SciBricks

Stephen Hawking

2012-02-17T13:54:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the delay in posting. Let's follow up those two different Einstein mosaics with other great scientists. I can't believe I've never post Iain Heath's Stephen Hawking. Raise your hand if you've got A Brief History of Time on your bookshelf.

More Einstein

2012-02-02T10:28:00.004-05:00

Arthur Gugick gives us his own version of an Einstein mosaic.

Einstein

2012-01-29T08:37:00.001-05:00

Dave Shaddix pays tribute to Albert Einstein.

Figs in space

2012-01-27T16:49:00.001-05:00

Canadian high school students Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad had an idea. They'd seen that some MIT students had sent a balloon into space, and they wanted to try it themselves. The purchased a balloon, and created a payload that involved cameras, a video camera, and a smart phone with GPS tracking. They sent this up about 80,000 feet about the earth's surface, and were able to take amazing photos. What's more, they were able to retrieve the payload and get this data. The reason it's hitting this blog is that they had a passenger. Watch the video to see an accelerated view of a minifig going where no fig has gone before (well, there are actually some LEGO pieces on the International Space Station, and images of figs were on a Mars probe).

Google Science Fair

2012-01-20T15:37:00.000-05:00

Google is once again sponsoring an international science fair. If you're a teenager, check it out. The sponsors are Google, CERN, National Geographic, Scientific American, and ... LEGO!

Here are last year's winners Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose, and Naomi Shah as the guests of President Obama. Note the cool LEGO trophies!

Anatomy

2012-01-15T08:52:00.003-05:00

Nannan Zhang is in med school, and he made this tribute to his Anatomy professors, the UTSW Anatomists.

Smaller frog

2012-01-14T19:58:00.002-05:00

I previously blogged Dave Kaleta's great dissected frog. George G made this tribute.

... in a galaxy not so far, far away ...

2012-01-13T09:43:00.000-05:00

Astronomers using the Kepler space telescope have found a third real-lifeTatooine (here in LEGO by Larry Lars). No, they haven't seen Jawas running around. Instead they've found another planet circling a binary star. Though this was a gas giant, it was very near the habitable zone of the binary system. Scientists estimate there might be several million of these in the Milky Way, suggesting that there might be somewhere within a few hundred light years you could go out and watch the double sunset.

Saturn V

2012-01-12T01:03:00.002-05:00

Check out this amazing detailed and massive Saturn V by LEGO Professional Ryan McNaught. This is surely the MOC by which we will judge all future NASA MOCs. You can read some details in this article. BTW, if you're down under, get yourself to Melbourne next week for the Brickvention gathering, where you'll be able to see this in person.

Oh, can I say it again, this is massive. 5.6 meters tall, to be precise. That makes it, I believe, true to minifig scale. See here with Ryan for scale:

Galapagos Tortoise

2012-01-10T09:14:00.003-05:00

The Galapagos tortoise played a role in Darwin's development of the theory of evolution. He realized that the tortoises on different islands had developed differently in response to their environment, writing "animals on separate islands ought to become different if kept long enough apart with slightly differing circumstances. – Now Galapagos Tortoises, Mocking birds, Falkland Fox, Chiloe fox, – Inglish and Irish Hare."
The news reported yesterday that a species of Galapagos tortoise previously thought to be extinct is still alive. Biologists found genetic markers unique to that species in living tortoises that appear to be cross-breeds.
Here Kaptain Kobold depicts Darwin observing a tortoise.

Boom

2012-01-01T17:22:00.000-05:00

We all recognize a mushroom cloud (here in LEGO by Brucey-Wan) as the result of an atomic explosion. A radioactive element is one that is unstable due to the ratio of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. These atoms fall apart, often emitting small subatomic particles. If you have a high enough concentration of unstable atoms (i.e. critical mass), these subatomic particles can ram into other radioactive nuclei, causing them to break apart just like hitting the cue ball into a rack of balls at the start of a game of pool. This breakdown (fission) leads to more subatomic particles being spit out, which run into more nuclei, and again and again and again, a chain reaction. At each fission event a small amount of energy is given off, but as the chain reaction proceeds, a huge number of atoms break down in a very small time, and the huge amount of energy given off is the atomic explosion. This energy superheats the air, which expands with explosive force as the blast. At the center of the blast, this hot expanding air rises straight up, and this creates a wind coming in and up that pulls up dust and debris from the ground. When this reaches a high enough elevation, hitting much cooler air, the cloud stops rising and mushrooms outward. This cloud also contains radioactive elements blown apart in the initial atomic blast, and this dust settling back to earth is the radioactive fallout.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

Physicist Kenneth Libbrecht of Caltech is fascinated by snowflakes (here in LEGO by lego_mancer). Snow crystals (flakes are technically blobs of conglomerated snow crystals) form when a tiny droplet of water freezes in a cloud at about -10 degrees C. The initial ice crystal will form a hexagonal prism due to the symmetry of how water molecules interact. After the first solid crystal forms, supercooled water vapor will go directly from the vapor to solid phase, starting at the six corners of the prism. As the crystal tumbles through the cloud, water condenses faster and slower, giving the beautiful complex shapes we've all known since we cut snowflakes out of paper in a grade school art class.

Learn much more at his site SnowCrystals.com. This site is very well written for the non-scientist, and you can learn things about the reason for the hexagonal shape, why snow looks white, whether any two crystals are actually the same, and how to grow artificial snow crystals. There are also tons of beautiful photos. Give yourself a Christmas treat and check out the site.

LEGO for girls / science for girls

2011-12-24T12:56:00.001-05:00

As a science educator, we constantly hear about the pipeline. The education pipeline starts with a perfect balance between boys and girls, but over the years from grade school to high school to college to graduate school girls get turned away from STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines at a greater rate than boys. The numbers are certainly significantly better than they were ten or twenty years ago, but there is still a disparity between men and women in technical fields.

