The Year Of The Higgs, And Other Tiny Advances In Science

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, the long-sought building block of the universe. This image shows a computer-simulation of data from the collider.

Barcroft Media/Landov Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, the long-sought building block of the universe. This image shows a computer-simulation of data from the collider.

Barcroft Media/Landov

It's a year-end tradition to cobble together a list of the most important advances in science. But, truth be told, many ideas that change the world don't tend to spring from these flashy moments of discovery. Our view of nature — and our technology — often evolve from a sequence of more subtle advances.

Even so, chances are good that this year's list-makers will choose the discovery of the Higgs boson as the most important discovery of 2012.

The Higgs is a long-sought building block of the universe. It finally put in an appearance at an accelerator in Europe. But though it was big news, it wasn't apparently a revolutionary discovery.

"There are certainly a number of physicists who are actually disappointed," says Sam Arbesman, a scientist and mathematician at the Kauffman Foundation. "They were hoping to find something a little different from what all the models predicted."

“ It's not necessarily true that we need to find these singular big discoveries. Because the truth is, the way we make discoveries is oftentimes based on the accumulation of a lot of smaller insights and smaller ideas and discoveries.

- Sam Arbesman, scientist and mathematician, Kauffman Foundation

Instead, they got a discovery that mostly assures them the universe works pretty well the way they thought it did. So big news doesn't necessarily change the way we look at the world.

Arbesman and science historian W. Patrick McCray took a few minutes recently to talk about the nature of discoveries in science and technology. Each has just written a book about the process of science and technology. Arbesman's is The Half-Life of Facts; McCray's is The Visioneers.

McCray, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says revolutionary discoveries don't necessarily announce themselves when they happen. Consider this story: In 1988, a French scientist and a German scientist independently discovered a basic physics phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance.

The discovery seemed so arcane it didn't make a splash, like the Higgs boson. But, as it turns out, this phenomenon provided an extraordinarily powerful new way to get data on and off a magnetic disk, "and became the basis for a multibillion-dollar market for computer hard drives," McCray says.

That fueled a technology revolution and eventually led to a Nobel Prize for the scientists. But Arbesman says even this story distorts how science often progresses.

"It's not necessarily true that we need to find these singular big discoveries," he says. "Because the truth is, the way we make discoveries is oftentimes based on the accumulation of a lot of smaller insights and smaller ideas and discoveries. And oftentimes in the aggregate, those kinds of things — the things that we expect or the things that we don't expect — are often what drive science."

One classic example of this is the observation that the Earth's surface is always rearranging itself, as continental plates drift around the globe. This theory, now called plate tectonics, was first proposed in 1912, "but it took decades for enough evidence to be accumulated to support the theory, and also for scientists to come around to the idea that the continents were moving," McCray says.

Plate tectonics is now an indispensable way of understanding many things about our world — not just about what drives earthquakes, but how animal species came to be distributed around the planet. This kind of slow burn happens more often than you might think.

"I think the laser, initially, in terms of a technology, was one of these great examples where it was a really cool thing, but I think no one had any idea what it could be used for," Arbesman says, "and now it's ubiquitous."

There's a lesson in that for Arbesman. It's not so easy to figure out what fields of science to fund in order to get breakthroughs in return.

"The truth is, we don't really have a good track record at predicting which ones are going to be relevant in the long term," he says. "And we want to make sure that we support the creation of knowledge. And to do that, we have to really make sure that we support everything all across the board."

That means, of course, most of the time we will be supporting research that may fill in facts around the edges but won't be revolutionary.

McCray argues that one of the most notable trends in science this year wasn't a discovery at all. It has to do with how much the public accepts what scientists tell them.

"Debates over climate change, evolution, whether vaccines cause autism, things like that — all are part of a larger debate about the role and place of experts in American society," he says.

Americans still accept that science is a way to learn truths, but people are less likely to trust scientists as objective experts, McCray says. "And I think it's certainly something that a decade from now, we might look back upon and find quite curious, and indeed, quite serious."

