How Do Wombats Make Cube Shaped Poo?

Posted on September 30, 2019 by | 1 comment

How do wombats make cubed poo? That was what Patricia Yang and her fellow researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology wanted to know. Their research, which was first presented at the 71st Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics and which has since gone on to win an Ig Nobel Prize earlier this month, sheds light on the processes involved in the creation of the distinctively shaped feces.

Wombat – Wikipedia Commons

 

Why Cubes and Why Is It Interesting?

In the modern world, most cubes or rectangular prisms are formed by one of two methods, extrusion and/or injection molding.

Extrusion is the same process that occurs when you squeeze a tube of toothpaste out, producing a long cylindrical piece. In essence, extrusion involves pushing a material through a die shaped like the cross-section of the final product (in the case of a cube, the cross-section would be a square). The resulting extrudate (the material that has been extruded) is then cut to size.

Injection molding is takes a material in a heated and liquid state, and injecting it into a mold. As the  material cools, it takes on the shape of the mold cavity. The mold is then separated and the resulting injection molded piece is then cleaned.

Cubes are a shape rarely found in nature and therefore, the wombat’s cubic scat has always been a fascinating mystery.

Lego, Injection Molded Plastic Toy Bricks – Semevent, Pixabay with Editorial License

 

As it turns out, wombats use piles of their poop to mark territory, much like how dogs use urine to do the same. Like their plastic brick counterparts, cubed poos are simply better at stacking than conventionally shaped fecal matter.

Wombat Excrement, Showing Distinctive Cube Shape – Wikipedia Commons

 

So How Do Wombats Make Cubed Poo?

When Dr. Yang and her fellow researchers were given two corpses of wombats euthanized after vehicle accidents, they began to dissect them immediately. The researchers began by inflating a long balloon into the animal’s intestines. They measured the elasticity of the intestinal walls and found that the elasticity varied at different points of the wall. The researchers theorize that the stretchier sections were responsible for the curved corners where as the more rigid sections were responsible for the straight and flat edges of the poop. They also found that only the last 8% of the intestines were actually responsible for the shaping of the excrement. Some also think that wombat diet has much to do with the formation and stability of the cube shape. The dryness of wombat diet helps maintain the rigid shape.

Why Is This Important To Us?

As mentioned previously, we normally use extrusion or injection molding to form cubic shapes. The revelation that we can use soft elastic tissue to form cuboids may provide new techniques for manufacturing.

 

Written by Tim Chan

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Weekend catch-up sleep is not the cure we hoped it to be

Posted on September 29, 2019 by | 2 comments

 

Header image

Image by Free-Photos on Pixabay

Most of us have probably caught ourselves fantasizing about the best part of the weekend – sleeping in. After a hectic and crazed work week, our sleep-deprived states eagerly await the feeling of refreshment that comes along with those extra hours of shut-eye. However, recent evidence found by Depner and his colleagues in an early 2019 study shows that paying back our sleep debt on the weekends still come with a health cost.

The effects of sleep deprivation

On a basic level, we all know (and feel) that an insufficient amount of sleep leads to health complications. There have been numerous studies and data to support that people who fail to get enough sleep are at a higher risk of developing chronic diseases, along with a plethora of other health-related issues such as mood disorders and decreased immune function, all of which are documented in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. The following video by TechInsider, featuring professor of neuroscience and psychology Matthew Walker, goes more into depth about the effects of sleep deprivation on the brain and body.

Sleeping more on the weekends cost us

To combat these potential health risks, most people try to get more sleep on the weekends in order to boost up their daily sleep average, which is currently recommended to be between 7-9 hours for adults. Unfortunately for those of us who do, the paper published by Depner and his colleagues in Current Biology shows that “weekend recovery sleep” is not an effective strategy in combating sleep deprivation. In fact, the paper points out that these extra sleep hours may increase weight gain, promote excess caloric intake, and negatively impact how the body handles insulin.

