How Cool is Science?

Here are the archived blog posts that focus on amazing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

Dreaded Topic of AI: An Introduction

AI is all the rage, and it's turning into quite the sore subject, especially among authors. Is it really your work if you used AI to write it? What can it actually do versus all the hype? As someone who has worked in the technology industry trying to market AI's true value to the business, and advocate for its shortcomings so the analysts aren't stuck with impossible tasks, I have opinions about it. As an author, I also have opinions, so...let's go! This week we'll talk AI in general, and next time we'll talk about it through an author's lens.

First of all, people throw around the term AI like they throw around "robots"--it is a very broad term. Imagine someone calling your dishwasher a "robot." Would that be true, exactly? Or if they called your Tesla a "robot?" That's many times what we run into when people say something is "powered by AI." Exactly what do you mean when you say "AI?"

There are large language models (LLM's) that are the first step to AI. It is a body of rules that predict what the next word will be in a conversation. This is how some chatbots feel conversational, and others just feel... well robotic.

Many times "AI" chatbots are just tools used to look up data and spit it back out, but in fun, polite ways. They don't really know what you're talking about, they just see "I like horses" and they tell you about horses. AI chatbots, conversely, might ask if you want to ride a horse and then direct you to some stables all in one note. Generally, the better the AI, the more action it can take and the more steps it can make. It "thinks" and goes one step beyond parroting back information.

AI chatbots are only as good as the information they pull from. With high security measures on companies, when you see the little "chat with me!" icon, chances are that isn't powered by AI that's particularly powerful because, for security reasons, it doesn't want the LLM to source information outside of the company. That's how secrets get out. So it just references internal documents and do YOU know anyone who keeps documents up to date? There's a whole "knowledge base governance" nerd group out there if you do, because it's a lot of work. There's also nerd groups for organizing garages. Fun to talk about, less fun to actually keep up with.

Outside of AI chatbots on company sites, you can always go with ChatGPT or one of its friends. Full disclosure: I love ChatGPT and think there's a ton of use cases that people don't think about.

HOW TO
Whenever I'm doing something technical (looking at you, 3D printer software Blender) and I get frustrated, I just ask ChatGPT how to solve the problem. As a writer, if scriviner (well trusted document creation software) ever seems to hide features from you, ask ChatGPT where to find the buttons. Trying to remember how to turn off automatic replies? Just ask your buddy.

PLANNING
When a child asks for a birthday party themed in some crazy way, (like space unicorns) you wonder how you will ever live up to the hype. But if you ask your buddy on ChatGPT, he'll give you games, food, and whatever else you might need. Want to do a girls' day at the beach, but you don't know which beach, where to eat, or what to do? Ask your favorite AI.

Before you become scared that AI will steal all your information and send assassins to kill you in your sleep, understand remembering petty details about you costs memory and you're only allotted so much before it, sadly, stops caring. You can go to settings and get a list of all the information it is choosing to "remember" about you and your conversations and delete whatever you like.

So, before you reach for google, try ChatGPT first. You might be surprised at what it can do for you.

Piezoelectricity

In The Niagara Event, electricity is given an additional element which causes materials to behave in strange ways. This idea of electricity changing the property of objects wasn't invented by me, but was inspired by real-life examples, like the piezoelectric effect.

Some crystals with certain lattice structures have a reaction to voltage and magnetic fields.

They...breathe.

That is this author's way of saying voltage can make the crystal bend and bending it can conversely give off electromagnetic charge. If you put a sine wave to it (alternating positive and negative voltage) it expands, contracts, expands, contracts...hence "breathes."

Imagine an up and down waveform of voltage. Once it gets to a certain high, the crystal expands, then when voltage drops below a level, the crystal contracts, etc. If you're thinking that sounds like a metronome, you're right.

Quartz crystal has been used as timekeeping pieces in circuitry. When you consider that temperature doesn't seem to affect the crystal, you've got a pretty robust clock for your circuit. (Imagine time slowing down in the cold or having to use a hair dryer to get a webpage to load faster).

Each unit of quartz can be cut in such a way to have a specific frequency. You throw random voltage noise at it and the output has a little of the rhythm the quartz has been cut for, which feeds back into its front and strengthens the beat until only the desired strong heartbeat remains.

