Monthly Archives: July 2010

Appetite Wins

Posted on by

Daniel Okrent has book out on Prohibition and was on The Daily Show the other night. George will has an op-ed that uses some of the information from the book.

Another round of Prohibition, anyone?

[B]y 1830, adult per capita consumption was the equivalent of 90 bottles of 80-proof liquor annually.

Although whiskey often was a safer drink than water, Americans, particularly men, drank too much. Women’s Prohibition sentiments fueled the movement for women’s rights — rights to hold property independent of drunken husbands; to divorce those husbands; to vote for politicians who would close saloons. So the United States Brewers’ Association officially opposed women’s suffrage.

(George still writes well, as long as the topic isn’t global warming.)

Okrent mentions the parallel to marijuana in the interview, though the op-ed doesn’t go there.

All About Protons

Posted on by

The Coolest Antiprotons

Earlier techniques cooled antiprotons with cold electrons, but the coldest antiproton temperature recorded with this method was about 100 kelvin. To turn down the heat, Hangst and colleagues used a technique called evaporative cooling, which had previously been used only for neutral atoms. “It’s exactly how your coffee cools itself,” Hangst says. “The steam above your coffee, those molecules are the hottest ones. They can escape from the coffee and carry away energy, so the coffee is absolutely colder.”

Meanwhile, protons are suddenly smaller: The proton shrinks in size

Pohl and his team have a come up with a smaller number by using a cousin of the electron, known as the muon. Muons are about 200 times heavier than electrons, making them more sensitive to the proton’s size. To measure the proton radius using the muon, Pohl and his colleagues fired muons from a particle accelerator at a cloud of hydrogen. Hydrogen nuclei each consist of a single proton, orbited by an electron. Sometimes a muon replaces an electron and orbits around a proton. Using lasers, the team measured relevant muonic energy levels with extremely high accuracy and found that the proton was around 4% smaller than previously thought.

Update (7/9) Chad has posted an excellent summary of the paper

Falling into The Canyonero

Posted on by

ScienceBlogs, we have a problem

Much consternation over at the home of science blogging, ScienceBlogs. The forum for the brilliant Orac, Pharynula, Molecule of the Day, and countless other insightful, funny and informative blogs has decided upon a bizarre new strategy in sourcing new posts. As of yesterday, the platform will host a new blog written by food giant PepsiCo, all about the company’s specialist subject of refreshing sugary drinks and their benefits for dental and dietary health.

Sorry, no, PepsiCo’s scientific staff will be writing about nutrition on the new Food Frontiers blog. I’ll give you a moment to get back on your chair.

They also host several of my favorite physics-y blogs, though I’ve only seen action-reaction (as of writing this) from The Quantum Pontiff, who is leaving, but mostly for other reasons and Science After Sunclipse, who is also eclipsing.

I can’t see this as anything but an advertising platform for a corporation. Which raises the question — will Scienceblogs be paying Pepsi to blog there, (as is the arrangement I expect it has with the rest of its bloggers) or is it the other way around? If it’s the former, why would you bother? Is this a Pepsi blogging juggernaut that they’ve assimilated? If it’s the latter, and the article implies that this is the case, then the sellout is blatantly obvious. Krusty, what were you thinking?

Nano Don Quixote

Posted on by

Efficient nano motor cleverly harnesses light

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Labs and the University of California have made a new nanoscale motor that can drive a disc 4000 times bigger than itself. It is powered via the so-called “plasmonic effect” and could be used to manipulate ultra-small objects like DNA and for powering nanoelectromechanical machines (NEMS). At merely 100 nm across the motor looks like a tiny windmill, inspiring the researchers to dub it a “light mill”.
…
In recent years researchers have discovered that they can increase the interactions between light and matter by taking advantage of the electrons that oscillate collectively at the surface of metals – called “surface plasmons”. Light fields are enhanced when they are resonant with these plasmons – an effect that has already been successfully used in techniques like single-molecule detection and surface-plasmon enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS).

This Beer Also Knows What You Did Last Summer

Posted on by

This Beer Knows Where You’ve Been

New research suggests that your visits to such places can be tracked by analyzing chemical traces in your hair. That’s because water molecules differ slightly in their isotope ratios depending on the minerals at their source. In a study published in the current issue of The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, researchers found that water samples from 33 cities across the United State could be reliably traced back to their origin based on their isotope ratios.

From the paper

The δ2H and δ18O values of a fluid input composed of beverages distributed on a large, regional scale may not necessarily mirror those of local tap water. The power of prediction using local tap water isotope ratios in models like that of Ehleringer et al. (1) would be confounded by the consumption of nonlocal beverages. On the other hand, some beverages (e.g., carbonated soft drinks, microbrew beer) likely use a more local distribution system. We expect the isotopic composition of a fluid input composed of beverages distributed on a small, local scale would generally mirror those of local tap water.

Which is why, to hide my whereabouts, I drink bottled water and imported beer. Stay thirsty, my friends.

Hit-and-Run

Posted on by

Out hiking/geocaching in the hot, hot sun with my camera, on the trail near South Run Park.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

A number of sources indicate that for some species, female dragonflies dip their abdomens in water to deposit eggs after they’ve been fertilized; there was a bit of that going on in the stream, along with a bit of tandem flying, if you take my meaning. Not sure if the collision is territorial, a clumsy mating ritual or just Odonata dickishness.