If you’ve never seen the classic short “Powers of Ten,” I’ve got a treat for you. Created in 1968 for IBM by Charles and Ray Eames (yes, of Eames Chair fame), the film has a very simple premise: start at a static scene, then start zooming out, at one “power of ten” per ten seconds — for example, from 10² meters to 10³ meters. As we zoom out, we see the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, and so forth. Once we reach 10²⁴ meters (the size of the observable universe), the camera then begins a faster zoom-in…and goes beyond the original scene, into the microscopic scale and beyond.

For me, “Powers of Ten” is an educational touchstone — it’s a film I was shown several times in science classrooms, and to this day, I find it captivating in its simplicity and power. All you do is zoom way out and zoom way in — the universe is just a matter of perspective.

For more, check out “Powers of Ten” on Wikipedia, and the official “Powers of Ten” website.

(Thanks to Kottke.org for pointing to this YouTube clip!)

McFerrin then says: “Now, what’s interesting to me about that is, regardless of where I am — anywhere — every audience gets that. It’s just that the pentatonic scale, for some reason….” One of the scientists on the panel raises the question: “Just to phrase the question scientifically, Larry, what the hell just happened here?” Just watch this. It’s neat and it’s short:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

For the entire program (including “what this has to do with science”), check out the Notes & Neurons site, which has a five-part video series showing the full discussion. Note: Part Four has the bit with McFerrin’s pentatonic scale demonstration and the subsequent discussion.

The Entire Program

You can also go here to view this “playlist” with the program in six parts. (Note: for some reason, part 5 wouldn’t play for me in the US. Oh well, it’s most of the program, anyway.)

(Via Kottke.org.)

Hot Springs

The boiling waters of Yellowstone National Park and other extreme thermal environments have species of thermophiles, or organisms that thrive in temperatures that would kill most living things. These thermophiles have specialized enzymes that keep their DNA from unraveling the way other life forms would. Chemicals from various thermophile species are used for a range of biochemical applications, such as DNA fingerprinting technology. Image by Flickr user v1ctory_1s_m1ne.

The Dead Sea

The Dead Sea has such a high saline content that pillars of salt form on its banks. Yet Halobacterium salinarum lives in its waters. Halobacterium is one of the most ancient of microbes, and depends more on light for survival than on oxygen. It adjusts its own needs according to the available light and oxygen. Image by Flickr user CharlesFred.

Toxic Sludge

A copper mine in Montana was abandoned in 1983. As water filled the remaining hole known as the Berkeley Pit, minerals and metals leeched out and made it extremely acidic and poisonous. No fish or plants survived in the toxic water. It was thought to be completely dead until 1995 when a scientist recovered a slime that contained Euglena mutabilis, This protozoan manipulated its immediate environment to make it more livable! Researchers eventually found over 160 different species of microorganisms in the polluted water, some of which are being studied for use in cancer treatment. There is hope that Euglena mutabilis will eventually clean up the toxic water. Image by Linda Amaral Zettler and David Patterson.

Beneath the Great Lakes

Sinkholes deep beneath the Great Lakes have a very different chemical makeup from the water above. These pockets are filled with salt, acid, and sulfur, but have purple cyanobacteria that use sulfur instead of oxygen for photosynthesis. Other species that live too deep for sunlight to penetrate live on sulfur without photosynthesis.

Sea Floor Volcanos

In the depths of the Pacific ocean, volcanic vents support life too far down to take advantage of any sunlight at all. Tubeworms and giant clams thrive in volcanic environments by feeding on smaller species that survive only on chemicals without the advantage of photosynthesis. Image credit: NOAA.

High-altitude Volcanos

The Socompa volcano is 20,000 feet high in the Andes mountains. Conditions there include little oxygen, lack of water, ultraviolet radiation, and methane. But scientists have found moss, algae, and over a hundred species of bacteria living in the shadow of Socompa. The area has been compared to Mars in its ability to sustain life.