Another fun application is an electric lighter. Pushing a button releases a spring loaded hammer to strike a piezoelectric crystal which makes enough of a voltage difference across a small spark gap, igniting the gas inside and thus turning on the lighter.

They are not as dramatic as the wild changes Lisa and her friends go through in The Niagara Event when exposed to tessalumens, but then again, the piezoelectric effect is real.

Read more here...Explain that Stuff; Science Direct

posted Mar 8, 2025

Food Genius of Soy

When I learned my baby I was nursing had a soy allergy, I thought it would be easy to cut soy out of my diet. I'd just reduce the quantity of Pad thai I ate, no problem. That was before I understood the food science genius that is soy.

Soy is everywhere. If you doubt this, pull out your snack drawer and start reading ingredients. Just skip to the end where the allergens will be listed in bold. Love Oreos? Contains soy. Like eating anything at Sonic? Soy. It's all because it's just such an amazing ingredient.

Soy lectin acts as an emulsifier. If you've ever tried to make your own salad dressing with oil and balsamic vinegar, it doesn't matter how much you whisk, the two liquids just won't come together and your salad will be bland in some spots and extra zingy in others. But mix in a teeny bit of Grey Poupon mustard to the dressing and poof! It's as good as if you bought it at the store. That's the magic of adding an emulsifier.

Soy also is a great source of protein. You want to get a protein bar? It probably has soy. You're a vegan but you need some protein? Bulk up on that soy.

Soy lectin also helps the stability of the food that has to be physically transported and experience temperature changes. You'll want that food made in a factory to still taste delicious and not spoil by the time it makes it to your pantry or favorite restaurant.

Soy is grown in fields is not just for people food, but animal feed (all that great protein without feeding animals to animals). This is where most of the soy grown goes, which is remarkable considering how much soy is found in people food.

Oddly enough, soybean oil is used everywhere, but when it's processed into oil, the allergens are no longer present so even though food may use soybean oil, it won't list SOY as an allergen. How does this magic work? I am not exactly sure.

But soy isn't just about food. You can use soy in biodiesel and also plastics or paint. In fact, there's even a children's book about Henry Ford and his use of soy to build a car.

The US accounts for 34% of the world's soybean production. Corn and soy account for more than half of the US's crop cash receipts. Soy is a big business and seriously interesting.

Soy isn't a very common allergen, but for babies, it's on up there right after dairy. 0.4% of infants have a soy allergy whereas 2.5% have a dairy allergy. Some are lucky enough to have both. Don't worry, formula for babies with dairy allergy have (you guessed it) soy as a source of protein.

Next time you pass a field of tiny green bunches of soy you'll know just how important that little bean is.

As for me? Don't worry. Even in a world full of soy, I can always rely on a few soy free foods....like bacon.

Read more here! United Soybean Board, usSoy.org, World Atlas, USDA,

Photo of the Smoky Mountains in Gatlinburg taken by me

What Makes Autumn Leaves So Brilliant?

In Tennessee, you have to take a trip to Chattanooga or the Smoky Mountains when the leaves change. The roads will reveal sweeping vistas of untouched mountains swirling in reds and yellows, purples and greens. If you want to kick it up a notch, then travel the “Tail of the Dragon,” a road that kisses the Smoky Mountains as it winds through 318 curves in an eleven mile stretch.

If you can time it right with the changing leaves, the drive is so beautiful, you’ll realize you’ve never actually seen the color yellow properly before. I love to go there in the fall, but the window of beauty is quite tight and the majesty ebbs and flows from year to year. Why is that? How do I predict that? Why isn’t my backyard that amazing?

Trees that change color (as opposed to evergreens) leverage chlorophyll in the leaves to absorb energy from the sun and convert that energy into sugar to feed the tree. Interestingly, chlorophyll absorbs the red and blue wavelengths leaving just the green wavelength to be reflected back to our eyes.

When that chlorophyll breaks down, it won’t absorb the red and blue wavelengths allowing the leaf to change color. Other pigments such as carotenoids (making yellow, orange, and brown) and anthocyanin (red, purples, and crimson) can then take center stage.

