One man's trash is another man's science song

Our featured science story of the week is Turning garbage into gas (from The Economist).

Appropriately tweaked, the destruction of organic materials (including paper and plastics) by plasma torches produces a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called syngas. That, in turn, can be burned to generate electricity. Add in the value of the tipping fees that do not have to be paid if rubbish is simply vaporised, plus the fact that energy prices in general are rising, and plasma torches start to look like a plausible alternative to burial.

A science song that aligns fairly well with this story is "Making biogas is a gas, gas, gas" by T. H. Culhane. Note, however, the difference between syngas, discussed in the article, and biogas, discussed in the song. The gases produced are different -- syngas is carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H₂), while biogas usually consists mostly of methane (CH₄) -- and they are produced by different processes, with biogas arising from the metabolism of living organisms such as bacteria.

Hey, I was on TV again!

Sorry for yet another bit of self-promotion, but here I am in "UW professor a mad scientist behind songs about science," a KING 5 TV piece that aired earlier tonight.

Another personal anecdote

On January 6th I gave a brief presentation -- "Global health, neglected diseases, and drug development" -- to students in Glacier Peak High School's biotechnology program. At the end of it I tacked on an a cappella rendition of a song about malaria written by my boss. A couple of weeks later I received a very nice thank-you card signed by 21 of the students. Although they only had space to write a sentence or two apiece, 14 of them mentioned the song!

Although we cannot conclude anything about my singing ability or the students' comprehension of the song lyrics, the song was obviously memorable. And if any of the students turn their attention to malaria again in the future, they may well recall the existence of this song, search for it on YouTube or my database, and perhaps digest the words and ponder their meaning. That's exactly the sort of informal learning that we want to encourage.

Antimatter hey, antimatter ho...

Jonathan Coulton, who we've mentioned before, is somewhat famous for his "Thing a Week" project, in which he recorded a new song every week for a year. A pretty strict schedule ... and yet downright lax compared to that of Jonathan Mann, who has been posting a new song to YouTube every single day for over two years running! His Song A Day #686 ("CERN Created and Held Anti-Matter") is our selection as this week's Science Song of the Week. Feel free to sing along with the chorus: "Antimatter hey, antimatter ho -- our model of the universe needs you, bro...."



Mann's song was chosen because it may serve as a fun entry point into a recent Science News article, "Sizing up the electron," which explains the connection between electrons and antimatter as follows.

[The electron] inspired the mathematical equation that first hinted at the existence of antimatter, the exotic, oppositely charged counterpart to ordinary matter.

Now the electron is poised to go one step further, by helping scientists understand why matter triumphed over antimatter in the early universe. In theory, the Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts, but if so they would have annihilated each other and left nothing behind.

Though the standard model of particle physics, the mathematical framework for explaining how stuff is held together, can't quite account for how matter beat out antimatter, some theories that go beyond the standard model do. By carefully measuring the shape of the electron, through a particular property known as the electric dipole moment, scientists think they can narrow those theories down to get at the one that best reflects reality.

"The electron EDM is one of the places where there should be a good chance of seeing some new phenomena that can't be explained in the standard model, and could in turn help to explain this matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe," says physicist David DeMille of Yale University.

I'm glad I have a boss who sings too

I got a rare call on my office phone this past Friday at about 4:30 PM. It was my boss, calling in from California. We chatted for a couple of minutes and then I said, "Look, I'm sorry but I have to go. We're, ah, making a music video about the lab's research."

I would have preferred not to cut off my boss with such a frivolous-sounding excuse, but felt safe in doing so. He himself has been known to sing about medicine in public. Besides, the video was sort of meant to celebrate the work being done by his group. In general terms, this entails the very early stages of drug development for infectious diseases. Like most biomedical research, it requires a constant influx of grant money ... which is why I called the song "Money 4 Drugz."



Many thanks to Ryan Choi, who directed the video, and everyone else who helped!