That trend affects how we make use of the discoveries that flow from science — so it also matters a lot.

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Another Year And I'm Still Here: A New Year's Meditation

Look at yourself. Right now.

You are muscle,skin, bone, brain, blood, warmed by energy, and all of you, every cell, even the subsets of those cells, all trillions and trillions of them, are going to tire, waste and depart. In 10 years almost every bit of you will have been replaced by new bits.

And yet, you will still be you. You will look like you do (sort of), you will behave like you do (sort of), others will know it's you (most of the time), and though a census of your innards will say, this is a new body, a different collection of atoms, you will know it's the same old you. How come?

If you are all new on the inside, how do you persist?

What Keeps Us Whole?

Well, there's your soul. If this weren't a sciencey blog, we could stop here. Your soul, breathed into you at your conception, will hang around till it's time to go and then be off to wherever it is souls go to. But suppose you are a "materialist"? Suppose you choose to imagine this journey naked, you as just a bunch of atoms, nothing added? What holds a soulless soul together?

The answer, these days, is your brain. Your memory. It's the story you tell yourself as you grow up, the unfurling narrative that begins with faces and smells and meals and sounds, then stretches into tales about your mom, dad, siblings, your pets, your family, your friends. It deepens with loves, joys, disappointments. It is always told by you, filtered through you. You are the one who tells it, you are the one who hears it, you are the only one who knows every bit of it.

Memories Are Our Duct Tape

To a significant degree, you are the sum of the stories you tell yourself about yourself.

Take away your memories, the connective tissue of your life, and what's left? You may be breathing, but in the late stages of memory loss, you aren't really there any more. You have unraveled.

We live this life together, but we experience it alone.

And when you actually die, what is annihilated? Well, there are tens of thousands of private images in your head right now: the pigeon you once almost caught when you were 4. The sight of a particularly beautiful girl disappearing through a doorway. The brief whoosh made by a snowy owl flying low that time you were walking alone in the woods. These are things no one knows, no one ever knew, no one but you.

When you go, they go. Forever. But as long as you're here, they stay. So, to all those pigeons, those girls, those owls that live in our heads, as long as we're here — to all of you, and to us, Happy New Year!

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Cheap Bubbly Or Expensive Sparkling Wine? Look To The Bubbles For Clues

The bubbles in champagne tickle the tongue and transfer wonderful aromas to the nose.

iStockphoto.com

There's nothing like the distinctive "pop" of the uncorking of a bottle of bubbly to create a sense of celebration. Whether it's Dom Perignon or a $10 sparkling wine, bubbles add pizazz.

Sparkling-wine lovers sometimes point to the glittering streams of tiny bubbles as an important attribute. Why? Well, tiny bubbles are a sign of age, explains French chemist Gerard Liger-Belair, author of Uncorked: The Science of Champagne.

"Old champagnes always show tiny bubbles, mainly because they have aged several years and lost a significant amount of dissolved CO2, the gas that produces the bubbles," Liger-Belair told us in an email.

And what else can the bubbles tell you? Well, if the streams of bubbles remain down to the last sip, this can be a clue as to how it was produced.

If you listen to my story, you'll hear a tour with Fred Frank, third-generation winemaker at Chateau Frank, part of Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars in the Finger Lakes region of New York state. Frank uses the traditional Champagne method to produce his sparkling wines. It's a labor- and time-intensive process whereby each bottle goes through a second fermentation in the bottle. "The benefit of this method is higher-quality sparkling wine," Frank says.

And one way that the sparkling wine produced in this method can distinguish itself in the flute is that the train of bubbles keeps streaming and streaming, down to the last sip.

So what's the science behind this? Liger-Belair said that by using the Champagne method, "the [bubble-producing] CO2 produced by yeast cannot escape into the atmosphere, and is kept mainly dissolved into [the] Champagne."

On the left a 2005 Chateau Frank and on the right a midpriced bottle of California bubbly. The Chateau Frank bubbles were noticeably tinier.

