Discoveries Hiding in Plain Sight

After vanishing for a bit into the world of working strange hours and taking classes, I am back with a discussion of discoveries hiding in plain sight. That almost seems topical! There have been plenty of scientific discoveries that occurred, essentially, because someone decided to actually look. So let’s look at some recent and not so recent examples. Sometimes you discover things completely by accident. Sometimes it was just there all along.

It’s actually a pretty good place to hide for a while

1.5 Million Penguins

The thing about Antartica is, shockingly enough, it’s a bit remote. There are  a lot of things we don’t know just because there are only a few people who have been there. So it’s not entirely surprising that there are things that have been overlooked.

Even when one of those things turns out to be over a million penguins. 

Hi guys. We’re just hanging out here. Photo by Jason Auch

In 2006, Michael Polito was doing work on Danger Island when he noticed that there was an awful lot of penguin poop scattered around. And penguin poop tends to imply that there are penguins somewhere doing the pooping. So the research group began examining satellite imagery of the Danger Zone and determined that there were an awful lot of Adelie penguins there. The final estimate of 1.5 million penguins represented a total increase in the global population of 20%.

Buckyballs

Carbon is probably the most studied element in the entire periodic table. Even the study of other elements is often framed in the context of carbon. It is, after all, what life itself is based on. The functionalized world of organic chemistry has occasionally been referred to as the study of reactions that don’t work, generally by exasperated students. There’s a lot to learn there. A lot to debate. But elemental carbon? In the mid-20th century we were pretty sure we had that figured it out. Either you had diamond, where every carbon was bonded to four others, or graphite where every carbon was bonded to three others in flat sheets.

In 1965, Eiji Osawa was studying a molecule called corannulene. He noticed that it looked rather like a piece of a soccer ball and proposed that the full ball could also exist. Smalley and Curl turned Osawa’s prediction into reality by blasting graphite with lasers. By vaporizing the carbon, they were able to isolate the regular clusters. Since the shape was so similar to a geodesic dome, they decided to name the new molecule buckminsterfullerene. And because chemists love a good nickname, they became known colloquially as buckyballs.

This was a surprisingly apt stock picture!

Eventually, it turned out that small quantities of buckyballs actually exist in nature. The fancy laser vaporization process is, in essence, a very elaborate way of making… soot. And indeed it turns out that you can actually find (highly impure) buckyballs in places as mundane as candle soot.

Fluorescent Puffins

Puffins notoriously get everywhere. They had to invent Porgs in The Last Jedi just to deal with that fact. But they have plenty of surprises available.

Just hanging out here with secret light up beaks.

Jamie Dunning didn’t even study puffins. He works with twites, but had been idly wondering about whether puffin beaks might fluoresce since related crested auklets did. Everyone does strange things sometimes when having a bad day in the lab, and Dunning went with “put a dead puffin under a UV light”. Probably one of the less destructive options for dealing with frustration, and certainly an original one.

And that’s how he discovered that the yellow stripes on puffin beaks fluoresce a brilliant blue. This discovery raises an awful lot of questions. For example “What in the beak is making it do this?” and “Okay what is this actually useful for?”. These might take a while to figure out, since this research hasn’t actually reached the point of publication.

Though of course, this all assumes that the same phenomenon is seen in live puffins. Like most living creatures, sea birds don’t appreciate you blasting a UV light in their face, so first Dunning and his colleagues need a way to protect the puffins’ eyes.

Which yes, does mean that they’re making sunglasses for puffins. Dunning declared that “This felt like the obvious thing to do” and really, who can argue with him on that? And because there’s no need to be boring, some of the 3D printed sunglasses are even in the shape of aviators.