Busted more than once.
Skulls in the Stars: Mythbusters were scooped — by 130 years! (Archimedes death ray)
About the same time, however, and in an earlier volume of the Proceedings, I found an article with the title, “On the burning mirrors of Archimedes, and on the Concentration of light produced by reflectors,” by John Scott. This article is also an investigation of a myth that would be tackled some 130 years later by the MythBusters! Apparently the 1870s-1880s were a good era for ‘busting!
Physics Buzz: Chicken Head Tracking
The technique – which you could generally call “tracking” but is also pretty much the same thing as “dead reckoning” (or is it ded reckoning?) – is utilized by aircraft and some car navigation systems. (I love it when “high tech” turns up in Nature.) The chicken’s body communicates its movements so well with her head, that she can almost instantaneously compensate for her movement of the lower body, and keep her head stationary in relation to her environment. To do this, her body has to have some fixed point, some center, and determine how far her bum has moved away it, then move her head an equal but opposite distance from it. Once again this requires very rapid communication, and then action, on the part of her body.
Snowmageddon, aka the Snowpocalypse, has moved intothe recovery phase. I got about 2 feet of snow, but further north and in the hilly regions, they got more. 40″ in some areas (i.e. more than a meter)
My car. It’s not a minivan.
I learned my lesson from the snowstorm in December and parked on the opposite row of the lot. The way they plow, the snow gets dumped on one side of the plow, and they don’t get as close to the cars. The people opposite me have 4 – 5 feet behind their cars, and it’s piled up, while I have no more than 2 feet. I dug out one gap between me and my neighbor yesterday, and will do a few shifts to complete the dig-out today. There’s always a little game of chicken in these situations — if you wait, your neighbor will dig out first and save you some effort. But they may also be assholes and dump snow in your cleared area, too. I was a good citizen and deposited the snow on the grassy knoll at the front of my car.
Electric Charge Can Change Freezing Point of Water
[P]revious experiments to understand whether electric fields can influence freezing were complicated by the materials used. The best materials for holding electric charge are metals, but as anyone who has tried to open a car door after a snowstorm knows, ice forms easily on metals even without a charge.
“If you try to do it with metal, you don’t know what is from the electric field and what is from the metal itself,” Lubomirsky says. “We wanted to know whether it is the charge that does it, or something special in metal.”
Instead of metal, Lubomirsky and his colleagues used a pyroelectric material, which can form a short-lived electric field when heated or cooled. The researchers used four pyroelectric crystals, each of which was placed inside a copper cylinder. The bottom surfaces of two crystals were coated with chromium to conduct an electric charge, and the other two were coated with an aluminum oxide to keep the surface uncharged.
An obvious question, not addressed by the article, is why you couldn’t (or rather, why they didn’t) create an external field separate from the surface being used for the condensation and freezing, and see how that affected the freezing point. This doesn’t seem to differentiate between surface and bulk effects.
Arts: Photographer Loves Math, Graphs Her Images
Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says. Graziano doesn’t go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she’s got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph.
A little like Matt’s Sunday Function over at Built on Facts, only with pretty pictures in addition to the graphs.
Watch out, Colorado
Altitude Causes Weight Loss Without Exercise
The scientists ferried 20 overweight, middle-aged men by train and cable car to a research station perched 1,000 feet below the peak of Germany’s highest mountain, Zugspitze. During the week-long stay, the men could eat and drink as much as they liked and were forbidden from any exercise other than leisurely strolls. The team measured the men’s weight, metabolic rate, levels of hunger and satiety hormones before, during, and after their mountain retreat.
After a week up high, the subjects lost an average of 3 pounds. A month later, they were still 2 pounds lighter. The sceintists’ data showed this was likely because they ate about 730 calories less at high altitudes than they did at normal elevations. They may have felt less hungry, in part, because levels of leptin, the satiety hormone, surged during the stay, while grehlin, the hunger hormone, remained unchanged. Their metabolic rate also spiked, meaning they burned more calories than they usually did.
I love the imagery of “ferrying” the test subjects. Like they were cargo, or veal. “Easy there, young man, you’ll only make yourself tired and stringy. Now, to check on the free-range children.”
Anyway, it’s not all beer and skittles. It’s not clear if fat was lost (vs muscle or water) and there are certain risks involved.
Thursday afternoon I had the realization that I still had not purchased a shovel; my inner drive to get one after our last big snowstorm waned immediately after I dug myself out and went home on vacation. So it wasn’t until the latest storm was looming, along with the local ordinance requiring one to go to the store for a 24-pack of toilet paper, gallon of milk and loaf of bread, that I realized I needed to go shovel shopping. And that the odds of quickly locating one might be small.
But I realized the odds of a shove being found elsewhere were pretty good, and that the vendor might be able to ship the shovel to me quickly. Amazon to the rescue! Shovel in stock, overnight delivery available, shovel actually delivered less than 24 hours after ordering. Now all I have to do is wait for the snow to stop.
Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress
With more than a twinge of irony, Murray Hill Incorporated, a liberal public relations firm, recently announced that it planned to run in the Republican primary in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.
Unfortunately they were founded in 2005, and you need to be 25 to run for the house.
Related: Abstruse Goose: Wall Street
World War II computer Colossus that cracked Nazi code
Retired British spy catcher Tony Sale rebuilt Colossus, the world’s first recognisably programmable computer.
Colossus was instrumental in the work of code cracking operations at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire during World War II.
It deciphered messages sent by German over the Lorenz Cipher.
Turtle Universe: Neutrinos again
So now you’ve got this ice, you’ve got these muons made by muon neutrinos, you’ve got this blue glow. The ice below the South Pole is probably the purest and clearest in the world. There’s nothing to compete with this blue light, and it just lights up that ice, traveling a great distance through the crystal clear solid water. And when it comes to a detector (called a DOM for Digital Optical Module), that detector grabs the blue glow and stores it away. You’ve just detected a neutrino!
OK, so what? So you’ve just detected a neutrino. Big deal.
It is a big deal, and here’s why. Neutrinos weigh almost nothing. Almost. We now know that they have a tiny, but real, mass. Why? Because of Einstein again. Any particle with zero mass travels at the speed of light, but any particle with a real mass, no matter how tiny, travels slower.
Of course, any post entitles Neutrinos Again must have a prequel: Neutrinos