This is a sharp contrast to some cheap sparkling wines, where the CO2 is sometimes injected into the wine, similar to the process used to create carbonated soft drinks. "This produces big bubbles that dissipate quickly in the glass," he says.

In full disclosure, we compared the bubble streams of a bottle of 2005 Chateau Frank and a midpriced bottle of California bubbly. While the Chateau Frank bubbles were noticeably tinier, both produced multiple streams of bubbles that lasted a long while.

But here's one tip if you want to preserve the effervescence in every flute of bubbly: Pay attention to how you pour.

The traditional way is to pour Champagne straight down into the flute. But Liger-Belair says you may be losing thousands of bubbles this way.

In a study published in The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, Liger-Belair and some colleagues found that pouring champagne down the side of a tilted glass, similar to the way beer is poured, preserved about 25 percent more carbon dioxide.

This technique has not taken off in France, where Liger-Belair says no one wants to liken Champagne to beer. But scientifically, it's clear. If you want more bubbles — to tickle the tongue and transfer those wonderful aromas to your nose — try the tilted pour.

And while we're on the subject of French traditions, I should point out that if you listen to my story you'll hear about the kerfuffle over the use of the term Champagne.

The French are keen to point out that the term Champagne should only be used on the bottles of sparkling wines produced in the Champagne region of France. Champagne producers have launched a campaign in the U.S. to raise awareness of this issue.

In deference to this, Frank, a few years back, took the word Champagne off his label. Instead he references the Champagne method. And he says he's proud to promote his bottles of bubbly as sparkling wine from the Finger Lakes.

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A Busy And Head-Scratching 2012 Hurricane Season

This satellite image from Oct. 28 shows Hurricane Sandy in the Atlantic Ocean before making landfall.

NASA via Getty Images

Superstorm Sandy is what most people will remember from the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season. But Sandy was just one of 10 hurricanes this year — a hurricane season that was both busy and strange.

Late summer is when the hurricane season usually gets busy. But Greg Jenkins, a professor of atmospheric science at Howard University, says this year was different.

"We saw storms in May and June, and in July and then August, September and October," he says. Jenkins says many of those storms didn't get much attention, though, because of where they went. "Most of the tracks were out over the central Atlantic."

But there were a lot: 19 named storms. Most years have a dozen. And a lot of things about the season were just odd. Jenkins says early on, scientists were expecting a quieter year.

"We were all thinking that an El Nino would develop in the Eastern Pacific," he says. "And typically when we see that, it's not conducive to hurricanes. But the El Nino never developed."

El Nino conditions occur when the Eastern Pacific gets unusually warm. That changes winds flowing to the Atlantic in a way that discourages tropical storms and hurricanes. And without El Nino, two tropical storms actually formed before the season's official start on June 1.

Later, a storm named Nadine meandered around the North Atlantic for weeks, reaching hurricane strength three times and striking the Azores twice. Jenkins says Nadine seemed to ignore conditions that usually kill hurricanes — things like vertical wind shear. That's when high altitude winds blow at a different speed, or in a different direction, than low altitude winds.

"Nadine was under shear — the waters were cold," he says. "So there was really no reason for it to hang around forever. But it did."

And then there was Isaac, which seemed destined to strike the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.

It didn't. Instead, Isaac turned toward New Orleans, where it looked like it was going to arrive on Aug. 29 — seven years to the day after Hurricane Katrina.

President Obama even took to the airwaves to alert people along the Gulf Coast: "Now is not the time to tempt fate," he said. "Now is not the time to dismiss official warnings. You need to take this seriously."

But Jenkins says Hurricane Isaac continued to defy expectations. "As it moved off towards the west, it moved towards New Orleans. And then it just stopped — that was pretty bizarre. We were all thinking it was going inland. It kind of hung out around the coast, dumped a lot of rain" — more than a foot in some places.

And that brings us to the largest and strangest storm of the year: Hurricane Sandy. Almost everything about Sandy was unusual. It turned left where most storms turned right. It started out as a hurricane and then became an equally powerful winter superstorm. It brought heavy snow to the Appalachians.

