Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

The Ventures Physics. Or Biology.

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Walking or running efficiently, your locomotor muscles might not agree

So we’re good walkers, or at least economic ones. But the question is, what MAKES for this efficiency? How exactly are we burning fewer calories at a specific walking pace? Ideally, this means that our muscles, like our bodies overall, are at their most efficient at a moderate walking pace. The calories burned over time are the result of the total metabolic rate of all the muscles that produce locomotion. So since your metabolism is minimized at a moderate walking pace, creating the most efficiency, it would make theoretical sense that your individual MUSCLES are also minimizing their metabolism at that moderate walking pace, and the cumulative effect is one of energy efficiency.

Relax, It's not a Puppy Pulley

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Dog Cam

[A] team of U.S., Dutch, and Belgian researchers have developed an eye tracking device called a “DogCam” to see what a dog actually looks at when it studies the subtle cues of its owner and its surroundings.

The scientists will also be able to see other dogs take the subject’s lunch money for looking like this.

2nd Objoke: the editor on the video should be Seymour Butz

More Bang for the Calorie

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Why Calorie Counts Are Wrong: Cooked Food Provides a Lot More Energy

[T]he Atwater Convention has two big flaws. First, it pays no attention to the extent to which food has been processed. For example, it treats grain as the same calorie value whether it is eaten whole or as highly milled flour. But smaller particles are less work to digest, and therefore provide more net energy. Second, it treats foods as equally digestible (meaning, having the same proportion digested) regardless of processing. But cooked foods, as we’ve seen, are more digestible than raw foods.

Gone Bananas

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Spaces of Banana Control

In addition to precise temperature control, the ripening process also depends on atmospheric design. Over a 24-hour period, each roomful of bananas is gassed with ethylene, a plant hormone that accelerates ripening (and is also, curiously, the most produced organic compound in the world).

I learned about the role of ethylene a few years back, after wanting to ripen some bananas quickly and being told that putting them in a paper bag would do the trick. I did a test with one banana in the bag and one outside as a control, and the one in the bag did indeed ripen faster. And the internet told me that it was the ethylene that did the ripening, which is why “one bad apple ruins the lot” — as fruit like bananas and apples ripen, they give off ethylene, and that accelerates through the process, so one ripe piece cause the others to ripen pretty quickly. The paper bag concentrates the gas relative to it being out in the open and causes more ripening. Curiously, a plastic bag did not work — this could be because humidity inhibits ripening, and it’s possible the permeability of the paper bag allows water vapor to escape but still retain some ethylene to do its magic chemistry.

I Can't Believe it's not CSI!

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A New Perspective on Crime Scenes

Moving in the direction of what we see in fictional shows.

In 2009, to better record crime scenes, the New York City Police Department began using the Panoscan, a camera that creates high-resolution, 360-degree panoramic images. Each panorama takes between 3 to 30 minutes to produce, depending on the available light, and is added to a database where detectives can access it. Before the switch to the Panoscan, crime scene images sometimes took days to process. Now, soon after the photos are posted, investigators can point and click over evidence from a scene that they might have missed in the hectic hours after the crime.

Warning: graphic images