Schrödinger's Kitten
Irreverent Science for Everyone
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Ways to Electrocute Yourself Around the Home
I had a very bourgeois accident last week — while gaily opening a bottle of bubbly, fully half the bottle cascaded all over the gas hob, leaving me distraught and the hob sparking continuously for the next hour or so. In my wisdom, I decided to disassemble the hob, for ease of drying, using for protection the tea towel I used to sop up the wine. Who can tell me why this is a bad idea?
That Last Doctor Who Episode
The alternative title for this post was going to be "Yes, I know it's science fiction but I spend my time hitting my head on the sofa from sheer frustration when they try and do faux sciency bits and I don't see why you shouldn't suffer too" but I thought it was a bit long.
So, for those of you who don't watch Doctor Who, or have amnesia, the Daleks were plotting to destroy everything by aligning 27 planets in a certain way, including Earth. Presumably there was a feature in Evil Villains Monthly!1 about this, as it has featured in many a dastardly plot2 — although the Daleks were unusually pro-active in stealing and assembling the planets themselves rather than just waiting for the time to be right.
Lies, Misinformation and Jeremy Clarkson
A lot of people (mainly car drivers and lovers) have gleefully told me about the 'test' conducted on Top Gear which 'showed the Prius (a hybrid eco-car) wasn't that fuel efficient'. In case you haven't seen it, the clip can be watched here, unless it's been taken down by the BBC (the kitten accepts no responsibility for objects thrown at screen in an attempt to silence Jeremy Clarkson).
Why We Should Stop Using Fossil Fuels – Even If Global Warming Wasn't Happening (which it is, by the way)
Fossil fuels are what's left of ancient (dinosaur-type era) living things, crushed and simmered deep in the Earth for millions of years as more and more layers of mud covered their bodies. As the mud turned to rock, the organic matter turned into a rich soup of molecules called hydrocarbons. Then some hairless monkeys started digging it out, and found that it burnt real good. They called this hydrocarbon-rich material coal if it was solid, crude oil if it was liquid, or natural gas. And they burnt it, and it produced a lot of energy, more energy than anything the monkeys had burnt so far. It was really light for the amount of energy it had in it, too, so you could take a bottle or a lump of it with you and use it for transport without it weighing you down. And the monkeys used more and more of it for more and more things — oil could be turned into waterproof, mouldable, lightweight materials, which were just great for making disposable beverage containers and costume jewellery.
Dark Matter - Dark Cop-out
Dark matter is Magic. Not only is it undetectable (hence the name dark), it's also incredibly common — 10 times more so than ordinary matter — and miraculously solves any equations it's faced with. Why is this?
Because we made it up. Dark matter, and its even more slippery counterpart, dark energy, is a big plaster on some massive gaps between our theories and our observations of the universe.
Kitten Approved Technology
What better use for the interwebs and podcasting than to broadcast soothing purrs around the world? This is not purely ear candy: purring is officially productive.
The purr is used as a social communication to indicate 'all is cool' — kittens purr to their mother from a day old, and cats may purr when approaching strange felines to signal their peaceful intent. Purring also indicates the cats' emotional state; but while the most common instance of purring is to indicate contentment, cats also purr when injured, stressed, or giving birth. In a stressed situation or when an animal is hurt, where is the motivation to purr? Using precious energy to hum to oneself would seem to be a bit of a useless evolutionary strategy.
Why Are We Fat?
It turns out there are possibly scientific excuses — sorry, reasons — why I, along with most of the Western world, according to well-meaning TV chefs and hysterical headlines, am plump. The blame for this is usually laid at the feet of unhealthy food and increasingly sedentary hobbies (such as browsing websites, you porky reader you).
A number of the excessively sanctimonious seem to blame the growing tidal wave of blubber on fast food, which is apparently only consumed by people lacking in education (and, one assumes, impulse control). Of course, nobody with a high-class education (which presumably includes simple biology) would ever eat pie 'n chips. They'd eat foie gras.
The Importance of Being Polycrystalline
Whether or not it's got anything to do with global warming, it's gloriously sunny here in the United (snigger implicit) Kingdom. And since it's impossible to buy coconut icecream, I am attempting to make it With Science.
The naïve way to make icecream is to take cream and freeze it. However, this gives you a solid block of milky ice. You can try and catch it when it's only partially frozen, but that relies on precise timing and will usually just produce slush. The key to making tasty icecream lies in how the molecules inside it are arranged. When a liquid freezes, the molecules slowly lose their kinetic energy and form bonds with each other, holding them together in a regular fashion. This regimented pattern spreads out to the other molecules, and hey presto, you have a state change from liquid to solid. If the liquid's left undisturbed while this happens, you end up with just one big crystal of ice — structurally sound and impossible to break into.
Nanotech for the Enthusiastic Amateur
While I was looking for a diagram to put in my recent research project (to illustrate atomic force microscopy, because I couldn't face drawing it), I found The Open Source Handbook of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. This is great! Not only for us students who cannot manage to stay awake in our nanotech lectures (sorry Prof. Petrashov...) and who are prepared to chance our coursework on internet hearsay; but also for everyone else who doesn't want to pay £3000 (or more?) per year of education, but does want to know about the tech we're building the future out of.
How The Universe Is
I apologise for the overuse of really, lots and very in this piece. Anyone wishing to buy me a thesaurus may.
The universe is mostly nothing. On a galactic scale, it is, indeed, very big. And the lumps of planets and stars in it — even though these are indeed mind-bogglingly big, even when compared to things like Westminster Cathedral, frinstance — are very very rare and very very tiny, relative to the massive amounts of nothing in here. This is the same no matter what direction you look in: just light-years of nothing punctuated by the occasional fiery ball of gas, or a speck of rock. It’s all rushing away from us (maybe Earth smells, or something), spreading out in every direction, so the amount of empty space versus the amount of actual stuff is even increasing. Even if you just look at one of the rocky bits; my favourite rock, our rock, the Earth, really closely... it’s still mostly nothing.