Author: Jovy Eramela

Do dinosaurs go RAWR?

Chris Cook of NovusTV interviews Iain Fraser, Science Facilitator at Science World about Extreme Dinosaurs. Source: Youtube Channel (NovusTV)

Not everyone can truthfully say that they work amongst a collection of giant robotic dinosaurs. However, I actually can live up to that claim, as I work part-time as a Science Facilitator at Science World during the weekend.

The Extreme Dinosaurs exhibition currently at Science World hosts 18 species of dinosaurs in animatronic form (essentially robots that look and move in a very lifelike fashion), most of which are life-sized. All of these dinosaurs have strange characteristics that were used to help them survive during the Mesozoic Era; these range from horns, plates, and crests to even feathery down, bony tail clubs, and thick skulls.

Pachycephalosaurus skeleton on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The actual purpose of some of these adaptations is still up for debate. For example, some scientists hypothesize that Pachycephalosaurus may have butted heads like rams to show dominance while looking for mates due to their thick skulls. Others think that the skulls were too fragile for the dinosaurs to butt heads, and aimed for the side of their competitors’ bodies instead.

Even with fossil evidence, there are still many adaptations that paleontologists have not been able to come to a consensus as to what their purposes were. There are some characteristics that can’t be verified from the fossil record, like the colour of dinosaurs and the sounds that they make. These still remain a mystery, and the best that scientists can do is to make an educated guess.

With many new species of dinosaurs being discovered within the past few years, the scientific method of making and testing hypotheses is alive and well in the field of paleontology.

Tags Dinosaurs, Scientific Method

Environment New and innovative science Science in the News

Double (Double) Rainbow, all the way (all the way)

Post author By Jovy Eramela
Post date October 9, 2011
2 Comments on Double (Double) Rainbow, all the way (all the way)

Double Rainbow Song by Paul Vasquez and the Gregory Brothers.
Source: Youtube channel (schmoyoho)

You may have heard of the “double rainbow song,” in which a man named Paul Vasquez ecstatically reacts to seeing a double rainbow. Now imagine Vasquez’s excitement when he finds out that a quadruple rainbow does indeed exist, and was just recently captured on camera for the first time by German meteorologist Michael Theusner. His findings were published in the October 1, 2011 issue of the Applied Optics journal.

Rainbows form from the refraction of light. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Rainbows are formed by the refraction of light through water droplets in the air. This refraction sometimes occurs a second time after being reflected once in the droplet to form a double rainbow. Rarely does the process occur inside the water droplet a third or fourth time for a triple or quadruple rainbow.

Sightings of triple and quadruple rainbows are extremely rare, as the conditions needed for them to form are increasingly more difficult (only a small portion of the light rays are reflected for a second refraction, and even smaller for the third and fourth refraction). Due to the drastic decrease in intensity, triple and quadruple rainbows are nearly invisible to the naked eye, and require image editing to be able to be seen. Additionally, the third and fourth rainbows can be easily missed because they are located away from the first and second rainbows.

Original and digitally enhanced pictures of the triple and quadruple rainbow. Source: Michael Theusner

The discovery and photography of triple and quadruple rainbows contributes to more than just another Internet meme. In addition to being a scientific breakthrough, it is also a reminder for all scientists to be meticulous and detailed when making and recording observations, as there can be more contributing factors and things going on in a particular experiment than what’s immediately visible. Much like how a series of image manipulations was required to see the additional rainbows, a detailed and thorough analysis of data could lead to discoveries that might not otherwise be found.

Tags Meteorology, Rainbow

Biological Sciences Fun! Science Communication

It’s like Autocorrect, but for your brain

Post author By Jovy Eramela
Post date September 18, 2011
4 Comments on It’s like Autocorrect, but for your brain

If you’ve ever used a word processor like Microsoft Word before, you’ve probably encountered the wonderful Autocorrect function. Autocorrect fixes some commonly made spelling errors as you type, which helps improve typing speed by reducing the need to manually correct those mistakes.

Interestingly enough, the human brain also has a built-in mechanism that catches these types of errors and mentally fixes them while they’re being read. Let’s take a look at this paragraph:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Weird, isn’t it? However, there are a few flaws in this argument.

According to the way the letters are supposed to be shuffled (the first and last letter of each word stays in the same position), words with three or fewer letters are unchanged. There are 32 words that are unaffected by the shuffling — that’s almost half the paragraph! Likewise, the shuffled four-letter words are easy to read because they can only be rearranged by swapping the middle two letters. For the remaining words, the rearrangements of the letters are fairly intuitive. For example, “porbelm” is only two letter switches away from “problem.”

Although it is true that we consider the entire word instead of just the individual letters when we read, the examples presented in the paragraph above are much too simple. Consider words like “Cgibramde” as opposed to “Cmabrigde” that was in the paragraph; a well-shuffled word is much harder to recognize.

What does this have to do with communicating science? Being able to be clearly understood is an important skill to have when it comes to sharing knowledge and information with others. While there is some truth with the “letter order doesn’t matter” argument (in the fact that the brain processes entire words at a time instead of letter-by-letter), a lot of it is just misleading science.

Further reading: