The Sight and Sound of Science

How do you process music? Do you let the music flow over you? Do you translate the sound to notes? Do you look at the fingering and movement of the player? The answers perhaps depends on your level of knowledge and talent in the instruments that generate the music. The beauty of music is that you can enjoy it at any or all of these levels. I would argue that it is the same for science. Whether the details are in the equations or in the instrumental apparatus, you can still enjoy the phenomenon. 

When you look at the sky during the day or at sunset what do you see? It’s likely you’ve noticed that the sky is blue, and sunsets are red. I see that too, but I also think about the jumble of collisions between photons and the particles in the sky. The red photons are less likely to be back scattered than the blue ones… So in the end, the red ones get jumbled less, and reach my eye directly as the sun is setting. The blue photons scatter more and spread across the sky. Each of those trajectories involves equations describing the motion of the photons and one could try to follow them too. But actually, there are so many that no one can really follow them all. Instead, it is their emergent behavior that can be tracked in some collective way. You might think that that emergent dance of photons is all of the beauty in and of itself. You, like me, might find all the fun in determining the governing equations and finding their solution. Or you might remain steadfast that the beauty lies in a visually arresting sunset as if it were a painting. Regardless, the beauty comes out from science! 

On my experience delivering a webinar...

I recently participated as a speaker in a Webinar for the American Chemical Society (ACS.) It was only the second webinar that I have delivered. My first was held on January 2013 as part of the monthly meeting series of the Lehigh Valley Local section of the ACS. They were an early adopter of the medium. That is, they were quick to figure out that it's cost effective to host speakers from a distance while also addressing a greater number of their members. The latter is particularly important to them because they cover a large geographic area placing any particular choice of meeting location too far from most of their members. My host, Lorena Tribe, helped me learn how to use questions through the presentation effectively in order to engage their web audience. I found the technique to be so successful that I have retained and used the questions (in think-pair-share style) as I present our work (on the energetics of proteins) at department seminars.

As a consequence, when I was asked to participate in the ACS Webinar, I was initially not phased by the opportunity. That is, until I learned that the audience would include nearly 400 participants. Fortunately, the ACS staff was similarly awesome. They provided all the necessary infrastructure and great user support. All I had to do was put my slides together just like I do for any other seminar. The inclusion of my industrial collaborator, Stephen Quirk, framed my otherwise academic discussion into one that was more accessible for a broader (viz. industrial) audience. Plus he did all the hard work of selecting the questions for me to answer during the Q and A. All-in-all my total time investment was probably less than four hours. Moreover, we reached a large audience and one that I probably would not have "seen" otherwise. That's a high benefit to cost ratio which I consider a big win.

If you missed my Webinar on "Digitally Pulling Proteins: Molecular Dynamics Simulations," you might still be able to hear it at http://acswebinars.org/digital-proteins. At present, it's available only for view by ACS members.

Power of analogies in science

If you know how a basketball spins on each of its axes, then it turns out that you also know how a classical methane molecule spins. Such analogical pairings are useful because they allow you to better understand the less familiar of the pair through what you know of the other. The trouble, of course, is that analogies are often imperfect. Not every property is directly connected between the pair. So you have to be careful to assign which are mappable. For example, you certainly won't be able to play basketball with methane despite the analogy with respect to rotations.

Meanwhile, mapping a problem to one that is even more difficult to solve sounds like a bad idea. But if the more difficult problem solves itself them you just might win out after all. Toshiyuki Nakagaki and his colleagues at Hokkaido University did just this, twice. First, they showed that they could map simple mazes onto a board in which mold could grow. It turns out that after a while, the mold grows best along the shortest path between the ends. It would be very difficult to simulate the mold growth, and yet the analogy allows the mold to solve a complicated optimization problem for us. It turns out that you can replace the maze with a real problem related to finding the best possible train network connecting some number of cities over a selected terrain. Now the mold can be used to find the optimal rail network. For each of these two analogies, Toshiyuki Nakagakii received ig Nobel awards. I mention him, in particular, because I got a chance to meet him while I was in Japan. And now, I wonder if I might be able to map the solution of a chemical reaction pathway to his mold growths?!