Jenkins says even veteran hurricane scientists were amazed. "If you're looking at it from a weather or research point of view — it's just like, 'Wow. Really?' "

Because Hurricane Sandy was expected to become a winter storm, the National Hurricane Center handed off warning duties to another branch of the National Weather Service before landfall. Officials are still discussing whether that confused the public.

But Jenkins says it was clear that Sandy was going to be a major threat. "The wind field was so large and the winds were powerful. And it began impacting the East Coast days before it actually arrived."

The superstorm became the largest on record — more than 1,100 miles across. Storms that big can generate huge tidal surges. And just hours before Sandy reached the coast near Atlantic City, James Franklin of the National Hurricane Center broadcast this message:

"The area that we're most concerned about is Raritan Bay, Long Island Sound, where we could see anywhere from 6 to 11 feet of inundation above the ground. That means if you're 6 feet tall, the water could be 5 feet above you," Franklin said.

The storm surge exceeded even that forecast, reaching 13 feet in parts of lower Manhattan. Meteorologists say they don't know why there were so many storms this year. It's not clear, for example, whether global warming was a factor.

But they note that since 1995, 70 percent of hurricane seasons have been busier than normal.

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Research Moratoriums And Recipes For Superbugs: Bird Flu In 2012

Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., use eggs to see if the Asian strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus has entered the U.S. in this photo from 2006.

Andy Manis/AP Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., use eggs to see if the Asian strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus has entered the U.S. in this photo from 2006.

Andy Manis/AP

For scientists who study a dangerous form of bird flu, 2012 is ending as it began — with uncertainty about what the future holds for their research, but a hope that some contentious issues will soon be resolved.

Last January, dozens of flu experts around the world agreed to what was supposed to be a 60-day pause in controversial experiments on the H5N1 bird flu virus. But none of them resumed work as planned because all year long, the debate over the benefits and the risks just wasn't going away.

Virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands says he reluctantly went along with the moratorium, "but I've not been a great advocate of it because there is urgency in this type of research."

Fouchier gets funding from the National Institutes of Health to study H5N1, which is widespread in poultry in parts of Asia and the Middle East.

H5N1 rarely infects humans, but more than half of those known to have gotten sick with it have died. Scientists have long wanted to know if this bird flu could mutate in a way that could make the virus start spreading between people and cause a pandemic.

“ If this was a circumstance where there was an easy path forward, where you could simply write down in an afternoon how best to handle this, well, we would have done that.

- Francis Collins

So Fouchier's lab experimented with the virus and found that certain genetic changes did make it capable of spreading through the coughs and sneezes of ferrets, which are the lab stand-ins for people.

This discovery provided important new clues about how future pandemics might emerge from nature. But at the same time, the findings were basically the recipe for creating a superflu — one that might kill millions.

That's why a panel of government advisers initially recommended against publicly revealing the details of both this experiment and another one like it done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"I think the biggest fear that we had was that these experiments were going on without the appropriate public dialogue," says Paul Keim, a microbiologist at Northern Arizona University, who chaired the panel.

For years, biologists have talked about the question of how to handle legitimate research that might produce information that could be misused to cause harm. But this so-called dual-use problem was largely theoretical in the life sciences. The bird flu research made it painfully real.

"It upped the ante, both in terms of what's at stake here in terms of public health and what's at stake here in terms of potential risks," Dr. Amy Patterson, who helps to direct the NIH's Office of Science Policy, says. "It captured people's attention."

Months went by as everyone scrambled to figure out what to do. Scientists argued at conferences and published op-eds. The World Health Organization held a closed-door meeting of flu experts. Officials tried, unsuccessfully, to find some legal way of giving the key details only to people who needed to know.

In the end, science journals did openly publish full reports describing the studies in detail. But the research moratorium continued and people asked: Well, now what? Is it back to business as usual? Or is there a line that should not be crossed?

The NIH just held a public meeting to discuss whether, and under what conditions, it should fund future experiments that might make this form of bird flu more dangerous.

Officials have drawn up a set of draft criteria for making decisions, and they want to know what people think. They're accepting emailed comments until Jan. 10.

