Rainbow Fire Jack-o-Lantern Idea

Several readers have asked how I achieved the rainbow fire effect with this Halloween jack-o-lantern. It's very simple! Here are written step-by-step instructions for you, plus a video.

Make a Rainbow Fire Jack-o-Lantern | Watch the Video

You'll get the best success if you apply the alcohol liberally. Glop on the hand sanitizer. Drizzle extra methanol all over everything. The alcohol will pool around the base of the pumpkin, so you need to expect fire on your surface. It's an alcohol fire, so it burns off quickly. Just make sure you don't perform this project near anything flammable.

Feel free to experiment with colorants. You could add copper sulfate, borax, lithium or strontium salts, calcium or even storebought smoke bombs or sparklers for added panache.

If you are lighting the pumpkin indoors, I recommend setting it on a cookie sheet, which in turn rests on a potholder. If you are setting the pumpkin alight outdoors, avoid placing it on dry grass. I filmed the video with the pumpkin sitting directly on my kitchen countertop. I'm not saying you should do the same -- just pointing out that the project is not particularly hazardous if you exercise caution and control. Have fun!

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Beloved Brazilian Monkey Clings To A Shrinking Forest

The wild population of the golden lion tamarin, which lives only in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, fell to just 200 in the 1970s. Conservationists have helped the species rebound, but the monkeys are still at risk as development encroaches on their remaining habitat.

Andrea Hsu/NPR The wild population of the golden lion tamarin, which lives only in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, fell to just 200 in the 1970s. Conservationists have helped the species rebound, but the monkeys are still at risk as development encroaches on their remaining habitat.

Andrea Hsu/NPR

The tiny, copper-hued golden lion tamarin is so beloved in Brazil that its image graces the country's 20-real bank note. But this lion-maned monkey is in peril.

There's only one place on earth where the golden lion tamarin lives in the wild: in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, or Mata Atlantica, just north of Rio de Janeiro. Deforestation in the region has reduced the monkey's habitat, once a massive ecosystem stretching for a half-million square miles, to just 2 percent of its original size.

By the 1970s, the total golden lion tamarin population in the wild had plummeted to just 200 individuals. Conservationists have brought the monkey back from the brink — barely. Through captive breeding programs in zoos, the tamarin population grew until biologists were able to release tamarins into the wild.

At first, the zoo tamarins didn't know how to survive. Some were eaten by predators; some starved. But others managed to reproduce, and subsequent generations have thrived. Today, there are 1,700 of them living in patches of forest along the Atlantic Coast.

But that comeback may be short-lived. The monkeys need even more forest for their population to grow.

Power lines, roads and agricultural development in Rio de Janeiro state have isolated golden lion tamarins in forest fragments, leaving them vulnerable to inbreeding and other threats.

Mehgan Murphy/Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Power lines, roads and agricultural development in Rio de Janeiro state have isolated golden lion tamarins in forest fragments, leaving them vulnerable to inbreeding and other threats.

Mehgan Murphy/Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

Seventy percent of Brazil's human population lives in what was once the Atlantic Forest. Cities are ballooning and huge oil reserves have been discovered just north of here. A highway that cuts through this region is currently being doubled in size, from two lanes to four.

"We have very [little] forest left, and forest we have is absolutely fragmented," Luis Paulo Ferraz, head of the Associacao Mico-Leao Dourado, or Golden Lion Tamarin Association, tells NPR's Melissa Block. That fragmentation leaves the tamarin populations isolated in small forest patches, hurting the species' genetic diversity.

"That's why we have to create corridors" linking forested areas, Ferraz says. In the case of the highway, "the right thing to do is to create an artificial connection between both sides of the road. ... The tamarins need to cross over the road and need to have something that makes them feel protected."

Ferraz's group's idea is to create a sort of "tamarin bridge" stretching across the highway. It would require tree cover so the monkeys aren't exposed to bird predators, and it must be sturdy enough to withstand wind and the movement of trucks below.

