This is cool: images of Barack Obama, each made from 150 million carbon-fiber nanotubes by John Hart, an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Each Nanobama below is about half a millimetre (roughly 1/100th of an inch) across.


Click on the image to go to John Hart's Nanobama site or click here to go to his Nanobliss site.

There were a couple of interesting stories about old hair and the DNA in it in the news today.

The first was that researchers in Poland and Sweden think they've found the skeleton of the 16th century astronomer Copernicus in a cathedral in Poland. Regular readers of big books written in Latin will remember Nick as the one who wrote De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ("On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres"), the first book to claim that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. (Sixty years later, the Catholic Church got around to banning it as part of its Galileo-crushing activities.)

The Poles found the skeleton in a grave and had the face reconstructed using forensic techniques; a CBC story says that archeologist Jerzy Gassowski said that the result "bears striking resemblance to existing portraits of Copernicus."

The hair comes into the story when "Swedish genetics expert Marie Allen found that DNA from a tooth and femur bone matched that taken from two hairs retrieved from a book that the 16th-century Polish astronomer owned."

The other interesting story was the mammoth: the New York Times reported that scientists at Penn State were able to sequence "a large fraction of the mammoth genome" using clumps of its hair which had been found preserved in permafrost. The scientists leading the research say they believe there is "no technical obstacle to decoding the full mammoth genome," and figure that for about $10 million it would be possible to create a mammoth embryo which could be carried to term and delivered by an elephant.

Aside from the obvious questions, like 'can we really do this?' and 'should we do this?', scientists also need to ask themselves what they'll say when the baby mammoth asks where he or she came from: it won't do to say something like, "You were cloned from another mammoth's pubes."

How long would it take the Large Hadron Collider to defrost a pizza?

(The answer: "Not even 'not very long.'")

Van Pool Bob had just dropped off Van Pool Barb turned the van around and crossed the bridge over Wheeling Creek to take me home.

"Why don't they put in a wall," he said as we waited at the traffic light, "in the water and funnel the creek through it and put in a turbine?" He spent the next few minutes describing a hydroelectric generating station of the kind in operation at the Grand Coulee, Niagara Falls, and the Hoover Dam.

At the spot where we had just crossed, Wheeling Creek is thirty feet wide and a foot deep. And it had rained five of the previous six days.

A few minutes later, Van Pool Bob drove by the funeral home, just as he does every day. For the past week its front lawn has been buried under a pair of 20-foot-high mounds of dirt and heavy construction equipment.

"Whoa!" he exclaimed. "What's going on here?"

Excavations for The Three Gorges of Wheeling Creek, perhaps?