Charged 2026

Category: vintage science

  • Insect robots: How do they fly?

     

    “How do airplanes stay afloat?”

    “The same way a bird stays afloat.”

    When we give that answer to a kid, we fondly realize the connection between nature’s creatures and machines, and that the nature influenced creation of many machines from time to time. That is why the Wright brothers spent a great deal of time observing birds in flight and realized that when birds soared into the wind, the air flowed over the curved surface of their wings, and thus generated lift which helps them stay in flight. They noticed the wings of birds minutely, and realized that they change the shape of the wings to turn and maneuver, and thus flaps and stabilizers were born in the airplane wings. In a similar fashion, various insects and birds have influenced designs of many machines for their structural and aerodynamic ability. These creatures not only helped design the structural and aerodynamic systems of large machines, but attracted considerable attention from scientists and engineers for small-scale robots. Today we deep dive into the world of small robots and how they fly!

    Insects were the first organisms on Earth to take to the skies – estimates on the origin of insect flight range from ~320 to ~400 million years ago (Misof et al., 2014). That is a long, long time before vertebrates achieved this feat. Over time, insects mastered their flying ability, and achieved great perfection in speed, agility, and grace in the air. By design, insects such as hover flies and birds such as hummingbird have remarkable abilities to hover in the air, as well as being able to perform aerobatic maneuvers such as sideways or backward flying. The technique that they use is called a flapping wing motion. This remarkable ability is a key in the design of small-scale aircraft for surveillance or reconnaissance. Traditionally, engineers designed a medium to large scale aerodynamic vehicle with traditional mechanical linkage systems (Van Breugel et al., 2008). However, when it comes to an unmanned small-scale aerial vehicle (or even micro-scale that mimics the size of an actual small insect such as a hover fly), one of the key challenges in traditional designs was that the flapping-wing action was not stable because of the power and weight ratio that needs to be achieved to match the hovering and flying abilities of the insects and birds observed in nature.

    Historically, there have been a number of research efforts that focused on the mechanical and structural aspects of a small-scale flying robot design. One such project was the Entomopter project in Georgia Tech (Michelson et al., 1998). The researchers used a chemical muscle to produce linear actuation strain. Two sets of rigid wings (front and back) were placed, and chemical muscle actuated them. Other traditional designs of small-scale flying robots used gears and links for the movements needed for of an airborne vehicle.

    How do the “insect” robots get up in the air?

    In order to achieve a flapping action in-flight to gain altitude, sweeping and the pitching motions are needed to be achieved. The current design is set up to exploit resonant properties, as exhibited by flying insects, to reduce the energy expenditure and to provide amplitude amplification for the wing sweeping motion (Bolsman, 2010). Design objective for a small-scale flying machine is to reproduce a reference motion based on the kinematics of insects. Insects and birds perform wing flapping and adjustments of the body orientation in order to control speed, altitude and orientation of the flight. As shown in the figure below, to transfer this analogy to a micro-robot, the sweeping motion of the wings are emulated as a steady-state motion. The details of a control system can be found in advance literature (Bolsman, 2010). However, in simple terms, the design takes into account a constant resonance frequency, and a maximum wind sweeping stroke. As the stroke increases (shown by the extreme lines in the figure), the wings generate lift. The mass of the device (as in an insect) is centered towards the geometric center of the device, resulting in maximum possible stability. This is the stage where the robots get airborne and continue hovering.

    Lift: Flapping wing motion with sweeping stroke

    How do the “insect” robots move in the air?

    The hovering is the first state of condition that the robots achieve, similar to an insect. The figure above shows a simple two wing device. Each wing is designed to have independent controls to change flapping In order to change the direction to left or right, so that each wing is capable of having a different sweeping motion. This inevitably creates a sweeping motion that are not equal in each wing, and results in a rotation in the direction of the difference. An insect performs these exact same maneuvers to create a rotational motion for left-right (rolling) movement.

    As shown in the figure, the center position holds the center of mass for the whole assembly. As such, changing the center position of the sweeping motion will change the direction of flight as well. This is performed by shifting the positions of the effective centers of pressure of the left and right wings. This invariably creates a backward motion (or pitch), and more power from the device’s power source provides a required forward motion while maintaining the achieved altitude.

    How strong are these “insect” robots?

    A simple model of a small-scale flying robot has been described here to depict the fundamentals that are derived from an insect or a small bird for flapping motion design. A fully fledged flying micro robot has more control systems that are able to achieve a full range of motions if needed, with more complicated actuations that are associated with multiple wings and wing rotations. In addition, structural integrity is also a key factor which, surprisingly, is also derived from insects. One of the most fascinating and extraordinary creatures in earth are ants, they can carry objects several times of their body weight. Ant’s neck has a very sturdy construction by nature, because of the fact that they lift the large weights with their mouth, and the load is transferred through the neck. Researchers found from models that an ant’s neck can withstand loads of about 5,000 times the ant’s body weight! (Nguyen, 2012). This design is also simulated to be able to provide the micro robots a sturdy yet very lightweight construction, a critical requirement for such a device.