On another note, a study published in Stress and Health in 2010 found that maintaining a consistent sleeping pattern proves to be beneficial for us, and that getting those extra hours on the weekend alone are not enough to combat sleep deprivation as they may disrupt our internal clocks, making it even harder for us to fall asleep and to wake up.

What we can do to combat sleep deprivation

Since getting extra sleep on the weekends is not our cure to sleep deprivation, the best we can do for now is to try and maintain consistent sleep schedules by distributing that extra sleep we would get on the weekends to weekday nights.

Sandra Yoo

Sept 29, 2019

Revised Oct. 21, 2019

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A Solution to the Rise in Obesity

Posted on September 28, 2019 by | 2 comments

We all care about our health to a certain extent! It’s not surprising that in a world filled with McDonalds XXL portion sizes and an unlimited amount of unhealthy fast food options that over the past few decades there has been an increase in the rate of obesity. Obesity can be labelled as a medical condition where an individual carries extra weight or body fat which could have significant impacts on their health.

Body Mass Index: Numerical values are indicated by BMI = Body Mass/Height
Image Source: Vector Stock
Artist: MicroOne

With growing concern about obesity due to the risks it implements, it’s important that we take actions to prevent it from spreading and causing severe health problems for many individuals around the world. Health risks associated with obesity include heart disease, diabetes, and gastrointestinal diseases; as well as other disorders that are yet to be identified.

The Gut Bacteria That Could Cure All

At the University of Utah health department, researchers have recently identified a class of 20-30 bacterium in the gut known as Clostridia which protects mice against becoming obese. The study suggests that the same bacteria also controls weight gain within humans. If we are able to alter the amount of Clostridia present in the gut, this could mean a whole new lifestyle for many.

Specifically, in the observational study, Ph.D. June Round has claimed that healthy mice have lots of Clostridia, whereas those with impaired immune systems lose the bacteria’s as they age hence weight gain. Even when unhealthy mice with minimal Clostridia are fed a healthy diet, they tend to become obese. However, when the mice were reinjected with Clostridia, they are able to maintain slimness.

Clostridia in Healthy and Unhealthy Mice Gut
Image Source: Science Mag

Results gained from the study found that Clostridia prevents weight gain through blocking the intestine from absorbing any fat consumed. In particular there are a couple molecules produced by Clostridia that prevent the fat absorption and further isolation of these molecules could lead to treatments for obesity. Additionally, it was established that our immune systems also play a key role in maintaining balance among the diverse bacteria present within the gut. If the bodies defence system is weak, some bacterial species are able to dominate and shift health towards a negative direction. It is critical for the immune system to operate and recognize specific bacteria appropriately in order to produce proper antibodies.

What Could This Mean For Us, Humans?

Considering humans display to have Clostridia within the gut as well, research concluded that the lack of this bacterium in humans leads to obesity as well as type 2 diabetes. With more mirroring and understanding the connections that underlie from mice to human there is hope for our world. New treatments will provide individuals, like ourselves to hopefully be at less risk from the treats we consume.

Written By: Sana Furqan

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One Atom Thick “Supermaterial”: Graphene

Posted on September 23, 2019 by | 1 comment

What is graphene?

Essentially a 1 atom thick sheet of pencil lead, graphene is the first “2D” material we’ve ever come across and holds unique properties that boast a wide berth of potential applications. Like all other purely carbon materials, it is in the arrangement of the carbon atoms that give the material its specific properties. The difference between soft, flaky graphite and extremely tough diamonds are in how their carbon atoms sort themselves, and evidently, in how many atom layers they do so in. The hexagonal arrangement of carbon in graphite boasts strong bonds between the atoms, playing a part to graphene’s immense strength once isolated. University of Manchester researcher Andre Geim and his team were able to perform this isolation by using tape on graphite repeatedly, until only graphene remained, earning Geim a Nobel Prize in 2010 for his findings.

Alex LMX / Shutterstock

What’s special about graphene?