Okay, I know that I'm biased here since I'm obviously a LEGO fan, but I believe that playing with LEGO as a kid can be a great learning tool. Kids learn problem solving skills, they follow directions, they learn three dimensional thinking. I contend that I'm an organic chemist today in part because of playing with those little plastic bricks in my childhood. While LEGO bricks are gender neutral, LEGO has become known to many as a "boys' toy". Now LEGO is working to turn this around with the new Friends line. They've studied how girls play similarly to and differently from boys. The figures are meant to look more like girls than the traditional minifig, since they argue that girls want toys that look like themselves. The main characters have story lines, similar to the American girls series (though without the historical tie in, that might have been cool), and the color palette is supposed to be more 'girl-friendly'.

This move has not been without some controversy. As I see it, the complaints come in a couple of flavors. Some within the fold of LEGO builders don't like the new figs and the move away from more open ended non-story-driven building. Others argue that these sets play into too many gender stereotypes. 'Boy' sets are about exploring and conquering, while the new 'girl' sets (which are all pink and lavender) have girls going to the hair salon. I certainly understand both of these points. However, as the dad of a four-year-old girl, I'm pretty excited about these sets. Like it or not, my girl is totally into princesses and fairy tales, and I don't think (maybe I'm fooling myself here) that we've tried to indoctrinate her into some stereotype roles here. But she'll completely love these set. The new figures, for instance, are extremely similar to some Strawberry Shortcake figures she already has and loves. And loving these sets will, I'm sure, push her to more inventive building with LEGO, and all of the educational benefits that go along with that. (To be fair, she also completely loves her Toy Story LEGO sets, and those are completely gender neutral.)

Don't worry, though. I'm not going to run out and buy her the hair salon set. The first one that I'll get will be Olivia's inventor's workshop (okay, probably the puppy set too). Check this out! Here we have a girl playing with a microscope, building a robot, and working out mathematical equations on a chalkboard. Now that's the sort of role model I want for my girl. I hope that LEGO makes more sets along these lines as they expand the Friends theme. But even if they don't, I think that getting more girls into building with LEGO is a Good Thing, both as a LEGO enthusiast and as a science educator.

Microscope

2011-12-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

A microscope (here by Carl Merriam) uses a series of lenses to magnify very small objects.

PhD!!

2011-12-17T19:45:00.004-05:00

Congratulations to MorsLEGO's wife, who just completed her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology. He made her this small scene of her at her microscope in commemoration of her achievement.

Roald Amundsen

2011-12-15T09:57:00.002-05:00

I missed posting this yesterday, which was the 100th anniversary of Roald Amundsen (here by BruceWaynelego) reaching the South Pole.

Higgs boson

2011-12-13T14:24:00.003-05:00

CERN scientists in Geneva today reported that they may have found evidence for the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle in the universe that was predicted by the standard model and is thought to play a role in why all of the other particles have mass. The Large Hadron Collider smashes protons together at extremely high speeds and then analyzes the debris. One of the instruments used to study the pieces is the Atlas detector, here in LEGO form by Dr. Sascha Hehlhase. Dr. Hehlhase is a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark. This model is scaled to a minifig, which gives you a feel for the size of the real thing.

Happy Integrated Circuit Day

2011-12-12T09:15:00.001-05:00

I'm sure I'm not the only one here who start their online day with Google as their homepage. Anyway, today's Google doodle honors Robert Noyce, who, along with Jack Kilby, invented the integrated circuit (here much larger, in ABS rather than silicon, by Dave and John Xandegar). Over the past half century, our whole world has been turned upside down by the technology flowing from their initial work.

Farewell, Voyager

2011-12-06T11:43:00.001-05:00

If you're my age, and in any way interested in science, you probably remember being inspired by all of the great images of Jupiter and Saturn that came out when I was in about fifth or sixth grade as the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes flew past our Solar System's biggest planets. You may even remember watching Carl Sagan tell us all about them on TV. Anyway, Voyager 1 (here in LEGO form by Shane Larson) is at the very edge of the Solar System. At about 11 billion miles away from the Sun, the probe has entered a region where the effect of the solar wind, energy and particles being pushed out from our sun, is all but gone, and it is starting to feel the currents of interstellar space. The batteries will last until the year 2025, so as the probe goes further, scientists are looking forward to learning more about what it's really like out there beyond the edge of our chunk of the galaxy.

Gagarin

2011-12-02T10:50:00.001-05:00

Lego Monster Ed Diment and members of the Brickish Association helped coordinate a massive group build where members of the public put together this mosaic at the Lego Space show at the National Space Centre Leicester, UK, this past July.

Lemniscate

2011-11-27T09:40:00.001-05:00

The lemniscate of Bernoulli, here by aklego, is a plane curve defined from two given points F₁ and F₂, known as foci, at distance 2a from each other as the locus of points P so that PF₁·PF₂ = a². This is a special case of a Cassini oval (which is simply where the product of the two distances equals a constant). BTW, all of that description came straight from Wikipedia. It's been a lot of years since I took a formal math class, and don't remember these at all.

Happy Halloween

2011-10-31T12:26:00.000-04:00

I apologize for the gaps in posting. Anyway, I wanted to do something holiday themed, but wasn't sure what to choose. I considered putting up a LEGO Frankenstein scene, since Dr. Frankenstein is kind of the ultimate mad scientist, but wanted to do something a little more 'real science'. So I thought: what do kids get tons of at Halloween? Sugar! So I found this. MIT sponsor the Mind and Hand Alliance to get kids excited about science. In one exercise, they use LEGO to build models of molecule, and here and here they have instructions to build glucose, one of the key sugars in biochemical processes. Technically table sugar is actually sucrose, which is a combination of glucose and fructose, but there you go. There model making is interesting - they use black, white and red LEGO bricks to represent carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, which are kind of the standard colors used in molecular models (atoms don't actually have colors, of course), and they represent carbon and oxygen as being the same size and hydrogen as smaller. They also have some sense in their model of stereochemistry, with some groups pointing up and others down, as is also true of real molecules. The ultimate result is not very satisfying to me, though, since the rectangular shapes imposed by the LEGO bricks don't lead a shape that closely fits the real molecule. But if it gets kids thinking about molecules, though, I'm all for it. I've noted here before that in part I am a chemist today because of building with LEGO as a kid.