In detail, the dates and prizes of the teams recognized by ig Nobels for mold growths mentioned above are:

2008 ig nobel in Cognitive science: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero, Akio Ishiguro, and Ágota Tóth, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.

2010 ig nobel in Transportation Planning: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.

Scientists gossip too! (With a shout out to @ChemBark)

In any given academic discipline, there simply aren't that many people in research active departments. In part, this is because there just aren't that many primarily graduate institutions (PGIs) as classified by the Carnegie Institution.  In chemistry, there are well over 100 such departments, with USNews and World Report ranking the top 140. The NSF also keeps track of chemistry departments according to research expenditures using federal research dollars. Not surprisingly, departments with larger expenditures tend to be larger. (At the very least, they need more people to use the money.) In the top 50 of these departments, there are approximately 1600 professors. That number is smaller than the number of students in the high school I attended as a teenager. It's also small enough that it gives rise to all sorts of overlapping social networks, and intrigue....

That's right. Intrigue. The questions include: Who got their first job and where. Who got tenure, and sadly who didn't. Who's moving where. How much money was so and so offered to go where, and why they did or did not take the offer. Who got which prize or honor. Put two chemistry professors in a room who've never met before. First they'll tire themselves out discussing their latest research results and how they might help the other one advance their research projects. Then, they will catch their second wind discussing other chemists that they know in common. Of course, social media has a role to play here too. A very good blog, ChemBark, tracks, among many things, the latest academic hires and poaches in chemistry. It's kept current through blog replies providing information that is used to update the main post. (In a sense the page is a moderated wiki.) As it's impossible to hide who is visiting a given department and when, this crowdsourced updating works remarkably well. That is true as long as the readers of ChemBark span all of chemistry. That's not quite the case as I noticed that several theory hires were missing!! Which isn't necessarily ChemBark's fault; it's just an indication of the breadth of chemistry spanned by his reply-writing readership or my overly sensitive perspective about my own subfield of chemistry. 

Blogging Chemists; Everyone is Doing It? (#Chemistry)

You wouldn't be surprised to know that I sometimes find myself in circles of chemists. In those circles, when I mention the fact that I've started blogging, the first thing I hear is "Did you you know that Michelle Francl has a blog?" Indeed, she was the first person I asked about how to do this right! (All of the blame for my mistakes, though, go entirely to me.) Ever since I met Michelle, I've been priviledged to see how quickly she adopts new cyberenabled technologies to communicate her science. She was among the first (if not the first) of us to podcast chemistry lectures. She's maintained chemistry blogs for nearly a decade. Check her out at Culture of Chemistry and on posts at the Sceptical Chymist. (One blog isn't enough for her!)

This naturally leads to the question as to which other chemists blog? Paul Bracher maintains ChemBark that is certainly a blog (and a very good one at that!), but is also part wiki through its comments and re-editing. He'll be starting a faculty position at Saint Louis this fall. A group of chemists aggregate their posts at Chemistry Blog. One of their Staff Bloggers, Kenneth Hanson, is starting a faculty position at Florida State this Fall. In one series of posts, he's currently recounting the process of securing a chemistry faculty position. Though it's "obvious" for us insiders, it is evidently not so for would-be professors. Hanson is leveling the playing field through this series of mentoring posts. It's perhaps not surprising that this new generation is experimenting with social media as a way to advance their science! 

Beyond trailblazing senior faculty members, like Michelle, I'm also curious about the extent to which others are jumping into this pool. Among my own colleagues, Andrew Lyon maintains a blog embedded within his group's website. David Scholl does the same. Of course, most colleges and universities are now paying their press teams to maintain these dissemination channels. So perhaps blogging is the new normal for chemists?!