I’ll be the ticket if you’re my collector
I’ve got the fare if you’re my inspector
I’ll be the luggage if you’ll be the porter
I’ll be the parcel if you’ll be the sorter

—”Love Song” by Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible, Rat Scabies, and Algy Ward

“Love Song” is the opening track of the Damned’s album Machine Gun Etiquette, which I bought in 1979 when it was first released as a vinyl LP. The punk band’s deft use of metaphor in the opening verse has always reminded me that analogy, metaphor, and other tropes are not just for poets and orators. Indeed, physicists and the people who write about physics deploy them freely.

Perhaps the most straightforward use of metaphor in physics is for descriptive labels. In 1937 John Slater approximated the atomic potentials in a crystal as a lattice of nonoverlapping wells. By 1961—at least according to the earliest reference I could find—Slater’s approximation had acquired the apt, delightful, and easy-to-recall name “muffin tin.”

In 1997 observations made by the SOHO spacecraft cleared up a mystery having to do with the inactive, “quiet” regions of the Sun’s corona. Thanks to its then-unprecedented resolution and sensitivity, the SOHO‘s Michaelson Doppler Imager revealed that the quiet corona’s magnetic field arises not from plasma that diffuses from active regions, but from the magnetic activity of the quiet corona itself. To Alan Title the newly discovered field lines that sprout from the quiet corona resembled the looped tufts of a carpet—hence the name he devised, “magnetic carpet.”

Some concepts in physics can be hard to convey, especially to nonphysicists. As an explanatory tool, my fellow science writers and I sometimes use analogy and metaphor to relate an unfamiliar concept to a familiar one.

For example, in a 2004 news story for Physics Today I compared molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, which seek to track the motion of every particle, with a new variant of the Monte Carlo algorithm that Nicholas Metropolis and his collaborators devised in 1953:

So, if MD is like a movie, the Metropolis algorithm is like a sparse set of shuffled snapshots. If you simulated a cocktail party with the Metropolis algorithm, you wouldn’t see dynamical events, such as guests arriving and departing, or rare events, such as a waiter refilling a punchbowl. But, taken together, the Metropolis snapshots would fairly represent the party in full swing. From them, you could deduce whether, on average, people had enjoyed themselves.

However, sometimes analogies and metaphors are not used for literary effect, but for literal comparison. Earlier this year my colleague Richard Fitzgerald wrote about a tabletop experiment that sought to mimic the radiation that leaks out of a black hole via a mechanism proposed in 1974 by Steven Hawking.

Remarkably—at least at first glance—the experiment involved water flowing at high speed over and around obstacles. Because of the similarity of the equations that underlie both Hawking radiation and the waves shed by the obstacles, the two systems are analogous to each other. But whereas one system, the waves, is easily observed in the lab, the other, Hawking radiation, isn’t.

Whether studying one member of an analogous pair brings true physical insight into the behavior of the other member is not obvious. To justify evoking the analogy, you have to be sure that both systems are governed by the same mathematics. Yet to make that justification, you have to understand both systems well—which would seem to vitiate the need to evoke the analogy in the first place.

That said, knowing the equations that govern a system isn’t the same as understanding its behavior. Superconductivity, ferromagnetism, and other electronic phenomena could emerge from quite simple Hamiltonians, but the long-range many-body interactions embodied in the Hamiltonians are too complex to calculate or even to simulate.

But in principle, a cold-atom analogue of an electronic system could be engineered to test whether, say, the Hubbard model is sufficient to capture the onset of superconductivity in a high-T_c cuprate. Indeed, several research groups around the world are working toward that end—which, if achieved, would be a literal, not metaphorical, triumph.

Charles Day

Thanks to Maire Evans for suggesting the topic of analogies.

Popularized by a 1994 Dilbert cartoon, buzzword bingo is a satirical game that exposes the lazy, fatuous use of clichés in the corporate world.

To play, each person fills out a bingo card by writing in each of the squares a different hackneyed word or phrase, such as “set the expectation moving forward,” “open the kimono,” or “reach out to stakeholders.” Then, cards in hand, the players listen to an executive’s speech, attend a business meeting, or read an annual report. When they encounter a word or phrase on their card, they cross it off. The goal is to check off all the squares in a single row or column. Whoever finishes first says—or, given the likely setting, whispers—”Bingo!” and wins.