Acrylonitrile

2011-10-24T06:37:00.001-04:00

I've previously discussed polymers. A polymer is a long chain made up of repeated molecules linked together. The plastic that makes up LEGO bricks is ABS, a compound polymer made of three different parts. Nathan Proudlove was originally going to produce all of these in brick form, but due to the size of the project limited himself to a beautiful rendition of acrylonitrile. The black spheres represent carbon atoms, the white are hydrogens, and the blue sphere is a nitrogen. You can also see that two of the carbons are connected by a double bond (two pairs of shared electrons), and the carbon and nitrogen are connected by a triple bond (three pairs).

Yuri Gagarin

2011-10-12T14:48:00.000-04:00

Fifty years ago this year, Yuri Gagarin climbed into the Vostok 3KA capsule and was launched atop a Vostok 8K72K rocket into space. 108 minutes later he had made a complete orbit of the Earth and returned to earth via parachute. Apparently he landed near a farmer and daughter, and he later recalled "When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!" Gary Davis made this amazing bust.

Bono1900 made Gagarin and his rocket.

Morgan190 put together this minifig.

Hayabusa

2011-10-05T16:44:00.001-04:00

I've previously noted the Japanese Hayabusa probe that was sent out to retrieve samples from an asteroid. It turns out LEGO is going to be making an official set (available in Japan only, though, I believe) of this probe.

This is part of the LEGO Cuusoo project, that was piloted in Japan but is now coming to the internet near you. People can submit ideas and then vote on what they'd like to see LEGO produce as a set. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that LEGO designers take the original idea and rework it into a set, rather than simply taking submitted designs. Anyway, the previously noted Shinkai 6500 ocean probe was also produced via LEGO Cuusoo. Interesting that the first two projects that came through this program were science themed. I believe that these may have been prototype designs.

Zoetrope

2011-09-23T15:38:00.000-04:00

A zoetrope is a device to create an optical illusion of movement out of still pictures. A cylinder is set vertically so it can spin. Along the inside are individual pictures, and the cylinder walls are pierced by slits. As the cylinder spins, your eye catches glimpses of the pictures inside in quick succession, and your brain strings these together into a moving image. The early predecessors of the zoetrope go back almost a couple of millenia, but the modern zoetrope was invented about two centuries ago. Improvement and related devices led over the course of the 1800s led to the motion picture projector, and today's movie theaters, which work on pretty much the same principle. This LEGO zoetrope by 62bricks was inspired by an earlier creation by Lego Tron.

Radioactive waste disposal

2011-09-21T16:54:00.000-04:00

Leaving aside the possibility of a horrible accident, like Chernobyl or Fukushima, nuclear power is a great way to generate power. (we could certainly argue about how the once-every-twenty-years possibility of a major even compares to the much less flashy but much more prevalent accidents due to coal or other technologies). The radioactive waste repository (here by Corioso) addresses the biggest problem with nuclear power (and with nuclear medicine and other uses) - what to do with the waste. A substance is radioactive when it is made up of atoms with unstable nuclei. An unstable nucleus will break down over time, emitting small particles and energy. This radiation can cause damage to other molecules (notably important biomolecules in living systems) by knocking away electrons. If this happens to DNA, for instance, this can lead to damage or breakdown of the DNA, leading to things like cell death and cancer. Some radioactive substances will be dangerous for many many years, even centuries, and so the waste is buried deep underground in stable geologic formations.

Sextant

2011-09-19T16:54:00.001-04:00

Matt Armstrong is doing a series of inventions and made this beautiful sextant. This instrument was first developed in 1757, and is used for measuring the angle between two distant objects - most importantly the horizon and a star. This can be used to calculate a ship's latitude, and was extremely important in helping ships navigate across oceans.

Student office

2011-09-07T16:01:00.000-04:00

First up in my look back at my chemistry grad school MOC is the student office. When you're in grad school, this is basically your home. You work here, you entertain yourself by surfing the web, you eat the dinner that you grabbed in the student center at your desk so you can check your reaction every ten minutes, sometimes you even sleep here. Ah, the glamorous life of the grad student.

Chemistry Graduate School

2011-09-06T16:09:00.003-04:00

About ten years ago I made a Chemistry Graduate School for my then-girlfriend-now-wife, who is also a chemist. I put this together like it was a line of small modular sets based on the design of the old Harry Potter sets (e.g. see Snape's Class and the Forbidden Corridor).

Albert Einstein

2011-09-02T01:01:00.002-04:00

Around the turn of the last century it was believed that physics was pretty much a closed book, that Newtonian physics explained it all. Then in 1905 a humble patent inspector named Albert Einstein published four key papers based simply on sitting at his desk and thinking that revolutionized the face of science. To take one, "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" (the basis for his 1921 Nobel prize) looks at a phenomenon that had not been explained before that point, the fact that electrons are ejected from a surface when you irradiate it with an appropriate wavelength of light. Einstein suggested that light could be described as both a wave and as discrete particles. This wave/particle duality forms one of the key elements of quantum mechanics. He realized that when you deal with very small amounts of energy, you find that it is quantized - that is, you cannot break it down into smaller units (just like matter can be broken down into smallest units). His other studies went on to revolutionize our understanding of matter, energy, gravity, magnetism, light, and the nature of space itself. It's no surprise that he has become the face of science and genius, and this huge bust can be found in Legoland Germany (there's a similar bust at Legoland California, and probably the other Legolands as well).

Bye-bye, figs!

2011-08-31T01:47:00.001-04:00

Pcdos61 was there to watch the launch of the Juno probe (the one that is carrying three minifigs to Jupiter).

