My time at the Department of State has come to an end.

On September 1 I return to my former life, that of a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Baltimore.

I’ll be taking the next two weeks off to move and relax and spend time with family.

It’s been a pleasure reading and responding to your comments and e-mails.

Check back here in September for more news about Science Planet.

Bassam Jalgha won the inaugural ‘Stars of Science‘ competition, an Arab reality television show where 16 aspiring scientists and engineers compete to have their idea selected for development and commercialization.

Image by Stars of Science

'Stars of Science' finalists Bassam Jalgha (right) and Mohammed Orsod

Jalgha’s winning idea, an automated tuner for the oud (a musical instrument), is the perfect blend between his two passions: science and music.

“I was always amazed by science, and I always had a curiosity to discover how things work,” Jalgha told me. “Since I was a kid I used to reverse engineer anything around me, without necessarily bringing it back to operation.”

Born in Furn El Chebback, a suburb of Beirut, Jalgha joined the Lebanese National Conservatory at age 12 and studied the oud, an Arabic string instrument similar to a lute or mandolin.

After receiving a music degree from the conservatory, Jalgha moved to the American University of Beirut and received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.

Jalgha continued playing the oud, even finding time to compose music (he wrote the score for the documentary film “The Sky Was Angry“).

During one of his engineering classes, Jalgha realized that he could combine his musical interests and his engineering skills to design a device that would tune the oud automatically.

The oud commonly has 11 strings: 5 pairs of strings plus a 6th individual string. Each string (or string pair) is tuned so that it plays a different pitch when plucked. By turning pegs at the end of the string, the player can change the tension of the string, listen to how the instrument sounds and adjust the pitch. Tuning the oud is similar to tuning a guitar, cello or violin, except that the oud has more strings (guitar usually has 6, cello and violin, 4).

Tuning the oud, however, is no small matter. Jalgha describes it as “a tedious task that requires much time and dedication.” Humidity, heat, and vigorous playing cause subtle changes to the length and tension of the strings; this requires the oud to be tuned frequently.

Jalgha remembers times when he was a beginner. In between lessons the oud would need to be tuned, but Jalgha couldn’t tune the instrument accurately. He had to wait until his next lesson so the teacher could spend 15 minutes and tune the oud for him. Meanwhile, Jalgha would practice with an instrument that was out of tune - not fun for Jalgha, and probably not pleasant for his neighbors.

Jalgha devised an apparatus that connects to the tuning pegs, listens to the sound of the plucked string, analyzes it and sends a signal to a motor that adjusts the peg until the string sounds the correct pitch. A powerful digital signal processor acts as the autotuner’s brain, identifying the frequency of the sound (the pitch) and comparing it to the desired frequency. After comparing the measured tone with the desired one, the processor sends a command to the motor, ordering it to rotate in a certain direction and with a certain speed to achieve fast tuning accurately.

The device is only connected to the oud during the tuning process; once the oud is properly tuned the device is removed.

The project is still in an early phase. “With the acquired money and support I received from the [Stars of Science] competition, I intend on further developing the tuner device as a product to enter the commercial market,” Jalgha said. He also hopes to modify the autotuner for use on other stringed instruments beside the oud.

Jalgha is now studying for a master’s degree in engineering at the American University of Beirut. He continues to play the oud, despite the intense time commitment of his engineering studies.

“I believe that if someone wants to do something and he gives it all the energy it needs he cannot but succeed in a way or another,” Jalgha said. “You just need the will to do it, and to convince yourself that you can do it.”

Image by Stars of Science

Bassam Jalgha celebrates his victory

Sir Paul Nurse is a Nobel prizewinning geneticist who examined his own family tree and found something unusual.

I don’t want to ruin the story - it’s a great one - by telling you what he found. Listen for yourself (here or here) and see how scientists are not emotionless automatons focused only on data and logic. We actually have problems and emotions just like you!

Sir Paul told his story about how discussing family trees can be dangerous during the World Science Festival in New York in June. The story was recorded in front of a live audience for The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization.

Yesterday, President Obama marked the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing by meeting with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the three astronauts who conducted the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

Obama said:

“I also know that, as a consequence of the extraordinary work of NASA generally, that you inspired an entire generation of scientists and engineers that ended up really sparking the innovation, the drive, the entrepreneurship, the creativity back here on Earth.  And I think it’s very important for us to constantly remember that NASA was not only about feeding our curiosity, that sense of wonder, but also had extraordinary practical applications.  And one of the things that I’ve committed to doing as President is making sure that math and science are cool again, and that we once again keep the goal by 2020 of having the highest college graduation rates of any country on Earth, especially in the maths and science fields.”

Cool again? Math and science were always cool!

Image by NASA

Footprints and debris left by astronauts on the moon in 1971, photographed in July 2009

When camping in the wilderness, there’s a principle that one should protect recreational natural lands in order to maintain their health and beauty. Leave No Trace is a movement that encourages campers to leave the wilderness as they found it, by not leaving behind any trash or equipment. Pack it in, pack it out.

Many of these principles are ignored when exploring a region for the first time - a region like the moon, for example.

This photo is a recent image of the moon, taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can see equipment left there almost 40 years ago, including the lunar module which the astronauts used to land on the moon, scientific instruments and footprints leading between the two.

Apollo 14 was the third mission that landed on the moon, so perhaps land it in, launch it out wasn’t in effect yet. As NASA prepares to return to the moon, maybe they will rethink their policy.