Last month, media consultant and blogger Adam Sherk ran 3000 corporate press releases through a text filter that had been primed to pull out buzzwords. He reported his results in a blog entry.

Although not as elaborate as “socialize the concept” or “operationalize the process,” Sherk’s buzzwords have lost their impact through overuse. The top nine, listed below, each occurred more than 200 times.

1. leading
2. solution
3. best
4. innovate/innovative/innovator
5. leader
6. top
7. unique
8. great
9. extensive

By coincidence, the e-mail that drew my attention to Sherk’s list arrived in my inbox just before a press release from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Entitled “Closing in on the Pseudogap,” the press release describes three experiments aimed at elucidating an enigmatic state of electronic matter in a high-temperature superconductor, lead bismuth strontium lanthanum copper oxide.

I’ve written news stories for Physics Today about superconductivity. The topic is difficult to get across to the magazine’s readers who don’t work in the field. It’s even harder to get across to the science journalists who read press releases. The author of the Lawrence Berkeley press release, Paul Preuss, did a great job.

Now I expect you’re wondering whether Preuss used any of Sherk’s buzzwords. The answer is no and yes.

In the 1632 words that Preuss wrote to describe and explain the experiments, not one of Sherk’s buzzwords appears. But in the 83-word paragraph that, I presume, Preuss and other authors of Lawrence Berkeley press releases are obliged to append, three of them appear:

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provides solutions to the world’s most urgent scientific challenges including clean energy, climate change, human health, novel materials, and a better understanding of matter and force in the universe. It is a world leader in improving our lives and knowledge of the world around us through innovative science, advanced computing, and technology that makes a difference. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory managed by the University of California for the DOE Office of Science.

So my advice to the Lawrence Berkeley press office amounts to a challenge: Try to rewrite your one-paragraph description of the lab so that it sounds fresher and less corporate. From an end-user perspective, it would be a win–win solution!

Charles Day

I’ll be spending this week at the American Physical Society’s March meeting, which is being held this year in Dallas, Texas. The meeting is huge, not only in the number of attendees but also in the number of talks. Each day is divided into four three-hour time slots; each time slot contains 45 simultaneous sessions; and each session features 5–11 talks!

Even if I were still a researcher whose work was confined to one or two subfields, I’d have difficulty choosing which talks to attend and which to forgo. Now that I work for a physics magazine whose mission is to inform all kinds of physicists about all kinds of physics, the challenge of devising a personal March-meeting program is even greater.

What’s more, if, through writing a few stories about a particular topic—say, the various quantum Hall effects—I’ve become familiar with it, I should resist the temptation to attend sessions devoted to that topic. Rather, I should seek instead unfamiliar topics, which could prove to be just as interesting to me and to Physics Today‘s readers.

Having been to about half a dozen March APS meetings, I’ve devised a set of tips to help me get the most out of big science conferences. Although they’re more relevant to science journalists than to researchers, I list them here because you might find them helpful.

• Attend sessions made up of invited talks.

At least at the March APS meeting, invited-only sessions offer the best prospect of understanding, albeit partially, the science content of the talks. Invited talks tend to be longer, which gives the speakers the chance to properly introduce their topics to nonspecialists. Short, contributed talks, by contrast, have to jump right to the results, leaving nonspecialists in a state of puzzlement.

• Don’t spend all your time in talks.

Thanks to the arXiv preprint server, it’s possible to be au courantwith many fields of physics without leaving your lab, office, or home. When we go to meetings, it should be to meet people, as well as to learn about new work.

• Introduce yourself to people.

Accosting strangers can be daunting and isn’t perhaps a priority if you’re not a science journalist. But you can expand your network of acquaintances and potential collaborators by introducing yourself to what I call near strangers. These are people whose papers you’ve read and admired or who collaborate with your collaborators but not yet with you.

• Visit the exhibit hall.

Even if you’re a theorist who isn’t ever going to buy any of the spectrometers, lasers, cryostats, and other shiny new tools on display in the exhibit hall, you’ll find strolling through the hall’s aisles a worthwhile diversion. For one thing, people tend to visit the hall alone, which makes them easier to approach than if they’re outside a session, talking with their friends and collaborators.

