CENtral Science

In Print: Shall We Play A Game?

The Newscripts blog would like to be closer Internet buddies with our glossy print Newscripts column, so here we highlight what’s going on in the current issue of C&EN. The following comes courtesy of the writer of this week’s glossy print column, C&EN Senior Editor Michael Torrice.

The Nintendo Entertainment System came out in the U.S. almost 30 years ago. My family bought the gray video game console in 1988, and my friends and I played it for countless hours. We once staged a Nintendo Olympics, with each kid adopting an official song and flag. Winners received medals or a trophy made from Legos, I think. For this week’s Newscripts column, I relived a bit of my childhood when I wrote about a computer scientist who taught his computer how to play Nintendo games.

Stompin’ goombas: A computer scientist taught his computer to play Nintendo games such as “Super Mario Bros.” Credit: Tom W. Murphy VII

Tom W. Murphy VII is the computer scientist, and he works on machine learning, which is basically teaching computers how to perform specific tasks. (Yes, Murphy is the seventh Thomas Murphy in his family. He says the first died in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War.)

The neat thing about Murphy’s Nintendo-playing program is that it uses a simple, general strategy that works on several games, including the classic “Super Mario Bros.” The program can play a wide range of games because it doesn’t know anything specific about a game (for instance, it’s unaware that mushrooms make Mario grow big). Instead it uses a two-phase process to learn what it means to win in a specific game and then looks for the best series of button presses to succeed.

In the first phase, the computer “watches me play the game and peers inside the memory of the Nintendo and looks at what’s going on,” Murphy says. Basically, it finds bytes of memory that increase in value as Murphy plays. These bytes often correspond to things like the score or progress through a game level—although the program doesn’t know what the bytes translate to on the screen. Continue reading →

Amusing News Aliquots

Silly samplings from this week’s science news, compiled by Sophia Cai, Bethany Halford, and Jeff Huber.

High school junior Justin Beckerman tests out his submarine at Lake Hopatcong, in New Jersey. Credit: Saed Hindash/The Star-Ledger

Kids these days do some pretty wild stuff. This New Jersey teen built his own submarine. [NJ.com]

Approximately 78,000 people have paid money to apply to be one of the first four settlers on Mars. And for those who aren’t selected, Earth’s toilets still offer plenty of opportunity to flush money down the drain. [NBC News]

Listen to Paul. Don’t let sad kitten ruin your job interview. [ChemBark]

Here Europeans are worrying about horse in their meatballs, while Chinese consumers have to worry about bird flu in their KFC and rat in their mutton. [NPR]

Study finds that people with nicknames earn more than those with longer names. What do you think about that, Sport? [TheLadders]

Find some psych study conclusions a bit weird? That may be because their subjects were primarily WEIRD. [Slate]

Sucking on a child’s pacifier may promote the child’s defenses against allergies. It also teaches stressed-out parents how to self-soothe. [ScienceDaily]

And last but not least: Mates in Australia, check out today’s solar eclipse. The rest of the world can watch it via live feed. [National Geographic]

In Print: Droplets of Rain, Strands of Honey

The Newscripts blog would like to be closer Internet buddies with our glossy print Newscripts column, so here we highlight what’s going on in the current issue of C&EN.

Petrichor: The rainy-day smell comes from a potpourri of compounds. Credit: Shutterstock

People living in the Bay Area rarely complain about the weather. But San Francisco-based Senior Editor Jyllian Kemsley tells Newscripts that, lately, she’s been a bit wistful for rain. “We’ve had very very little here since December. The California news last week, in fact, was that the water content in the snowpack is 17 percent of ‘normal,’ ” Jyllian says, noting that they probably mean “average” instead of “normal.”

So for this week’s Newscripts print column, Jyllian dug through old literature to learn the chemistry of the scent of rain–or petrichor, as Australian chemists Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas coined it in 1964. Turns out, they were able to isolate an oily yellow material responsible for the characteristic rain scent (that this Portland-raised Newscripts blogger knows so well). Although Jyllian doesn’t know the original motivations of rain-scent researchers, she does point out that Bear appears to have been a talented chemist.

Also inspired by a scientific question raised in the 1960s, Jyllian’s second Newscripts item discusses why honey and other viscous fluids don’t drip off of a spoon like water but instead stretch to lengths that seem to defy physics. Traditionally, scientists thought falling fluid is driven by gravity and not viscosity, but that doesn’t explain why honey can maintain a droopy strand for 10 meters or more, whereas a thin stream of water breaks up into droplets after a mere 10 cm. 

The ’60s scientists weren’t the only curiously fascinated ones. Assistant Editor Craig Bettenhausen says: “I distinctly remember when I was a kid turning on the sink, looking at it with a strobe light going, and having my mind blown by the realization that it was lots of little droplets and not a continuous stream.”

But thanks to a 2013 study, these collective curiosities are answered. The researchers found that the length of a fluid strand depends on small waves in the materials. These waves amplify over time and once large enough, break the fluid stream. Because viscosity dampens the amplification, honey gets to hang on a little big longer.

