Eye of the Mind

8220;Design and the Elastic Mind,8221; Galison said approvingly, is different 8212; playful, yet respectful of the science that informs each object on display. 8220;It8217;s science in a new key,8221; he said. In this exhibition, Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the museum8217;s department of architecture and design, gathered the work of designers and scientists, meeting in the sweet spot on a cultural Venn diagram where the two disciplines overlap.

Absinthe8217;s workings still remains a mystery
Absinthe was the drink of choice in the seedy brothels and cafes depicted by the 19th-century French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It reputedly drove people mad and was eventually banned in many places. The psychological effects aside, absinthe has an unusual property, one shared by Pernod, ouzo and other anise-flavoured drinks. It turns cloudy when water is added. A plant-derived oil responsible for the drink8217;s distinctive flavour is fully dissolved in the undiluted liquor which is at least 45 percent alcohol, the rest being water. When more water is added, the oil comes out of solution and forms little droplets. These make the drink cloudy. In the current issue of Langmuir, a journal of the American Chemical Society, a team of Dutch chemists led by Erik van der Linden of Wageningen University explored the physics of this phenomenon. Equations predict that the more watery the mixture, the longer the drink will remain cloudy. That is because it should be harder for the oil molecules to coalesce into large droplets. The equations also predict that the higher the water content, the longer it will take for the oil to 8220;cream out8221; on the surface. The Dutch experiments, however, showed just the opposite. The more alcoholic the mixture, the longer the cloudiness lasted and the slower the creaming.

All species at the click of a mouse
Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 ft long. And you8217;d have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered. It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a website called the Encyclopedia of Life eol.org. On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, introduced the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million. While many of those pages may be sparse at first, the authors hope that the world8217;s scientific community will pool all of its knowledge on the pages. Unlike a page of paper, a page of the Encyclopedia of Life can hold as much information as scientists can upload. 8220;It8217;s going to have everything known on it, and everything new is going to be added as we go along,8221; said Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and now serves as its honorary chairman. Wilson has been involved with similar projects that failed. But in the past few years major advances in databases have made the goal more realistic. Today biologists can consult databases that hold DNA sequences from hundreds of thousands of species, for example. There are also more detailed databases about groups of species, like mammals, fungi and parasites. In 2003, Wilson wrote a paper in which he called for all that information to be available in one place. NYT

A natural 8216;thermostat8217; may protect coral from bleaching
Some coral reefs in naturally warm waters near Australia appear to be relatively unaffected by the kind of climate-change-induced 8220;coral bleaching8221; that has damaged reefs in regions where water temperatures have risen more dramatically, scientists have found. The findings, published in the online journal Geophysical Research Letters, appear to support a theory that a natural 8220;ocean thermostat8221; prevents surface water temperatures from climbing above 88 degrees Fahrenheit in open oceans, the researchers said. Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and the Australian Institute of Marine Science studied the correlation between sea temperatures and bleaching8212;a whitening caused by a loss of algae8212;by analysing sea-surface temperatures from 1950 to 2006 in tropical waters. They concluded that reefs that have evolved in naturally warm waters may enjoy a degree of protection from global warming by the 8220;ocean thermostat,8221; while reefs in cooler waters do not.