If you have additional tips about getting the most out of big meetings, please leave a comment here. And if you see me at a meeting, please say hello!

Charles Day

The title comes from a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting, which was held in Washington, DC, and ended yesterday.

The annual AAAS meetings are somewhat odd. At the other meetings I attend, scientists give talks for other scientists. At AAAS meetings, scientists give talks for science journalists. As you might expect, AAAS talks are accessible and informative for nonexperts. However, if your job, like mine, entails keeping up with advances in a particular field, you’ll learn more from the sessions devoted to topics outside your field—which is why I spent Saturday afternoon learning about the ecology of Earth’s aerosphere.

Belying the sweeping scope of its title, the aeroecology session was about using radar, lidar, and other imaging modalities to track and count bats, birds, and airborne insects. The narrow focus did not lessen my interest. Rather, I learned that just gathering ecologically relevant radar data, let alone using them, is a fascinating problem that’s rewarding to solve.

The map, which you can enlarge by clicking on it, shows the locations of the 159 high-resolution Doppler radars operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Together, the networked radars—known as NEXRAD—provide meteorologists with a detailed and near-complete view of precipitation over the continental US.

The network is in the midst of a major upgrade. Old radars that use only horizontally polarized waves are being replaced with more advanced radars that use both horizontally and vertically polarized waves. By rapidly switching between the two polarizations, the new radars can tell whether precipitation is rain, sleet, hail, or snow.

They can also tell the difference between precipitation and airborne fauna. Indeed, meteorologists routinely filter out from their radar maps the signals from swarms of bats and other animals. Ecologists, however, are using the data to better understand how colonies of insectivorous bats and birds wax and wane in response to climate and other factors.

In her talk, ecologist Winifred Frick of the University of California, Santa Cruz, described using radar data to determine what local weather conditions influence when colonies of Brazilian free-tailed bats debouch from their caves for their evening feed.

But what of the physics promised in the title? One of the session speakers, Phillip Chilson of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, is a physicist. Among the problems he tackles is how to get as much information as possible from NEXRAD. Dual polarization radar, he said, could be used to distinguish long skinny insects, such as dragonflies, from round squat insects, such as bumblebees.

At the end of the session, the speakers fielded questions from their audience. One questioner asked about the challenges of working in an interdisciplinary team. Language—or rather jargon—was cited as one barrier to effective teamwork, but its negative effect was more than offset by the benefits of interdisciplinary teamwork.

Frick recalled that before she worked with Chilson, she tended to regard the atmosphere as a static medium, a place for bats and other aerosphere-dwelling animals to fly and feed in. From Chilson and his colleagues, she learned to appreciate the atmosphere’s dynamic properties—which, as it turns out, are important to the bats, birds, and insects that she studies.

Charles Day

When Physics Today surveys its print readers and logs the habits of its online readers, the Physics Update department routinely comes top or near the top in popularity. Many online readers evidently like the department so much they bypass the homepage and go directly to the Physics Update page.

In its current incarnation Physics Update serves 250-word summaries of research papers. The summaries appear online on Mondays and Thursdays as soon as they emerge from editing. Not all the online summaries appear later in the monthly print issue, the exceptions being summaries of papers written up at greater length in the Search and Discovery department.

Physics Update has always striven to cover interesting research, but its format, audience, and editorial home have all changed over the years. You might be surprised to learn that the department made its debut in 1990—not as part of Physics Today, but as a service for science journalists.

Devised and written by Phil Schewe of the American Institute of Physics’s media relations department, Physics News Update, as it was called, came out once a week and featured 50-word summaries of news stories about physics. Here’s the first issue, dated 28 September 1990.