Such a bridge has never been tried before, but the association, with support from its U.S.-based partner organization, Save The Golden Lion Tamarin, has been working on creating ground-level corridors for years, planting seedlings to connect the patches of forest habitat in a golden lion tamarin reserve.

A few miles away, a team from the group Agro Jardim, which works with the Golden Lion Tamarin Association on the reforestation effort, is planting trees that will eventually be home to a small group of tamarins.

Carlos Alvarenga, a forestry engineer, is in charge of the reforestation effort here. Does he ever feel mismatched, planting saplings while cities and roads grow around him?

"It takes a big effort," Alvarenga says. "But you can't just give up now. I'm certain that this work will succeed."

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Metric Prefixes Quiz

I consider myself to be comfortable using metric units. I know the standard prefixes and how to convert between units. Having said that, I did not get a perfect score on this quiz the first time I took it. You know how you can talk yourself out of the right answer? Yeah... I did that. Let's see if you will too. You might want to review the metric prefixes or you can just be bold and take the quiz. If you score perfectly, no gloating is allowed.if(zs>0){if(zSbL250)gEI("spacer").style.height=Math.floor(e[0].height/12)+17.5+'em';else{var zIClns=[];function walkup(e){if(e.className!='entry'){if(e.nodeName=='A'||e.style.styleFloat=='right'||e.style.cssFloat=='right'||e.align=='right'||e.align=='left'||e.className=='alignright'||e.className=='alignleft')zIClns.push(e);walkup(e.parentNode)}}walkup(e[0]);if(zIClns.length){node=zIClns[zIClns.length-1];var clone=node.cloneNode(true);node.parentNode.removeChild(node);getElementsByClassName("entry",gEI("articlebody"))[0].insertBefore(clone,gEI("spacer"))}}}};zSB(2);zSbL=0

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Books of The Times: Richard Dawkins’s ‘Appetite for Wonder,’ a Memoir

This first installment reads like the work of a man who has already written abundantly about himself. He often tells stories that, he acknowledges, he has told before. He includes the texts of speeches he has made. And he puts particular emphasis on the evolution — yes, he’d approve of that word — of “The Selfish Gene,” the 1976 genetics book that established his reputation (and put the word “meme” on the map).

With the benefit of hindsight, and with a dearth of other compelling material, he wonders if “The Immortal Gene,” a title suggested to him by a London publisher, might have been better than the one he used. “I can’t now remember why I didn’t follow his advice,” he writes. “I think I should have done.”

Anyone expecting an incisive account of Mr. Dawkins’s growth as a scientist may be surprised by the meandering path he takes here. True, his lineage is impressive, and his boyhood was uncommonly adventurous, so both warrant attention. He takes his time explaining that his great-great-great-grandparents eloped more cleverly than most couples do. Henry Dawkins and Augusta Clinton made their getaway in a coach, but not before the groom-to-be had planted half a dozen decoy coaches near Augusta’s home so that her father, Sir Henry Clinton, could not prevent the marriage. As the British commander in chief in America, he could not win the Revolutionary War, either.

The family history also includes Clinton George Augustus Dawkins, son of the eloped couple, who earned his place in family lore during the Austrian bombardment of rebel Venice in 1849, when a cannonball hit his bed.

“A cannonball penetrated the bed covers and passed between his legs, but happily did him no more than superficial damage,” reads the inscription that accompanies a cannonball in Mr. Dawkins’s possession. The story may not be 100 percent true, but it does underscore this family’s staying power.

Mr. Dawkins’s forebears had scientific leanings of all kinds. Since many were posted to remote corners of the British Empire, those leanings are more exotic than most. One cousin wrote major books about the birds of Burma and Borneo. Other relatives held the post of chief conservator of the forests in India and Nepal. Another relative is credited with persuading Aldous Huxley to take mescaline and open the doors of perception. As Mr. Dawkins has already written in a brief and more obscure memoir: “For generations, sun-browned Dawkins legs have been striding in khaki shorts through the jungles of Empire.”