    Ultra-light, small scale robots are in use for surveillance, military operations, rescue missions, medical sector, hazardous material test/retrieval, and many other scenarios. We will continue to see the marvelous development of these micro machines, inspired by the insects and small birds around us, while pondering over the question: “how birds fly?”

    References:

    1. Bolsman, C. T. (2010). Flapping wing actuation using resonant compliant mechanisms: An insect-inspired design.
    2. Van Breugel, F., Regan, W., & Lipson, H. (2008). From insects to machines. IEEE robotics & automation magazine, 15(4), 68-74.
    3. Misof, B., Liu, S., Meusemann, K., Peters, R. S., Donath, A., Mayer, C., … & Niehuis, O. (2014). Phylogenomics resolves the timing and pattern of insect evolution. Science, 346(6210), 763-767.
    4. Michelson, R. C. (2000). S. Patent No. 6,082,671. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
    5. Michelson, R. C., & Reece, S. (1998, March). Update on flapping wing micro air vehicle research-ongoing work to develop a flapping wing, crawling entomopter. In 13th Bristol International RPV/UAV Systems Conference Proceedings, Bristol England(Vol. 30, pp. 30-1).
    6. Nguyen, V. N. (2012). Development of a Finite Element Model of an Ant Neck Joint for Simulation of Tensile Loading(Doctoral dissertation, The Ohio State University).

  • The von Neumann Architecture

    The von Neumann Architecture

    Introduction

    Have you ever wondered how your computer works? Who decided that we should use keyboards to tell our devices what to do? And who else later decided that touch screens were cooler much of the time. Much of how we think about computing we currently owe to John von Neumann, who developed the current way of thinking about computers.

    The Von Neumann architecture is a model that was developed in the 1940s by John von Neumann, a physicist and mathematician, who was an early computer researcher. During World War 2, cracking secret codes and the development of nuclear weapons led to an increase in public funding for computer research, as machines could do lots of arithmetic quickly and accurately. Von Neumann would go on to outline a model for building any sort of computer in his The First Draft Report on the EDVAC (the EDVAC being a computer he was working on at the time) that has been the standard for all computing devices since.

    In his model, von Neumann illustrates that a computer should have several main components:

    • Arithmetic Unit
    • Control Unit
    • Memory
    • Input
    • Output

    Flexibility of the Model

    This model is relatively flexible – in his paper, von Neumann mentions that different machines could very well have different capabilities while still being built with all of these components in mind. Computers that use the von Neumann architecture range from very simple (such as the one in your microwave) to the massive supercomputers that have dedicated buildings. The wide scope of computers that fall under the von Neumann model are proof that von Neumann achieved his goal when it came to creating a model that was versatile.

    Components and What They Do

    The control unit, as described by von Neumann, is the part of the computer that keeps track of what is supposed to run when. When you turned on your computer, your PC’s control device (most probably inside of a CPU) queued up the correct start up operations. The purpose of the control unit is to allow a computer to run many different kinds of programs, and switch between them when necessary. While this seems trivial now, the first computers were manually operated. If you wanted a computer to do something different than what it was previously doing, you had to go in and change all of the wires yourself. The conception of a control unit allowed the computer to modify its own hardware and software, allowing a great deal of abstraction for users. Computers being able to modify themselves (and other computers) essentially enables modern computing as we know it, the good (high level programming languages, not swapping about the wires in your desktop) and the bad (it would be impossible to hack a pre-von Neumann computer without performing an elaborate heist operation to change around the wiring yourself).

    The arithmetic unit of a computer does the logical processing. Computers were originally designed for doing lots and lots of math, so von Neumann designated an entire component of his model to do that. Despite being called the arithmetic unit, this unit is also responsible for doing logical operations as well. Arithmetic units allow computers to distinguish if two sequences of binary are completely the same (an AND operation), if some of the numbers are the same, or allowing sign flippage.

    The memory component of this model is probably simplest to understand. If we want computers to do work in a useful capacity, they need to be able to remember what we’ve done. Most modern computers have two types of memory. They’ve got long term, slower memory, which is usually kept in the hard drive. Computers also have faster, short term memory. This is typically stored in RAM. Traditionally, RAM memory has been volatile. This means that it is erased when you turn the power off. This is also why you used to lose everything you did on older video games without saving – if you didn’t tell the computer to move your data out of RAM and onto the hard drive, it was just lost.

    The last components of a computer are its input and output components. Input is just how the user puts instructions into a computer. These days, inputs are most often keyboards and/or touch screens, although speakers are becoming more common. Output is how a computer communicates what it’s doing to the user. Most computers have a visual (a screen) and an audio (speakers and/or headphones) component to the output.

    Conclusion

    The von Neumann model for computing has lasted for nearly a century. Pretty much any device that you use will have been built and designed with the von Neumann architecture in mind. That being said, scientists are looking beyond this model for the future. Quantum computing and other innovations may mean we say good bye to the von Neumann architecture.