FIFTH FORCE experiments are increasingly giving negative results. New measurements have demonstrated that a fifth force could be no more than about a trillionth as strong as gravity. (Science News, 22 September, p. 183)

THE MAGELLAN SPACECRAFT map of Venus (2% of the surface so far) provides images 10 to 100 better than previous radar surveys. Strange tectonics–plentiful volcanoes and weird fracture systems–are at work. (NY Times, 26 September, p. A1)

SUPERCONDUCTORS BEYOND 123: Robert Cava of AT&T Bell Labs reviews recent research on the thallium and bismuth superconductors and discusses prospects for higher critical temperatures. (Scientific American, August 1990)

GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE ASTRONOMY may truly come into being in the next few years with the advent of new facilities such as the Caltech-MIT Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. So far only indirect evidence for gravitational waves can be inferred, in this case from the decaying mutual orbit of the two neutron stars in the pulsar system PSR 1913+16. (Mosaic Magazine, Summer 1990, published by the NSF)

SOLAR CELLS may be better at converting sunlight into heat than into electricity, some researchers believe. The record efficiency for conversion to electricity, a tandem GaAs and Si cell at Sandia, is 31%. The theoretical limit is thought to be 40%. But thermal conversion may be more efficient and, besides, a great deal of the world’s energy consumption goes toward the production of heating anyway. (New Scientist, 22 September, p. 48)

METEOR COMPOSITION: unlike earth rocks which in the course of time have been melted and recrystallized into different forms, meteors have remained largely unchanged from when the solar system began and even before. Diamonds found in some meteors may have been produced by chemical vapor deposition, a process (also used in making diamonds artificially) that might occur in the outer layers of stars and supernovas. (New Scientist, 15 September, p. 46)

The first issue was exceptional in that all the items came from the popular press. But within a year, papers in Physical Review Letters, Nature, and other journals provided the raw material, along with press releases from labs and talks at meetings.

The distribution method also changed. The first issues were sent by fax to a modest number of science journalists. Later ones were sent by e-mail to the journalists and to an increasing number of scientists in the physical sciences who appreciated the short, punchy summaries.

Physics Update first appeared in the pages of Physics Today in the magazine’s February 1995 issue, whose cover is reproduced above. The issue was the fourth produced under editor-in-chief Steve Benka. Wanting to provide his readers with more physics news, Steve took Phil’s Physics News Update, edited the items for the magazine’s readership, and ran them on one yellow-tinted page up front.

The new department proved popular with readers and also with advertisers, who’d pay extra to appear on the facing page. Phil and his colleague, Ben Stein, wrote most of the items. Steve wrote some, too. Physics Update ran on page 9 for nearly 10 years.

For the June 2006 issue, Physics Today underwent a major redesign, acquiring not just a facelift but also two new departments, Quick Study and Back Scatter. As part of the redesign, Physics Update migrated to the end of the Search and Discovery department. Introducing the redesign in an editorial, Steve wrote

Thus, all the current research news coverage is logically brought together in one place: In-depth stories of results deemed important by the community are followed by brief notices of research deemed interesting by our editors.

The last significant changes to Physics Update occurred two years ago. In June 2008, Physics Update became the truly online department it is today, accessible to all and updated twice a week. Around the same time, AIP’s media relations department decided Phil’s and Ben’s outreach efforts were best spent doing other things, among them AIP’s Inside Science News Service. Since August 2008, all Physics Update items have been written by Physics Today editors.

In chatting with Phil today, we both realized that his very first Physics News Update of 21 years ago resembled a modern blog. All it lacks are links. If you visit the website of the American Physical Society, you’ll spot, on the left-hand side, a list of short items that could well be called Physics News Update.

Charles Day

Despite subscribing to the Economist for 25 years, I’ve yet to become a regular reader of the newspaper’s Science and Technology department. Because my job entails keeping up to date with scientific developments, the science covered in the Economist is often already familiar. Other stories—a smaller number—describe long-shot ideas that would overthrow current thinking, provided they’re true.

But the lead story in the current issue was neither familiar nor about long-shot science. In “A Spark of Genius,” the Economist‘s anonymous reporter described a paper entitled “Relativity and the Lead-Acid Battery” that had recently appeared in Physical Review Letters.

I encourage you to read the story, which is a tour de force of science writing. Here’s a brief summary.

The University of Helsinki’s Pekka Pyykkö and his colleagues asked themselves a question that you’d think had been answered before: Why are lead–acid batteries—the type that have been used in cars for more than a century—so effective?

