Which bird migrates the farthest?

The bird that flies farthest is the Arctic tern, an elegant white seabird. This bird also sees more daylight than any other.

Arctic tern in flight

The Arctic tern breeds on the shores of the Arctic Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere summer. And it feeds over the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere half a year later – in Southern Hemisphere summer. So, like many birds, this bird flies great distances every year to maintain its life of endless summertime.

North American Arctic terns fly about 40,000 km each year. That’s a distance about equal to the distance around the Earth.

Two Arctic terns

An Arctic tern can live for 25 years, so in its life-long quest for summer it can fly a million kilometres – nearly three times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

Source - EarthSky.org

How Earth’s biggest animal started small

Far bigger than any dinosaur, the blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever lived.

An adult blue whale can grow to a massive 30m long and weigh more than 180,000kg - that’s about the same as 40 elephants, 30 Tyrannosaurus Rex or 2,670 average-sized men.

But this giant among giants started as something far smaller.

Although the blue whale is an endangered species, its population is on the rise.

Like all whales, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) evolved from a four-legged mammal that lived on land some 48 million years ago. This ancient ancestor, Pakicetus, was only 1.8m long. It foraged in streams and some of its descendants became adapted to living in water. This eventually led to a completely aquatic creature called Dorudon ("Spear-Tooth"), which lived 37 million years ago and grew 4.5m long.

In Dorudon, we see the beginnings of what makes whales so special. Its nostrils moved back from its snout to the top of its head, its forelimbs became stiff flippers, its body elongated, its hind limbs became virtually non-existent and its tail evolved into two rubbery flukes, which propelled the animal forward through the water with an up and down motion, rather than the side-to-side movement of a fish tail.

The evolution from Dorudon to blue whale involved a number of changes to cope with its enormous size. Here are nine you need to know about:

1. Deep breath!

Blue whales can dive for up to an hour at a time, going to a depth of 100m, so they need highly efficient lungs to survive. Two enormous blowholes, big enough for a small child to crawl into, allow the fast and efficient exchange of oxygen. Blue whales exchange between 80 and 90 per cent of oxygen in their lungs each time they breathe, compared to just 10 or 15 per cent in humans. 

2. Can you hear my heart beating?

Oxygen is pumped around its enormous body by an equally massive, four-chambered heart. Weighing some 900kg – and the size of a Mini car – the blue whale’s heart beats once every 10 seconds, pumping 220 litres of blood through its body, and beats so loudly it can be heard from 3km away through sonar equipment.

3. Skin deep

A blue whale’s skin markings are unique, much like fingerprints. The pale bluish-grey colour gives the species its name, although the skin can also look silvery grey or tan, depending on the light. A blue whale has between 80 and 100 long grooves running along the length of its throat and chest.

A blue whale’s skin markings are unique, much like fingerprints.

4. No time (or capacity for tears)

Blue whales have relatively small eyes for their body size – each about the size of a grapefruit – and their eyesight is thought to be weak. They have no tear glands or eyelashes.

5. Sound you out

Despite having no external ears, blue whales are believed to have excellent hearing, using air sinuses and bones to detect sound. They communicate using low-frequency whistles or rumbling noises which can travel hundreds of kilometers and reach 188 decibels – louder than a passenger jet.

6. Big mouth

Their gigantic mouths – big enough to house 100 people – can capture enormous quantities of prey with each gulp of water, filtering the nutritious krill from the expelled water with stiff bristles that grow from the roof of the mouth. During the summer months, they eat up to 6,000kg of krill a day. 

7. Turning up the heat

Blue whales reach sexual maturity between five and 10 years of age. They seek warmer equatorial waters before embarking on an elaborate mating ritual that involves the male and female rolling over one another, diving in a deep dive, then suddenly swimming to the surface for copulating. The males have the biggest penis in the animal kingdom, about 30cm in diameter when erect and 3m in length.