Fermat, well, no, Pythagoras

2011-08-17T10:41:00.003-04:00

If Google is your home page (it's mine), you noticed this morning that today is the 410th anniversary of Fermat's birth. We all remember from high school geometry that the sum of the squares of the sides of a right trangle equals the sum of the hypotenuse, or a² + b² = c², the Pythagorean theorem. Fermat famously came up with his 'last theorem', that this did not work for other powers, e.g. there are no positive integers that lead to a³ + b³ = c³. Unfortunately he didn't have space in the margin where he noted to give the proof. Or maybe that was fortunate, as it inspired the last few centuries of mathematicians to tackle this problem, until it was finally proven in 1995. I couldn't find any LEGO creations relevant to Fermat, but the Pythagorean theorem is useful in building with LEGO. You may think that LEGO is limited to square structures, but using pythagoras you can connect things at other angles, using 3/4/5 triangles, or 5/12/13, etc. For example:

Or you can see the lines here:

The late Erik Brok did some work on this using hinges:

and technic beams:

There's more discussion of how to use Pythagoras in LEGO building on various LEGO sites, like here, here and . Break away from the rigid rules of right angles!

What hath God wrought?

2011-08-15T09:57:00.003-04:00

During the early 1800's there were a series of inventions designed to transmit messages over wires, leading up to the point where Morse developed his telegraph (here in LEGO by Monsterbrick) in 1837. This was the first step of the telecommunications revolution that brought the world together, leading up to the internet today.

More on Juno

2011-08-04T10:44:00.002-04:00

The Brothers Brick had some additional links on the figs going to Jupiter - the press releases are available from NASA and LEGO.

LEGO writes that "The LEGO crew’s mission is part of the LEGO Bricks in Space project, the joint outreach and educational programme developed as part of the partnership between NASA and the LEGO Group to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering, and mathematics." and that information and activities will be found at LEGOspace.com.

BTW, looking closely at the figs, I notice that Galileo isn't just holding a simple ball, but instead it's engraved to look like Jupiter (you can see the swirling clouds and the great red spot).

Minifigs headed to Jupiter

2011-08-03T20:57:00.003-04:00

Three minifigs are headed for Jupiter! These three stowaways, representing Jupiter, Juno and Galileo, are affixed to the Juno space probe, which is launching in two days. The probe will arrive near Jupiter in July 2016. LEGO carved these out of solid aluminum to include in the probe. They only revealed this little detail at the last minute - I hope they actually make something out of this and produce these as plastic figs. I'd love to own an official Galileo fig.

Periodic Table of the Elements

2011-08-03T13:23:00.002-04:00

Surely everyone recognizes the periodic table, posted on the wall of every chemistry classroom, but what does it mean and does that characteristic shape bear any meaning? Let's start with the basics - The world around you is made up of a little over 100 fundamental types of atoms, called elements. These elements are characterized by the number of protons in the nucleus - Hydrogen, the smallest element, has only one proton, Helium has two, Lithium has three, and so on. Mendeleev noticed that when you arrange these by increasing number of protons, there are repeating properties - every eighth element reacts in a similar way. It turns out, reaction patterns are related to the arrangement of electrons around the nucleus. These electrons are found in regions called orbitals. S orbitals hold two electrons, p orbitals hold six, d orbitals hold ten and f orbitals hold 14. Now take a close look at the table below. On the left=hand side is a block made of two columns, then a block colored blue made up of ten columns, then another block made of six columns, and down below is a white section made of fourteen columns. That's not accidental. Neutral atoms have an equal amount of protons and electrons, so Mendeleev's list could also be characterized by an increasing number of electrons. Reading from left to right and moving down the table line to line, the first two electrons are in s orbitals, the next two are also in s orbitals, then the next six electrons go into p orbitals, and so forth.

Telescope

2011-07-31T14:47:00.001-04:00

Alan Rifkin, of FAR Laboratories, built this fully functioning telescope.

Shuttle set rerelease

2011-07-29T13:04:00.004-04:00

As part of a tribute to the end of the Space Shuttle program, LEGO is rereleasing set 10231, Shuttle Expedition. This is a fairly minor reworking of last year's set 10213, Shuttle Adventure. It's supposed to be a more sturdy design to be more play-able for younger kids.

Curiosity

2011-07-26T09:46:00.002-04:00

Just because the Space Shuttle program is over doesn't mean NASA is shutting down. Our astronauts will continue to visit the International Space Station using other rockets, and a future manned program is in the works. More immediately, though, is the Curiosity (here built by Tim Goddard), an unmanned probe that will launch for Mars later this year. The Mars Space Laboratory's mission is to collect and analyze samples to see if Mars can, or has in the past, support any form of life.

Doppler effect

2011-07-24T17:12:00.003-04:00

Since sound travels as a wave, if you move the source of that sound, the waves will be pushed closer together (higher tone) or further apart (lower tone). This is the source of the doppler effect, as you can hear when a firetruck goes past, or in this rotating speaker by ISOGAWAYoshihito. This is also the source of the red shift that indicates that other galaxies are moving away from us.

Welcome home, Atlantis

2011-07-21T11:39:00.003-04:00

With the landing of the Atlantis, three decades of the Space Shuttle program draws to a close. It feels like I've been watching these things go up in the air for most of my life, so it's kind of a sad moment. Whither now, NASA? Remember when George Bush announced the next step for NASA was a trip to Mars? The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 provides for development of a new launch system, to ultimately move beyond Earth orbit in five years, but in the meantime our Astronauts will be riding Russian rockets up to the ISS, or else fly on commercial carriers. This Shuttle sculpture is from Legoland Windsor.

Happy birthday, Gregor

2011-07-20T03:56:00.002-04:00

As anyone who visits Google knows, today is the 189th anniversary of the birth of Gregor Mendel (here in LEGO form by Kaptain Kobold). Mendel discovered the basic laws of genetics while observing the growth of pea plants. He noted that if two plants with purple flowers are crossed, the offspring has purple flowers. If two with white flowers are crossed, the offspring has white flowers. However, if a purple flowered plant is crossed with a white flowered plant, the offspring has purple flowers. While the molecular basis for this would not be discovered for fifty years, he correctly surmised that flower color is driven by a pair of factors, and there are dominant and recessive genes. He worked out the implications of how genes are mixed and matched in sexual reproduction, and is considered the father of genetics.

