Photo provided by Dalton Colen.

Recent mechanical engineering graduate Andy Benn isn’t used to having time on his hands. Spending an afternoon playing tennis and eating lobster rolls, is well, unprecedented for the former Baja team captain who said he was clocking 80 to 100 hours a week in the auto shop in the basement of Richards Hall before graduating earlier this month.

In case you haven’t heard of it before (and I hadn’t), Baja is an international competition sponsored by the Society for Automotive Engineering in which undergraduate engineers design, build, and race an off-road vehicle three times a year. The son of an amateur car racer, Benn said that when he applied to colleges back in 2007, he only considered schools that had a team.

Benn told me that Northeastern’s team is nearly 20 years old and boasts a long history of success. But their most recent competition marked its best finish ever. They placed third overall and second in the endurance portion of the race. The team was also one of six teams (out of 82) to progress to the “design finals” in Tennessee a week and a half ago.

While I don’t claim to be an auto junkie by any stretch of the imagination, I do know how to drive stick, which I’m extremely proud of. So you can imagine my embarrassment when I forgot what a transmission was and had to ask Benn and his former teammates during our interview last week. You see, Benn designed and built one this past spring. For fun. In between designing and building a new suspension for his Capstone project….in between, you know, classes…and co-op.

Benn seemed to have a hard time not looking at me like I was an alien when I asked about the transmission. All of this just comes so naturally to him. It’s as if off-roading is just an extended version of walking for him. Incoming team captain Matt Nussbaum, on the other hand, first heard of the Baja race during a freshman activities fair in 2009. For Nussbaum, Baja originally presented a unique way to satisfy his love of hands-on work, machining, and tooling. He liked the idea that he would have to eventually make the parts that he designed on the computer–not always the case when it comes to classroom design experiences. He joined for the valuable engineering skills Baja provided, but he hasn’t left because he too has become obsessed, just like Benn.

After Nussbaum joins the ranks of alumni advisors like Benn and hundreds of other team members from the Baja days of yore, middler Dalton Colen will take over as team captain. Benn has already begun grooming him. As a kid, Colen and his dad built a “project car,” an experience that, in some respects, sealed his fate as an engineer. That was fun he said, but Baja is better. Here he gets to make decisions, engineer solutions to real concrete challenges.

And what are some of those challenges? Baja cars have to endure a series of hard-core assaults during the three day competitions, including a four hour endurance race and a brake-neck hill climb. To be successful, the cars need to be lightweight and durable, they need to be able to handle the bumps and surprises of an off-road course. They also need to use cost effective designs and be based on sound engineering decisions.

And what better way to ensure that your car will succeed in the official race than to do everything you can to make it fail beforehand? This is the strategy Benn has taken with Northeastern’s car over the past couple of years. After showing up to a race the day after assembling their car for the first time the team decided to get everything done as far in advance as possible and spend a month “driving it to break it,” as Benn said. In this way they manage to identify the weak links and design solutions to mitigate them next time. This year’s car clocked thirty hours of driving time before it ever hit an official course, a stat that  dropped the judge’s jaws in Tennessee.

It paid off though, of those 82 cars I mentioned before, Northeastern’s was one of two that never broke down during the entire race. Benn says the secret to this success isn’t great engineering ideas, although those are of course important. Rather it’s good project management. “Being able to conceptualize what you can get done, the feasibility of it,” is critical, said Benn. No matter how great an idea you’ve got, if you don’t have the time or resources to see it to fruition, it will only hold you back, he explained.

The next race is this weekend in Rochester, NY. Stay tuned for the results on that one. We’ll be cheering for you here in Boston, Baja!

An oyster rake is given a rest after a long, mostly unsuccessful day of digging for the shellfish. Image by Roberto Diaz de Villegas.

New faculty members Randall Hughes and David Kimbro set up shop at the Marine Science Center this winter after spending several years at Florida State University studying oyster reefs. During their time in Tallahassee, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastated the region, dumping nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the ocean over a period of 87 days. The tragedy killed 11 people and threatened fisheries and other animal populations throughout the Gulf of Mexico.