At the same time, government officials are finishing up a review of what kind of lab safety measures should be used when doing this type of work.

Fouchier, for one, says it's still unclear to him how things will go.

"It's critical who is going to do the vetting on this research, who decides what can be done and what cannot be done," Fouchier says. "If you ask infectious disease specialists about what should be done, you're going to get different answers than if you ask security specialists."

Some researchers who don't have to follow the NIH rules may decide to just go ahead with these experiments, despite the lingering uncertainties.

"I suspect that we will be seeing a lifting of the moratorium on the part of people who are not NIH-funded," Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said after the NIH conference. "They will do that according to their own guidelines of their own funders and the country in which they are doing the research."

And if everything still seems unresolved, that's because this situation is really hard, NIH director Francis Collins said at the end of the recent meeting.

"If this was a circumstance where there was an easy path forward, where you could simply write down in an afternoon how best to handle this, well, we would have done that," Collins said.

He thinks this bird flu situation will hopefully get people better prepared for the next time something in biology raises similar concerns.

"And if we can get this one right, then the hope is, we can go on to some of those other issues undergirded by something more in the way of a foundation than we've previously had," Collins said.

Because if there's one thing that everyone can agree on, it's that the challenge of potentially dangerous information in biology is not going to go away.

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Why Charities Need To Consider Donors' Politics

As American make contributions to various charities at the end of the year, there is increasing evidence that politics is playing a role in their decisions. Research suggests that the way the charity presses certain ideological buttons predicts whether liberals or conservatives will pony up a donation.

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Book Challenges Kids With Science-Based Mysteries

Move over, CSI and NCIS, there's a new game in town. Authors Eric and Natalie Yoder share some of their 'One Minute Mysteries' that can be solved with logic and knowledge of science — and without the aid of a magically fast DNA lab or improbable photo enhancement software.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Did you get a box set of "CSI" videos for the holidays, you know, the show with the magical blue light that analyzes all the clues? Any enhanced photo software photo thingie that makes impossibly blurry pictures clear again? That's my favorite, how they can magnify something, and it just suddenly fills in all those little pixels.

If this only-on-television sort of sleuthing is not for you, where they solve a horrible crime in an hour, how about a more cerebral kind of game, where you can solve a crime in a minute? Presented for your consideration, short mysteries for kids you can solve with a little logic and some science knowledge.

Want to give it a try? Our number 1-800-989-8255. Give us a call, and you can talk about it with my guest. Eric Yoder is a report with the Washington Post, his day job, but he's also co-author with his daughter Natalie Yoder of the book "One Minute Mysteries: 65 More Short Mysteries You Solve With Science!" Just published, they're both with us today. Welcome back. Happy holidays.

ERIC YODER: Thank you.

NATALIE YODER: Thank you, hello.

YODER: And thank you for having us.

FLATOW: You're going gangbusters with this series. I guess it must be well-accepted, Emily(ph) - I mean Natalie. I'm sorry.

(LAUGHTER)

YODER: It's OK. Yeah, they're doing very well. This is our third book. The first two were written when I was a middle school and high school, and now I'm a college student. So we've seen these books grow, and apparently everyone likes them.

FLATOW: Now do you start with a concept you want to get across and then write sort of backwards to come up with a story?

YODER: For some of them we find a common science fact or misconception, and then we build a story around them. But some of them are just problems that we see in daily life, and we decide to make them a story.

FLATOW: 1-800-989-8255 if our number, if you'd like to play along with us, and I'll read one or two if I can get the time for it of 65 more short mysteries, and maybe you can answer the question or solve the mystery of how somebody knew that. And I like the way the book has always been set up. You have the mystery on one page, and then you turn over the leaf, and you see the answer to the mystery on the next page.

YODER: Yes, we tried to do that so there's kind of an immediate reward, especially for children, rather than for example putting all the answers in the back of the book and making them fish around for them. We find that kids like to read several in sequence, and just having them page after page like that I think really encourages them to keep reading.