The unique properties the carbon sheet takes once taken from graphite into a single atomic layer are what earn graphene the title of a supermaterial. First and foremost, its incredible strength is over 40x stronger than that of a diamond. Prof. Hone at Columbia University puts this into perspective in his words, “it would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap.”. Beyond that, graphene is also a great conductor of both heat and electricity, moving electrons 200x faster than silicon. Graphene also absorbs very little light, making it translucent. With all these amazing properties in one material, the applications are countless and exciting, some currently in practice include glasses, and sporting equipment. While the current logistics of incorporating the material into transistors and other high-scale applications are yet to be feasible, further research and investment into graphene is in progress and marks an exciting development in the future.

 

-By: Tae woo Kim

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The dead don’t speak – but they can move

Posted on September 23, 2019 by | 1 comment

It’s become common sense that something dead cannot speak or think. However, what if they can physically move? Although it sounds like something out of a horror-movie, new research shows that this phenomena has been found to be of certain truth.

 

Australian researchers at the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research have based their research on the post-mortem movement of the human body using a camera to create a time-lapse of the movement by periodically taking images of the corpse every 30 minutes for duration of 17 months.  For the entire duration of the filming process, they revealed that the corpses had continuously moved.

 

“What we found was that the arms were significantly moving, so that arms that started off down beside the body ended up out to the side of the body” states medical scientist and head director of this research, Alyson Wilson, to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

 

The cause for such movement was articulated by the research team to be a “process of decomposition”, based on a previous published study that outlined that the human body  “[tends] to mummify rather than decompose in the Sydney environment”. Thus, the research team specifically reasoned that the movement of arms could be a result of “shrinking and contracting” of body tissues when the “body’s [muscles dry] out”.

 

To arrive to this conclusion, Wilson and her team were the first to use a time-lapse camera to record the position of the body on a daily basis. They had put the body into a cage with entrances on each of the sides to prevent researchers from disturbing the body. Each of the according alphabets are all cameras that have been placed for the experiment to take pictures of the corresponding body parts. A gives a full top view of the body, B gives a view of the face, C and D allows the observation of the hands, and E provides a full profile view of the body (Figure 1). In (Fig. 1), the colored lines represent the corresponding location of where the camera has been situated. The converging points of two of the same colored lines indicate the position of the camera to give the readers a better understanding of the scope of the experiment, and allow it to be reproducible for any other scientists.

Figure 1. Diagram that shows the location of the camera placements (A,B,C,D,E) for the experiment. (F) is the subject of experiment. Colored lines correspond to the camera placements to indicate the precise dimensions of where the cameras were placed (A; Red | B; Dark blue | C; Dark green | D; Light green | E; Light blue)

 

The images captured by the cameras were compared against their devised system of allocating points for the level of decomposition that the body has achieved. This point system derives from the categories and stages of decomposition (from Megyesi et al. 2005), where points are tallied for each decaying symptom the body shows. The points would then be totaled to indicate the stage of decomposition the body is at. Thus, the degree of movement can be recorded with its stage of decomposition. 

For further comprehension, below is a video that describes the stage of decomposition, but take note that the video itself is unrelated with the conducted research; this is due to the fact that the researchers did not permit their videos regarding the research released to the public. However, this knowledge should give you a better understanding of how the body decays, allowing you to correlate it with the movement of body stated within the literature, considering that this is a complicated and informative topic.

 

  • Figure 2. Video describes the stages of decomposition of the human body. Video is not associated with the actual research, but here as a guide to help you understand the different stages of decomposition for your further understanding to relate it to the degree of movement mentioned within the research article

In this video (Figure 3), which again, is unrelated to the actual research (due to the same reason above), shows how the study of decaying human body helps the forensics team assess a collection of data made by real-life samples in different decaying conditions. This would help the forensics team that find bodies in different environments to compare it with different decaying states that have already been recorded by a research team, because bodies decay differently depending on the local environment. As a result, the forensics team would be able to compose a more precise and accurate diagnosis of how someone had died, aiding any investigations associated with it.

  • Figure 3. Video describing how the study of decaying human bodies help forensics teams. This video is here to help you in how this research (dead  bodies can move) has an effect in contemporary society.

