The Dandiness of Candy Was Not Measured

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Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make an incredible discovery

When they tested the resulting materials for superconductivity, they found that the ones soaked in commercial booze came out ahead. About 15 percent of the material became a superconductor for the water mixed with ethanol, and less for the pure water. By comparison, Shochu jacked up conductivity by 23 percent and red wine managed to supercharge over 62 percent of the material. The scientists were pleased, if bemused with their results.

One wonders, did they have a hangover (or regret their conductivity becoming super) the next morning?

A Cold, Lazy Bum

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BEC: What Is It Good For?

The primary application of atomic BEC systems is in basic research areas at the moment, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. You sometimes hear people talk about BEC as a tool for lithography, or things like that, but that’s not likely to be a real commercial application any time soon, because the throughput is just too low. Nobody has a method for generating BEC at the sort of rate you would need to make interesting devices in a reasonable amount of time. As a result, most BEC applications will be confined to the laboratory.

It’s not for lack of trying though. DARPA has a program aimed at applications of BECs to interferometry (Guided BEC Interferometry) which Chad mentions as one application. Research programs I mentioned some time ago are probably sill at it, though not all of them are intended to exist outside the lab.

I Think it Worked for the Professor, Too

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University of York scientists using ginger in conservation of endangered stag beetle

The new research shows that stag beetles, almost extinct in parts of England and Wales, are attracted to a chemical found in ginger and this can be used to lure the insects into aerial traps fitted with tiny microphones to monitor the movement of larvae in underground nests. From this, scientists can monitor the falling numbers of adult stag beetles.

Interesting that the chemical wasn’t found in Mary Ann, but you have to go with what works, li’l buddy.

Caught in the Act

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NASA’S Fermi Catches Thunderstorms Hurling Antimatter Into Space

Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before.

Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.

From the Forges of the Ice Queen Lair

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Extruding Ice from Steel Fences and Pipes with Diurnal Freeze/Thaw (Relative of the ice cube spike you might have seen in your freezer)

After extruding many rods and ribbons of ice from steel pipes I think I know how the ice was extruded from the steel fence in British Columbia. While I produced my ice in one night, the processes leading to the extrusion of ice from the steel fence took place over a couple of days. It is a product of the diurnal freeze/thaw process, consistent with this series of pages.

Somehow water gets into the pipes of that steel fence. On the first night the water in the fence freezes, but it does not freeze solid. Then the next day some of the ice melts. The ice that remains in the fence floats to the top of the water. Then that night the temperature falls and ice forms again. This time the expanding water forces some of that ice that did not melt the day before to be pushed out of any holes where the two pipes are welded together. The results are the ribbons of ice captured by Sheryl.

The Non-Rivalry Rivalry

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In light of a surprisingly good weekend of wild-card playoff football (Three games competitive until the end, and the fourth didn’t get out of hand until the second half), we have Brady, Manning and the rivalry. (It means a little less right now, with the Colts being bounced by the Jets, but whaddaya gonna do?)

In comparison to other sports and other rivalries, this one isn’t. Quarterbacks aren’t in direct competition with each other, and they don’t act like rivals. One minor objection I have to the analysis is that they don’t emphasize the importance of the other players on the team. While passing yards and TDs reflect talent of the quarterback, your winning percentage also has a lot to do with how good your defense is. But that’s peripheral to the point of the story.

Context Matters

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In physics, units matter (just ask the Mars Climate Crasher Orbiter). They put a context on the number. That isn’t always enough, because you don’t know if the number is big or small unless you compare it to a familiar quantity, which is why it’s a good exercise to be Putting a number in its context

[I]s the failure rate exceptional? A figure means nothing if it has no context: 600 pregnancies sounds like a big number, but there is no way to know what it means unless we know how many women had Implanon, and for how long.

By Gum it's Glass!

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The hover tag on the recent xkcd cartoon Misconceptions mentions the common glass mistake, that it is a slow moving fluid (also seen: supercooled fluid). I remarked to a colleague that part of the foundation for that was not understanding that there is a glass transition, while the more common observation is a first-order phase transition from liquid to solid. He mentioned a good example of a glass transition:

Take a cold piece of chewing gum. Break it in half. That’s a material in the glassy state.

Put the gum in your mouth and wait a short time. Then bite. Elastic and rubbery, but still a solid. Somewhere in that temperature span is the glass transition,

Doctor Obvious Goes to College

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College students lack scientific literacy, study finds

Students trying to explain weight loss, for example, could not trace matter once it leaves the body; instead they used informal reasoning based on their personal experiences (such as the fat “melted away” or was “burned off”). In reality, the atoms in fat molecules leave the body (mostly through breathing) and enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and water.

Rough calculation: Assume you breathe in around a liter each time at 20 breaths per second minute. To make the math a little easier, let’s make that 22.4 L of an ideal gas per minute, which is one mole. Increase the CO2 by 1.5% in each cycle, which takes a Carbon atom out of your body. That’s 0.015*12g*60*24 = 260 g. You lose more than half a pound just breathing each day.

Most students also incorrectly believe plants obtain their mass from the soil rather than primarily from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “When you see a tree growing,” Anderson said, “it’s a lot easier to believe that tree is somehow coming out of the soil rather than the scientific reality that it’s coming out of the air.”

Feynman told us this.

College upperclassmen still fail at scientific reasoning

Related to/based on the first article; it adds a few other points.