Since the spill, the oyster fishery in Apalachicola Bay, where Kimbro and Hughes worked, was declared a federal disaster, said Kimbro, who, along with Hughes and dozens of other researchers, had already been investigating the impacts of disturbance on marine organisms. But the oil spill made it all a lot more relevant, especially to the people who lived in the area. Two years later the community is still not fully recovered. Oyster deaths aren’t just oyster deaths—they also spell financial turmoil for people like oyster fishers and food service managers. “This fishery supplied 10 percent of the commercial product to the US. This is affecting at least 2,500 local jobs in Florida,” said Kimbro. “It’s a big deal.”

Hughes and Kimbro realized that their research could benefit that community: if they could figure out what makes for prime oyster real estate, they might be able to help implement remediation strategies to bring that oyster fishery back up to snuff. But “outsider” scientists trying to interface with a generations-old community is easier said than done. Hughes and Kimbro realized that if their work was going to do anything at all, they’d first have to communicate with the people living in the area about their research. They’d have to stop talking in scientific jargon and start having regular conversations with the people immediately impacted by the spill.

So in 2011 the duo applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation’s “Connecting Researchers to Public Audiences” program. They wrote a detailed, 15-page project proposal outlining their very scientific approach to science communication. Joining forces with the local public radio station, WFSU, they put together a suite of communications tools and training to help them connect with the community members affected by the spill.

Each week they and their students post about their research to a blog hosted by WFSU’s website: In the Grass, on the Reef. Film producer Roberto Diaz de Villegas shoots video footage of the team in action, as well as interactions with the community. All of this is expected to soon be compiled into an hour long documentary about the researchers’ efforts.

The most recent video on their blog gives you a little glimpse of how their work is both facing serious challenges because of the spill, as well as how their communications efforts may be creating positive connections between the oyster fishers and the scientists, who clearly need to work together to overcome those challenges:

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Did you watch GoT last night? If not, don’t worry, the following post will not reveal a thing, I promise. Rebecca Certner, a PhD candidate in Steve Vollmer’s lab, wrote it a couple weeks ago for the Marine Science Center’s graduate research blog. If you’re a Khaleesi fan, a Joffrey hater, or just curious whether a giant frozen wall the likes of THE Wall is physically feasible, please read on. And don’t forget to suspend your suspension of disbelief. Magic has no place in this highly scientific exploration of the best epic fantasy currently on cable.

Like every other fantasy geek in the Western world I’ve awaited the return of HBO’s Game of Thrones with great anticipation and high expectations. Thankfully, so far, season 3 does not disappoint. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, it’s got all the medieval and magical goodness of Lord of the Rings with the added perk of frequent and unabashed nudity. Really, what more could you want?

However, if you manage to look beyond the swashbuckling and dragon hatchlings perched atop naked women, you will see that Game of Thrones is chock full of science. And since this blog is an educational and professional forum for academic discussion, I will focus on the scholarly underbelly of GoT rather than the dragons. However, this is in no way a slight to Daenerys Targaryen, whose overall badassery I greatly admire.

So lets get right down to it. I’m going to talk about three fantastical elements from from the show (divided into three scientific fields for your convenience) and discuss their respective merits.

#1: The Ecology of The Wall

One curse of being a grad student is our tendency to be bothered by things that most normal human beings don’t notice. For example, it is often difficult for me to watch sci-fi movies because I’m constantly being bombarded with artistic choices that don’t jive with earth’s natural laws.

This is me every time a movie’s plot revolves around the zombie apocalypse or a viral outbreak.

But I digress. My point is, when I first beheld the Wall, the small part of my brain that wasn’t mooning over Jon Snow became skeptical that such a structure could exist. Turns out I was right. The dimensions of the Wall simply can’t stand up to gravity, leaving the 700 foot high 300 mile long fortification to warp under its own weight. Even though we can safely assume that temperatures are always below freezing at Castle Black, the immense pressure created by the millions of tons of ice would actually melt the lower parts of the Wall. According to glaciologist Bob Hawley of Dartmouth College, the Wall would take on the shape of a glacier flowing downhill, the base pushing outward as the top pushes down. In reality, the biggest problem with the Wall isn’t actually its height or length, but its slope. Martin Truffer, a physicist from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, estimates that for the Wall to be 700 feet high it must also be 28,000 feet wide. So just take away the 90 degree angle and the Wall goes from fantasy to reality; all that’s missing is a set of gloomy criminals to patrol it. Unfortunately, that slope also makes “climbing” the Wall little more than a chilly jaunt, basically useless against invading wildlings and white walkers.