    References

    Brandl, M. F. (2017). A Quantum von Neumann Architecture for Large-Scale Quantum Computing. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02583)

    Freiberger, P., & Swaine, M. (2016, November 14). Von Neumann machine. Retrieved September 15, 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/technology/von-Neumann-machine

    von Neumann, J. (1945). First draft of a report on the EDVAC. doi:10.5479/sil.538961.39088011475779

     

  • Computer Programming: A Women’s History

    I always found it interesting how people tend to see computer science and coding in general as inherently a male-dominated field, despite how the very foundations of computer programming were established by a woman, Ada Lovelace. In the 60s, computer programming was considered women’s work (look at the work of Dorothy Vaughan). The code that send us to the moon was predominantly written by a woman, Margaret Hamilton. In fact, in the days of the Atari and early gaming systems, many legendary game developers were also women (Carol Shaw, Donna Bailey, and Roberta Williams, just to name a few). And today, MIT’s Katie Bouman and her team are the first to ever capture an image of a black hole. Computer science may appear to be a male-dominated field, but we can’t forget that the pioneers of the field were women. This is my tribute to just three of those extraordinary female programmers.

  • The Secret Kennedy: The Science Behind Lobotomy

    Introduction

    Everyone has heard of John F. Kennedy before. Whether it be from his presidency, his role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, or his assassination. Many people have even heard about his brother, Robert F. Kennedy and his assassination, or the so-called ‘Kennedy curse.’ However, most people have not heard of the one Kennedy sibling who played a huge role in redefining a medical tragedy. This is because her existence was swept under the rug by her father as a critical failure and embarrassment. 

    It’s time for a spotlight to be shone on the tale of the secret Kennedy sister, Rosemary, and how lobotomy, a surgery designed to reduce prefrontal cortex functioning, ruined her life. This is the story of a woman like many others of her time who suffered at the hands of faulty medical practices and biases that swept the world in a frenzy.  

    The Story of Rosemary Kennedy

    Rosemary Kennedy, April 1940

    https://www.jfklibrary.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/kfc%202612p%20crop.jpg 

    Rosemary Kennedy, born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy in 1918, was not born like her brothers and sisters. Due to a lack of oxygen during her birth, Rosemary ended up with a learning disability that placed her significantly behind her age group in school (Larson, 2015). However, due to the highly influential political career of her father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Rosemary was forced to keep up the public appearance of being “well-adjusted.” Her mother would fabricate a world of appearances and deception to other high-class mothers about her daughter’s intellectual capability, JFK would accompany Rosemary to tea-dances under a watchful eye, and her parents even fabricated Rosemary’s search for a teaching degree (Larson, 2015). To the outside world, Rosemary served as an icon for the perfect daughter of a political figure. However, internally in the Kennedy family was everything but perfect.

    At age 22, Rosemary reportedly became more “difficult” with outbursts of aggression that led to her family’s decision to send her to a covenant school in Washington D.C. (“Rosemary Kennedy”). But when rumors spread that Rosemary might be having inappropriate relationships with men at her school, her father’s frustrations exploded. The threat of shame to his career and the budding careers of his children drove Joseph to sign Rosemary up for a prefrontal lobotomy with Dr. Walter Freeman, a popular lobotomist at the time, to reduce her mood swings and cumbersome behavior. After her lobotomy, Rosemary’s mental capacity was reduced to that of a toddler’s and she could no longer care for herself (Larson, 2015). Joseph hid his daughter away from the rest of her family at an institution for the mentally disabled called St. Coletta’s, and until his death, the world never knew the truth to the terrifying reality of what lobotomy did to Rosemary. 

    How did this happen though? How did a lobotomy lead to such a drastic change in Rosemary’s mental and emotional capacity? To understand this, first the process of a lobotomy and the areas of the brain it targets must be understood.

    The Process of a Lobotomy

    A lobotomy is a medical procedure developed during the 1940s and 1950s, in which parts of the brain are physically altered as a way to treat mental illness or behavioral problems. The practice of lobotomy began with Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, but was popularized in America thanks to Dr. Walter Freeman (Lewis, 2014). Moniz originally crafted the process of the prefrontal lobotomy, where a doctor would drill a whole into the top of a patient’s head and then either inject ethanol to destroy brain fibers or use a leucotome (a wired loop) to slash away parts of the frontal lobe (Lewis, 2014). Later on, Dr. Freeman popularized the second form of lobotomy, called transorbital, where an ice pick would be placed behind the eye and used to severe the connection between frontal cortex from the thalamus (the motor and sensory control of the brain) (Lewis, 2014). The original appeal of lobotomy at the time stemmed from the lack of other ways to treat mental illness. In the 1940s and early 1950s, there were not yet any antipsychotic drugs, and it was very expensive to keep a family member in a mental institute (Hall, 2015). The lure of making a former difficult family member more docile through a simple surgery and improving family reputation became a common reason why lobotomies were performed (Hall, 2015).  

    That common reason of improving family reputation was one of the main ones Rosemary’s father had as he signed her up for her lobotomy. And while Rosemary underwent a prefrontal lobotomy, both forms of the procedure targeted similar parts of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) and produced similar effects in patients.