Just a quick apology for the month long hiatus in this blog. Life has been hectic lately.

Shinkai 6500

2011-06-18T13:05:00.002-04:00

I previously noted the Japan-exclusive set 21100, Shinkai 6500. Builder Ocean-Storm made a number of modifications to make a more accurate model of the deep-sea explorer.

Building in space

2011-06-16T12:58:00.002-04:00

The other day I mentioned the LEGO sets sent to the International Space Station. While some of them are more fun, like a model of the ISS, some of them will be physics experiments. LEGO hasn't posted lesson plans yet, but students here on earth will build models to do simple experiments, like compare mass using a balance, and their results will compare to those performed in orbit, under conditions of microgravity.

STS-134

2011-06-14T10:45:00.000-04:00

STS-134, which landed recently, was the next to last Space Shuttle mission. One fun aspect of this mission was the launch (literally) of a partnership between LEGO and NASA. A set of LEGO models was brought up on the Shuttle to the International Space Station as part of an interactive project to get grade school kids excited about science. This actually isn't the first such partnership, but more on that at another time.

Skeleton

2011-06-12T10:43:00.001-04:00

Choking Hazards made this great skeleton.

Anatomy class

2011-06-10T10:41:00.001-04:00

Zack Marsh made this poster of the respiratory system.

MRI

2011-06-08T10:28:00.002-04:00

MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is based on the same principles as NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) (they changed the name out of concern that patients wouldn't come near something 'nuclear'). Hydrogen atoms have a very small magnetic moment. Normally, these magnetic moments are completely random and cancel out. When placed in a strong external magnetic field, these hydrogen nuclei align either with or against the external field. When these are pulsed with radio wave energy, the tiny atomic magnetic moments flip from low energy state, to high energy state, and then relax back to the low energy state. Since the body is full of water molecules, mapping out the location and density of these molecules (or, more properly, the hydrogen atoms in the H2O), doctors can get a peek inside your skin.

NFPA 704

2011-05-21T01:32:00.005-04:00

If you've spent any time around a chemical laboratory, you're familiar with these colorful diamonds. Even if you haven't, you've probably seen them where ever potentially dangerous chemicals are stored. The National Fire Protection Association designed the chemical hazard label (here by me) to be a quick indicator of the presence of dangerous substances.

This symbol is found on individual chemical containers, and also on the doors to rooms containing these chemicals. The blue box indicates health hazards ranging from 0 (no hazard, no precautions needed) to 4 (potential to cause serious harm or death upon short exposure). The red box is for flammability, from 0 (inflammable) to 4 (forms an extremely flammable vapor at normal pressure and temperature). The yellow box notes reactivity, again ranging from 0 (completely stable) to 4 (capable of detonation or explosive decomposition). The white box is reserved for special hazards. The NFPA standard only recognizes OX for oxidizing agents, and a W with a slash for those substances that react with water. Informally, people often add other hazards to this box, such as the symbol for radioactivity, or the word ACID, etc. One thing to note, you have to include the highest level hazard on the sign, so if you saw the NFPA label below on the door to my lab, it tells you that there is at least one substance in the room with a health hazard of 3, another substance that has the flammability of 4, perhaps still another with a reactivity of 3, and something else that reacts with water, not necessarily any one chemical with all of those properties. The idea is that someone entering the room (particularly an emergency responder) would know what possible hazards are there and what protective gear they need to wear.

Haleakala Observatories

2011-05-19T13:38:00.002-04:00

MorsLEGO made a tiny model of the Haleakala Observatories on Maui. The location (altitude, weather and lack of light pollution) makes this an ideal site. These observatories contain several telescopes and other instruments devoted to a wide variety of missions, such as tracking the movements of the earth's tectonic plates by bouncing a laser off the moon, tracking asteroids, a military project to track enemy satellites, and a telescope devoted to educational projects that teachers can apply to participate in.

Shinkai 6500

2011-05-17T03:38:00.003-04:00

No other manned research submarine can dive deeper than the Shinkai 6500, a vessel operated by JAMSTEC, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. This year, LEGO offered set 21100 based on this sub exclusively in Japan. Ocean-Storm shows the Shinkai 6500 here investigating a hydrothermal vent. Superheated water issues from these cracks in volcanically active areas, often including high levels of sulfur. The energy and minerals available from these vents can give rise to very unique life forms, such as the giant tube worms seen here.

Breaking Bad

2011-05-12T06:58:00.000-04:00

Chemistry is the study of change. Electrons change their energy levels, Molecules change their bonds, elements combine and change into compounds. It is all of life: the constant, the cycle. Solution, dissolution, over and over and over. Growth, then decay, then transformation. It is fascinating. Really.

That's what Walter White tells his students in the pilot of Breaking Bad. When his life begins to fall apart, he starts synthesizing metamphetamine. The chemistry there is actually pretty simple (let's face it, there are a lot of people making meth out there who ain't the sharpest knives in the place where they keep the knives), but I don't know if I feel comfortable going into it here. Instead let's get into something much more kid-friendly: how to make poison gas. ;) When confronted by two other drug dealers who want to kill Walter and his partner Jesse, he throws some chemicals together and suddenly the bad guys (the badder guys?) are choking on the floor. He tells Jesse "red phosphorus in the presence of moisture and accelerated by heat yields phosphorus hydride, phosphine gas." Actually, not quite, according to Dr. Jonathan Hare. He probably should have used white phosphorus, a different allotrope of phosphorus. Allotropes are different ways of arranging atoms of just one element. For instance, both graphite and diamond are allotropes of carbon. White phosphorus consists of four atoms arranged at the points of a tetrahedron. When this is heated over 250 degrees Celsius, it transforms into red phosphorus, which is an amorphous network of phosphorus atoms. You probably know red phosphorus best from wooden matches. Anyway, when white phosphorus is heated with water at basic pH, phosphine gas is indeed produced.

P₄ + 3 NaOH + 3 H₂O ? 3N aH₂PO₂ + PH₃

Orion Pax made this awesome rendition of Walter's RV

Saturn V

2011-05-10T01:29:00.002-04:00

Matt Wagner rendered this great version of the Saturn V, the rocket that sent the Apollo missions to the moon, based on set 7468, Saturn Moon Mission.

