It's time to come clean. It was a difficult thing to admit to myself but I've just had this unusual attraction for such a long time. At least it's comforting to know that you share something in common with great thinkers such as Alan Turing, DaVinci, ... Euclid, Leibniz, Gauss, Newton and Pythagoras. Yep, we're all "gay".Just to confirm here: That's gay for math.

Well, our Valentines Day traffic seems to be leveling off back to normal. I guess it's back to our regularly scheduled program, back to the daily grind, and back to our core readership (Hi Kate and Kevin!). Thankfully it's reading week so blogging doesn't even count as procrastination, it's strictly business.

Language barriers, what a nuisance. How can one collaborate internationally when ideas are lost in translation? The least that a worldly English-speaking researcher could do would be to learn another language. And what better language than the language of science, German. Err, actually, these days English seems to be the language of choice but there's no harm in adding a few words to your brain's crowded Germ-o-dex in between Heineken, Jagermeister, and Budweiser.

Just kidding, you probably know more words German words than you give yourself credit. Half of these German loan words were named after German scientists too.

• Fahrenheit, named after the German inventor, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit.
• Diesel, named after German inventor, Rudolf Diesel.
• Cobalt, derived from the German kobalt, from kobold meaning "goblin".
• Zinc, used first by Paracelsus, a German chemist who referred to the metal as Zinken or Zinck
• Neanderthal, named after the "Neander Valley" in Germany where the first Neanderthal remains were found.
• Geiger counter, named for German physicist Hans Geiger.
• Aufbau Principle, from German "Aufbau" meaning "construction", used to determine the electron configuration of atoms.

Here are some less commonly known German words which still have significant use in English.

• Ansatz is the process of is laying out your initial conditions, assumptions, and equations when are are attempting to solve a math problem. I had no idea there was a word for this.
• Heiligenschein is a white halo of light visible around the shadow of the observer's head. So much for being an angel, thanks German.
• Zitterbewegung is the circular/helical motion of electrons producing spin and magnetic moment.
• Bremsstrahlung, from German bremsen "to brake" and Strahlung "radiation", describes the radiation which is emitted when electrons are decelerated when they are fired at a metal target.
• Karst, is the type of landscape formed by dissolving layers of bed rock. Responsible for the bad ass Niagara Escarpment over here in Ontario.
• Gedankenexperiment, a hypothetical scenario, or thought experiment.
• Aha-Erlebnis, Eureka!

If you want to take things to the next level you may need some material to practice your German translations with. I found this book on Project Gutenberg called the German Science Reader. It was kinda written in 1907 but check out the footnotes for lots of translation aid. Some of my favorites include:

• Sinusschwingungen: sine oscillations.
• die Fortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeit: velocity of propagation.
• Aggregatzustandsveränderungen: changes in the state of aggregation (i. e. from liquid to solid etc.).
• das Knallgebläse: oxy-hydrogen blowpipe.
• das Beharrungsvermögen: capacity for persisting = inertia.
• die Zeiteinheit: unit of time.
• bis ins Unendliche: to infinity.

After you have learned sufficient German you can appreciate fine science puns such as this one I got from Science Jokes:

Q: What is Schroedinger's parakeet called?

A: Ein Teilchensittich.

Here's the explanation:

Sittich is German for parrot.
Wellensittich is German for parakeet.
Welle is German for wave.
Teilchen is German for particle.
So by Wave-Particle duality you have Teilchensittich.

Ich lachte laut!

Jacks of Science wishes you a happy almost Valentine's Day! I desperately tried to hold  back until the day itself to post these cards I photoshopped for my school's science newsletter but those jerks/cool dudes at Ironic Sans scooped me!

Credit for romantic wordplay and random font selection goes to me. Most of the images used are free for the using but special thanks goes to the monkey kiss and global warming photographers. If you are one of the fine photographers of these images I won't hesitate to remove them from my site but remember that you are breaking someone's heart in the process! 

Cards after the jump, just click each card for a higher res image fit for the science nerd of your dreams!

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I've read A Brief History of Time, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and even The Cartoon History of the Universe but none were as brief/knowledge-packed as science humorist (!?) Eric Shulman's "Wiki History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less". Check it!

Vegetarians beware, this post is all about meat.  More specifically, we look at the what makes meat the colour it is.  It all comes down to a handy molecule called myoglobin.  But first, a bit about twitching.