FLATOW: Natalie, as you say, when we first met you back in 2009, you were in high school. And now you're off at college. Are you going to be studying literature and writing or move on to something...?

YODER: I'm actually a sophomore at Penn State. I'm studying communications and political science. But I am taking writing-intensive classes, and in the future I would like to do writing for PR or marketing. So this has definitely helped.

FLATOW: Political science you think will be helpful?

YODER: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: OK. That was one of the favorite subjects when I was in college many years ago, but that's good. And are the books actually being well received? You say you're selling a lot of them. But do you know if they're being received in high schools or middle schools? Are kids being introduced to them through classes in schools at all?

YODER: Yes, we've heard from many, many teachers both directly and through comments sent to the publisher that teachers like to use them to reinforce what they're teaching in the classroom. Sometimes they use them as homework assignments, sometimes as warm-up assignments during the class period or as maybe extra-credit assignments.

And we have just heard so many teachers tell us that they really, really find them valuable as a real-life way to reinforce what they're trying to get across in the classroom.

FLATOW: All right, I have a couple of contestants. I think it's Dante(ph) and Erica(ph) in Nashville. Hi, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

DANTE: Hello.

ERICA: Hi.

FLATOW: Hey there. OK, are you ready to listen to the story, the mystery, and maybe solve it for us?

DANTE: We're ready.

FLATOW: OK, here it goes: Ivan's father had bought a new smoke detector six months earlier, putting each one of them on each level of their house, one in the laundry room downstairs, one in the sunroom on the main level, one in the upstairs hall between the bedrooms.

The smoke detectors sent wireless signals to an alarm system. Ivan's father had asked him to replace the batteries and looked surprise when Ivan brought the smoke detectors to him, where he was working at his tool bench in the garage; that was where they kept the fresh batteries.

You didn't have to take them off their bases, his father said. You could have just taken the new batteries, opened each smoke detector where it was and switched the batteries there. Sorry, I guess I didn't understand what you meant, Ivan said. Can't we just change them here? Well, to do that sure, but we have to put each smoke detector back in the same place, or the alarm system won't work right, his father said.

They're - and they're all the same except that the color of one is more faded than the others, and one has dark spots. At least that tells us what we need to know, doesn't it, Ivan asked? And so I guess the question is: How do they know where to put them back? Dante and Erica, where do they know how to put them, or which one goes to where? Any answers to that?

(LAUGHTER)

DANTE: The one that was in the - it was in the sunroom...

FLATOW: One in the sunroom, one in the upstairs hall.

DANTE: That one's going to be duller, the color will be duller, or faded I guess.

FLATOW: Yeah, you got that. Let me go - let me read - that's very good. Let me go to the answer page. It says: the faded one must be the one from the sunroom, the brightest of the places, Ivan said, setting aside the one with the lighter color. And the dark spots on this one are mildew, meaning it must have come from a damp, dark place, the laundry room. That leaves the other one for the upstairs hall.

DANTE: Very good. Thank you.

FLATOW: Did you - do you study science in school, Dante, was...?

DANTE: I'm a third-year medical student, and my wife is a biology teacher.

FLATOW: Is that you, Erica?

ERICA: Yes.

FLATOW: Did your training help, you think, solve these problems?

ERICA: No.

(LAUGHTER)

ERICA: Common sense.

FLATOW: Just common sense. Well, thank you for playing along with us. I wish we had a prize to give you, but we don't.

ERICA: Thank you.

DANTE: Thank you.

FLATOW: Just the knowledge that you helped the rest of America solve the problem. Have a happy new year to you both.

DANTE: You guys, too, bye.

FLATOW: Bye. Is that typical of how it works?

YODER: Yes, some of them are set up kind of as the classic mystery story, where it must be one of these three things that happened or, you know, in whodunit terms, it must have been one of those three people who did it. And so you use your scientific understanding to, you know, eliminate possibilities and to, you know, match up causes and effects.

FLATOW: So you must be already thinking about the next book you'd like to take on. Do you think about making each one topical, different topics, or do you mix them all up in the book?