As a result…

The Wall: MYTH

Which brings us to…

#2: The Biology of Joffrey‘s Parentage

“We’ve had vicious kings, and we’ve had idiot kings… but I don’t know if we’ve ever been cursed with a vicious idiot for a king.” Joffrey Baratheon: taking teenage angst to a whole other level.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the creator of the series, George R. R. Martin, has a nasty little habit of using incest to drive major plotlines. In fact, it seems that the only thing Martin enjoys more than literal blood is figurative bloodlines. From the Targaryen sibling spouses to Craster and his daughters, each case is more disturbing than the last.

However, today we are concerned with the Lannisters. To give you a brief overview: Cersei Lannister (the deviant lady pictured below) is married to a perfectly unrelated (albeit drunken and irresponsible) king. Despite this arrangement, all three of Cersei’s children (including Joffrey) were fathered by her twin brother (Jaime), who is employed by said king (Robert) due to his uncommon skill with a sword (pun unintended). To make a long story short, Robert dies completely unaware of this horrifying fact and several other folks meet ghastly ends trying to prove it.

Ew. Just… Ew.

But wait a minute, how did anyone figure this out in a world without paternity tests? Turns out that King Robert had some deviant behaviors of his own, namely leaving children in various brothels all over the capitol. Like their father, all of these kids have dark hair. Meanwhile, Cersei, Jamie, and their unnatural brood all sport the trademark Lannister hair color: blonde.

As a human being this whole situation disgusts me. As a geneticist, I see some red flags. Inbreeding is obviously bad for any species but hair color isn’t a great litmus test. Lets look at the facts. First of all, the genetics of human hair color have not been fully established, though many believe it to be under the control of multiple genes. So right off the bat we learn that the heredity of hair color is complex; it is not so black and white – or blonde and brunette – as Martin would have us believe. We do know that hair color comes from two pigments: pheomelanin (blonde and red hair) and eumelanin (black and brown hair). We also know that black/brown hair appears to be dominant over blonde/red hair. Ergo, blonde individuals, like Joffrey, must have inherited only blonde alleles from each of their parents. Cersei obviously passed on her blonde genes to Joffrey, as a blonde herself that is all she can give. She and brother Jamie could certainly have produced the evil blonde sociopath that is Joffrey. However, even though Robert is a brunette, there is no proof that he is homozygous in the eumelanin department! Robert could easily have a blonde allele that is masked by a dominant brunette allele. Indeed, Martin gives no description of his parents. One of them might have been as blonde as a Lannister for all we know! Robert having only dark-haired bastards is simply not enough proof to rule out his role in Joffrey’s conception. After all, we also have no idea what these various mothers look like and they contributed half the genes. So, while Jamie could easily be the father, Robert could be as well.

As a result…

Cersei’s baby daddy: Not enough evidence… MAYBE

Moving on to…

#3: The Chemistry of Wildfire

Ah wildfire. When Martin becomes bored with slashing folks to pieces he simply burns them alive. Wildfire ignites everything it touches, even water, turning your opponent’s fleet into a macabre St. Patrick’s Day barbeque. It’s actually the perfect weapon, if you don’t mind its tendency to explode for no reason.

Silly Stannis, Wildfire is for Targaryens.

But could the Battle of the Blackwater be based on real-life medieval warfare? Did Martin steal this “pyromancer’s piss” from our past? The answer is yes.

Behold, Greek fire, the stuff of nightmares. Just like Wildfire, the recipe for Greek fire was revealed on a need-to-know basis so modern pyros can merely speculate on its biochemical composition. However, most scholars agree that, at its core, Greek fire was based on petroleum and therefore, similar to napalm. This allowed the substance to ignite quickly and spread over large areas as well as burn on water. There was also probably some potassium nitrate and calcium oxide thrown in there for dramatic detonation purposes.

Now all that’s left is the question of the color.

It ain’t easy being green…

Lucky for Tyrion, this is an easy fix. There are plenty of metal compounds that burn green. For instance,trimethyl borate (don’t try this at home) produces a lovely emerald flame. Unfortunately, the liquid itself is colorless. Again, this is not a problem. Copper(II) chloride will greenify the stuff faster than Joffrey can skulk back to the Red Keep during battle.