Arecibo message

2011-05-08T01:12:00.002-04:00

On November 16, 1974, a 1679 digit message was broadcast into space from the Arecibo Telescope. The stream of 0's and 1's was created by shifting the frequencies, or, here in LEGO form by Chris Doyle.

1679 is the product of 23 x 73. If some alien race receives the signal, and then breaks it down into 79 separate sets of 23, then can then assemble these into a picture.

The result would give them information about us - an indication of the elements used in our DNA makeup, an image of the double helix, an image of a human, and the composition of our Solar System.

This was really more of a proof of concept experiment than an actual attempt at communication with others in our universe. Given that the globular star cluster targeted by this message is 25000 light years away, any response would come in about the year 52000 AD.

BTW, Carl Sagan, who was a proponent of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI), was a part of the composition of the message. If you read Contact (again, please, don't watch the horrible movie), he spends a great deal of time discussing how messages could be transmitted across the stars and subsequently decoded.

Freedom 7

2011-05-05T07:47:00.000-04:00

Fifty years ago today, Alan Shepard became the first American (and the second person, after Yuri Gargarin) to enter space. The Mercury program was the first step (followed by the Gemini and Apollo programs) towards the moon landing. Those 16 minutes of going up and coming back down again are commemorated in this model by Dave and John Xandegar of briXwerX Studio.

Very Large Array

2011-05-03T00:27:00.002-04:00

The Very Large Array is a multiple aperture radio telescope. That is, it is made up of 27 separate dishes that can be configured over a 22 mile radius to act as one huge radio telescope. Special carriers on railroad tracks allow the dishes to be arranged into different configurations. The VLA has been used to study such phenomena as ice on the surface of Mercury and cosmic jets of material expelled from distant galaxies. It's also showed up in popular culture, as in the final scenes of Contact. BTW, that's a really horrible movie, but the book is outstanding. If you read the book you learn about graduate school in the sciences, how research funding works, how radio antennae study distant galaxies, how we can encode and decode messages and international relations in the sciences. If you watch the movie you get to see Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey hook up.

BTW, David Wegmuller even built a wprking mechanism to move his VLA dish, above. Now he just needs to build 26 more of these and spread them out over a gymnasium floor.

Arecibo Observatory

2011-05-02T23:46:00.003-04:00

An optical telescope gathers the light coming from a distant object, such as a star or planet. Visible light, though, is only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum ranging from very low energy (long wavelength) to high energy (short wavelength). It's just the set of energies that happen to interact with our eyes. Stars and other astronomical objects produce energy over the whole range, and radio telescopes can gather information about these stars by looking at this energy. The Arecibo Observatory in Peurto Rico is the largest single aperture telescope around at 1000 feet in diameter, and it has led to such discoveries as the first binary pulsar, the first extrasolar planets, and prebiotic molecules in a distant galaxy. You may also recognize it from movies like Contact, where Jodie Foster first meets Matthew McConaughey. BTW, that movie ends at ... (hmm, guess you'll have to come back tomorrow) ...

Along with this, John Knight has done a number of other virtual LEGO models, including a highly detailed Space Shuttle, Vostok 1 and the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, among others. I hope he gets around to building these out of actual LEGO bricks. I know he has some, such as he used in his Hubble Telescope.

Great Scientific Theories - flat Earth

2011-05-01T13:22:00.000-04:00

JETfri has started a project to illustrate great scientific theories, with a touch of humor. Let's start with the flat Earth theory. Contrary to what many believe, in western civilization a belief in a flat Earth was dispelled a few centuries BC. This was probably first noticed by sailors leaving port and seeing their point of origin drop below the horizon due to the curvature of the earth. As early as 240 BC Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth by comparing the shadow cast by the sun in two different locations. From this point on all educated people knew that the Earth was round (uneducated people probably never considered the matter). For instance, if you read Dante's Divine Comedy, he travels down into the Earth through Hell, and climbs up a tunnel on the other side to find Mount Purgatory (he even describes the flip in the pull of gravity as he passes through the center of the Earth). When Columbus proposed to sail around the Earth to reach China, the objection was not that the Earth was flat and that he would sail over the edge, instead it was that the Earth was way too large and he would run out of supplies before ever reaching China. Indeed his detractors were correct - Columbus vastly underestimated the size of the Earth. It was only the placement of the Americas that saved his journey from disaster - If there were just ocean all the way from Spain to China his men would have died of thirst long before they made it there.

Bricks in Space

2011-04-29T22:28:00.003-04:00

Today's launch was postponed, but part of the payload on this mission is a set of LEGO blocks. This is part of the Bricks in Space program, that has put together a number of lesson plans using LEGO on the International Space Station to get kids interested in science. It looks like astronauts on the ISS will be building simple machines out of LEGO to demonstrate principles of physics in zero gravity, and then kids in class can build the same machines and compare the results in normal gravity. I believe this mosaic was part of a LEGO display at Cape Canaveral for people who came to watch the launch. It looks like both President Obama and the recovering Representative Giffords (whose husband is a Shuttle astronaut) were on hand, despite the cancellation of the launch. Well, maybe they at least got to check out the LEGO display. :)

Möbius strip

2011-04-28T10:58:00.001-04:00

In the mid-nineteenth century mathematicians August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing found that if you take a strip of paper, give it a half twist, and attach the ends, you create an interesting object. If you follow your finger along the surface you will find that it has only one continuous surface (that is, as you follow along you will end up covering both sides of the strip. If you try to cut it in half, you only end up with a longer strip with two full twists. The mathematics describing this, and similar objects, gets quite complex. Möbius strips have found applications beyond being mathematical oddities. For instance, conveyer belts are often built as Möbius strips so that they have even wear and tear. In chemistry, Möbius aromaticity involves a ring of atoms that incorporates a half twist. Crazyjoe579 made this LEGO version.