    Prefrontal Cortex Damage and Its Effects

    Prefrontal lobe of the brain

    https://www.livescience.com/42199-lobotomy-definition.html 

    The prefrontal cortex of the brain is responsible for social behavior, emotional responses, working memory, long-term decision making, and language/speech (Teffer & Semendeferi, 2012; Pirua & Liu, 2018). Lobotomy endeavors to sever this section from the brain to reduce emotional stress, cure mental illness (such as schizophrenia and depression), and as in Rosemary’s case, reboot “socially dysfunctional” women (Hall, 2015; Koziol & Tone, 2018). While to some extent lobotomy can prohibit emotional and social distress since the process does essentially wipe one part of the brain related to emotional response, it does so at an often catastrophic long-term cost to the patient.

    Damage to the prefrontal cortex can result in the reduction of critical analysis in long-term consequences of one’s actions (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio & Anderson, 2002). Patients will only follow impulses, not thinking about how their decisions can impact themselves or others in the future. This is often a common side effect experienced by lobotomized patients such as Mona Gable’s mother, who after her lobotomy suddenly began to run up credit cards, chase her children with baseball bats, and go on late night joy rides without a second thought (Gable, 2016). Part of this change in patients also stems from the loss of empathy and short-term memory that occurs with damage to the prefrontal cortex. Without the part of the brain responsible for social behavior fully functioning, patients begin to lose their connection to others in their social groups. It becomes increasingly difficult for patients to interact with people and express the more complex social behaviors such as empathy, and their short-term memory begins to fade, making it increasingly harder to partake in daily activities without extra assistance.  

    These alterations are a gateway to some of the worst transformations made by prefrontal cortex damage: overall personality and language production. Without their prefrontal cortex, people lose the part of their brain most responsible who they are as a person and why the act the way they do. Dr. Walter Freeman himself even stated that, “Every patient probably loses something by this operation, some spontaneity, some sparkle, some flavor of the personality” (Hall, 2015). Patients lose their motivation, ability to plan, how they interact with others and much more. They leave the procedure no longer the same person they were before. And from a more technical standpoint, patients can no longer even communicate as they did so before, since damage to the prefrontal cortex also damages speech and language ability. Patients post-lobotomy can have trouble forming meaningful sentences or understanding what others say to them. These transformations are what occurred with Rosemary. All of her personality, her spunk, her ability to speak/communicate with others was wiped as her prefrontal cortex was sliced away. The smiling girl in the photo disappeared and only a hollow shell of her former self remained. She could no longer interact with others at the capacity she could pre-lobotomy and she could no longer care for herself on a daily basis without having someone else help her make decisions and remember how to do various activities.

    Legacy of Lobotomy and Rosemary Kennedy

    The dark tale of lobotomy and Rosemary Kennedy leaves the science and medical community with a few haunting reminders. 

    For one, the quick, widespread popularization of lobotomy demonstrates why the scientific community must be more cautious when new therapies, treatments, medications and medical technologies appear with limited effectiveness and safety information. Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz published the results of his first lobotomy only around 4 weeks after the surgery had taken place (Hall, 2015). He did not take extra precautions in monitoring longstanding consequences of lobotomy because the initial results seemed very promising at a time when mental illness had few treatment options. The scientific method and the need for quality testing and experimentation is not to be skipped over. Even if the procedure seems like a blessed cure all, there can be unforeseen consequences that would need further careful observations before the product is approved for its to be used. If the initial report regarding lobotomy had been published later, the doctors could have better observed the long-term changes in personality and cognitive function of the original patients, and then maybe the over 50,000 other lobotomy patients would not have had to suffer similar fates to Rosemary Kennedy’s (Lewis, 2014).

     

    My drawing representing the uneven justification of lobotomized patients’ lives for the Noble Prize and prestige Moniz won for his ‘easy solution’ to mental illness

    Additionally, Rosemary’s story itself is rooted in a much larger issue: implicit bias against women in medicine. While lobotomy was originally labeled to treat mental illness in mental institutes, most of the times it was used for treating unruly women no longer following the social norms of the 1940s and 1950s. The statistics themselves of how many more women than men were lobotomized, even though men made up the majority of mental institutes at the time are shocking: For Dr. Walter Freeman’s personal operations, he performed 75% of them on women, and in the Stockton State Hospital, 85% of lobotomies occurred with women (Koziol & Tone, 2018; Hall, 2015). Over time, lobotomy became less about treating mental illness and more about controlling women. In that sense, Rosemary could be considered a poster case of the abusive use of lobotomy in women. Her mood swings and alleged unruly behavior with men drove her father to seek to change her through a medical procedure becoming increasingly aimed towards women. She was a victim of how the medical world viewed how women should be treated. And while the process of lobotomy has thankfully become frowned upon and relatively inactive (partially thanks to the consequences of the Rosemary’s failed lobotomy being made public and partially thanks to the development of antipsychotic drugs), this implicit bias against women still lingers in the medical community today. For example, women are less likely to receive prescribed heart medication for congenital heart disease than men due to the misconception that older men are more at risk than women are (La Trobe University, 2019). Additionally, women with endometriosis usually have a 7.5 year period before they are diagnosed with the condition, only being told the symptoms are “normal” or “in their head” (“NICE call for improved diagnosis and management of endometriosis”, 2017). Both these cases illustrate how women are still disadvantaged by biases against their gender and how that impacts the success of their treatment. Medical treatment goes hand in hand with cultural zeitgeist on a subconscious level. It’s vital for anyone in the medical field to reevaluate personal biases as they treat a patient.    