Team Halfman. This is the last meme, I promise.

As a result…

Wildfire: Totally plausible

So there you have it. Martin’s universe is equal parts fantasy and science because when you play the game of thrones you either create an ad hoc hypothesis or your theory dies.

Originally published on the MSC Graduate Research Blog.

Apparently, it’s “statistically unwise” to include bowling scenes in Hollywood screenplays.

A collection of glass sculptures of marine animals inspires a scientist and a movie maker to create a new documentary film.

Ridiculous video of a bat tongue in action, plus some info on how this otherworldly Chiroptera muscle works.

Alexander Graham Bell, the father of audio communications, shares his voice with us after more than a century sitting silently in the Smithsonian archives.

Photo by Thinkstock.

When the Human Genome Project wrapped in 2003, we assumed this ginormous data set would provide the much needed parts-list to fill in the blanks of human health and disease. But in the last 10 years it’s become exceedingly clear that things are just not that simple. Yes, our genes are obviously more than a little important in determining who we are, but a lot of other factors are, too. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that what we eat is a big one.

Health sciences professor Katherine Tucker has dedicated her life to understanding how nutrition affects us and, in particular, how our nutrition can be culturally determined based on our diets. Although indirectly, our genetics are connected to our culture as well. Now don’t get too worked up, I’m not saying there’s a gene for faith or anything like that. But there are plenty of examples of certain gene mutations being more prevalent among some populations than others. For example, a mutation to the BRCA1 gene, which is associated with increased risk for breast and ovarian cancers, is more common among white women than Asian women. A mutation to the ABCA7 gene seems to be more often associated with Alzheimer’s disease among older African-Americans than whites.

Tucker is part of a growing field called nutrigenomics, in which researchers are studying how the nutrients we consume affect gene expression. What does that mean exactly? Here’s one example: There are three possible variants of a gene called APOE, one is associated with higher levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C, the “bad” kind), one is associated with moderate levels of LDL-C, and one is associated with lower levels. But throw a bunch of high-fat food into the mix and the intermediate variant becomes a bigger predictor of high LDL-C. So, just because you have a gene associated with some physical characteristic, what you eat may change things completely.

It seems if we can nail down the sequence of the 3 billion nucleotides that make up the human genome, we should have no problem dealing with a little Vitamin A. But it turns out this is a ridiculously complex question to study. There’s a number of reasons for that, and one, as you may be guessing, is the great variability in the way we eat.

Say you want to figure out how zinc intake affects gene expression. You might first assume that the real hairiness of this challenge would be looking at zinc’s interaction with all 20K genes, but due to some serious technical advances, this is actually the “easy” part.

“Because of the specificity of most gene x nutrient interactions,” write Tucker and her colleagues in a recently published paper, “valid data are needed for nutrient intakes at the individual level.”

This basically means that the genetic effects of your zinc intake might not look the same as those of my zinc intake. In order to get meaningful information about how an individual’s diet affects his or her risk for different diseases, for example, you need to look at many, many, many….many different individuals.

Okay, sure fine. If we can look at 20K genes then 20K people should be easy enough. True…and, well, not true. You can ask as many people as you want how much rice they eat, knowing that the whole grain kind is high in zinc. But rice means different things in different cultures.

To some, rice means sticky white rice cooked with a little salt. Others eat a ton of butter or oil with their rice, so now you have to think about how fat will interact as well.

There are three main ways nutritional epidemiologists like Tucker ask people about their diets. They can ask what you ate yesterday, but that’s not usually a good indicator because you may have eaten a huge slice of cake yesterday, something you only do once a year on your birthday. They can ask people to keep a record for a week or more, but this is time consuming so people don’t love doing it, not to mention the fact that keeping a diet journal is known to affect the way one eats. The third way is to administer a “food frequency questionnaire,” wherein you answer a whole bunch of questions about how often you eat different foods. FFQs, as they’re called, have to be specifically tailored to different cultures in order to get accurate nutritional data, again: rice means different things in different cultures. So if you’re comparing a bunch of FFQ results across populations, the correlations with genetic factors and outcomes are probably very skewed.