Amusing New Aliquots

Silly samplings from this week’s science news, compiled by Sophia Cai, Bethany Halford, and Jeff Huber.

Na na na na na na na Bat Cave!!!!!: Chris Weir puts a new spin on the man cave. Credit: Walyou

Thinking of putting a wine cellar in your basement? Boring. Why not build a Bat Cave instead? [Walyou]

Hmm. Wondering if C&EN would spring to send us to this meeting next year. We’d have to get our hemp accessories ready. [Wired]

Refrigerators and washer-dryers, make way: 3-D printers could be coming to households everywhere … [Guardian]

… And they may even visit a body near you: 3-D printing is used to merge tissue and radio-wave-receiving antennae in “bionic ears.” [Science Daily]

Oh man, remember to back up your data. [Chemjobber]

Lovesick wild tiger breaks into a zoo in India in search of a mate. Scared zoo visitors seem to be overlooking how adorable this is. [BBC]

Laugh in the face of every lab safety class you’ve ever had, and hang dozens of test tubes from the ceiling with this handy chandelier. (h/t Deborah Blum, Michelle Sipics) [Etsy]

Study finds that more than 50% of ground turkey contains fecal bacteria. Dieters rejoice over a new reason to return to beef burgers. [Consumer Reports]

Jamestown settlers may have come under desperate times, but cannibalistic survival is a way of life for shark embryos. [NBC News]

If a tree screams in a forest, does it make a detectable sound? Scientists say they’re working on hearing thirsty trees’ distress calls. [Yahoo!]

“A Boy and His Atom”: The World’s Smallest Movie

Forget pushing electrons, IBM researchers-turned-filmmakers have moved 5,000 atoms to make a stop-motion film–the world’s smallest, confirms Guinness World Records. How can you watch such a tiny movie, you ask? Well, the frames in the film are magnified about 100 million times. (To give perspective: “If an atom were the size of an orange, then the orange would be the size of the whole planet Earth,” the researchers say.)

Meet Adam and his toy atom:

And you thought Disney/Pixar was good at tugging on your heartstrings with no dialogue and bare-bones animation. But in comparison to Disney’s Oscar-winning “Paperman,” which is a little longer than 6 minutes and had dozens of animators, this team of IBM researchers used the tools they had in their lab to make the 242-frame “A Boy and His Atom.” The team used a scanning tunneling microscope to drag atoms along a surface, then took pictures after each move to make the stop-motion film. I’ll let them explain:

For more on how it was made, watch all of their behind-the-scenes videos here.

h/t Chemjobber via Beth Halford

In Print: Horse. It’s What’s For Dinner

The Newscripts blog would like to be closer Internet buddies with our glossy print Newscripts column, so here we highlight what’s going on in the current issue of C&EN.

Horse: Potential party crasher. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Some may be worried about recent news reports of horse DNA being detected in processed beef. Alex Tullo, however, isn’t one of them. The C&EN senior correspondent explores the recent uproar over horse meat in this week’s Newscripts print column, discussing the Food Safety Authority of Ireland‘s detection of horse DNA in burger products as well as the efforts of New Mexico-based firm Valley Meat to sell horse meat in the U.S. But the most provocative part of the column comes when Alex remembers the time from his childhood when his dad, in line with the culinary traditions of his Italian family, cooked horse steaks for dinner. Alex writes that his dad had a friend “acquire horse meat for him somewhere in New Jersey.”

Alex says the story reflects his dad’s sense of humor, but it’s also just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Alex’ unconventional food adventures. As Alex tells the Newscripts blog, he loves frog, tolerates alligator, and adores boar. “I usually get these kinds of meat when I am traveling,” he says. “I don’t have the nerve to prepare them myself.”

Despite his appetite for the unconventional, however, Alex can understand the reasons behind the recent uproar over the discovery of horse DNA in beef. Horses “represent too much to the culture,” he says. “Go to any city park, you’ll find statues of military leaders mounted on horses.” Nevertheless, he maintains that there are unintended consequences that can come from not slaughtering horses. For instance, “feral horses are a big problem in the Southwest,” he says.

Alex predicts that the public will experience many more horse-meat-style scares in the future, especially given the increasing use of DNA testing to authenticate food (a topic that, he points out, C&EN Senior Editor Sarah Everts actually reported on back in 2009). “We’re going to learn a lot about what we have been eating over the next couple of years,” Alex predicts.

Looking back at our time in New Orleans

When ACS last convened in New Orleans in 2008, the city was still getting back on its feet after Hurricane Katrina stormed through. This time, the mood was much different. First of all, the convention center has undergone a major facelift, and it looks really nice! The French Quarter was even more colorful than I remembered, and meeting attendees took time out to explore the rich culture and cuisines of the city. As for me, I had the most amazing oyster po’ boy sandwich from the famous Mother’s restaurant.

Here’s a look back at some of my favorite moments from the 2013 ACS spring national meeting in New Orleans, and be sure to check out the meeting photospread in this week’s issue of C&EN: http://cenm.ag/pics.