    These are dark truths, not easy to grasp, but their importance stands firm. We must learn from our mistakes or we will be doomed to repeat them as the medical community continues to evolve and expand. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement offers many strategies to reduce implicit biases affecting medical treatment, such as increasing recognition of stereotyping, seeing people as individuals and building equal relationships with them, expanding one’s opportunities to interact with groups outside your own context, perspective taking, and more (IHI Multimedia Team, 2017). By using methods such as these to improve the environment of the medical field, we, as the scientific community, can start reworking how standards for treatment as a whole are handled. However, at the end of the day though, it comes down to the individual practitioner performing treatment. So heed cases likes Rosemary Kennedy’s and lobotomy’s, and who knows maybe you can find the next contemporary procedure that turns out to be barbaric in years to come.

    My Connection to This Tale of Lobotomy and Rosemary

    Personally, this topic hits close to home in terms of my career aspirations. I’m training to be a biomedical engineer, so I will be one of the main people designing healthcare equipment and procedures for the general public. One of my biggest fears is creating a medical device that actually ends up hurting someone or a group of people because I accidentally overlooked a certain aspect of it. And while hypothetically, the other engineers working with me should catch my lapses in logic, as we saw with the case of lobotomy, sometimes that process can be skipped over. With this article, I wanted to share the tale of lobotomy, not only as a reminder to me, but also to anyone reading, that you need to be responsible for critically thinking about the solutions you create to problems in any scientific industry. At the end of the day, you could be the person who saves thousands of patients from unnecessary pain and heartache if you just speak up and go against the popular flow.

    Additionally for me, it’s so vital that workers in healthcare be directly connected with the people they are treating. If I can’t, on some level, empathize with the person I’m treating, how will I create an effective procedure for them? People are individuals, not just items to characterize into implicit groups and call it a day. Rosemary Kennedy’s story always breaks my heart, hearing about how this wonderful young lady, full of joy and spunk, cruelly had that all ripped away from her because a bias against women she couldn’t control. I don’t want to be someone who lets situations like that idly happen. As I follow through with my career as a biomedical engineer, I want to be one of the individuals leading the medical industry in fighting implicit biases to create a better tomorrow for patients. How many times in history must the path for medical advancement be paved in blood before we begin changing our approach to it?   

  • Sleep Well: Your Psychological Health Depends On It

     

    There is some truth to the phrase “waking up on the wrong side of the bed.” When I don’t sleep very well, I will probably be much more affected by seemingly minor mistakes than other times. For example, I might be particularly self-critical of a research presentation, ruminating on the negative aspects and failing to acknowledge anything positive. The recurrent thought of poorly answering a question might leave me feeling disappointed. In contrast, I will probably fail to retrieve the memories about the questions that were answered well or the clarity of concepts explained. Cognitive neuroscientists have linked poor sleep to poor psychological health at the neural level, particularly involving a brain structure called the amygdala.

    The amygdala is an almond-shaped brain structure that modulates emotional reactivity. When sleep deprived, amygdala function is perturbed and becomes over-reactive during the waking day (1). In other words, sleep deprivation can lead to a heightened sensitivity of the amygdala. For example, your roommate’s incessant pencil tapping that normally seems bearable when not sleep deprived, may be particularly annoying after a night of little to no sleep.

    Sleep deprivation may reduce attentional focus on positive materials.

    Moreover, sleep deprivation may influence emotional memory. For example, researchers gave participants a series of positive, negative, and neutral words to study. They found that those who were sleep deprived remembered fewer positive words than those who were well-rested (1). This suggests that sleep deprivation may reduce attentional focus on positive materials. Furthermore, it has also been found that connectivity between the amygdala and control center of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is reduced when sleep deprived (2). Reduced feedback from the prefrontal cortex may lead to amygdala overactivity when sleep deprived.

    Sleeping through the night or over several nights gradually reduces one’s response to feel upset when recalling a negative experience.

    Considering that sleep deprivation impairs the ability to remember positive information, it is closely linked with depression. It is thought that obtaining sufficient sleep causes reductions in the emotional response to negative memories by reducing the response of the amygdala. In other words, sleeping through the night or over several nights gradually reduces one’s response to feel upset when recalling a negative experience. For example, after sleeping, you may be able to remember when your first pet passed away, or when you scored poorly on an exam, without feeling emotionally crippled by the memory. Sleep reduces emotional reactivity to memories.

    Experimental research found that sleep deprivation caused a near 30% increase in anxiety symptoms.