In the Clouds

Bacteria even live in the clouds! These microbes act as particles that ice form around and fall as snow or rain. They are called biological ice nucleators. Nucleators are found in plants and soil and are thought to ride on pollen as it is blown into the atmosphere. The part of the bacterial life cycle spent on vegetation may sustain an ice nucleator during its ride in the clouds, and the cloud seeding may be a mechanism for spreading it to distant parts of the earth.

Space

No look at extremophiles would be complete without tardigrades, or water bears. These tiny animals are found in various extreme conditions on earth. They can survive hot and cold temperatures, radiation, lack of food and water, and even in a vacuum. The European Space Agency sent tardigrades into orbit in 2008, where they were exposed to cosmic radiation, solar radiation, and vacuum pressure. The space tardigrades were in a dormant state during the flight, which means their metabolism was slowed down considerably -a method they use to weather extreme conditions on earth. After returning from their adventure, they lived and even reproduced! Image by Flickr user Goldstein lab – tardigrades.

Beneath Antarctica?

Two miles beneath the ice of Vostok Research Station in Antarctica, a huge freshwater lake has been isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years. The water is below freezing temperature, but stays liquid because of the pressure from the ice above. Researchers have not yet broken through to the water, but samples of ice just above the lake reveal the presence of microbe fossils. The lake is saturated with oxygen due to the temperature and pressure, and has been compared with the environments of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. There are plans to send down a probe called a cryobot, but extreme care will be taken to preserve the pristine conditions of the isolated lake.

More from mental_floss…

Veterans Day Videos: Dogs Welcoming Home Soldiers
*
9 Muppets Kicked Off Sesame Street
*
Toilet Paper History: How America Convinced the World to Wipe
*
5 Country Stars Who Got Fried in the Food Business
*
Ben & Jerry’s Bagels? The Original Plans of 10 Fast Food Joints

Complete lyrics after the jump.

A long, long time ago,
Long before the Super Bowl and things like lemonade,
The Hellenic Republic was full of smarts,
And a question resting on the Grecian hearts was;
What is the circumference of a circle?”,
But they were set on rational numbers,
And it ranks among their biggest blunders,
They worked on it for years,
And confirmed one of their biggest fears,
I can’t be certain if they cried when irrationality was realised,
But something deep within them died,
The day, they discovered, Pi.

They were thinking;
Pi, pi, mathematical pi,
3.14 15 92,
65 35 89 7,
932384 62,
6433832 7 (not rounded).

Well this kind of Pi is different than most,
It hasn’t got berries, ain’t spread on toast,
And that’s how it’s always been,
We keep extending its decimal places,
Pushing our computers through their paces,
But we’ll never reach the end,
So why the fascination with,
A number whose end is just a myth?
Whence the adulation,
For mental masturbation,
It might have something to do with the stars,
To calculate distances from afar,
But that’s just a guess ’bout the way things are,
Regarding the precision of Pi,

I am pondering;
Pi, pi, mathematical pi
3.14 15 92
65 35 89 7
932384 62
6433832 7

Now I feel that I should mention,
Pi is applicable in any dimension,
At least as far as I know,
If there were no Pi we’d be missing things,
Like marbles and mugs and balls of string,
And sports, such as soccer and curling,
The orbs in their celestial paths,
Navigate along elliptical graphs,
Ellipses have pi in them too,
Just one side of them has grew,
You can see pi in most everything,
It’s in Cornell’s Electron Storage Ring,
And also in slinkies and other springs,
And that’s why it’s important to know pi,

You should memorize,
Pi, pi, mathematical pi,
3.14 15 92,
65 35 89 7,
932384 62,
6433832 7,

Once one night I had a dream,
That pi was gone and I had to scream,
Cause all pi things had disappeared.
Can you imagine a world like that?
Circles aren’t round and spheres are flat,
It’s the culmination of everything we’ve feared,
‘Twas a nightmare of epic proportions,
One that gave me brain contortions,
Oh wait! I mean contusions,
They put me in some institutions,
But then I escaped and now I’m free!