Physics by Design

2011-04-26T10:52:00.002-04:00

Barbara Bratzel has been using innovative methods to teach kids science, and LEGO is one of her favorite classroom tools. Her eighth grade class is called Physics by Design, and she's gathered the lessons she's designed into a book (now in its third edition) so that other teachers can benefit from the same techniques. She has her students designing robots and simple machines to teach them principles of mechanics and construction. She says that LEGO is a great tool to get kids interested in science, even those who might not normally gravitate to it.

Bioturbation

2011-04-19T17:22:00.003-04:00

That's the process of soil (or other substances) being mixed up by the activity of animals. Worms are among the most important actors in this process, which is vital to the health of the ecosystem. Darwin actually studied this process, and his last book was The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits. On his front lawn he had a stone that he carefully observed daily, noting how the action of worms underground led to settling of the soil. Kaptain Kobold recreated the worm stone in celebration of Darwin Day earlier this year.

Poly(1-cyanoethylene/1-phenylethylene/but-2-ene-1,4-diyl)

2011-04-14T07:08:00.004-04:00

Serious LEGO fans know that ABS is the plastic that makes up those little bricks. Some of those go further and know that this is a polymer made up of acrylonitrile, butadiene and styrene. But what is that? Let's take a step back and learn a little bit about polymers. A polymer is like a chain. Each link of a chain is identical, and the difference between two chains of the same material is simply the number of links. The process of connecting one link to the next is the same whether you're talking about the third link, the thirtieth, or the three thousandth.

In a polymer, the individual links are small molecules that get connected together to make one big long molecule. For instance, PVC, or polyvinylchloride, starts out with separate molecules of chloroethane made up of two carbon atoms, three hydrogen atoms, and one chlorine atom. In the image below I show just five molecules coming together to make a short chain (color coded to make them easier to see), but in a polymer you will have hundreds or thousands of links connected to each other.

ABS is a more complex polymer made of three pieces. The A is acrylonitrile (blue in the picture below), B is butadiene (magenta) and S is styrene (red). This is called a copolymer. You could put these together in any number of different ways. For instance, the chain could be ABSABSABSABSABSABS, or AAABBBSSSAAABBBSSS, or AAAAABSAAAAABSAAAAABS. The different patterns, and relative amounts of the three pieces, will lead to polymers with different properties. I wasn't able in a quick search to find the exact mix in the plastic that LEGO uses, so I showed one industrial instance that divides the chains up into two blocks - sections of repeating ASASAS and other sections of repeating BBBBB. This plastic is produced in small pellets (often with color agents and other inclusions, though my photo just shows some raw uncolored pellets) which are then used for the injection molding process.

Vostok 1

2011-04-12T06:23:00.002-04:00

Today is the 50th anniversary of our first step off this planet of ours. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gargarin climbed in the Vostok 3K-A capsule atop a modified R7 rocket and launched into space. After a single orbit of the earth, lasting just under two hours, Gargarin returned safely to earth. Incidentally the R7 rocket was originally designed as an ICBM, but found much more use in the Russian space program. Variants of this rocket design are still used today to launch cosmonauts into space. Reto Geiger built a LEGO version of Vostok 1.

Crab Nebula

2011-04-10T07:18:00.000-04:00

In 1054 AD Chinese and Arab astronomers noted a bright star in the sky. This was a supernova, the explosive death of a star. The cloud of gas left behind was first observed in 1731. It was eventually dubbed the Crab Nebula, because to some observers it was shaped like a crab. At the center lies the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star that is a strong source of radio waves and gamma rays. In addition to their astronomical significicance, these great clouds of gas and dust are often sources of interest due to their beauty, as seen in this mosaic by Arthur Gugick.

Mitosis

2011-04-05T07:30:00.000-04:00

Cells produce offspring by the process of mitosis. First the parent cell DNA is replicated so there are two identical copies. Fibers pull the two sets of chromosomes to opposites ends of the cell, and then the cellular membrane pinches together in the center to make two identical cells. The director of the MIT Community Outreach and Education Program developed a series of LEGO models to help kids learn about biology, including this mitosis animation. These models, joined together under Sciene Builders, Inc. were at one time available for sale through LEGO Education, though it doesn't look like they are available any more. Don't worry, though. These are pretty simple constructions, so you could easily build your own based on their inspiration. If you need LEGO bricks, check out BrickLink.

Hayabusa

2011-04-02T17:45:00.000-04:00

In 2003, Japan launched the Hayabusa probe towards asteroid 25143 Itokawa. After studying the asteroid for a few months, the probe collected physical samples from the surface of the asteroid. Then the probe returned to the earth, where the samples were collected last year, and they are now being studied. In81212 made this LEGO model of the Hayabusa probe.

Incidentally, I should note that this model is what led to this blog. I've considered doing a blog along the lines of real science for a while now, but when I saw this I thought it deserved some notice. So many people make LEGO creations (called MOCs) of fictional space ships, but it's cool to see some real ones as well.

What came first, the dino or the egg?

2011-04-01T16:53:00.001-04:00

That's the question asked by Playmo figure 4925, Scientist wtih Baby Dino.

Happy birthday, Bunsen

2011-03-31T11:09:00.000-04:00

I'm sure I'm not the only one who logged onto the computer this morning and wondered why Google had a bunch of lab equipment as their logo. It turns out today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Robert Bunsen, designer of the gas flame burner we've all used in lab (see a LEGO version by Neodymium-boy below). Bunsen created this gas flame (or improved on previous designs, to be more exact) as part of his study of emission spectra of elements. When you heat up a substance, the energy can bump electrons from lower energy levels up to higher energy levels, putting them at a higher potential energy. This is analogous to lifting a weight - by putting in energy, you are putting the weight at a higher potential energy relative to the earth's gravity. When you let go of the weight, it will fall back down. The same is true of electrons; they will relax from a higher energy state to a lower energy state. That energy has go go somewhere (the conservation of energy tells us that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it simply changes forms), and in many cases it is given off in the form of light. Studying the energy of the light given off tells us about the relative energies of the electrons involved.