    In addition to an increased susceptibility to negative emotion, sleep deprivation is closely linked with anxiety. Indeed, recent experimental research found that sleep deprivation caused a near 30% increase in anxiety symptoms (3). For example, suddenly hearing a loud noise, such as an alarm, leads to fear as an initial reaction. You may feel your heart pound through your chest; your pupils may dilate; and you might look around to locate the noise. However, once you realize that it is only a test for the warning alarm systems, you will quickly resume to your work. However, if you’re sleep deprived, this process may happen a bit more slowly. It may take longer for your brain to process the fact that it’s only a warning alarm. Your increase in heart rate may persist, and you may feel anxious for longer than someone who is not sleep deprived. Thus, anxious feelings will likely be intensified when you are in a sleep-deprived state.

    Failing to sleep intensifies emotional responses at the neural level. Brain structures involved in emotional processing and cognitive control, particularly the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, are functionally altered by sleep deprivation. Although the life of a student is a demanding one, sleep should be prioritized in order to thrive and function with peak psychological health. So if you’re feeling crappy, try getting a good night’s sleep.

    References

    1.Walker, M. P., & van der Helm, E. (2009). Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in

    emotional brain processing. Psychological Bulletin, 135(5), 731–748.

    https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016570

    2.Yoo, S., Gujar, N., Hu, P., Jolesz, F. A., & Walker, M. P. (2007). The human emotional

    brain without sleep – a prefrontal-amygdala disconnect. Current Biology, 17(20), 1–8.

    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.08.007

    3. Anwar, Yasmin. “Chronically anxious? Deep sleep may take the edge off.” Retrieved from: https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/11/06/chronically-anxious/

  • God does not Play Dice

    “I am convinced God does not play dice with the universe.” – Albert Einstein

    Quantum Mechanics, despite how fancy and scifi-esque it sounds, is not a new concept. The “revolution” began in the beginning of the 1900s with Maxwell Planck’s theory that energy is quantized into “packets” called quanta, and has remained at the forefront of scientific discovery to the present day. The majority of the scientific community generally believes that Quantum Mechanics accurately describes the universe, but not everyone. In fact, Albert Einstein, himself, was not convinced of the completeness and accuracy of Quantum Theory. In fact, one of Einstein’s most famous quotations: “I am convinced God does not play dice with the universe.” was him expressing wariness of Quantum Theory, despite his work creating it. He was a champion of an idea that has become known as “Hidden Variable Theory”, an idea that persists to this day. But in order to learn what Hidden variable Theory actually is, we have to better understand what quantum mechanics is, and its difference from classical mechanics.

    You, as a person, have lots of experience dealing with Classical mechanics. Classical mechanics are the “laws of physics” that govern the world you are familiar with. Momentum, acceleration, orbits, forces, without meaning to, we come into contact with classical mechanics every day. Everything from the moon in the sky to the friction stopping your car from rear-ending the car in front of you, to a cornerback making the game-saving tackle at the end of the football game are governed by the laws of classical mechanics. And one important quality of classical mechanics is that it is deterministic. This means that that given all the information about a situation, you can predict what is going to happen. For example, we know, at any given moment, where the moon is in the sky. We know where the moon will be in the sky in 100 year from now because we understand the gravitational interaction between the earth and the moon, and based on the mass of both of the bodies, and their distance from each other, and the orbital speed, we know the path the moon will take for centuries to come. And it is incredible accurate too. At midnight (eastern standard time) on April 2, 3019 the moon will be 19.49% full.

    Quantum Mechanics, however, is not deterministic. Using quantum mechanics, we cannot predict the outcome of the situation with 100% accuracy. Instead, Quantum Mechanics is probabilistic. This means that we can determine the outcome that is most likely to occur, but we still do not know exactly what will happen. We just know the odds. (don’t tell Han). Quantum Mechanics govern the world of incredible small things. In systems nearly atomic in size, the laws of classical mechanics begin to break down, and a new, strange, law rules. And this law is very counter-intuitive, and because of this has faced a lot of backlash. Quantum Mechanics being probabilistic is the chief reason Einstein and other physicists have a problem with quantum mechanics, and is the motivation behind the Hidden Variable Theory.

    Imagine you are at a baseball game. Surrounded by fans and the smell of popcorn, you intently watch the pitcher throw pitch after pitch. Now imagine you had no idea what air was. The air is still there, of course, but in your mind, the pitcher’s hand is the only thing that affects the ball. The pitcher will pitch each ball exactly the same, but the ball will not always end up at the same place. Of course, most of the pitches would end up in the strike zone, but some won’t be. Some balls will curve, while others fly straight, some will be faster, slower, some will fly right down the middle and others will fly wayward. We cannot determine exactly where each pitch will end up, but we can say where it will most likely end up. This is probabilistic.

    Now imagine the same situation, but you are now aware of air. You understand how the spin of the ball interacts with the air to curve the ball, and aware how air currents and wind changes the path of the ball. With this new information, this new variable in the equation, we can now determine exactly where each pitch will end up. The discovery of this new variable turns the probabilistic system into a deterministic one. This is the main idea of Hidden Variable Theory, that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete, and some hidden variable, will make the it deterministic.