8. Thirsty babies

Blue whales are placental mammals and the foetus develops in the uterus of the mother. The developing foetus grows quickly and after seven months, it is about 3.5m long. The calf is born tail first at 12 months and weighs about 2,700kg, swimming immediately to the surface for air. It suckles on its mother’s two nipples, feeding on up to 180 litres of fat-rich milk a day, allowing it to grow at a daily rate of 90kg. Weaning occurs at around seven or nine months, when the calf is some 15m long.

9. Population counts

It is thought that there were once more than 250,000 blue whales. Now it is estimated there are between 10,000 and 25,000 left in the world. After decades of being hunted for their meat, oil, and other valuable body parts, they are now classified as an endangered species on the IUCN’s Red List.

Source - BBC Earth

Jack Kilby and the 1st Integrated Circuit (IC)

Sep 12, 1958 - Jack Kilby presented an electronic circuit at Texas instruments which is now recognized as the 1st integrated circuit. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2000. To congratulate him, American President Bill Clinton wrote, "You can take pride in the knowledge that your work will help to improve lives for generations to come."

In mid-1958, Kilby, a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments (TI), did not yet have the right to a summer vacation. He spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design that was commonly called the "tyranny of numbers", and he finally came to the conclusion that the manufacturing of circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution.

On September 12, he presented his findings to company's management. He showed them a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached, pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, proving that his integrated circuit worked, and hence he had solved the problem. Along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later), Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit.

The first working integrated circuit created by Jack Kilby. It contains a single transistor and supporting components on a slice of germanium and measures 1/16 by 7/16 inches (1.6 x 11.1 mm).

Jack Kilby went on to pioneer military, industrial, and commercial applications of microchip technology. He headed teams that built both the first military system and the first computer incorporating integrated circuits. He later co-invented both the handheld calculator and the thermal printer that was used in portable data terminals.

Source - Wikipedia

Carl Anderson, and his order of positron & muon

September 3, 1905 - birthday of Carl David Anderson, an American physicist. He is best known for his discovery of the positron in 1932, an achievement for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics, and of the muon in 1936.

Anderson studied physics and engineering at Caltech. Under the supervision of Robert A. Millikan, he began investigations into cosmic rays during the course of which he encountered unexpected particle tracks in his cloud chamber photographs that he correctly interpreted as having been created by a particle with the same mass as the electron, but with opposite electrical charge. This discovery, announced in 1932 and later confirmed by others, validated Paul Dirac's theoretical prediction of the existence of the positron.

Anderson first detected the particles in cosmic rays. He then produced more conclusive proof by shooting gamma rays produced by the natural radioactive nuclide ThC (Tl-208) into other materials, resulting in the creation of positron-electron pairs. For this work, Anderson shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics with Victor Hess.

Fifty years later, Anderson acknowledged that his discovery was inspired by the work of his Caltech classmate Chung-Yao Chao, whose research formed the foundation from which much of Anderson's work developed but was not credited at the time.

Chung-Yao Chao. Chao's research formed the foundation from which much of Anderson's own work developed. Chao died in 1998, without sharing in a Nobel Prize acknowledgment

Also in 1936, Anderson and his first graduate student, Seth Neddermeyer, discovered the muon (or 'mu-meson', as it was known for many years), a subatomic particle 207 times more massive than the electron, but with the same negative electric charge and spin 1/2 as the electron, again in cosmic rays. Anderson and Neddermeyer at first believed that they had seen the pion, a particle which Hideki Yukawa had postulated in his theory of the strong interaction.

Seth Neddermeyer

When it became clear that what Anderson had seen was not the pion, the physicist I. I. Rabi, puzzled as to how the unexpected discovery could fit into any logical scheme of particle physics, quizzically asked "Who ordered that?" (sometimes the story goes that he was dining with colleagues at a Chinese restaurant at the time).

The muon was the first of a long list of subatomic particles whose discovery initially baffled theoreticians who could not make the confusing "zoo" fit into some tidy conceptual scheme. Willis Lamb, in his 1955 Nobel Prize Lecture, joked that he had heard it said that "the finder of a new elementary particle used to be rewarded by a Nobel Prize, but such a discovery now ought to be punished by a 10,000 dollar fine."