To sing of the virtue of pi,
Pi, pi, mathematical pi,
3.14 15 92,
65 35 89 7,
932384 62,
6433832 7.

A new PBS* documentary, The Botany of Desire, premieres Wednesday night (tonight!) at 8pm on PBS stations throughout the US. It’s based on the popular Michael Pollan book of the same name, and I urge you to carve out two hours (in most markets between 8pm – 10pm) on Wednesday night to watch it. The program is packed with science, history, and beautiful photography.

I’ve seen the film in advance, and I highly recommend it, particularly if you’re interested in any of the four plants featured in it: tulip, marijuana, potato, and apple. By telling the stories of these plants, Pollan explains how in some ways the plants are manipulating us, rather than the other way around — in the same way that flowers “use” bees to spread their pollen, these plants have “used” humans to spread themselves across the planet and out-compete other plants. One note: the program may not be suitable for young children, as there is use of the word “sex” (as applied to plants) and discussion of marijuana. It also might be pretty boring for the under-twelve set (despite beautiful flower photography), unless they’re thoroughly nerdy.

Here’s a preview of the documentary:

After the jump, I include some notes on each plant discussed in the documentary.

The Apple – Good for Booze AND for Eatin’

Apples arose in Kazakhstan, where bears would eat them and, uh, deposit the seeds as they went. But when people entered the picture, we began to spread the apple and its sweetness. Thus, the “biological strategy” of apples is to increase their sweetness, causing us to spread them around the globe. Humans have an innate desire for sweetness — presumably because in nature, sweetness is rare and generally denotes lots of calories.

Although the Bible doesn’t specify the fruit that was at the heart of so much trouble in the Garden of Eden, we assume it to be an apple — even though it was probably a pomegranate due to geographic restrictions on where apples grow best. Then there’s the rather fascinating discussion of Johnny Appleseed, whose real motivation was to bring alcohol (via hard cider) to pioneers, rather than tasty sweet apples. (Follow the link for some more info, all snagged from Pollan’s book, on the man — he was surprisingly rich for a dude who wore a tin pot on his head.)

Tulips

Tulips are examples of angiosperms, or flowering plants. The rise of the angiosperms brought sex (via flowers and pollen exchange) into the plant picture, and as Pollan says, “sex creates variation.” The documentary thoroughly explains the Dutch speculative investment bubble known as Tulip Mania, which made tulips one of the most valuable commodities in the world. At the height of Tulip Mania, a single tulip bulb sold for the equivalent of what today would be $10-15 million! Tragically, some of the most prized tulips were made beautiful because of a virus that was slowing killing them — which caused spectacular striped or “broken” flowers, but ultimately killed the plant. Pollan suggests that the tulip’s biological “strategy” has been to develop a form of beauty that humans find very appealing, causing us to domesticate and grow it even to the point of financial ruin.

Cannabis

I won’t say much about this section, as this is a family blog, but I can certainly say that this program treats the topic fairly and doesn’t go nuts with it. There’s an interesting discussion of how THC (the main “active ingredient”) binds to receptors in the human brain that affect the brain’s ability to remember and forget — and Pollan wonders exactly how a plant would find a way to manipulate those human brain receptors in order to make cannabis such a widely-propagated plant today. It is a curious question, indeed — how would a plant manage to just “happen” to have such a profound effect on humans? Again, Pollan wonders if this is a biological “strategy” in some sense.

The documentary includes extensive footage of legal (under state laws, though not federal law) cannabis growing operations — you get an inside look into how medical marijuana is produced, and it’s surprisingly complex. My favorite line: in describing how the farmers plant only female cannabis plants so they’ll produce more THC-rich resin, Pollan describes the grow room as a room of “massive sexual frustration” — all the female plants are desperately trying to catch some male pollen, producing more and more resin in their efforts.

