Rocks on Mars

Garden of the Gods

We know a lot about rocks, and the ways they react to wind, water, sunlight, heat, and other factors. Geologists can look at a strange rock formation, such as Colorado's Garden of the Gods, at tell you exactly what happened to create these odd structures. However, as with all science, there's always more to discover. The newest discovery is of a completely new kind of landform... on Mars.

This new kind of structure is called a periodic bedrock ridge. This sounds quite technical, but in reality, that is exactly what the structures look like: ridges in the bedrock at a regular (or periodic) distance from each other. In fact, it looks quite similar to sand dunes, at a first look. However, instead of being grains of sand blown into piles by the wind, they are tracks eroded by the wind into the bedrock. 

Periodic Bedrock Ridges
From Science Daily

David Montgomery, of the University of Washington, suggested that these features formed because the rock has bands of softer material within it, and that the erosion is of an unusual sort, that works perpendicular to the wind direction. The hypothesis is that the high speed winds on Mars are thrown into the air when they collide with a solid land formation, and that these periodic bedrock ridges form when the winds return to the surface. In order to visualize this, imagine driving a remote-control car. Jump it off a ramp, and onto a memory-foam type surface. The place where it impacts will have deeper tire tracks than anywhere else. That car is like the wind on Mars, and that impact point is where Montgomery and his team believe the ridges form.

This research is particularly interesting because there don't seem to be any analogs, to date, of this kind of feature on our own planet. On Earth, the presence of water means that very rarely will bedrock be eroded by wind alone. This difference means that we can understand not only Mars geology better, by utilizing these landforms to look at the beds in the Martian surface and figure out more about the geologic history of the planet, but also understand better how erosion works and parse out, here on Earth, the differences between different types of erosion, and the characteristics that separate one from another.

TED-Ed and Scientific Unknows

Sorry for the recent silence. This is a crazy semester for me but hopefully things will lighten up soon. Anyways, I was recently perusing the interwebs and was pointed to a new TED initiative by Ron Garan on Google+.

From the website, TED-Ed's goal is to

...Capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos. A new site, which will launch in early April 2012, will feature these new TED-Ed Originals as well as some powerful new learning tools.

I think this is a wonderful idea. TED has the connections to bring together great minds and create a wonderful product. I was going through the videos currently up and couldn't help but watch one focusing on unanswered questions. I highly recommend it as it mirrors some of my own thoughts on why these mysteries need to be shared. After all it's questions, not facts, that drive curiosity.

I am really excited to see what results this project produces. TED is currently looking for teachers and animators so if you think you would be a good fit, or know someone else who would be, put in their name. To close here is another TED-Ed video about the awesomeness of science by Mythbuster Adam Savage.

Basic Rocket Science

Rocket science may not be as hard as you think. Check out this video to learn about how rocket propulsion works:




h/t to Henry Reich on Google+

A (Cricket) Song Long Forgotten

Along with most soft tissue, color, and a host of other features of prehistoric life, the sounds those long-gone creatures made are lost through the depth of time. While we make inferences about the sounds made by Parasaurolophus, Tyrannosaurus rex, the earliest birds, and the other animals living at the time, those projections are just just guesses, based on an approximation of acoustic and air flow properties. If those creatures had vocal chords, or any soft-tissue mechanism for creating sound, then we today have no way of recreating those noises.

A singing modern cricket
From what-when-how

However, there are some animals that don't use soft tissue and complex skull structure to create sound. Modern crickets, katydids, and other insects in the Orthoptera order create sound by running a row of "teeth" on one wing across the other, similar to a violinist running a bow across the strings. These fine details, however, very rarely preserve in the fossil record. It was not until a very detailed specimen, from North China, was discovered that Dr Fernando Montealegre-Zapata and Professor Daniel Robert, experts in biomechanics, were able to determine how ancient crickets made noise, and what they would have sounded like. This 165 million-year-old cricket had similar stridulating organs (the mechanism used to make sound) to modern species, something that's never been seen before in a fossil. The team built a reconstruction of that structure, and compared it to many modern species, to determine what it sounded like. In fact, the fossil was so detailed that they could fully recreate the song of this species, named Archaboilus musicus. You can listen to it here.


Unless the laws of physics suddenly allow us to build a time machine to the past, we will never know exactly how the Jurassic landscape sounded. The discovery of A. musicus, and hopefully more insects like it, along with understanding the sounds made by amphibians, mammals, dinosaurs, and reptiles, based on what information we can glean from the fossils and what we know of modern creatures, will help us to slowly piece together a more dynamic landscape of the past, engaging not just the eyes, but the ears as well.

Source: Science Daily- Fossil cricket reveals Jurassic love song
Wired - 165-Million-Year-Old Cricket Song Comes Back to Life

The Extreme Tardigrade

Most extremophiles are bacteria, living in places like the deep-sea hydrothermal vents, sulfuric hot pools, oxygenless layers in the ocean, and other environments that are deadly to every other form of life. But there are a few extremophile animals, such as the tardigrade.

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Impressed yet? These invertebrates are some of my favorite living animals, and are a fascinating study in how evolution works. We still barely understand extremophiles of this sort, and there's a lot more research to be done. If you are interested in learning more, there are some resources below the break.