Editor’s note: to protect the identity and avoid embarrassment for the people involved, we have retracted the name and field of the Laureate – though if you were assuming it was a man, you’d be right. Not that it narrows the possibilities by much.
Academics around the world are applauding a recent Nobel Laureate for remembering to thank his overworked post-doctoral students after their discovery helped him win the notorious award.
A leaked draft of the Nobel Laureate’s acceptance speech revealed some open secrets about his true feelings toward his underlings, which many have described as “out of touch.”. The full draft reads:
“I am truly thrilled and honored to receive this prestigious award all by myself, with no co-winners. I would like to thank the Nobel Prize committee for continuing the decade-long tradition of giving this prize to a man, the obviously bigger-brained of the sexes.”
“I suppose I should thank all the people who made this possible, including the many researchers before me who laid the groundwork for this science, but it’s not my fault that I simply did it better (neener neener)! “
“I’d like to thank my undergraduate minions who have worked endless hours in the lab for experience and no pay, my grad students who have given up their chance of any personal relationship to make this research a success, and finally, my post-docs who have generously allowed me to take credit for years of their work.”
“I hope all the members of my lab are equally as thankful for the prestige of working in the lab of a Nobel Prize Winner!
Since my graduate students will benefit tremendously from the increased status this award brings to the lab, I trust that they will understand when I cut their graduate stipends by 50%.”
“It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.
But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
I’ve always imagined octarine to be that green-purple metallic color of bird feathers. You know, that color that seems to change depending on the incidence of light?
Peacock feathers always looked octarine to me. From StockSnap
Just humming outside our window
We have a plant outside our window. It has tiny yellow flowers that bloom in the winter and seem like they taste delicious. Or would taste delicious if I were a hummingbird.
The feeding ground, bird not included.
We have at least two regular hummy-visitors, that I’ve seen. Just buzzing around just outside our window, usually, when I’m on a phone call and I lose my train of thought and end up sounding (even more) incoherent on my call.
In my defense, I grew up in a place where hummingbirds aren’t that common, so they are pretty amazing for me to see.
But, I think the most fascinating part is how their color seems to change. From one angle, one of the two birds has a deep red colored throat. Change the angle slightly, and it looks completely different.
Considering we’re seeing these tiniest of birds in the winter, and there are only one species that don’t migrate south for the winter, we are probably seeing Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna), named after Anna Masséna the wife of a nineteenth-century bird collector.
Male Anna’s Hummingbirds have a brightly colored neck. There are about 1.5 million of these hummingbirds in existence. They are quite common, and seemed to have adapted well to urban environments – they surely don’t seem to mind buzzing outside our window and distracting me from phonecalls!
Nature photography is hard.
Why do hummingbird feathers (seem to) change color?
Hummingbird feathers aren’t “the color of magic,” they show the optical phenomenon called iridescence. Iridescent surfaces seemingly change color depending on the view or illumination angle. It’s the same effect that causes that rainbow sheen on a soap bubble, that lenticular-looking effect on some minerals, the changing colors of the tapetum lucidum, and that metallic shine on butterflies and bird wings.
The colors of the material are not due to a pigment (though that can determine the base color), but due to microstructures within the material that interfere with light in different ways (structural coloration).
Let’s take the example of a soap bubble. A soap bubble can be considered a thin film, it basically has two interfaces: the air-soap interface, and the soap-water interface. Light will interact with those interfaces in two ways: some light will be reflected (like on a mirror), and some will transmit and refract (change of angle due to material change).
So if we consider a single incoming ray of light, it will be reflected twice, once at each interface – and two rays will interact with each other by interference. Constructive interference happens when the light is in phase, destructive when it’s out of phase.
Depending on the angle of the incoming light, the angle of where we observe the light, the thickness of the film, etc. certain wavelengths (or colors) will be visible to the observer, because the rays constructively interfere, while others colors will be cancelled out.
This phenomenon is called thin-film interference, an effect that occurs when the material thickness is of the same order as the wavelength of visible light (380-750 nm).
Light reflects off the two surfaces and interferes constructively or destructively. Then *physics* happens. Image source.
Changing angles
When we change the angle of incoming light (by changing from which angle we observe), the thickness through which the light has to travel changes, changing its interference pattern. For example, looking straight on might make the film look red, while at an angle the same material will look orange or green or blue. This is how we see a rainbow effect on a soap bubble.
Different light incidence angles change the color observed. Created using a thin film simulator.
A lot of tiny little mirrors
The same thing happens when we have certain crystalline structures, which is why some minerals show iridescence, or materials that are basically just a bunch of tiny little mirrors (like CDs).
The same is true for bird feathers, they show a regular crystalline nanostructure: individual tiny mirrors are spaced out just right to cause constructive interference of certain colors at a certain wavelength. And that’s why the Anna’s Hummingbird that chills* out outside our window sometimes looks like he has a bright Fuschia neck, and sometimes he does not.
Different examples of iridescent structures as found in nature. From Parry, Ahu & Savin, Thierry. (2016). Recent advances in the biomimicry of structural colours. Chem. Soc. Rev.. 45. 10.1039/C6CS00129G.
Anyway, to me, octarine is real, and not only on Discworld.
*Actually, I’m not sure hummingbirds now how to “chill.”
Grad student Anna Esquivel’s duties, which already include carrying out her research project, managing the lab, and TAing twice a week, have now expanded to include creating all poster and presentation images for her group after she created a half-decent image of a protein for a lab meeting.
“It was so amazing to see,” said Dr. Lyndon Vang, a postdoc in the same lab as Anna who attended the lab meeting in question. “The Prof was incredibly impressed by Anna’s ability to turn the standard shapes available in Powerpoint to an adequate representation of a protein. You should have seen the Prof’s face when the animation started!”