Potatoes

The documentary takes us to South America, showing how the descendants of the Incas are still farming potatoes, and how potatoes traveled from South America to Europe via the Spanish Conquistadores. The potato was such a hugely productive crop (more food per acre than grain) that it transformed the Old World, enabling the industrial revolution. There’s also much discussion of “The Lumper,” the dominant strain of potato in Ireland that happened to be susceptible to a wind-spread fungus that destroyed Lumpers, causing the terrible Potato Famine. The famine killed one out of every eight people living in Ireland. Can you imagine that? Pollan suggests that the Potato Famine is a parable about the dangers of monoculture (planting a single type of plant) — had the Irish planted a wider variety of potatoes, they might have had more that were resistant to the fungus that killed Lumpers.

Also discussed: how the fast food industry currently relies on a monoculture of the Russet Burbank potato to make the “long fries” used in McDonald’s, to fill those tall red fry boxes; how that monoculture demands lots of pesticides; and how Monsanto is developing insect-repellant crops — and what happens with those crops over the long term.

Full Blogger Disclosure

I have received an advance screener of this documentary from PBS, but have not been compensated in any way for this post. I just like PBS and documentaries, and think this is a great program — and the book is highly recommended as well.

* = Note that the program is presented by KQED in San Francisco and produced by Kikim Media. But to myself and y’all, that’s fancy talk for “PBS.”

In honor of Bill Nye’s appearance (yelling “I’m just a speck!”) in We Are All Connected, I thought I’d round up some clips of his classic science show for kids. Enjoy!

Quicksand!

Quicksand is just really, really wet land!

Illusions!

Whoa, Jerry Andress is showing off all kinds of cool stuff (see also: The Ames Window – A Bizarre Illusion).

Astrology

Bill Nye explains the astronomical basis for astrology. My favorite quote: “and it did work [the sun rising behind certain constellations] — two thousand years ago when the Babylonians made all this up.” See also: Carl Sagan on astrology.

Gravity

Do not, I repeat, do not attempt this demonstration at home. I sure hope they recycled those electronics properly after throwing them off the building. :)

Crying

Why do we cry? Why does Bill Nye cry? Why do we blow our noses when we cry? Why is Bill Nye getting so upset about all this?

Why Pluto Shouldn’t Be Called a Planet

But “ice dwarf” just sounds like something out of Dungeons & Dragons, dude.

More Bill Nye Goodness

Go check out tons more on YouTube! Post your favorites in the comments, if you’re into that sort of thing.

You can download MP3s and learn more from SymphonyOfScience.com.

Complete lyrics are after the jump.

Lyrics:

[deGrasse Tyson]
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically

[Feynman]
I think nature’s imagination
Is so much greater than man’s
She’s never going to let us relax

[Sagan]
We live in an in-between universe
Where things change all right
But according to patterns, rules,
Or as we call them, laws of nature

[Nye]
I’m this guy standing on a planet
Really I’m just a speck
Compared with a star, the planet is just another speck
To think about all of this
To think about the vast emptiness of space
There’s billions and billions of stars
Billions and billions of specks

[Sagan]
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

Across the sea of space
The stars are other suns
We have traveled this way before
And there is much to be learned

I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we

[deGrasse Tyson]
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??

(Richard Feynman on hand drums and chanting)

[Feynman]
There’s this tremendous mess
Of waves all over in space
Which is the light bouncing around the room
And going from one thing to the other

And it’s all really there
But you gotta stop and think about it
About the complexity to really get the pleasure
And it’s all really there
The inconceivable nature of nature

This is just a short video of Mr. Hardesty showing his masterful technique for blowing huge bubbles using baby shampoo. Slightly gross (since he gets baby shampoo all over his face and neck) but work-safe.

(Via Waxy.org.)