I’m joking, but the photo is real. It is amazing that we can see NASA’s debris 40 years later, preserved so well in the vacuum of space.

Apollo 14 command module pilot Stuart Roosa took hundreds of tree seeds with him into space. Roosa never set foot on the moon (and thus never left any debris behind), but he did return the tree seeds to Earth, where they were germinated by the U.S. Forest Service and planted throughout the United States and around the world. Roosa’s seeds are now known as moon trees.

Image by G. Otto, GSI

A view inside the particle accelerator used to discover element 112.

To those who had to memorize the periodic table of the elements in school, add a new atom to your list: element 112, whose discovery has now been verified by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the world authority on chemical nomenclature.

Element 112 is the heaviest element in the periodic table, 277 times heavier than hydrogen. To produce 112, scientists took charged zinc atoms and fired them through a 120 meter long particle accelerator onto lead. When the zinc and the lead nuclei merged – or fused, making this a nuclear fusion reaction – a new element with 112 protons was formed (30 protons from zinc plus 82 from lead).

The new element didn’t last long. It decayed in less than a second, requiring rapid and sensitive methods to detect its fleeting existence.

The team that discovers an element is honored by proposing a name.

Suggested names include Obamantium and Emergencium.

Alas, Sigurd Hofmann and his colleagues have proposed copernicium (to be abbreviated Cp), in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), the Polish scientist and astronomer who discovered that the planets in our solar system orbit the sun.

“After IUPAC officially recognized our discovery, we – that is all scientists involved in the discovery – agreed on proposing the name copernicium for the new element 112,” Hoffman said in a statement.  “We would like to honor an outstanding scientist, who changed our view of the world.”

21 scientists from Finland, Germany, Russia and Slovakia were involved in the discovery.

The Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany, where Hofmann is based, discovered the six most recent elements to be added to the periodic table: bohrium (107), hassium (108), meitnerium (109), darmstadtium (110), and roentgenium (111).

Image by Paul Hammond

97 percent of scientists said that humans evolved over time, but 28 percent of the American public believes that scientists have not come to a consensus on evolution.

The statistics on climate change are similar. 84 percent of scientists agree that the earth is getting warmer due to human activity, but 35 percent of the American public think that scientists have not reached a consensus on the influence of human activity on global warming.

In both cases scientists have reached an overwhelming consensus, yet one third of the general public thinks that scientists are debating these issues!

This suggests that scientists need to do a better job educating the public - and by educating I don’t mean a discourse on how atmospheric carbon dioxide levels contribute to increases in average global temperatures and ocean acidification. I mean that scientists need to do a better job discussing scientific consensus with the public (though the former is also important).

For example, I have a colleague who doesn’t think that human activity contributes significantly to global warming. He also thinks that there is no scientific consensus on the issue. Perhaps my time would be better spent convincing him that there is, in fact, scientific agreement on the human causes of global warming, instead of delving into the science of climate change.

On the other hand, what is scientific consensus? 2533 scientists-representing the fields of biology and medicine, chemistry, geosciences, and physics and astronomy-were surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. About half of the scientists were in biological and medical sciences, which some might argue are as related to geosciences as art is to astronomy. (As a biologist, I knew nothing about climate change before coming to the State Department.)

Pew surveyed scientists and non-scientists in the United States. Although the survey was conducted in English and Spanish, no doubt the results represent a U.S. view. How would scientists and the public react outside the U.S.?

Take this 12 question quiz and test your general science knowledge.

The average score was 65 percent (eight questions correct). What was your score?

Science is a career for those passionate about science, not for those looking to make a lot of money. Long hours and dismal pay (relative to the amount of time spent in school) are normal, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a method for reducing the cost of higher education: textbooks for rent.

When I was an undergraduate, students bought textbooks from the university store. At the time a group of entrepreneurs parked a truck near the university book store and sold textbooks from the back at a discount.

With the rise of the internet, I could purchase textbooks online at an even greater discount, but in the end I still lost - having spent hundreds of dollars per semester on textbooks, I could sell them back to the university for a small fraction of their original cost. My other option was to keep the textbooks and hope they would remain relevant.

In the sciences, this is a hopeless proposition. As one of my professors in graduate school told me, as soon as a science textbook is printed it is already out of date. That’s how quickly discoveries are made (or how slowly textbooks are published).

Two companies, Chegg and Bookrenter, now allow you to rent textbooks. Choose and pay for the book online, receive it in the mail. At the end of the semester, simply mail the book back in the box provided (return shipping is free). Just like Netflix, the online DVD rental service, but for textbooks.

You can highlight portions of the text and still return the textbook, but only within reason, according to the Chegg Web site. Writing notes in the margins is prohibited.

Molecular Biology of the Cell is a widely-used textbook now in its 5th edition. It retails for $149, you can find it online at Amazon for $115 - or you can rent it for one semester for $50.

Organic Chemistry by Leroy G. Wade, Jr., 7th edition? Retails for $197, Amazon sells it for $152, but you can rent it for a semester for $90. I used the 3rd edition in college and I still own it. I haven’t opened it in a decade! Anybody want a free organic chemistry book?

This weekend we celebrate Independence Day, July 4, the day in 1776 when the United States became an independent country. In honor of this event, Friday is a government holiday.

I’ll be back on Monday. Have a great weekend!