The science behind a lead–acid battery is outwardly simple. Each of the battery’s six cells consists of two electrodes dipped in a solution of 35% sulfuric acid and 65% water. The anode is made of lead(IV) oxide; the cathode is made of lead. Immersion in sulfuric acid causes the Pb cathode to shed electrons, which readily accumulate on the PbO₂ anode, creating the all-important potential difference—about 2 V per cell.

Lead belongs to the periodic table’s carbon family, as does tin, which lies just above it. Given the two elements’ similar chemistry, a tin–acid battery ought to work nearly as well as, or even slightly better than, a lead–acid battery, but it doesn’t.

Pyykkö suspected that special relativity might account for lead’s better battery performance. As one gets deeper into the periodic table, the positive charge on an atom’s nucleus becomes bigger. Consequently, the outermost electrons, the ones that participate in chemistry, feel a stronger force—so strong, in the case of lead, that the electrons whizz around the nucleus at 0.6 the speed of light, c.

According to special relativity, a particle traveling with speed v behaves like a particle that’s more massive by a factor, γ, given by

γ = (1 − v²/c²)^−1/2.

The effect of relativity on a lead–acid battery’s electrode materials is opposite but not equal. In lead, the increase in effective mass causes the outer electrons to sink closer to the nucleus. In lead oxide, it deepens the empty potentials into which free electrons can fall. Lead becomes a worse cathode, but lead oxide becomes an even better anode. For tin, γ is a nonnegligible 1.07, but for lead, γ is a chemistry-changing, battery-boosting 1.25.

That relativity influences atomic properties wasn’t new to me. The exotic superconductivity of so-called heavy fermion systems arise from partially filled d and f orbitals. Spin–orbit coupling, the interaction between an electron’s spin and orbital angular momentum, underlies the spin Hall effect and other phenomena. The coupling increases with atomic weight.

In hindsight, Pyykkö’s evocation of special relativity doesn’t seem, well, special. What is remarkable, at least to me, is his choice of problem. In high school and university, we learn how to solve problems that already have worked-out answers. Being a scientist entails identifying new problems, which is sometimes harder than solving them.

Charles Day

Big, scandalous cases of scientific fraud are widely covered in the popular press. In the early 2000s Jan Hendrik Schön of Bell Labs published 21 papers about organic semiconductors: seven in Nature, six in Physical Review Letters, and eight in Science. All of them were withdrawn when it turned out that Schön had faked the results.

Schön’s notoriety was so great that he became the subject not only of news reports, but also of books and even a BBC TV documentary, “The Dark Secret of Hendrik Schön.”

Trends in scientific fraud also make the news, although not as often. Last September a report in Nature about a move to kill off China’s weakest scientific journals began as follows:

Few Chinese scientists would be surprised to hear that many of the country’s scientific journals are filled with incremental work, read by virtually no one and riddled with plagiarism. But the Chinese government’s solution to this problem came as a surprise last week.

Low-key, “routine” cases of scientific fraud don’t appear to be newsworthy. Like shoplifting, vandalism, disorderly conduct, and other misdemeanors, such cases are deemed of local, not national, interest. News of a plagiarized paragraph in a chemistry paper, say, might appear on a chemistry blog; less likely in the New York Times.

But a steady background of petty fraud harms the integrity of science more than sporadic spectacular outrages. A Schön or a Viktor Ninov, who faked evidence of a newly discovered superheavy element, can be excused as a pathological outlier. Widespread fraud suggests something intrinsically wrong with the science establishment.

So I was relieved to hear from Marty Hanna, a Physics Today copy editor, about Retraction Watch. Founded by Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, the blog strives to publicize every fraud-prompted retraction that occurs in the scientific literature.

Marcus and Oransky aren’t the only watchdogs. Academic publishers, both nonprofit and for-profit, are collaborating to implement a software tool, CrossCheck, that screens for plagiarism when a paper is submitted.

Ideally, scientists shouldn’t cheat. Realistically, some scientists, under pressure to succeed, will always succumb to temptation and commit fraud. When they do so, and when the watchdogs catch them, I hope they feel guilty and ashamed. That reaction would mean that efforts of the American Physical Society and others to instill ethical behavior are working.

