Monday, 22 December 2008

Energy comes from dancing!

last weekend i organised an anti-xmas-stress party (check the poster out: i made it! and am so proud of it!) with some people from the Weltladen, the fair trade store here in Heidelberg, and the dj there told me about a brand new club in the Netherlands where they are trying to use sustainable technologies, like that they produce electricity from the energy of the people dancing... how cool is that?? i was super excited, as i am always whenever i hear about energy that is conserved and reused in a clever way, and not only dissipated! so i started looking for info about the whole business, and i found out a lot of stuff...

the club is called Watt, it opened 3 months ago in Rotterdam and it's the first sustainable dance club ever. first, there is a special dance floor which makes use of the piezoelectric effect: some elements, crystals like quartz, if deformed or compressed are able to develop a potential difference, which can be plugged into a circuit and directly transformed into electric energy! which means that the more the people dance in the club, ie. the better the party is, the more energy is produced, and you can directly see it in the light show of the club itself! it clearly has a tiny energetic efficiency, but still it raises awareness about energetic issues, plus the club is sustainable in so many other aspects, from the refillable cups to the spectacular toilet where the flush water comes directly from the rain collected on the roof... for more info check out the website of the company (Sustainable Dance Club) or - if you trust me! - this article i recently wrote (in Italian...)

and now i want to go there and have a look, dance it out, produce some positive energy - and maybe take it along with me, i feel i need some...

Image credits: Mike Nolte & Giulia Melloni

Thursday, 13 November 2008

when pluto was a planet

or, the age of innocence from an astronomer's point of view

for 76 years, kids in school have learned that our solar system has 9 planets: mercury, venus, the earth, mars, jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune and pluto. first the four "rocky" ones, small and made out of solid material. then the four "giant" ones, much more massive and made out of a dense mixture of gaseous elements. and then, there was pluto.

pluto was the last one to be discovered, in 1930, and has always had the charm of an outsider. it is the farthest of the sun's court, but not always: its orbit is in fact very eccentric, and crosses the one of neptune, so that the two switch regularly in being the most distant from the sun. another weird fact about pluto is that it is rocky and tiny, like the earth-like planets, and unlike its closer, giant neighbours.

when pluto was still a planet, it also had a satellite, charon. charon was identified as a satellite only because it had been discovered more than 40 years later after pluto, but it would have been more appropriate to refer to them as a double planet system: contrarily as for all other satellites, the mass of charon is not significantly smaller than that of pluto.

then, the past decade witnessed new discoveries: quaoar, sedna and eris, all objects with masses and orbits very similar to pluto's. who knows how many other pluto-like bodies future observations will report. not being able to ignore the new discoveries, but also trying to prevent the number of solar system planets to increase dramatically, the international astronomical union called a halt and came out with an official definition for a planet.

the new definition involves not only being a celestial body orbiting the sun with a nearly spherical shape, but also being the object which contains most of the mass in its own orbit.
not being much larger than its fellow charon, pluto did not fulfill the definition, thus ceased being a planet in 2006.

i grew up with the dream of becoming an astronomer, thinking that the practice of such a pure science was the highest step of human knowledge. not that it mattered much, but at the time i was also aware that i was living in a special planet out of a set of nine. then i started moving my first steps in the world of astronomy and astrophysics, still amazed by the idea of research. i was walking along the twilight zone, uncertain about how to cross it, and suddenly pluto was not a planet anymore. reality was there to be faced: science was no more the purest of all things, it is in fact just a human matter. it was not as neat as i thought, but most importantly i learned how it isolates the individuals who practice it from the rest of the world. i started wondering if this price is worth the game. and i'm still wondering. the age of disillusion.

right after the end of pluto's career as a planet, the american dialect society chose "to pluto" as word of the year. it's supposed to mean "to deprive something of its value". along with the former ninth planet, also my dream was plutoed. but i decided to restore its value. i realised science was not what i had expected, but i chose to deal with it, to adjust my dream and take the most i could from it. pluto is now a dwarf planet. let's see what happens to me and science.

Monday, 13 October 2008

a science blog

here's a new blog. it's supposed to be a container of all my writing attempts, which are going to be more or less related to science.
scientific topics, science teaching, science and society. whatever.
and since i like to make things difficult, each time i'm going to choose a topic and write something in the style of some specific magazine.
let's see how long it lasts...