YODER: We mix them up depending on where we get the ideas. We have kept a folder of ideas just working on it over the last several years. And so the first book was of science stories. The second book, of course, was stories based on more mathematical principles, and of course this one is science again. So it is a little easier to get science-based stories and ideas because there's just so much of science around us in everyday life.

FLATOW: So you - Natalie, do you come up with ideas from things you see on TV or where?

YODER: Some of them are from things we see on TV, but a lot of the concepts, again, come from daily life. And some of them are just facts that I learned in school or we've encountered at home or on family vacations. And science is all around us. So is concepts in math. And sometimes you just have to look into things and find the mystery within them.

FLATOW: There you go. Let me see if I have time for one more to read. Let's go to John(ph) in Atlanta. Hi John.

JOHN: Hi, how are you doing?

FLATOW: All right, ready to play? Here I go.

JOHN: Yeah, I'll give it a shot.

FLATOW: Hey, I had an old picture up of my grandma looking just like that, only it wasn't a costume to her, Cassandra said, as Ingrid walked into the homeroom. She said they actually thought you look cool. Their school normally had a dress code, but it was Halloween, and everyone had come in that day wearing costumes. Ingrid was dressed like a hippie. She had a tie-dyed shirt, beads, sandals and sunglasses with orange lenses shaped like hearts.

Ingrid took off the sunglasses for class, but she put them back on when it was time to get ready for the Halloween party in the afternoon. The class was decorating the classroom and painting signs for the school parade. Kahn, who thought he was funny, was hanging decorations upside-down. Preston was pretending to sword-fight in his pirate costume with a paintbrush. And Ricky was playing with fake blood after putting some on his zombie costume.

When it was almost time for the parade, Cassandra noticed that one of the signs had been decorated with a red, rather than an orange pumpkin. OK, who's the joker here, Cassandra asked? John, do you have any guesses, and reason it out with us.

JOHN: Right, well, I would guess that the person who painted the pumpkin red was the person who was wearing orange sunglasses because that changed the way she saw the light. Was that Ingrid as the hippie?

FLATOW: Well, let's go to the answer page. Flip over - or there is a picture of someone wearing sunglasses. She looked around the room for a guilty face. I see now, Cassandra said, it's your orange-colored sunglasses, Ingrid. They make everything look the same color to you. They're acting as filters, so the light of only one or some colors come through to your eyes, but other colors are blocked. What you thought was orange paint is actually red. Take off those sunglasses, and you'll see.

Oops, Ingrid said laughing, I guess we'll just paint some flames on it and call it a pumpkin on fire.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Very cute ending. Thank you, John, you got it right.

JOHN: Great.

FLATOW: Thanks for playing along with us.

JOHN: Thank you very much.

FLATOW: You're welcome. Have a happy new year.

JOHN: You too, bye.

FLATOW: It seems like you don't have to be a kid, Natalie, to enjoy playing these little games with the puzzles here.

YODER: Well, I hope not. I hope that people at all ages can enjoy them.

FLATOW: Yeah, and do you laugh at the things you see on TV sometimes, like I started out by talking about CSI and weird kinds of instruments they have that nobody has?

YODER: I'm actually a big fan of "CSI," but it's also cool to be able to write them and to know that children will be able to solve them.

FLATOW: Yeah, so when can we see the next book?

YODER: Well, we're working on it right now. We're thinking about doing something math-oriented again. But we have some other ideas, and we might try a different format the next time around. So it will be some time, but in the meantime, we're really happy that this book just came out, and it's, you know, now available along with the other two.

FLATOW: All right, thank you very much for taking time to be with us, and have a happy holiday.

YODER: Thank you.

YODER: You, too, thank you.

FLATOW: Eric and Natalie Yoder, author of "One Minute Mysteries: 65 More Short Mysteries You Solve With Science!" We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about probably a renaissance scientist you've probably never heard of because so many of his ideas were wrong. No wonder you didn't hear about him, but still an interesting guy. Stay with us. We'll talk more about him when we get back after this break.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow, this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

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