Charles Day

On Mondays I usually visit Science‘s press site, which contains links to papers that will appear in the journal four days later alongside enticing summaries of the most newsworthy papers. This Monday the paper listed first bore the title “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus.” Its summary read:

Living off Toxic Waste — Bacteria That Munch on Arsenic:

Can you imagine eating toxic waste for breakfast? Researchers have discovered a bacterium that can live and grow entirely off arsenic, reports a new study. The findings point for the first time to a microorganism that is able to use a toxic chemical (rather than the usual phosphate) to sustain growth and life. Arsenic is normally highly toxic to living organisms because it disrupts metabolic pathways, but chemically it behaves in a similar way to phosphate. Scientists have previously found organisms that can chemically alter arsenic; and these organisms have been implicated in ground water poisoning events in Bangladesh and other places in Asia when people have shifted to using borehole or well water to avoid cholera. Now, Felisa Wolfe-Simon and colleagues have found a bacterium able to completely swap arsenic for phosphorus to the extent that it can even incorporate arsenic into its DNA. The salt-loving bacteria, a member Halomonadaceae family of proteobacteria, came from the toxic and briny Mono Lake in California. In the lab, the researchers grew the bacteria in Petri dishes in which phosphate salt was gradually replaced by arsenic, until the bacteria could grow without needing phosphate, an essential building block for various macromolecules present in all cells, including nucleic acids, lipids and proteins. Using radio-tracers, the team closely followed the path of arsenic in the bacteria; from the chemical’s uptake to its incorporation into various cellular components. Arsenic had completely replaced phosphate in the molecules of the bacteria, right down its DNA.

I quote the summary in full so that you can remark for yourselves the utter absence of any hint of extraterrestrial life. On the other hand, the press release I received from NASA on Monday mentioned only the paper’s implications for extraterrestrial life:

NASA SETS NEWS CONFERENCE ON ASTROBIOLOGY DISCOVERY; SCIENCE JOURNAL HAS EMBARGOED DETAILS UNTIL 2 P.M. EST ON DEC. 2

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on
Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact
the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the
study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in
the universe.

So if you awoke to news of poison-eating space aliens in California, credit NASA not Science. But how plausible is the link between the discovery of bacteria that can swap arsenic for phosphorus and extraterrestrial life?

Phosphorus is the ninth most abundant element in living organisms. Its compounds are found in teeth, bones, cell membranes, and a host of important biomolecules, including cells’ main source of chemical fuel, adenosine triphosphate. Phosphate groups also hold together the nucleotides in RNA and DNA.

Because arsenic belongs to the same group in the periodic table as phosphorus, it can readily replace phosphorus in biomolecules. But the arsenated compounds don’t work—hence the element’s toxicity. The newly discovered bacteria are remarkable in that they apparently possess a chemical means of mitigating the toxicity.

But before you start scanning the skies for arsenic-laced M-class planets, keep in mind that arsenic is cosmically rarer than its group V neighbor phosphorus. In Earth’s crust arsenic occurs at a concentration of about 1.5 parts per million. Phosphorus is 1000 times more abundant.

Life as we know it on Earth originated just once, a reflection of its low probability of getting started. I’m therefore skeptical that life forms based on a rare element such as arsenic evolved elsewhere.

I can’t resist ending this blog entry by pointing out another scientific substitution of arsenic for phosphorus. Three years ago in his quest to find semiconductors with interesting magnetic properties, Hideo Hosono and his team from the Tokyo Institute of Technology synthesized a compound with the chemical formula LaOFeP.

The material becomes superconducting at the unremarkably low temperature of 4 K. But the arsenic-substituted compound, when doped with fluorine, superconducts at 26 K, which is uncomfortably high for a normal superconductor. Hosono had discovered a new and exciting class of superconductor.

Despite spawning thousands of papers from excited physicists and chemists around the world, Hosono’s discovery barely registered in the mainstream media.

Charles Day

One of the things my wife and I like to do over Thanksgiving is read magazines, especially unfamiliar ones. A few days before the holiday, we visit Borders or Barnes and Noble and buy a batch of magazines.

The October/November issue of Bust was among our haul. What had caught my eye in the magazine stand, besides the cover’s magenta logo and photo of Helen Mirren, was the line WE ♥ SCIENCE in the top left.