Anna has now been tasked to create all the images that the lab will use for all future talks, posters, and publications – including a (virtual) poster presentation that Dr. Vang’s due to present tomorrow. “Good thing I have Anna to help me,” Dr. Vang says. “So far, all I have is a title and half an abstract.”
Jadine Sparks, another grad student in the same lab, is an aspiring science illustrator. “It’s kind of frustrating; I’ve spent hours creating scientifically accurate figures in Adobe illustrator, both for scientific posters I’ve presented and to expand my portfolio – I want to make a career out of this. But apparently, all my figures look “too professional” for a scientific conference.”
Anna allegedly also knows how to do conditional conditioning in Excel, implying that soon she will also be designated the lab’s biostatistician.
Bonus: here’s an actual image I made in PowerPoint for my PhD theses. It took me embarrassingly long:
I have not made it a big secret that I think penguins are pretty cool. (Does that count as a pun? “Cool,” because they live on the South Pole, get it? Get it?)
So to end this crazy year in style, I want to share some of the news and novel science related to our favorite tuxedo-wearing friends. In style, because tuxedoes are fancy! (Get it?)
Sidenote: While researching “Best Penguin Moments of 2020” I learned that the Pittsburg Penguins are a hockey team (and not a lovely group of penguins in the Pittsburg zoo) and that there are many top Penguin book lists circulating on the internet. Not quite what I was looking for!
1. Penguin picture wins Ocean Photograph Award 2020
Starting things off with some cuteness, a picture of two penguins that had apparently lost their penguin partners and were seemingly comforting each other, won the Community Choice Award at Oceanographic magazine’s Ocean Photograph Awards 2020.
That’s all you need to know. Now wallow in cuteness.
Wellington, a Rockhopper penguin in Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium who gained viral fame earlier this year thanks to a video of him hanging out with a Beluga whale, celebrated his 33rd birthday this year, with a day of fishy deliciousness.
Birds get the flu too! And more importantly, birds can get vaccinated against the bird flu!
Copenhagen, Denmark – Humboldt penguins get a vaccine against bird flu at the city zoo. Photograph: Ritzau Scanpix/Reuters
Let this be a reminder that if you are able too, it is worth getting vaccinated against the flu, and when if becomes available to you, against SARS-CoV-2 as well!
4. Penguins make the best of a bad situation
In a tiny bit of silver lining to climate change, recent research showed that Adelie penguins may actually thrive in warmer years. In years where there is less ice, Adelies spend more time swimming, saving energy, and covering more foraging ground. The researchers predict the population is likely to grow as the ice caps decline.
5. Penguins suffer in a bad situation
On the flip side of the story above, warming waters near Antarctica may be the reason for the biggest king penguin colony declining in size, having lost 900,000 birds over the past few decades. If anything, changing climate is causing species to adapt, and some will be okay, while others will not.
6. Penguins celebrate the holidays too!
Okay they don’t, but earlier this year we 3D printed some penguins, and they have now found their home!
A Waddle of Penguins
Getting Tuxed up!
Macaroni Penguins love presents too!
I hope you all have a wonderful New Year, full of waddling and warmth and tasty fish!
Originally published on the satire science journal website DNAtured
Fourth year graduate student Virinder Singh was excited to find a new email from his supervisor in his inbox last Friday at 11:13 PM. Responding to a three-month-old request for feedback on a first draft, his supervisor had sent the following message:
K.
Sent from my iPhone
“I was having a drink when I checked my phone and noticed a new email,” Singh says. “I immediately rushed back into the office to start getting back to work. It was then that I realized that Prof McNally had forgotten to include the attachment.”
Singh’s supervisor, Dr. Alistair McNally is known for his open door policy: students can come to him anytime with questions. The door to his office is always open. He, however, is never there.
Dr. Jena Li, a postdoc in Dr. McNally’s group, seemed disgruntled: “Good for Virinder, I hope he’s able to finish that paper. I’ve been waiting more than a year for a reply to an email asking for a meeting. I’m not even sure Dr. McNally knows I exist!”
When asked for a statement, Dr. McNally replied “K.”
Research Chemist Dr. Jamie Dennis was shocked to discover that they were on the FBI watch list after googling the chemical structure of phenylalanine, without specifying that they did not intend to make meth.
“I’m usually so careful,” says Dr. Dennis. “One of the first lessons you learn in a chemistry undergrad course is to always, always, put “but not for drugs” in a google search. Especially if you’re looking at crystallization temperatures.”
This is not the first time a member of the chemistry department has been flagged. In 2015, a grad student was temporarily suspended bringing blue rock candy to an after-class happy hour.
“For the last decade or so, we’ve had to be a lot more careful,” said FBI Agent Susan Pearson. “We’ve put tabs on all chemistry teachers, chemistry grad students, and chemistry researchers, just to be safe. With those paltry teaching salaries, everyone wants to be the new Walter White.”
Dr. Dennis says that they’ve learned their lesson, but after comparing their postdoc stipend to the money that could be made from a few illegal synthesis reactions, says they will now simply complete future searches in Incognito mode.
Every October, artists all over the world take on a challenge: make a piece of art (usually within a certain theme, using a specific media, and using a prompt list) every day for one month.
While I would not call myself an artist (though, art and science do have things in common), I took up a hobby I’d started a few months back: brushlettering or handlettering. One letter a day. And of course, I picked a science theme.
So here you go, part 1 of #Alfabetober, inspired by Carla Kamphuis (I realize that there are only 26 letters, while there are 31 days, there are some rest days).
