Tea with Science

Night has fallen in the tropics. Beneath the ocean surface, a soft body and swaying tentacles reach up from a skeletal cup. This is a polyp, the individual of the coral reef. Its tentacles are armed with stinging tips, ready to bring any passing plankton into the body. The polyp is not alone. Its colony of identical swaying polyps may have been around for centuries. Panning further out, the colony is part of a reef that could be thousands of years old and more than a thousand kilometres long. Credit:  NOAA /Julie Bedford A generation ago, coral reefs were thought to be immutable. Colonies might occasionally perish at the force of a hurricane or predator, but the overall reefs would carry on, providing a quarter of marine life with food or shelter, providing developing countries with a quarter of their fish catch, providing shorelines with storm protection, and providing jobs in tourism. Then in 2006, two common corals were listed as threatened. In little more than the decad...

17th February, 2018 Mid-Hudson Valley, New York Snow is promised this evening, and we are watching for those first chubby flakes to break the dark. When they come, they’ll drift in soft clusters, they’ll stick to our woolly gloves, and the kids will look skywards to catch them on their tongues. So we imagine. Stellar plate, by  Alexey Kljatov  /  CC BY-NC 2.0 The reality may be different: wet globules sticking to our eyelashes, pellets hurling themselves into our down-turned faces, or something so fine that we won’t at first be certain whether it’s rain or snow. What’s happening up in those clouds right now? What type of snow are they making? All snowflakes, the beautiful and the plain cold ugly, start out when water vapor crystallizes around a speck of dust or pollen in a cloud. The water molecules arrange themselves into repeating hexagons, one water molecule at every corner of every hexagon. Different crystals take different structures,...

Imagine yourself a space tourist, standing on the moon and looking back at those fluff-white clouds gliding across the Earth. You can gaze on that view as long as you like, but you’ll never see Earthrise nor Earthset from the surface of the moon. The Earth will stay in one place and instead of watching it travel across the sky, you'll get to watch it spin. Our 1st glimpse of the far side, 1959/ Luna 3 , by  OKB-1 You would see the Earth spin from the moon because the moon takes the same time to make one full rotation as it takes to orbit the Earth, a little over 27 days. As a result, the moon always shows us the same face. It’s a leisurely rotating pace compared to the Earth’s whirling, 365 times for each single orbit around the Sun. Long ago, when the moon was young, it span a lot faster. As it did so, the Earth’s gravity was felt more strongly on whichever part of the moon was facing the Earth, just as the moon’s gravity tugs at the Earth’s oceans to produce tides. Th...

Plant an apple seed from the juiciest apple you ever ate, then sit back and wait ten years. You might move away in the meantime, but you won’t forget your little apple tree. Take a pilgrimage to see the result of your patience: ripe apples. They’ll look a little different from that memory of ten years ago, but bite into one and… euugh! Spit it out and stare in horror. Mutsu - my favourite:-) The saying is wrong; the apple always falls far from the tree. Every seed in every apple contains a different combination of genes from its two parents, and only occasionally does the crossing result in a tree with a good tasting apple. It’s a problem that was solved thousands of years ago by grafting. Apple growers discovered they could dispense with seeds by inserting a twig with a bud from a desired tree into the base of a less desirable tree with the top cut off. The resulting apples, barring mutations, would all be as delicious as those from the first tree. It was an early form of clon...

If history is written by the victors, the story of life on Earth belongs to blue-green cyanobacteria. Since they first appeared in the oceans perhaps 3 billion years ago, they are thought to have caused mass extinction, triggered climate change so catastrophic that even the equator was covered in glaciers, and taken dominion over the land by embedding themselves into every plant in the world. Spirulina /by Will Power / CC BY-ND 2.0 That's quite a profile for simple little blue-green bacteria that we usually come across as toxic “scum” on ponds, or as health-promising spirulina. When cyanobacteria first evolved, there was very little oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, and hence no ozone layer to block out the Sun's deadly UV radiation. Primitive life therefore confined itself to the oceans, using chemicals such as sulfur to make food. Cyanobacteria did things differently. It absorbed the sun’s energy to make food by photosynthesis, creating oxygen as a by-product, ju...

In a few weeks’ time, the oyamel fir forests high in Mexico’s mountains will start to twitch. Millions of orange and black wings will lift from the trees, as overwintering monarch butterflies leave their winter shelter to start their last journey. The flight ahead is short compared with the one they made late last year, but their fat reserves from autumn feasting are down to just a few milligrams. The priorities now are to mate and to find milkweed on which to lay their eggs, providing food for the next generation. Monarchs in Motion/Image: Tarnya Hall / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 These butterflies were themselves born under a milkweed leaf perhaps 2500 miles away, as summer neared its end last year. How did they find the energy for such an arduous journey, and how did they all find their way from across the northeastern USA and Canada to just a dozen overwintering sites in Mexico? The flapping of wings would not take the monarch butterfly very far. The small body can scarcely carry enough...

In 1905, long before Albert Einstein was a household name, the young man spent his days assessing inventions as a patent clerk. I suppose that made physics his hobby. Yet that year he reasoned his way to a whopping four papers, plus a doctoral thesis. These weren’t minor papers making incremental advancements in an esoteric area of knowledge. These were game changers. Among them, Einstein changed the way scientists perceive light, and unified time and space. Einstein’s iconic equation didn’t appear until the last of his papers that year. It was a short paper, almost an addendum to his earlier work on special relativity, a short paper in which Einstein reached "a very interesting conclusion”: that mass and energy are two forms of the same thing. E=mc 2 . Energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. Since the speed of light multiplied by itself is a very large number, a little bit of mass is equivalent to a huge amount of energy. Energy and mass ar...