Thus, this major discovery brings new light into our society of how forensics teams could interpret their data or the recreating the crime scene itself. As Alyson states, “this knowledge could be significant in unexplained death investigations”. Until now, forensic scientists have assumed the position of the discovered body to have remained in the same bodily position since the time of death, unless some other force has moved it. Now that knowledge of post-mortem movements have become clear, forensic scientists can now devise a new method in diagnosing the specificity of the cause of death. 

Written by Isaiah Youm | September 23. 2019

  • Edited October 14. 2019

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infinitely interesting

Posted on September 23, 2019 by | Leave a comment

What is infinity? I heard many different answers. A math student told me that infinity is the number with the greatest value, since infinity has larger value than any finite value, and it is great! In this post, I will give an introduction to infinity and present some of the interesting paradoxes of infinity.

Most people know infinity from the high school math courses. Infinity is just a result of a number divided by 0. The statements high school teachers taught are correct, but that is not the end for “infinity.” Infinity is a state or a concept. In the Oxford dictionary, infinity is defined as “the state of having no end or limit.” We know that infinity is greater than all other numbers, but what if we compare infinity with infinity? If there are two sets, each of which has infinitely many elements, which one is bigger and which one is smaller?

To answer those questions, let us start with how mathematicians compare the size of the set. To compare sets, mathematicians usually pair up elements, one from the first set and one from the second set. If each component can be paired with a component from the other set, and there is no element left after the pairing, they can conclude the size are the same. Consider the following scenario, we want to give candy to children, and we do not know how many candies are there. We can give one candy to each child. If we still have candy left after we give each child one candy, we know the number of candy we have is more than the number of children. If we run out of the candy before each child gets one candy, and some of them start to cry, you will know there is less candy than you expect (hope that will not happen).

Consider the following question, which set is larger, the set of odd numbers or set of even numbers? I think most of you will believe they have the same size. If you think this way, congratulations, you are correct! And consider this question, which set is greater, the set of natural numbers of the set of even numbers. I believe that most of you will believe the set of natural numbers is larger than the set of even numbers. Since the set of natural numbers are the set of odd numbers combining with the set of even numbers. However, they have the same size. Let’s verify the method we described above. We can try to match the even number with the natural numbers see if there are any numbers left after we match them. We can map two from the even number to the one in natural numbers, 4 to 2, 6 to 3,… In this way we can use the formula the even number 2n can map to natural number n to infinity, with no left elements from each set. The picture below also shows the idea.

mapping from natural numbers to even numbers

The picture shows the mapping from natural numbers to even numbers. From the article “Infinity and Trying To Do Maths With It”.

If you want to see some mind-boggling example of what happens if infinity happens in real life, see this video about Hilbert’s paradox of the infinite Hotel down below.

All the above examples I gave are only one kind of infinity. Mathematicians call it countably infinite. Countably infinite sets are the sets that we can pair each element in the set with a natural number, like even numbers, odd numbers, prime numbers and so on. But is that all kind of infinity? Does there exist other sizes of infinity? The answer is yes for both questions!

Picture from Wikipedia Cantor’s diagonal argument page

Consider a set of infinitely many strings with infinite length. For each pivot of the string, it is either 0 or 1. Then is this set countably infinite?  Actually, the set is not countably infinite. This is proven by famous mathematician Georg Cantor in 1891, and his proof is known as the diagonalization argument. The idea is as follows: construct the following string, take the first element of the first string and flip it (if the original digit is 0, then take 1; if the original digit is 1 take 0) as the first element, and take the second element of the second string and flip it as the second element, and continue (show in the picture below). The constructed string is different from any string since it is at least one fliped digit that is different from any other string. So we created a string that we cannot assign natural numbers to. So the set is not countably infinite. A direct consequence is that the real number is uncountably infinite. This is a link to a formal proof of why real numbers are uncountably infinite using diagonalization argument.

http://mathonline.wikidot.com/the-set-of-real-numbers-is-uncountable

In fact, there is a more important consequence of the diagonalization argument. The power set of a set has greater size, even the set is infinite. The power set is a set of all the subsets. By this consequence, there are infinitely many uncountably infinite sets.