    Probabilistic systems are so foreign to us. The laws of physics we learned in high school and we have come in contact with are all deterministic, so it is only natural to think that if Quantum Mechanics is not deterministic, then it is only because we do not fully understand it. The search for this hidden variable persists to this day, albeit without success. Quantum Mechanics has proved to be very accurate when applied to a wide array of systems. The allure of this idea in understandable, after all, it makes sense, deterministic systems are familiar to us, and some of the brightest minds in history have dedicated years to finding this hidden variable. We do not know if God truly does play dice with the universe, but maybe the dice in its own way brings an elegance and beauty to the cosmos that would otherwise be so predictable.

    Genovese, M. (2007, January 12). Research on Hidden Variable Theories: A review of recent progresses. Retrieved March, 2019, from https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0701071

    Look Up the Moon Phase for Any Date. (n.d.). Retrieved March, 2019, from https://www.moonpage.com/index.html?go=T&auto_dst=T&tzone=et&m=4&d=2&y=3019&hour=0&min=0&sec=0Maguire, S. (2012, November 12).

    It’s been a tough week for hidden variable theories. Retrieved March, 2019, from https://quantumfrontiers.com/2012/11/08/its-been-a-tough-week-for-hidden-variable-theories/

    Townsend, J. S. (2012). A modern approach to quantum mechanics. Sausalito, CA: University Science Books.

    Uzer, A. T. (2018). Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. Lecture presented in Georgia Institute of Technology.

  • Elizebeth Smith Friedman: A Forgotten American Hero

    An illustrated tribute to the most brilliant code-breaker you’ve never heard of.

    Ever since reading The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone, I have been fascinated by the life of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a woman who was by all means a pioneer and an American hero. Despite founding one of the first facilities dedicated to the study of cryptography in the U.S. and pioneering many of the foundational principles and techniques still used in code-breaking today, much of her accomplishments were overshadowed by her husband and much of her work was hidden away in government vaults. The more I learned about her and her contributions to US war efforts, espionage, and domestic crime–including cracking difficult Enigma machine and JN25 codes, decoding rum-runner messages during Prohibition, and deciphering encoded letters containing naval movement in preparation for the Pearl Harbor attacks–the angrier I felt. I felt angry for her being forgotten in the annals of history, angry as a woman. It felt reprehensible to me that, due largely in part to sexism, her incredible story had been overlooked for so long. While an illustration drawn by some random college student in Georgia is far from the praise and recognition she deserves, I hope to convey my feelings of gratitude and admiration for her brilliance, no matter how insignificant the gesture.

  • Historical Haikus

    Famous Scientists

    Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
    He proposed madness
    We revolve around the sun
    Woke before others

     

    Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
    Brilliance in design
    The Alternating Current
    Still lives on today

     

    Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)
    Having ALS
    Did not stop his legacy
    Understanding time

     

    Nikola Tesla's Alternating Current

  • Mum’s the Word

    When most people think of mummies, a strange mixture of ancient curses and toilet paper-wrapped Halloween costumes come to mind. It comes as no surprise that the concept of mummies is linked to the magical and superstitious- after all; it is pretty unbelievable to see intact bodies that are 2,000 years old. How could you not think of zombies or ghosts?

    Like all mysteries, however, mummies actually have a scientific explanation.

    IMG_0779

    Human bodies decay and break down by two major mechanisms: autolysis and putrefaction. Autolysis is essentially a self-destructive process during which enzymes that typically aid in digestion begin to digest the body itself. After this, putrefaction begins when bacteria from the body’s flora or the surrounding environment start to break down the organic matter for their own nutrition, leading to the decomposition of the corpse. The bacteria introduce additional enzymes that continue the liquefaction, and eventually, the body will attract flies and scavengers that can feed on the remains. In order to effectively preserve a body, these processes must be interrupted, or at least slowed significantly. There are several known factors that can do just that:

    • Water content: The bacteria and enzymes need an environment with water; so drying the corpse is essential to its preservation. The drying out of the body is known as desiccation, and can happen naturally in extremely arid environments, like the hot sands of the deserts, or can be chemically induced, like with the Egyptian embalming process, where the bodies were covered natural drying agent named natron.
    • Temperature: In extreme temperatures, especially cold, dry environments, bacteria are unable to survive. In addition, many enzymes denature, or unfold, in extreme environments, and can’t function properly. This slows the decay process down greatly, and can also occur naturally, leading to mummies such as the Iceman found in the Italian Alps. It is actually very similar to the way that your freezer helps you to preserve food!
    • Organ Removal: Removing internal organs that contain a large population of bacteria prevent decay from the inside out. This was an important part of the preparation of Egyptian mummies, where most major organs were removed from the body and placed into sacred canopic jars.
    • Chemical Interactions: Many different chemical interactions can contribute to the preservation of human tissue. Some of the most common include:
      • Exposure to heavy metals ions, including copper and arsenic, can lead to the denaturation of the enzymes involved in autolysis, as the metal ions bind to the polypeptides.
      • Lime, calcium oxide, reacts with water and raises the temperature to form calcium hydroxide. This reaction process dries out the body and raises the pH, which can limit the effectiveness of enzymatic activity.
      • Resins can be also be used in mummification, as an antiseptic and as a barrier against rehydration when spread over the skin.