So, as Tucker and her co-authors repeatedly point out, the need for better, more effective dietary assessment methods is critically needed before anyone can reliably consider how nutrition and genetics are connected. We know that they are, of course, but to do anything real with that knowledge there needs to be a heck of a lot more standardization among the protocols, which will require some creative thinking on the part of the people performing these studies.

Tucker has already begun collaborating with researchers in Northeastern’s Personal Health Informatics program to think about using technology to streamline the process. As becomes clearer every day, crowdsourcing data through the Internet and our smartphones is an incredibly efficient way of collecting data. You just have to ask the right questions.

Professor Paul Dayton of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California spoke at the Marine Science Center on April 26. Photo by Kara Sassone.

April 26 marked the annual Riser Lecture at the Marine Science Center to honor Doc Riser, the founding director of the MSC. I’d had the event in my book for several months, but when it finally came upon us my schedule had been overridden with other junk, precluding me from being able to make it up to Nahant for the afternoon. Luckily, the MSC has its own cohort of wonderful science bloggers (aka graduate students that write about their work and other fun stuff here). I asked Lara Lewis, one of said bloggers and a member of Northeastern professor Joe Ayers’ lab, to write about the lecture for our reading pleasure here at iNSolution. And here’s what she had to say:

Renowned UCSD ecologist Dr. Paul Dayton began the 27^th Annual Riser Lecture by admitting he was a failure.

Kind of. More specifically, he shared an anecdote about how the first experiment he conducted in Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound failed. He thought he would see differences in sponge growth if he excluded predators from the area, but he did not. Paul didn’t mind admitting to this “fail,” nor would most scientists because honestly the nature of scientific experimentation leaves so much room for “failure.”

In my mind, though, there are really two ways to fail: (1) an experiment truly does not work, or (2) the results are not as expected. The first is the most difficult—I’ve experienced this trying to extract and amplify mRNA from single cells, and after testing the final product, “Surprise! No RNA!” (RNA, a molecule that helps translate genetic code into proteins, is so susceptible to degradation that the starting levels in a single cell make it really difficult to end with a measurable product). There is no ‘result’ with these types of problems—you just need to revamp your protocol until it works (or give up, but that’s no fun).

Paul Dayton experienced the second type of failure. He rethought the problem, added some extra experiments, and was able to figure out the predators didn’t eat enough sponge to see an effect on sponge populations in that system.

Paul shared a lot of wisdom during his visit to Northeastern’s Marine Science Center for the 27^th Annual Riser Lecture and Dinner at Northeastern’s Marine Science Center. The Riser Lecture is an event people around here really look forward to because graduate students (like myself) have the opportunity to catch up with each other between the spring semester and the start of the summer research ‘field season.’ It’s also great because a distinguished lecturer is invited to give a talk on their work and the lectures are always exceptional and highly entertaining.

I had the opportunity to meet with Paul a couple times over the course of the day as well as attend his lecture on Friday evening. He shared some very amusing stories about his adventures growing up near logging camps in the rural Northwest and his time in McMurdo, Antarctica. Lets just say Paul isn’t afraid of a good prank. He also shared an important message about his “failure” and its trajectory over time.

Though his first experiments in the mid-60s didn’t run smoothly, they did establish preliminary photo documentation and surveying of the research sites. Flashforward ten years and add in the work of other scientists from the McMurdo research station, and then fastforward another thirty years and more work, and you have a lot of information about the underwater ecosystems off of Antarctica.

After examining photographs from these initial study sites and the type of organisms that grew on the experimental setups he’d left behind in the mid-60s, Paul realized that the landscape of the study area was changing drastically. The relative proportion and type of sponge, urchin, and seastar species varied substantially. Though the ocean floor conditions (temperature, pH, sunlight) seemed stable at the time, the larger oceanographic influences that fluctuate at long time periods (on decade-long cycles, even) were continually changing the dynamics of this ecosystem.

While Paul’s work feels entirely disparate from mine, his realization still led me to reflect on my own research on the crustacean nervous system. When I think of long-term fluctuations in the behavior and nervous system activity of an American lobster, for instance, I really think about the organism developmentally. The lobster is going to be substantially different in 2003 compared to 2013 if the lobster was a larva in 2003 and is now a reproductively active adult. It’s hard to judge these larger oceanographic influences on an organism’s behavior when the organism itself is changing so dramatically.