Source - Wikipedia 

Wondering what to read?

The winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has some suggestions.

Michael Rosbash won the Nobel for his work on circadian rhythms with Jeff Hall and Michael Young. He's read a lot of books about science over the years.

BrandeisNOW asked him to select his favorites suited for a non-scientific audience and why he chose them. 

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

By James Watson

A great book written by a great ego. Judged by the New York Times as one of the 100 best pieces of literature written in the 20th century. (That's literature, not science books!)

The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology

By Horace Freeland Judson

A history of the remarkable era that built the foundation of DNA research. An unforgettable cast of characters including — but by no means limited to — James Watson and his partner Francis Crick. This obsessed group of scientists, many of them close friends, built the magnificent edifice on which genetics rests. 

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

By Michael Pollan  

A great read that reveals a surprising relationship between plants and humans. Are we sure that we are the masters and plants do our bidding?

The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time

By Jonathan Weiner

A story about a pair of modern-day Darwins, Peter and Rosemary Grant. They are a married couple from Princeton, two professors, who have made studying finches on the Galápagos Islands their life's work.

The Empire of All Maladies

By Siddhartha Mukherjee

A great book about the history of cancer research, the politics involved and the science behind everything from traditional chemotherapy to more modern approaches. A revealing look at many of the key characters behind the work.

Source - BrandeisNOW

Frederick Soddy, Radioactivity & Soddy Circles

September 2, 1877 - birthday of Frederick Soddy, an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements.

In 1900 he became a demonstrator in chemistry at McGill University in Montreal, where he worked with Ernest Rutherford on radioactivity. He and Rutherford realized that the anomalous behaviour of radioactive elements was because they decayed into other elements. This decay also produced alpha, beta, and gamma radiation.

In 1903, with Sir William Ramsay, Soddy showed that the decay of radium produced helium gas. In the experiment a sample of radium was enclosed in a thin-walled glass envelope sited within an evacuated glass bulb. After leaving the experiment running for a long period of time, a spectral analysis of the contents of the bulb revealed the presence of helium. Later, Rutherford and Thomas Royds showed that the helium was first formed as positively charged nuclei of helium (He 2+) which were identical to alpha particles, which could pass through the thin glass wall but were contained within the surrounding glass envelope.

Soddy and Ada Hitchins (Soddy's research assistant) showed that uranium decays to radium.  They also showed that a radioactive element may have more than one atomic mass though the chemical properties are identical. Soddy named this concept isotope meaning 'same place'. The word 'isotope' was initially suggested to him by Margaret Todd. Later, J. J. Thomson showed that non-radioactive elements can also have multiple isotopes.

Soddy also showed that an atom moves lower in atomic number by two places on alpha emission, higher by one place on beta emission. This was discovered at about the same time by Kazimierz Fajans, and is known as the radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy, a fundamental step toward understanding the relationships among families of radioactive elements. Soddy published The Interpretation of Radium (1909) and Atomic Transmutation (1953).

In 1918 he announced discovery of a stable isotope of Protactinium, working with John Arnold Cranston. This slightly post-dated its discovery by German counterparts; however, it is said their discovery was actually made in 1915 but its announcement was delayed due to Cranston's notes being locked away whilst on active service in the First World War.

Soddy received the 1921 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research in radioactive decay and particularly for his formulation of the theory of isotopes.

He rediscovered the Descartes' theorem in 1936 and published it as a poem, "The Kiss Precise", quoted at Problem of Apollonius. The kissing circles in this problem are sometimes known as Soddy circles.

Descartes' theorem states that for every four kissing, or mutually tangent, circles, the radii of the circles satisfy a certain quadratic equation. By solving this equation, one can construct a fourth circle tangent to three given, mutually tangent circles. The theorem is named after René Descartes, who stated it in 1643.

Source - Wikipedia