     

    I hope you found this interesting, and good luck with those linens!

     

    References:

    Aufderheide, Arthur C. (university Of Minnesota, Duluth), A. (2011). Scientific Study of Mummies. Cambridge University Press.

    Harris, T. (2018, March 08). How Mummies Work. Retrieved from https://science.howstuffworks.com/mummy.htm

  • What’s The Connection Between Complex Chemistry and Islamic Medieval Architecture?

     

    karbala, iraw

     

    The expansive domes and minarets of famous mosques such as the Blue Mosque in Istanbul or Al-Masjid An-Nabbi in Medina exude a quiet, powerful energy. Oftentimes these are characterized by a large, stone courtyard. You walk through the simple, colorless path towards the mosque entrance. You feel cleansed, as if you’re leaving a part of the world outside; it’s almost unsettling. At a first glance, you could describe these mosques as plain. Crossing the threshold, however paints a different picture. Your sight is overloaded with bright jewel-toned colors: azure, emerald, turquoise, fuchsia, red. It’s hard to focus on one detail – will it be the gold leaf, intricate etch work, milky marble, shimmering glasswork? You are humbled standing underneath the enormous ceilings.

    The glittering shrines and mosques that characterized medieval Islamic architecture are more than just a pretty sight, but in fact the product of geometrical planning. Aside from the lavish materials and colors, it is the tiling patterns that make the architecture stand out. These patterns are featured prominently in Islamic arts as a substitute for more figurative images. The reasoning was that images depicting people would lead to idol worship. Inside the mosque, you see these tiles plastered densely together on the ceilings, the columns, the minarets, the free wall space.(*)

    Islamic interlacing patterns can be divided into two categories: the arabesque versus girih. While arabesque designs feature more curved elements in an effort to emulate greenery and nature, the girih is composed of geometric lines mostly of stars and polygons with interlaced lines. Muslim architects designed the girih tiling system with only two simple tools: a compass and ruler. These patterns became complex tessellations made up of up to five different shapes: the bowtie, rhombus, pentagon, elongated hexagon, and decagon. Between the 1200s to 1400s, Islamic art developed the girih exhibiting the same complexity as quasi-crystals, a material that defies normal atom packing. Back at the mosque, you trace your fingers along the figurative tiles that blend seamlessly. A lime green pentagon here, an ivory star there.You see that the tiles are made of contrasting colors with a multitude of small shapes.

    Quasi-crystals are made of patterns that look regular but do not repeat exactly. The patterns in Islamic architecture demonstrate this by including “tessellations” that have five, ten, and twelve-fold symmetry. Technically, they are are not actually patterns, but just appear to be so. Scientists conjecture that Islamic architects wanted the effect of extend a pattern without just repeating images. Looking up at some of the mosques ceilings confirms the success of this design – you feel as if you are swallowed by the dizzying depths of shimmering oceans and bright stars.500 years later mathematical physicist, Roger Penrose at University of Oxford discovered the concept of quasi-aperiodic tiling. Sir Penrose stumbled upon a pair of tiles that cannot form a pattern in a periodic manner. This discovery was just a consequence of his work on the famous tiling pattern in mathematics – “given a collection of polygonal shapes, is it possible to cover the whole plane using just these shapes, with no overlaps?”

    Quasicrystals are found mostly in metallic alloys such as (Al-Li-Cu), and lack translational symmetry. The discovery of the non-symmetrical packing of atoms took a while for the scientific community to accept. Although first discovered in the 1960s, much of the scientific community refused to believe that materials could consist of irregular atomic structure. Next, materials scientist, Dr. Dan Shectman, designed an artificial alloy with quasi-crystal properties. He did not publish his results for years because he feared that others would ridicule his work.  Only after researcheres found a  natural quasi-crystal, icosahedrite in the Koryak Mountains, Russia in 2009 that led people to be convinced. Shectman received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011 for this work.

    Researchers connected Islamic girih and quasi-crystals recently; Dr. Peter Lu a physicist from Harvard University recognized ten-fold symmetry in architectural motifs while visiting Uzbekistan.  He analyzed 3700 Penrose tiles found in an archive of documented medieval Islamic architecture, and published a paper with Princeton University’s Dr. Paul Steinhardt titled ”Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture”. Dr. Lu uses the Darb-I-Imam Shrine in Iran as the iconic “near perfect” example of Penrose tiling. He conjectures that laborers could easily have created mathematically complex patterns by lining tiles decorated with lines that, once set down next to each other, form a continuous pattern.

    Back at the mosque – you see a worshipper prostrated to the ground, oblivious of the art around them. Their hearts disconnected from the ancient mathematics and chemical mimicry in which they are enclosed in. Science and spirituality; a Nobel prize in chemistry yet also an artform. These two paradigms reside side by side in the glorious, kaleidoscopic patterns of centuries old Islamic architecture. There is an elegance in the scales that aperiodic tiling has reached – from the utterly microscopic crystals to the gigantic mosques that can hold thousands of people.