A Hairy Proposition

Teenager invents £23 solar panel that could be solution to developing world’s energy needs … made from human hair

Color me skeptical. The story, of course, is very skimpy on the science, but let’s look at this. The claim of “9 V (18 W)” is really hard to believe, because P=IV means 2 A of current flowing through the hair, though that will be divided up. Still, the diameter of a hair is thinner than AWG 32 wire (at about 200 microns), which has a current limit of less than 0.1 A for power transmission, and that’s for a good conductor. Hair? Not so much. The pictures show a grid of interconnected hair, which doesn’t have all that much area, so capturing any more than a small fraction of the few hundred W/m^2 of insolation is not in the cards. A 20 x 20 grid at less than 0.2mm per hair is just a few square mm of hair — it can only get you a fraction of a Watt.

Question: why don’t we have our hair generating electricity like this while it’s attached to our heads?

At best, somebody dropped a prefix representing several orders of magnitude somewhere. At worst it’s a scam.

Seriously Inelastic

In physics we are usually taught that there are three types of collisions: elastic collisions, inelastic collisions, and completely inelastic collisions. Add to that the seriously inelastic collision.

Cocktail Party Physics: nascar driver vs. wiley coyote: a real-life seriously inelastic collision

Not for the squeamish — you should stick to ideal situations; this coyote is decidedly not spherical, especially after the impact. There is no truth to the rumor that NASCAR speedometers have a “purée” setting.

A Member of the TMTOTH Club

*Too Much Time On Their Hands

Leave It to Beaver: 1958

Someone watched an episode from “Leave It to Beaver” and freeze-framed a note from the principal that got sent home with ‘the Beav.’


Lew Burdette just hit a home run and Milwaukee leads seven to one in the series.

This is the last line of the filler material of the note.
No, my mistake, that was only the next to last. This is last.

Not a Myth

One of the things I had wanted to do on vacation was film a hummingbird in slow-motion. Alas, I did not see any visiting the feeder I set up . Our condo was not situated in a good spot; location, location, location.

However, I thought I had hit the jackpot while out geocaching one day, when I stopped to film some butterflies and bees pollinating some flowers. It looked like a small hummingbird.

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This is probably a hummingbird clearwing moth, Hemaris thysbe.

Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Program

Gorgeous first two-thirds of the Labor Day weekend, which I spent geocaching, up to the point where my knee started complaining about all the hiking. Off-trail bushwhacking seems to be the main irritant, along with hilly trails, and i was doing a lot of that on Sunday. The knee seems to wait until I’ve maximized the distance back to the car before starting to hurt, and this time was no exception. So I’m back in front of a computer screen, digging up interesting (to me) science stuff, and sorting through my slo-mo movies, getting things ready to go.

Getting the Latest Model is not Fashion

Dot Physics: The development of the atomic model

Ernest Rutherford said one day “hey, I think I will shoot some stuff at atoms.” I am sure his wife said “oh, Ernie” (she probably called him Ernie) “if it makes you happy to play with your little physics stuff, go ahead. I know how much you like it.” So he did. He shot some alpha particles (which are really just the nucleus of a helium atom) at some really thin gold foil.

Is Degrees Squared a Unit?

Physics Buzz: Six degrees of Paul Erdős

Some famous names have low Erdős numbers— Bill Gates has an Erdős number of 4, Steven Chu’s is 7, and Albert Einstein is 2.

If Chu’s is 7, mine is no greater than 10; I can trivially trace a path through my thesis advisor to his, to Chu.

And I’ve already mentioned that I sort of have a Bacon number of 3. Consequently, I’d like to popularize the notion of combining the two by adding them, making my Bacon-Erdős number, or Berdős number, 13 (or perhaps adding in quadrature, making my Berdős number 10.44)

Meanwhile, Chad asks Who Is the Erdos of Physics? Maybe we can make this three dimensional.

(Update: I’ve found that my Erdős number is no larger than 9, and I may be able to bring it down to 6 fairly easily)

One is the Loneliest Number

Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time

Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles proposed by physicists that carry a single magnetic pole, either a magnetic north pole or south pole. In the material world this is quite exceptional because magnetic particles are usually observed as dipoles, north and south combined. However there are several theories that predict the existence of monopoles. Among others, in 1931 the physicist Paul Dirac was led by his calculations to the conclusion that magnetic monopoles can exist at the end of tubes – called Dirac strings – that carry magnetic field. Until now they have remained undetected.

I’m guessing (from the Dirac string reference) that these aren’t the monopoles of standard electrodynamics, forbidden by Maxwell’s equations, but another weird result from condensed matter physics, to go along with fractional charge and spin-charge separation. This subtlety is probably going to be lost on the scientific fringe, though.

Update: Yeah, as I suspected. Via Starts With a Bang, the abstract says these are “emergent quasiparticles resembling monopoles.”