We do know, however, that these ambient conditions (temperature, pH, sunlight) are bound to induce changes not only in food supply availability and habitat, but also directly on the organism. Temperature, for instance, has far reaching impacts on crustacean behavior and nervous system activity. In some behavioral assays I conducted last year, we saw significantly different temperature preferences for Jonah crabs acclimated to different temperatures. We also saw differences in activity levels based on the ambient water temperature. Moreover, other researchers have shown that ambient or surrounding water temperatures can affect everything from neuromuscular junctions and walking speed to molting and reproduction.

In other words, not only is an organism’s behavior changing as it grows developmentally, it’s also changing based on its surrounding conditions. And certainly through the use of the McMurdo Sound photographs and surveys, Paul and his colleagues were able to understand that conditions and species populations can change dramatically over long time periods.

The takehome message is really to appreciate how many factors play into creating the world as we know it—populations of species rise and fall in cyclic periods ranging from the ephemeral ‘may flies’ to the decade or longer oscillations of Antarctic sponges. And species behavior will change with age, fluctuating habitat conditions, and likely a whole host of other variables we haven’t even begun to understand. Though we’re working to grasp how these factors all integrate, to put it simply—it’s going to take a while.

And with regards to scientific failure and Paul Dayton’s subsequent four decades of research, I think children’s book author Lemony Snicket sums it up properly: “What might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.”

The goal is to get a better sense of how people use their social networks during emergencies. Another way the team is looking at this question is through Twitter. Yu-Ru Lin, an assistant research professor on the team, created a great interactive Google map that shows all of the Tweets using fear-related words that came out of Boston on April 15, 2013. While people were apparently a little on edge all day — 26.2 miles will do that to you — there’s a very obvious spike at 2:49pm, when the first bomb went off. In the visualization below, you see the whole city light up with red dots, representing those fearful Tweets:

Here’s a static representation of the tweets, showing that clear spike right when the bombs go off:

If you’re interested in participating in Lazer’s Android project, you can learn more about the project on his website, VolunteerScience, which is a new platform his team developed to investigate these kinds of questions more readily. Also, it’s worth noting that the team will donate $3 to One Fund Boston for every person that participates.

Northeastern used to have its own team, but with seniors pursuing their capstone projects strapped for time and younger students still learning the basics of engineering, it fizzled out after just a few years. A true football steel bridge diehard, Civil and Environmental Engineering department chair Jerry Hajjar took matters into his own hands….or rather, he placed matters in the hands of Matt Pellegrino, a civil engineering student soon to graduate with a BS/MS in structural engineering.

Pellegrino did for the Northeastern Steel Bridge Team what Walter Matthau did for the Bad News Bears….only instead of starting with a bunch of terrible players, he had, well, no players. He recruited 25 students evenly dispersed across years, and got to work.

While most steel bridge teams have a single goal–to build an awesome bridge that wins the competition–Pellegrino had another challenge. He also had to build his team to be sustainable, so that it would last long after he’d left campus (incidentally, for a bridge engineering job in Dallas, which he’ll be starting just a few weeks after tossing his cap in the air this Friday).

The Northeastern Steel Bridge Team assembling their bridge on game day. Photo courtesy of Matt Pellegrino.

How does one build a sustainable team? With nearly two decades of leadership training with the Boyscouts of America, Pellegrino had something of an idea: You have to make each member of the team an integral part of the project, he told me. Instead of designing an elaborate suspension bridge that requires computational analysis to determine the multiple forces on the structure, the team chose a simpler truss bridge design. “It’s like the Tobin rather than the Zakim,” Pellegrino explained.

With the simpler structure, the younger students could understand the system they were working with, they actually got to be a part of it. “Then, because they were involved in the design, they’re more inclined to stay around and build the bridge and see it come up,” said Pellegrino.

They started designing last fall, then around Christmas time put in an order for steel. Northeastern alumnus Todd Stevens of Dimension Fabrications in Albany, NY donated all of it. “That guy was like Santa Claus,” said Pellegrino.

