmosphere, stripping limbs from trees and killing hundreds of animals. Read the rest of this entry →

It may be the ultimate symbol of human mastery over nature’s power: fire. On this edition of Clever Apes, we consider why flames fascinate us. Eons of evolution have written fire into our DNA – no wonder kids like to mess with matches.

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By now fire is an utterly mundane part of our everyday life. And yet it seems to hold at its core some bit of magic. Read the rest of this entry →

If you get yourself away from the city tonight – far away – you can catch one of nature’s great pyrotechnic displays. The annual Perseid Meteor Shower will be visible in the northeast sky. Your best bet is getting the city lights behind you when you’re looking toward the meteors, so … hit the road to Michigan or borrow a boat. (or join the Adler Planetarium crew for viewing party).

The meteors are actually tiny comet bits. Most are probably sand-grain sized, but they’re moving so fast (140,000 mph, according to NASA) they release a huge amount of energy and burn brightly enough to be clearly visible from earth. At least, if you can get Chicago out of your rearview mirror. The annual show happens when the earth passes through a debris trail left by the comet Swift-Tuttle.
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About three years ago, Will County and the advocacy group Openlands teamed up to restore a little waterway just outside Joliet. It’s called “Spring Creek,” but by 2007 it might as well have been named “Straight Ditch.” The stream had been straightened, and engineered to drain water from farm fields as quickly as possible. The restoration crew dug up old aerial photos from the 1930s, brought in excavators and bulldozers, and “re-meandered” the creek. They tried to recreate, as best they could, the original bends in the river.

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Science doesn’t always tell us what we want to hear, and our record of accepting unwelcome findings is less than stellar. We have been known to shoot the messenger … or at least lock him up until he concedes that the universe revolves around the earth.

In this podcast installment of Clever Apes, we meet a Chicago artist inspired by the story of Galileo Galilei. Galileo’s discoveries radically recast our picture of the known universe, and for his trouble he was denounced and arrested. Christopher Furman of Chicago Robotic Theater helped produce a play on that theme of outcast truth-tellers … with a very unusual cast.

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“Where da Higgs at?” That is perhaps the most succinct formulation of one of the hottest questions in physics, as coined by funky49 (his hip-hop nerdcore challenge to Euro-science closes out the latest Clever Apes). Meanwhile, there’s actually some news to report on that question: Fermilab scientists announced today in Paris that they’ve closed in further on the elusive “God Particle.”

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So much of science is about finding patterns – repetitions that let us predict outcomes for given circumstances. The universe is full of these rhythms – from the vibrating loops of string theory to the orbits of stars and planets to the pulsing of our heart. On this episode of Clever Apes, we delve into these deep rhythms.

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When you’re walking and not consciously thinking “put one foot in front of the other,” that’s because little drummers are keeping time for you in your brain. If you want to see what the planet looks like deep beneath the crust, then you can use the earth’s vibrations like sonar to scan the structures. And if you use beats and rhythms to crow about your lab, than you best watch out for rival science MCs.

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There are certainly scarier examples of historical medical instruments out there. But somehow, this one gets me. Read the rest of this entry →

Some intriguing news out of Northwestern yesterday: Researchers have taken a poison – arsenic – worked some nanotech mojo on it, and come up with a chemotherapy treatment that seems to be effective in treating an aggressive form of breast cancer. At least, in mice. This got me thinking about chemotherapy, that signature cancer treatment, and how it has evolved.

Chemotherapy is not pleasant. A breast cancer survivor named Eloise Orr told me chemo was the worst experience of her life – this from a person who had holes drilled in her skull for multiple brain surgeries. Chemo, after all, is poison – based on a concept from a more primitive era of medicine, and unchanged in some ways for about 60 years. Read the rest of this entry →