Although there isn’t much application to the size of infinity, they are the fundamental part of set theory, number theory, real analysis, and more. There are so many branches of mathematics that are built upon these abstract and fascinating ideas. Other than it’s importance in mathematics, it is also something really poetic about infinitely many sizes of infinity.

For a review of concepts of infinity, watch the video down below.

-(Sylvester) Shunkai Li

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India’s Water Crisis

Posted on September 23, 2019 by | Leave a comment

According to the  Composite Water Resources Management report, India is facing its worst ever water crisis, affecting more than 600 million people. 70% of India’s water is believed to be polluted. Indian Capital New Delhi and other 20 big cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Amritsar are expected to run out of ground water by the year 2020 affecting more than 100 million people. The CWMI report states that if India does not immediate steps to handle water crisis at this rate by the year 2030 more than 500 million people in India will have no access to clean drinking water.

Crisis in Major Cities: According to the UN report it is expected that by 2050 India will overtake China’s population and the growing population will outgrow the available water supply. By the year 2030 demand of water will double the available supply thus putting millions of lives in danger.

Contaminated water: In the past years 200,000 people in India have died due to inaccessibility to clean drinking water. India currently ranks at 120 out of 122 countries on the water quality index. India is far behind neighbours China and Bangladesh as just 50% of the rural population in India has access to clean drinking water.

 

Poor monsoon seasons: Due to consecutive poor monsoon seasons, water is becoming inaccessible to low-income families and people in poverty. Due to lack facilities like water tankers and rainwater harvesting system in place, low income families rely on groundwater for their needs. People below poverty are hit the hardest as they cannot afford the bottled water.

 

Effect on economic growth: According to NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India), India could lose 6% of its GDP growth due to the growing water crisis by the year 2050. Major Indian states contributing to the economy like Rajasthan, New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh have received scores below 50 on the Composite Water Management Index report. Due to lack of clean water sources available government spending on compensation to affected communities and will increase government spending on desalination plants.

The following video throws light on India’s water crisis and how it is a warning to rest of the world .YouTube Preview Image

Group A- Simarbir Singh Dhaliwal

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Welcome to SCIE 300 Blogging!

Posted on August 21, 2019 by | Leave a comment

Welcome to the SCIE 300 course blog!

Here are few things to note before you start posting. First of all, you should read the blogging resources page under the Create menu. This will help a lot if you’re new to using WordPress; you’ll find video tutorials about writing posts on this blog, adding media to your posts, tagging, and categorizing. You’ll also find a link to the grading rubric for your blog posts.

Next, check out the blogging guidelines. Here you’ll find the answer to the question: “What are we supposed to blog about?” You can also check out one of last term’s blogs for some additional inspiration.

There are a few important things to keep in mind when blogging. Please do not assume that just because something is online, it is OK for you to use it. For example, unless it is explicitly stated, an image on the internet can not just be copied, saved, and used in your own post without permission to do so. We’ve provided you with a lot more detail about properly using online content, but if you have questions, let us know.

This blog also contains a lot of resources for you. For example, also under the Create menu, there is a list of suggested software to use for your projects. We’ve also collected some writing and presentation resources. Basic audio/visual equipment can be borrowed from SCIE300. Contact the course coordinator for more info.

Under the Explore menu, you’ll find some sample podcasts and videos, links that may be of interest or assistance, a list of groups and associations related to communicating science, as well as a list of local museums and science centres. The Explore menu also contains a library resources page, which you should definitely have a look at. Finally, there is a bookshelf that lists relevant books that are on reserve for you in Woodward Library.

Let us know if you have any questions about the blog or would like to see any other resources made available. Or, if you find something that you think would be useful to the rest of the class, tell us, and we can add it to the resources. Better yet — write a post about it!

Happy blogging!

The Science 300 Team

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