Photo:Eric Niiler

I spent last weekend in the Harvard Forest, participating in hands-on science experiments as part of the Marine Biological Laboratory's science journalism fellowship. The goal was to give us an inside look at what, exactly, scientists actually do. When you're reading a peer-reviewed scientific research paper, where did all that data come from?

Sometimes, it comes from a swamp.

On Saturday, we walked into the Forest's Blackgum Swamp to take core samples out of the muck. There was no standing water in this swamp, at least not when we visited. But I wouldn't call the ground "solid", either. Instead, it was more like a moss-covered sponge. With every step, the ground beneath me would sink and smoosh. In some of the lower patches, that meant a shoe-full of water. In other spots, it was just a disconcerting sensation.

Taking core samples involves a little machine that's like a cross between a shovel and a straw. Made of heavy, solid metal, it has an extendable handle on one end. At the other, there's a hollow, cylindrical chamber that can be opened and closed by turning the handle counterclockwise. You drive the chamber into the ground, turn the handle, and then pull it back out. Once everything is back on the surface, you can open the chamber and see a perfect cylinder of earth, pulled up from below. That cylinder is removed from the chamber, wrapped in plastic wrap, labeled, and put in a long wooden box. Then you do all of that again, in 50 centimeter increments, until you hit stone. We got to about 475 centimeters—15 feet deep. By that point, you'll have collected 1000s of years of layered sediment.

This is not as easy as it sounds.

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How do engineers know that the pillars supporting a bridge can withstand the force of thousands of cars driving over them for decades? How do we know what would happen to that bridge during an earthquake? What about an earthquake in winter?

Buildings, roads and bridges are all designed with a buffer of safety—basically, engineers round up on the numbers, a lot, and design these things to be far more sturdy than they actually have to be. But to make those decisions, they first have to know the physical limits of the materials they're working with. The best way to do that: Take a scaled version of a girder, pillar, or concrete slab and push it past the breaking point. Yes, this is, in fact, as awesome as it sounds.

The Constructed Facilities Laboratory at North Carolina State University is one of the places in the United States where this kind of research happens. In this lab, engineering researchers shake, bend, freeze, and crush the stuff that supports our world. I got to take a tour of this lab back in January, led by lab manager, Greg Lucier.

The videos here will take you through the 4500-square-foot lab and introduce you to the equipment these engineers use—from giant compression machines to something called a "Thermotron environmental chamber."

We'll start with a quick spin around the lab, just to get acquainted with the space. Then, you'll learn how some of the systems you see here work and why they're so important. Finally, you'll get to watch the lab in action.

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A directory of wonderful sounds —

Carnegie Mellon University's Auditory Lab has a huge collection of high-quality audio recordings of random sounds—from a marble dropped onto sheet metal, to bubble wrap being popped, to crumpling newspaper, to the sound of a sponge being squeezed out over empty tupperware. I trust you all will come up with fun uses for this stuff. At the Annals of Improbable Research you can hear one of the lab's sloshing sounds. It is a very good slosh. (Via Marc Abrahams) — Maggie •

Next week is one of my favorite times of the year, when I get inundated with smart people and interesting ideas, like some kind of geeky Christmas. For the second time, I'll be a speaker at the University of Colorado-Boulder's Conference on World Affairs (Mark will be there too!). The Conference is unlike anything I've been to anywhere else. It brings together artists, writers, musicians, scientists, politicians, journalists—a whole stew pot of interesting people—to talk about things that matter to them right now.

To create the panel topics, the organizers have all the speakers send in a list of things we can talk about at an expert level and things we just like to talk about. Then they use those lists to decide what subjects the conference will focus on. All the panels are free and open to the public. And they're all incredibly interactive. More than half the time at any panel is given over to audience Q&A.

Last year, I ended up talking about everything from comic books to the future of transportation. It's a blast, and I'll be posting some stories to BoingBoing next week about cool things that I learn watching some of the panels. But if you're in the Boulder area, you should really try to make it out. It's an event that truly captures the Happy Mutant spirit.

The panels I'll be speaking on next week.

The panels Mark will be speaking on next week.

Previously:

Volcano Tungurahua in Ecuador erupts about every 90 years—it's a schedule the mountain has kept for 1300 years. This photo was taken by Patrick Taschler in 2006. (Via Astronomy Photo of the Day and Alexandra Witze)

We've talked here before about the extremely important (and often-overlooked) DIY aspect of science. Scientists are makers. They have to be. The tools they need often aren't available any other way. Other times, the tools are available, but they're far more expensive than what you could construct out of your own ingenuity.