What really causes the production of chlorophyll to die off? It’s produced to get energy from the sun, so when there’s less sunlight per day, less chlorophyll is produced until the tree gives up and stops altogether. This unmasks the other pigments and boom! The forest erupts in a kaleidoscope of yellows, reds, browns and more.

The veins connecting the leaves to the trees will start to close off in the autumn trapping sugars in the leaf that promote the pigments of autumn. Eventually, the leaves become completely choked off from the tree and they’ll fall.

Why the variation from year to year then, if the species of trees and the quantity of sunlight per twenty four hour period is stagnant along the same latitude? What are the other variables? The rest is due to weather and soil moisture. Remember, it isn't just length of day but cloud coverage that will also affect how much sunlight hits the trees.

Anthocyanin pigments are actually produced in the autumn. Its level of production is due to weather conditions causing variation in reds, purples, and crimson year to year. Warm days with bright sunshine will cause more of these colorful sugars to be produced than cooler or cloudy days. If the nights are cool but not freezing then the closing of the veins will be gradual which prevents sugars from leaving the leaves. More sugars, more vibrancy.

Carotenoids are always present in the background and aren’t produced yearly, so the yellows and golds stay consistent year to year once the chlorophyll dies off.

So if you’re reading this and live where the fall is characterized by lots of rain or the summers are blistering or dry, you might not understand the romance of the season. Go to New England in late September or the Smoky Mountains in early November, or anywhere in between for brilliant foliage. You can also try high elevation mountains in the West around this time as well. Watch for coloration in higher elevations before valleys (like Nashville).

If this is still a little too general, you can always cheat and check out sites that predict peak seasons based on geographic region like this one. Whatever your choice, enjoy the show this year!

Want to read more? Check out my sources: Forest Service, Smithsonian, and Tail of the Dragon.

Posted September 30, 2024

The little pistol shrimp the group found. He doesn't have a claw, but it should regrow.

Bird hanging out on a sign by the mangroves

Bucket of sea life we found

The Pistol Shrimp

The best vacations are the ones where you not only collect interesting memories, you collect interesting facts. So when we did a girls weekend at the beach, we also did a boat tour that came with its own naturalist and I learned that the world was more amazing than I realized.

We got out on a boat in Ft. Myers, FL and puttered out through the mangroves until we came to a little beach named "Picnic Island." There, we waded in the water waist deep with nets on sticks, dragging through the floor and seeing what animals we could find. The naturalist said 99% of what we'd find was harmless (and all would be returned to the ocean), but I never expected someone to find the last 1%.

We found lots of live shrimp (did you know they kind of jump at you to get out of the net?) and little tiny hermit crabs and all kinds of creatures at different points in their lifecycle, including egg sacs. But when someone found a pistol shrimp, we put that bad boy in a jar of his own.

Pistol shrimp have a claw that they can close very quickly creating a little bubble bullet that moves at 62 mph! The sound of that little claw measuers 218 dB, which is louder than a gun--a big gun! A .44 caliber pistol is only 168.8 dB, and that's the biggest number I could find with respect to gunshot measurements. When the little bubble pops, it produces a ton of heat as well, up to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The naturalist told us that you had to be careful putting one of these guys in an aquarium in case he shoots the glass and breaks it. Our fella didn't have his claw for whatever reason but we were still cautioned to hold the jar from the top. Later I learned they re-grow their superhero claws, thank goodness.

I was dying to research when I got home and was surprised that they weren't the mafia of the ocean floor. Don't get me wrong--those are some impressive statistics-- but their power is, in one sense, very small. The 'click' measures less than a microsecond and is just composed of air bubbles that stuns prey, killing small ones, but doesn't explode them or pepper them with holes.

However, God forbid they move in colonies. When they do, they've been known to interfere with sonar systems.

There's drama here and unbelievable magic that was sitting right under my nose. In one moment it's too amazing to be true, and in another, it's just animals being animals. There's a story here about an undersea western, a lone shrimp-boy out to make the world better. He may be damaged, clawless, but it will regrow and he will return more terrible than before.

Find out more! Science.org How Stuff Works ZME Science Wikipedia

Posted Sept 8, 2023

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