Bust‘s tagline is “for women with something to get off their chests,” but the issue was as much about celebrating women in science and their achievements as it was about airing their grievances.

The opening editorial from Debbie Stoller, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, set the tone. Before introducing feature articles on Antarctic science and the actor and pioneering cryptographer Hedy Lamar, Stoller described her own experiences as a graduate student scientist:

I spent the better part of four years inserting electrodes into the tiny neurons of leeches (true story). But at a certain point, I couldn’t take it anymore. I loved the science part—wondering about how our amazing brains work and trying to puzzle out an answer kept me endlessly fascinated. Instead, it was the daily grind that got to me.

Stoller switched fields from neuroscience to psychology. If she encountered any sexism during her science career, she didn’t say.

Evidence of overt discrimination was also missing, thankfully, from Trina Arpin’s article in the same issue. Arpin profiled several women scientists at various stages of their careers, including three students. One of the students, Sylvana Yelda, is pursuing a PhD in astronomy at UCLA under the guidance of Andrea Ghez. Despite having to write computer code—the equivalent of Stoller’s threading electrodes into leeches—Yelda was quoted as saying “I love what I do. I just really love astronomy.”

But two other students, the University of Connecticut’s Jayinta Banerjee and Sarah Lamb, recalled encountering sexist attitudes that caused them to switch from physics to other fields: Banerjee to biology, Lamb to engineering.

Both women told Arpin that they felt they had to worker harder than men did to prove themselves. If that wasn’t bad enough,

Lamb noticed that her male classmates, who had treated her as an equal when school started, began to emulate their professors’ gender bias. “Watching my class move through the physics program, freshman and sophomore years, we were the best of friends,” she says. But junior year, when the students began working more closely with physics professors on special projects, her male classmates changed. “It was like guys who had supported me turned into the mentors [they worked with],” adopting their professors’ tendencies to openly doubt her abilities and intellect.

Science in general and physics in particular will remain competitive—for the simple reason that telling a scientist not to work hard at something he or she loves, even when it entails tedious tasks, is usually futile.

But science in general and physics in particular don’t have to, and should not, remain hostile to women. The depressing thing about Banerjee’s and Lamb’s experiences is that they didn’t ask for or expect special treatment, just equal treatment.

Charles Day

Recently a colleague of mine forwarded to me a news story from the Cornell Chronicle. The topic was a robotic, mitten-like gripper being developed by physicists and engineers at Cornell and Chicago universities and iRobot, a company based in Bedford, Massachusetts.

As the video shows, the gripper can cope with an impressive variety of objects. Underlying that versatility is a surprisingly simple operating principle.

The blue latex bag that forms the gripper’s skin is filled with ground-up coffee. When the gripper first touches an object, the coffee grounds are free to flow inside the bag. Pushed gently onto the object, the gripper partially envelops it like a squishy, water-filled balloon. The grip is secured when air is sucked out of the bag, jamming the grounds so close together that they no longer flow. Frozen in an object-conforming grasp, the squishy balloon becomes a rigid claw.

When I read the release, two thoughts sprang to mind. The first concerns the physics. Coffee grounds and other granular materials are an active area of research. Unlike Bose–Einstein condensates, quark–gluon plasmas, or ocean–atmosphere interactions, granular materials are relatively easy to study in the lab.

As if to belie that convenience, however, the theory of granular materials is rich and subtle. Indeed, it remains an open question whether the jamming transition that the gripper and other systems manifest is a universal phase transition or merely a detail-dependent change.

My second thought about the gripper was biological. In its relaxed state, the gripper reminded me of an amoeba’s pseudopodia. Could higher animals have evolved grippers based on the jamming transition?

Such what-if questions are tricky to answer because a putative organ might have failed to evolve not because it is biologically infeasible but because by the time the organ could have given the animal an edge in the survival of the fittest, an organ of a different kind could have been irrevocably selected.

Is the gripper biologically infeasible? Possibly not. Fluid-filled bags abound in biology, as do molecular pumps that can move move water and other molecules in and out of cells. My hunch is that animals don’t have grippers based on the jamming transition because such grippers are biologically impractical for some reason.

Regardless of whether the universal gripper inspires you to think about science, the video is strangely compelling. A paper describing the gripper appeared yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Charles Day