Dissected frog

2011-03-24T01:50:00.000-04:00

I have no idea how I made it through all those years of science education and never dissected anything (oh, in one biochem lab we had to isolate proteins from rat livers, but my lab partner was a biologist and she did the actual dissection). Regardless, cutting into a frog, or a fetal pig, is a common activity in both high school and college science to teach students the details of anatomy. Some have argued that the educational value of this is overrated, and have proposed virtual dissections or other alternatives. Dave Kaleta came up with another solution, a LEGO dissected frog. If you look close, you can clearly see the heart, the lungs, the liver and the spine. There are a couple of elements I don't recognize, but given the authenticity of the rest, I'm sure Dave was working to closely emulate his source material.

BTW, in looking around the web, I've seen some other interesting variations, such as a knitted frog. That one also led to another interesting blog, the Art of Science, that I'm going to have to read more closely.

Particle Accelerator

2011-03-19T09:48:00.000-04:00

Shane Larson is a physicist at Utah State University, and also a LEGO hobbyist. So it's very appropriate that he built a scene of the target from a particle accelerator. He's even included a photo and diagram of the real thing so you can compare. A particle accelerator takes charged particles (like protons) and propel them at great velocities at a target. When they crash into the target, they break apart into even smaller building blocks, that can then be studied by the physicists to learn about the fundamental structure of matter.

BTW, this is a vignette, or a scene built on a small base. For more vignette LEGO creations, see VignetteBricks.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

2011-03-17T09:31:00.000-04:00

Think green for Saint Patrick's Day, green chemistry, that is. In recent years there has been a real movement for more environmentally friendly, or 'green chemistry'. This means the development of processes that are more efficient, use more bio-friendly materials (like water as a solvent instead of something like chloroform), and produce less waste. Janet Scott, who focuses on green chemistry at Monash University in Australia has developed a series of reactions she calls moelcular LEGO, because she synthesizes molecules with activated 'male' and 'female' groups that click together like the studs and tubes of LEGO bricks. She can then connect these pieces in various ways to make much larger molecules.

I should note that she is not the first person to use LEGO as an analogy for chemical transformations. A quick search of pubs.acs.org, which is the site for those chemical journals published by the American Chemical Society, turns up over 200 hits on the word 'LEGO'. Some of these are from the Journal of Chemical Education, where actual LEGO bricks were being used for demonstrations to teach chemistry to kids, but others are research articles. There are surely similar instances in other scientific disciplines. I'm sure I'll feature many such articles here on SciBricks in the weeks and months to come.

Discovery

2011-03-14T10:44:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, the Space Shuttle Discovery finished its final mission. Originally conceived in the late 1960's the Space Shuttle program was designed as a replacement for the Apollo program, that brought the first men to the moon. Unlike Apollo, the Shuttle is largely re-usable, cutting down on the expense and allowing for over 130 missions by the five Shuttle craft (two destroyed, two still in operation, and the Discovery retired this past week). These missions have included scientific experiments, deploying, servicing, and occasionally retrieving satellites, and the construction of the International Space Station (more on that in future blog posts). LEGO has released many official sets focused on space exploration over the years, including a few different variations on the Space Shuttle, including one that is specifically the Discovery, set 7470, seen here deploying the Hubble Telescope (more on the Hubble in a future blog post).

Molecular models

2011-03-10T12:01:00.001-05:00

I guess I should start things off with one of my own and give a little insight into myself. Chemists in general, and organic chemists in particular, often build models of the molecules that interest them. Dean Tantillo, a friend of mine who is a chemist at UC Davis, assembled a gallery of photos of chemists and their models. A model could be defined as a representation of a real object that tries to capture some of the properties of that object while abstracting other properties. For instance, a model airplane built out of LEGO might capture the basic shape and color scheme of a real airplane, but it is much smaller and does not fly. A molecular model allows us to examine the relative arrangements of atoms in a molecule, but is obviously at a significantly different scale. Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann has a great essay on how the method we use to depict molecules affects how we think about them (compare to Orwell's thoughts about how the language we use affects how we think). His essay is more about 2-dimensional depictions, but it also applies to 3-dimensional models.

Here is a LEGO model of formaldehyde that I built, sitting next to a model using a commercially available molecular modeling set. In the color scheme that organic chemists tend to use, the black sphere represents a carbon atom, the red sphere represents an oxygen, and the white spheres represent hydrogens. The gray lines represent bonds, or shared pairs of electrons. Note that two of the bonds are single bonds and one is a double bond. Also note that the angles between the bonds are roughly 120 degrees, which is appropriate to the actual model.

On a personal note, I really do think that my building with LEGO as a kid helped contribute to my interest in science as an adult. When I took chemistry and started building models, it immediately took me back to the happy days of my youth playing with a pile of little plastic blocks. Thinking in three dimensions is very important to an organic chemist, and again I think that LEGO modeling helped develop that skill.

Welcome to SciBricks

2011-03-10T11:42:00.001-05:00

Hi all,

Welcome to my new blog. In my private life I'm a LEGO hobbyist (AFOL, or Adult Fan of LEGO). In my professional life, I'm a chemist. Specifically I teach organic chemistry. This blog will try to bring together those two aspects of my world. Instead of simply showing cool models (see some of my other blogs for that), I'm going to try to teach something about science along the way.

BTW, I already have several blogs. Some ask why I don't simply have one blog to feature LEGO models. My personal vision for blogging is that a blog should have a particular focus. That way someone could visit a blog and see a full view of that aspect of the hobby. Also, someone interested in science, for instance, might be interested in reading this blog specifically, but maybe not a blog that also featured LEGO models of castles, cars, or spaceships (all of which have been done amazingly well and are legitimate subjects for blogging). To make things easier, I've put a series of buttons along the top of my blogs to help people easily click from one to another. This said, I should note that there are many excellent blogs that have a broader scope. I read many of these regularly and am friends with some of their authors.

BTW, I should also note that I have co-bloggers on a few of my blogs. I'm keeping SciBricks and GodBricks to myself, but if you are interested in joining in on one of my other blogs, contact me.