Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Mantis Shrimp

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How mantis shrimps deliver armour-shattering punches without breaking their fists

The smashers deliver the fastest punch of any animal. As the club unfurls, its acceleration is 10,000 times greater than gravity. Moving through water, it reaches a top speed of 50 miles per hour. It creates a pressure wave that boils the water in front of it, creating flashes of light (shrimpoluminescene – no, really) and immensely destructive bubbles. The club reaches its target in just three thousandths of a second, and strikes with the force of a rifle bullet. Against such punches, even the best armour eventually fails.
But the mantis shrimp’s club doesn’t fail. It can deliver blow after punishing blow, breaking apart its prey without breaking apart itself.

The Secret Lives of Cats and Dogs and Their Relatives

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Motion-activated cameras at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve provide scientists a window into the secret lives of the animals there. Some, like the hummingbirds, flit about during the day. Others come out at night. Among the cast are mountain lions, bobcats, deer, coyotes, foxes and skunks.

Don’t go there at night. All of the nocturnal animals are demonically possessed — you can see their eyes glowing!

It's Not You. It's Me.

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Taster’s Choice: Why I Hate Raw Tomatoes and You Don’t

All my life, I’ve been vaguely ashamed of my dislike, probably because it was such a profound disappointment to my mother, and naturally I craved her approval.

But no more! I just discovered that I am not alone in the blogosphere when it comes to hating raw tomatoes. Kylee Baumie of Living Green just came out of the closet as a “mater hater.” So did Steve Bender, a.k.a., the Grumpy Gardener, and Chris Tidrick, who blogs at From the Soil. They recently discovered their mutual dislike while at a Garden2Blog event in Arkansas. Like Chris, I, too, carefully remove all bits of tomato from food and leave it on the side of the plate. Solidarity!

We mater-haters have to stick together. As Grumpy notes, “Telling people you hate fresh tomatoes is like saying you hate giggling babies or that you loathe the prospect of world peace.”

Count me in this group. We should have t-shirts made.

I’m also sensitive to the bitterness in the foods Jennifer mentions, so it may be that I have that gene, too.

Getting Freaky With a New Lubricant

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Shouldn’t it be a lubrican rather than a lubrican’t?

MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing

When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the “secret” trick: smacking the “57” logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem.

There are two ways to go with the idea of waste, I think. With the coating there will be less condiment thrown away when it is “empty”, but for a traditional bottle, not having the same effective viscosity means pouring a lot faster, which may mean more waste as you accidentally drown your food. With squirt bottles, I think you’re OK. But less consumer waste means you purchase less, so a bold prediction of mine is that the product cost will rise to compensate.

She's So Deliciously Low

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The Indelible Stamp of our Lowly Origins

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I’ve been a participant in the evolution-creation struggle, from years ago on USENET in talk.origins, so I’ve heard all the blather at the beginning, many times. I was aware of the chromosome fusion between other apes and humans, but unaware how well the recent DNA sequencing had addressed the issue. It’s near the end.

Don't Forget the Gin

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Recipe For Safer Drinking Water? Add Sun, Salt And Lime

“So basically you add dirt and salt, to make the water cleaner?” I asked him.

“Right,” said Pierce laughing, “It’s not exactly intuitive.”

Perhaps not so intuitive to the average person, but it’s a process that may be more familiar to makers of wine, where bentonite is commonly used to clarify wine of impurities.
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Schwab and medical student Alexander Harding discovered that adding a half a Persian lime to a two-liter bottle of water reduced the disinfection time in the sun from six hours to a half an hour. That’s just about the same amount of time it takes to boil water, and much more energy efficient.