Squaring the circle

One more from Cole Blaq's fun Enter the Brick series: Circling the Square. This name refers to the old challenge of squaring the circle. The challenge was to use a compass (the kind you use to draw circles, not the kind you use to find your way in a forest) and a straight edge to draw a square with the same area as a given circle. The 1882 proof that this is impossible was also very important for number theory, as it helped show the transcendental irrational nature of pi.

Melting point

While digging through Cole Blaq's photostream to find an appropriate spray can model for my previous blog post, I once again enjoyed looking at his Enter the Brick series of sculptures based on the basic LEGO brick. One that deserves some highlight here is his melting point. The melting point is the temperature at which a solid changes into a liquid form. When I'm teaching about melting point, I often use LEGO bricks as an analogy (or just basic brick walls). A solid crystal is like a wall built of overlapping LEGO bricks. Each molecule is interacting with the molecules around it via a series of forces. As temperature is added, these molecules vibrate more and more. At some point, the force of the molecules vibrating is greater than the force holding them together, and so they start to slide past each other--i.e. go from the solid phase to the liquid phase. In a pure sample, each 'brick' is in a completely identical situation, and so each 'brick' is held to its neighbors by identical forces. Because of this, it takes the exact same amount of heat energy to break apart each of the bricks, and so there is a sharp melting point (that is, everything melts within a couple of degree range). On the other hand, if you have a mixture of different types of bricks, they don't fit together as neatly or as regularly. Therefore it takes less heat energy to cause melting (this is why, btw, you dump salt on the ice on your sidewalk), and, since each brick is in a slightly different situation and is therefore held to its neighbors by a different amount of force, the melting happens over a much broader range.

F. Sherwood Rowland and CFCs

A few days ago F. Sherwood Rowland, a retired professor of chemistry from UC Irvine, passed away at the age of 84. Professor Rowland is best known for being awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on chlorofluorocarbons. These compounds, known as CFCs, had a number of uses, such as refrigerants in cooling systems and propellants in aerosol spay cans. Rowland and his colleagues realized that CFCs were long-lived compounds that would remain in the environment, and they were light enough that they would find their way into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. There they would be bombarded by UV light (wavelengths of light that largely don't reach us down here at the earth's surface as they are absorbed by the ozone layer) which would cause them to break down. The product of this breakdown would be free radicals. That's a term you've probably heard of in terms of health issues - that free radicals cause damage to the body and that antioxidants (e.g. certain compounds in blueberries) can help counteract the effects. The reason free radicals cause damage is that they include unstable atoms that need one electron to become more stable. They will get this electron from whatever molecule they run into. If this is in your cells, a hydroxyl radical can run into your DNA or your proteins, and lead to damage to these important biomolecules. If this is in the upper atmosphere, chlorine radicals can run into ozone (O₃) molecules and cause them to break down into the more common O₂ molecules. The significance is that a drop in the concentration of ozone in the upper atmosphere lets more harmful UV light through to those of us down here at the earth's surface. In response to the work of Rowland and his colleagues, the Montreal Protocol in 1987 started to phase out the production of CFCs worldwide in order for the ozone layer to recover.



LEGO builder Cole Blaq has made a whole series of spay can models that are really fascinating. Decode is one of his most recent. I thought it was particularly nice for this blog, since in addition to relating to spray cans, there are also themes of DNA and robotics.

Happy Pi Day

Today, March 14, or 3/14, is Pi Day (hmm, Europeans tend to put the day before the month, so I wonder if they do this on April 31 - oops, there is no April 31). Anyway, lift a glass at 1:59 (and 26 seconds, if you're really precise) to Archimedes, who approximated pi in the third century BC. In celebration, here are some LEGO circles. Well, to be precise, these aren't really circles, but instead are polygons with very large numbers of sides, but Flatland taught us that once you got enough sides it was pretty tough to tell the true circles from the high-order polygons. BTW, making circles out of square bricks has been a challenge for LEGO builders, and get incorporated into all kinds of great creations like castles and spaceships.

Lewis structures

Chris Masi is a professor of chemistry at Westfield State University and also an LEGO builder and member of NELUG. He brought his profession and his hobby together in an exercise to teach Lewis structure using LEGO bricks. He presented this project at an education symposium at the 2008 meeting of the NorthEast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Anesthesia Delivery Unit

Professional LEGO builder Eric Harshberger made this amazing full-scale replica of an anesthesia delivery unity. This was used by GE Healthcare as a booth exhibit at a trade show.



Here it is next to the real thing.

Lewis structure

A Lewis structure is a representation of atoms and electrons that show how a molecule is constructed. Atoms reach their most stable state when they are surrounded by eight valence electrons (the "octet rule"). These electrons might be lone pairs--two electrons that are just associated with that atom--or covalent bonds--two electrons that are shared between two atoms. When there is a covalent bond, both atoms count the shared electrons as part of their 'valence spheres'. In a Lewis structure, lone pairs are represented by pairs of dots, while covalent bonds are represented by straight lines connecting two atoms. It looks like Lego27bricks is taking introductory chemistry, since his LEGO self is trying to figure out a Lewis structure.

Fermat's last minifig

Pierre de Fermat (here LEGO-ized by Michael Jasper) was an important mathematician, a contemporary of Descartes and an inspirer of Newton. He's probably most famous for his "last theorem". We all know that for a right triangle, the side lengths work out so that a²+b²=c². There don't seem to be any integers that fit into equations such as a³+b³=c³ or a⁴+b⁴=c⁴. Fermat noted in the margin of a book he was reading that he had a proof for that, and for all other integer powers greater than 2, but he didn't have space to write down his proof. This inspired the next two centuries of mathematicians, until Andrew Wiles finally completed the proof in 1995. He received a knighthood for his work! Who says mathematicians aren't cool?

Orrery

An orrery, here in LEGO form by V&A Steamworks, is a clockwork model of the solar system, showing the relative motions of the planets and moons. The name comes from the fact that one of the first modern versions was built in the early 18th century for the Earl of Orrery.

Stephen Hawking

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

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

Einstein

Dave Shaddix pays tribute to Albert Einstein.

Figs in space

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

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

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

Smaller frog

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

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

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

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

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

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.