With a few hundred pounds of steel in hand, they spent many, many hours between January and mid-April in the Snell Engineering building. They machined all of the pieces, creating their own giant Kinex set, and then assembled them into their mini-Tobin. A few days before the Northeastern Regional Competition, they carefully broke it down into a few sections. Just like the shrunken bridge, the sections had to fit real world specifications. They had to be smaller than a 3′x4″x5″ box (a scaled version of a tractor trailer bed), and they had to weigh less than 20 pounds (the scaled weight limits for most roads).

They transported their mini-bridge pieces across the river to MIT where 10 teams competed for a spot in the national competition. Five of Pellegrino’s teammates assembled the bridge on the clock and then bit their fingernails as they placed 100 25-pound pieces of cut steel across the top: The bridge stood the test of steel!

They also managed to overcome the Achilles heel that had plagued the old Northeastern Steel Bridge Team: when pulled from a certain point, the bridge moved less than a half inch in the lateral direction (as you might imagine, shaky bridges aren’t much fun in real life).

While they didn’t come in first place…or really anywhere close to first place, the team feels incredibly successful in its mission. They built their team, and their bridge, to be sustainable against the expected forces. Instead of 2500 pounds of steel, the student group has to withstand the constant flux of students coming and going. They’ll need to work together to pass their skill sets from one generation to the next.

Pellegrino said the effort was in no way a one-man show. Every member of the team had a role to play, and he is confident that after he’s been in Dallas for many years designing life-size bridges, the Northeastern Steel Bridge Team will still be building their mini ones.

Image via Thinkstock.

Civil and environmental engineering professor Philip Larese-Casanova has had a life-long love affair with metals. In his work in aquatic environmental chemistry, he looks at how metallic pollutants transform and behave in freshwater systems.

“I just had an interest in the metals,” he told me in an interview last month. “Maybe it’s because I see so many different personalities in them when I look at the periodic table.” I almost fainted like a Jane Austen character when he said that.

Larese-Casanova’s passion for chemistry transcends the calm patience with which he discusses the complex subject. But when I asked what exactly he meant by a metal’s “personality,” Larese-Casanova said: “It’s kind of like asking me, how did I fall in love with my wife ? It’s hard to verbalize a multifaceted passion concisely.”

He pulled out a picture of the periodic table to try and explain it:

“We can tolerate, for example, sulfate at low concentrations. But drop one period down and we get to selenium. Selenate is generally toxic,” he said. “So you make one small change, move down or across the periodic table and you can get to an element with completely different reactivities, toxicities, and chemical behaviors.”

The periodic table of the elements has a rich history, beginning with Antoine Lavoisier who arranged the then-known elements into groups of gases, metals, nonmetals, and earths, and culminating with Dmitri Mendeleev who found that arranging the elements based on their atomic weights would mystifyingly group them in the same way Lavosier had. Eclectic Artwork by Other Metro Sideshow Sign Company.

Just like two notes on a piano separated by a single octave, these two elements will share similar qualities. Whereas a low C will sound a little deeper than middle C, arsenic share some of the chemical “qualities” of phosphorous. They’re personalities are shadows of each other, like sisters separated by a dozen years in age.

But despite these similarities, phosphorous is a key element in the DNA of all living organisms, whereas arsenic is toxic to nearly all animals (it used to be an ingredient in rat poison!).

This is the beauty of the periodic table, and it helps organize the beauty that Larese-Casanova sees in the metals. While organic compounds are all variations on a theme (they all contain carbon), metallic pollutants are varied and nuanced, predictable and surprising, all at once.

A few of my favorite science stories and blog posts from the last two weeks:

1. How not to die, from the Atlantic: Two doctors take on the tragedy of end of life care
2. Play for all kinds of possibilities, from the New York Times : David Dobbs beautifully shows us how human play may drive evolution
3. Why was the Texas fertilizer plant so deadly?, from Scientific American: The title pretty much tells you what you need to know
4. “I think I’ve just thought up Something important”, from The Loom: Carl Zimmer’s tribute to the Nobel Prize winner Francois Jacob, who passed away over the weekend
5. Shut up, brain!, from You’ve got some science on you: Fellow Boston science writer Tom Ulrich discusses one of my favorite topics: falling asleep.
6. Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine, from Wired: Okay, I haven’t actually read this one yet, but I’m really excited to!

And finally, here’s a great video of what a capuchin monkey thinks about unequal pay for equal work: