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Most Exciting Forensic Science Jobs

CSI

Do you fantasize about growing up to become the real version of CSI’s crime-solving forensic scientist, but aren’t sure if the job is really as exciting as it seems on TV? Although you’re right to be skeptical (and many of the law enforcement processes depicted on fictional crime shows are inaccurate or flawed), forensic science is truly an exciting field to work in. Sure, there are boring branches of forensic science like odontology, which takes a bite out of crime by studying teeth.

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Making Fire… with Ice

Fire from Ice

There are forces at work in science that often amaze us with their polarizations and the oxymorons that are created. They aren’t necessarily contradictions, but rather conforming aspects within the apparent opposites.

Such is the case with making fire from ice. It’s simple, really, but cool nonetheless. Continue reading Making Fire… with Ice

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last update: February 23, 2012

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Neodymium Magnets and a Copper Pipe: Great for Parties

Fun with Magnets

 

Many people, particular youths, have a fascination with the pseudo-magical powers of magnets. The things we’re able to do with a magnet can give us a tremendous amount of time-wasting pleasure.

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New Artificial “Skin” Can Sense Pressure

New artificial “skin” fashioned out of flexible semiconductor materials can sense touch, making it possible to create robots with a grip delicate enough to hold an egg, yet strong enough to grasp the frying pan, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.

Scientists have long struggled with a way to make robotic devices capable of adjusting the amount of force needed to hold and use different objects. The pressure-sensitive materials are designed to overcome that challenge.

“Humans generally know how to hold a fragile egg without breaking it,” said Ali Javey, an electrical engineer at the University of California Berkeley, who led one of two teams reporting on artificial skin discoveries in the journal Nature Materials.

“If we ever wanted a robot that could unload the dishes, for instance, we’d want to make sure it doesn’t break the wine glasses in the process. But we’d also want the robot to be able to grip a stock pot without dropping it,” Javey said in a statement.

Javey’s team found a way to make ultra tiny “nanowires” from an alloy of silicon and germanium. Wires of this material were formed on the outside of a cylindrical drum, which was then rolled onto a sticky film, depositing the wires in a uniform pattern.

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Research Shows: Risk of Marijuana’s ‘gateway effect’ Overblown

New research from the University of New Hampshire shows that the “gateway effect” of marijuana – that teenagers who use marijuana are more likely to move on to harder illicit drugs as young adults – is overblown.

Whether teenagers who smoked pot will use other illicit drugs as young adults has more to do with life factors such as employment status and stress, according to the new research. In fact, the strongest predictor of whether someone will use other illicit drugs is their race/ethnicity, not whether they ever used marijuana.

Conducted by UNH associate professors of sociology Karen Van Gundy and Cesar Rebellon, the research appears in the September 2010, issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior in the article, “A Life-course Perspective on the ‘Gateway Hypothesis.’ “

“In light of these findings, we urge U.S. drug control policymakers to consider stress and life-course approaches in their pursuit of solutions to the ‘drug problem,’ ” Van Gundy and Rebellon say.

The researchers used survey data from 1,286 young adults who attended Miami-Dade public schools in the 1990s. Within the final sample, 26 percent of the respondents are African American, 44 percent are Hispanic, and 30 percent are non-Hispanic white.

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Oil-Eating Microbes Consume Oil Plume

It’s no doubt the massive oil spill in the Gulf was the worst we’ve ever seen and has destroyed much of the ecosystem of the area including companies that depend on the health of the area in order to continue to conduct business. However, scientists have found that petroleum-eating bacteria was plentiful in the clouds of oil that drifted for months following the April 20th incident.

This bacteria which has been consuming oil seeping from the seafloor for ages seems to have increased their own metabolic machinery to consume more of the oil quite efficiently. The result has been a natural cleanup mechanism that can reduce the amount of oil by half about every three days or so.

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What The Locals Ate 10,000 Years Ago

If you had a dinner invitation in Utah’s Escalante Valley almost 10,000 years ago, you would have come just in time to try a new menu item: mush cooked from the flour of milled sage brush seeds.

After five summers of meticulous excavation, Brigham Young University archaeologists are beginning to publish what they’ve learned from the “North Creek Shelter.” It’s the oldest known site occupied by humans in the southern half of Utah and one of only three such archaeological sites state-wide that date so far back in time.

BYU anthropologist Joel Janetski led a group of students that earned a National Science Foundation grant to “get to the bottom” of a site occupied on and off for the past 11,000 years, according to multiple radiocarbon estimates.

“The student excavators worked morning till night in their bare feet,” Janetski said. “They knew it was really important and took their shoes off to avoid contaminating the old dirt with the new.”

In the upcoming issue of the journal Kiva, Janetski and his former students describe the stone tools used to grind sage, salt bush and grass seeds into flour. Because those seeds are so tiny, a single serving would have required quite a bit of seed gathering. But that doesn’t mean whoever inhabited North Creek Shelter had no other choice.

Prior to the appearance of grinding stones, the menu contained duck, beaver and turkey. Sheep became more common later on. And deer was a staple at all levels of the dig.

“Ten thousand years ago, there was a change in the technology with grinding stones appearing for the first time,” Janetski said. “People started to use these tools to process small seeds into flour.”

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Scientists Watch Atom’s Electrons Moving in Real Time

For the first time ever, scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. have been able to watch an atom’s electrons move around in the atom’s outer shell. This marks a breakthrough that has the potential to shape and direct our current understanding of chemical processes towards a much better understanding.

The team of scientists were able to time the slight oscillations between the quantum states of valence electrons by using very short flashes of laser light in a process called attosecond absorption spectroscopy. By watching how electrons move, scientists can begin to understand the mechanics of these tiny particles in order to learn how they bond and laws that govern how they bond to make up everything around us. Until now, this has been impossible due to the tremendous speed of electrons.

“With a simple system of krypton atoms, we demonstrated, for the first time, that we can measure transient absorption dynamics with attosecond pulses,” says Stephen Leone of Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division, who is also a professor of chemistry and physics at UC Berkeley. “This revealed details of a type of electronic motion – coherent superposition – that can control properties in many systems.”

Bottom line is that this is a huge breakthrough in the study of the properties of the particles that make up everything we see around us. By understanding the mechanics of atoms, we may be able to learn more about the four major forces, and possibly, in time, learn how to bend them.

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