He himself was born in 1941 in Nairobi, Kenya. Growing up in Nyasaland (now Malawi), he led what sounds like a charmed early life. This book includes a lovely, whimsical painting, made by his mother, illustrating the family’s idyllic-looking African life, which included a pet chameleon and a pet bush baby, a squirrel-size, big-eyed mammal. Mr. Dawkins recalls his father’s bedtime stories (“often featuring a ‘Broncosaurus,’ which said ‘Tiddly-widdly-widdly’ in a high falsetto voice”) and reading about Doctor Dolittle, whose love of animals made him one of the great fairy tale naturalists.

But the tone turns sharper once this budding atheist is sent to a school where the pupils are compelled to say a good-night prayer. He says this was learned in “parrot fashion” and evolved into “garbled meaninglessness,” then adds tartly, “Quite an interesting test case in meme theory, if you happen to be interested in such things — if you are not, and don’t know what I’m talking about, skip to the next paragraph.” This is not a book that runs on charm.

The second half of “An Appetite for Wonder” follows Mr. Dawkins back to England, and into an educational system that he harshly denounces. He writes about bullying, mortifying embarrassment, sadistic punishment and an absence of critical thinking, which, by his lights, is worst of all. He still bristles at having unimaginatively been called “a very inky little boy” when forced to have an open ink pot on his desk and keep dipping a pen into it.

Mr. Dawkins’s memories briefly take him to Berkeley, Calif., where he lived long enough to protest American involvement in the Vietnam War. They finally arrive at Oxford, and to the beginning of his serious career in science. He presents detailed descriptions of some of his early experiments in animal behavior, like an analysis of newborn chicks’ pecking patterns.

Then he moves on to what appeared to be his calling, computer science and the creation of computer language. He sought computer-based methods of analyzing hierarchical patterns in nature, and the specifics of such material, like his Mutual Replaceability Cluster Analysis Program, are not for amateurs. We’re a long way from the sun-browned little boy who caught butterflies.

Mr. Dawkins treats the publication of “The Selfish Gene” as the dividing line between the first and second installments of this memoir. It’s a good place to pause, and it suggests strongly that the second volume will be heftier and more focused than this one. Mr. Dawkins’s memory for his work is much more vivid than his more personal stories. And the work has been far-ranging enough to support autobiographical study.

But, for now, we have the kindling of Mr. Dawkins’s curiosity, the basis for his unconventionality and some very odd glimpses of professorial behavior. Mr. Dawkins describes one teacher who would begin by saying, “Oh, dear” and “I can’t hold it” and “I’m going to lose my temper,” before warning his students to hide under their desks. And then the ink pots flew.

“He was a kind gentleman provoked beyond endurance — as who would not be in his profession?” writes Mr. Dawkins, himself no stranger to provocation. “Who would not be in mine?”

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[News & Analysis] Water Resources: Kenyan Find Heralds New Era in Water Prospecting

Science 20 September 2013:
Vol. 341 no. 6152 p. 1327
DOI: 10.1126/science.341.6152.1327 Water Resources Researchers have discovered five major new aquifers deep under the arid northwestern corner of Kenya, a U.N. program announced last week. The find boosts Kenya's known groundwater reserves by 17% and could be a game-changer in a nation hit hard by droughts over the last several decades. It also highlights advances in the field of water prospecting. By melding traditional geology with data from space- and ground-based sensors and powerful software, researchers are revealing hidden reservoirs in sometimes surprising places. Finding the water is just the first hurdle, however; drilling for it and managing it properly remain major challenges.

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Examples of Ionic and Covalent Bonds

If you are studying types of chemical bonding, you will need to be able to recognize compounds containing ionic bonds, those consisting of covalent bonds and compounds that contain both types of bonds. Here are some examples of the two types of bonding.

Examples of Ionic Bonds
Examples of Covalent Bonds
Compounds with Ionic and Covalent Bonds

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[News of the Week] Random Samples

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