In this video, researchers at Cambridge build LEGO robots that automate time-consuming laboratory processes at a fraction of the cost of a "real" robot.

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Via Karyn Traphagen

We've talked before about scientists using Rockethub to fund basic laboratory research—stuff that's important, but not likely to lead immediately to new technologies or other marketable products.

It's often hard to find the funding necessary to support this kind of research, and crowd funding is a great way to leverage public interest in science. Better yet, there's now a whole crowd-funding website dedicated specifically to the sciences.

The video above explains one of the projects that's trying to raise money through Petridish right now. David Kipping is a Harvard postdoc and a NASA Carl Sagan fellow. He wants to conduct the first ever survey of exomoons—moons outside our solar system.

Partially, his research is about understanding the universe. Knowing more about exomoons will teach us a lot about how solar systems, in general, work. But it's also about that tickly, exciting possibility of life on other planets. As we all learned from watching Return of the Jedi, it is possible to have a habitable moon. So far, the search for habitable exoplanets hasn't taken moons into consideration. Kipping's study would change that. But to make it work, he needs to buy a supercomputer. And for that, he needs your help. Kipping is within $3500 of his goal and has 14 days left to go.

Read more about Kipping's project at Petridish

Find lots more scientific research that needs your support.

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Last week, Maggie went to the largest science conference in the Western Hemisphere for four days of wall-to-wall awesomeness. Every day, she learned amazing things, watching scientists from all over the world talk about their work. Check the bottom of each post to find links to earlier posts in this series!

One of my favorite parts of the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference happens at the end of each day, after the panel discussions are over and the convention floor has been locked down. That's when the parties start.

Now, obviously, everybody likes parties. But these are better than most. The AAAS parties are where a delightful mixture of scientists, journalists, academic journal editors, and university public relations officers gather to compare notes, talk shop, and tell each other about the awesome science they learned during the day.

I already mentioned how hard it is to decide which panels to see and which lectures to attend. At any given time there will be three-to-five different things you'd like to watch, all happening simultaneously. During the day, you're forced to choose. But at night, the parties are where you get the chance to learn about all the things you didn't get to see for yourself. You arrive, are handed a glass of wine, and all your friends run up to find out what you learned that day. It is a wonderful, nerd-tastic experience, and I want to share it with you.

On Sunday, February 19th, I took a small video recorder to a AAAS wine and cheese party. I found some people with neat stories to tell and convinced them to share those stories on camera. Together, these 11 short videos—none longer than 4 minutes or so—will give you a taste of what a AAAS party is like. It'll also give you an idea of just how many subjects AAAS covers. This video collection contains cool facts on every topic from dolphin rights, to GM crops, to international political intrigue. Just kick back, pour yourself a glass of wine, and ask, "So what did you see today?"

First up: Freelance journalist Neil Savage, who learned some fascinating stuff about the plethora of ways technology helps us gather information about ourselves—and how we might protect that information in the future.

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Sure, it's fun to post old pages of mid-century science magazines and make fun of the predictions that never came true—flying cars! Weather control!

But it's equally, if not more, enjoyable to read predictions for things that actually happened. These are the things that remind us that the world we live in today is pretty goddamn amazing. Teacher Michael Poser sent me one such prediction that he and his students found in The Science Year Book of 1947, a sort-of proto-aggregator that compiled reprints of stories in science magazines. This quote came from a Scientific American article entitled "Microwaves on the way":

In peacetime microwaves are slated for an even more spectacular career… Private phone calls by the hundreds of thousands sent simultaneously over the same wave band without wires, poles, or cables. Towns where each citizen has his own radio frequency, over which he can get voice, music, and television, and call any phone in the country by dialing. Complete abolition of static interference from electrical devices and from other stations. A hundred times as much “space on the air” as is now available in the commercial radio band. A high-definition and color-television network to cover the country. And, perhaps most important of all, a nationwide radar network to regulate all air traffic and furnish instantaneous visual weather reports to airfields throughout the land. By such a system, every aircraft over the United States or approaching it could be spotted, identified and shown simultaneously on screens all the way from Pensacola to Seattle.

What an awesome find! I don't know about you, but I pretty much take for granted all the things that short wavelength radio waves (i.e. microwaves) do for me every day. It's amazing to see something that has become so blase talked about like the wonder of technology it actually is.

Image: mercury m3 sunbury microwave mast, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from osde-info's photostream