The difference between white and dark meat or white and red meat is a consequence of the different muscle cell types.  Muscle cells are commonly called muscle fibres.  White muscle fibres are also known as "fast-twitch" muscle fibres, and are geared towards (as their name implies) quick, sudden movements like a short burst of flight.  Most of the energy for white muscle fibre movement comes from the metabolism of glycogen, a networked polymer of glucose.  Glycogen metabolism doesn't require oxygen, but results in a buildup of lactic acid, which limits the length of time the cell can work before it needs rest to get rid of the accumulation of lactic acid and restore glycogen stores.

Red or, "slow-twitch" muscle fibres, by contrast, dominate in muscles that require prolonged constant effort, such as the legs of most animals.  Their primary source of energy is fat stores by way of cellular respiration.

Most animal muscles are made of a combination of white and red muscle fibres.  At one extreme, frog legs are almost exclusively white muscle fibres, since they make nothing but sudden fast movements.  Animals that are constantly chewing their cud, such as cows, have cheeks that are made up of only red muscle fibres.  Birds such as chickens or turkeys fly rarely, and only for short periods, so their breast muscles are mostly white fibres, while their legs are a combination of white and red.  Ducks are migratory birds, so their muscles contain a high proportion of red fibres to support extended periods of flight.

Most of raw meat's colour comes from a pigment called myoglobin, which is related to hemoglobin and binds oxygen to transport it around the cell.  Myoglobin, like hemoglobin, contains a heme group (pictured above) which contains a central iron atom, usually in the +2 oxidation state.  The colour of myoglobin is determined by whatever the iron atom is bonded to:  if it's bonded to an O₂ molecule, the myoglobin is bright red, whereas in the absense of oxygen it bonds to water and is a purple colour.  If the iron atom becomes oxidized, or loses an electron, the myoglobin turns brown.  This can happen after a prolonged time without access to oxygen, or in an acidic environment.

When meat is cooked, some of the proteins in it denature and become opaque, turning red meat pink.  At 60 degrees C, the myoglobin itself denatures and becomes tan-coloured, giving well done meat a brownish-grey colour.  Freezing for long periods of time can also denature the myoglobin.

Finally, curing meat can cause other molecules to bond to myoglobin.  Nitrite, used in cured meats like ham and bacon, reacts to form nitric oxide.  Myoglobin bonded to nitric oxide is pink in colour.  Smoking or barbequeing meat can also turn it pink‚ nitric oxide (named Molecule of the Year in 1992) is the culprit again.  This is the characteristic smoke ring‚ of smoked and barbequed meats that is prized by barbeque aficionados.

This post was generously contributed by long-time Jacks of Science fan Kate Cook studying at University of Waterloo. Thanks for the meat knowledge Kate!

You may or may not have read the "About Us" section and wondered what Computational Physics, or more generally, what Computational Science actually is. You wouldn't be the first! To the untrained ear, Computational Science sure sounds a lot like Computer Science. Even Google is a bit hard of hearing.

Computational Science is the scientific approach for the 21st century! With computers more powerful than ever and the internet more awesome than ever, it's natural that we should use such resources to further scientific research.

With one of these new fangled computing devices all sorts of formally forbidden "voodoo research" are suddenly fair game. Weather prediction, bring it on! Computer aided drug design, why not! Protein folding, I'd compute that in my sleep! Collisions of galaxies, at worst a cool DVD! Scientists can finally gain insight into phenomena of epic proportions which is unobtainable by experiment (damn funding!) and phenomena which is too messy to understand theoretically (damn brain!). The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and I both agree that computat. sci. is here to stay:

Computation is now regarded as an equal and indispensable partner, along with theory and experiment, in the advance of scientific knowledge and engineering practice.

A true computational wizard understands principles of efficient algorithm design, software development, scientific theory, mathematics, visualization, and error analysis. Definitely not a wizard to be reckoned with.

For more information you should read some Computational Science Wikipedia articles and embrace the age of computation that lies ahead of us. Also Mike Lazaridis, if you're reading this right now, I could really use a Perimeter Institute for Computational Physics down the road from my house, k thx.

Meet Walter White. Standing in front of a plume of red phosphorus gas in the middle of the desert without pants. He's a lot like me, sitting in the middle of the Writers Guild strike, in a desert of television repeats, without pants. But that's all about to change after the jump when I tell you about this awesome show and put on some pants!

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