Schrödinger's Kitten
Irreverent Science for Everyone
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The Fruit Is A Lie
We all know, I think, that a tomato is a fruit not a vegetable. It’s the sort of amazing fact printed on cereal boxes to amuse and entertain children with very low standards. The distinction is, so I fuzzily recall, that fruit are part of reproduction, whereas a vegetable is any other botanical bit we eat. Thus, fruit have seeds inside, veg don’t — veg can be leaves (cabbage), roots (parsnip) or buds (sprouts).
5 Things I Didn't, And You Probably Didn't, Know About CERN
I was lucky enough to go to CERN last week. Unfortunately I was there for work, which meant I couldn't harass particle physicists as much as I wanted to, but I did get to see the Compact Muon Solenoid (compact as in only 15 metres tall), and I did learn some things I did not know, despite being a particle physics/CERN fangirl.
Since I was very little I have known of CERN — my dad's best friend worked there — and since I read my first book on particle physics (circa 8 years old) I have wanted to work in it. So I was very excited. We're talking squealing, jumping up and down, planning my pillaging of the guest shoppe, etc. With my camera batteries fully charged I set off...
Amateur Mosquito Investigation Part 2 (or The Biting Bastards are Truly Bastards)
Slight delay in results caused by being out of the country and applying for paying jobs.1 However I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that I have the results of the first experiment. For those who've forgotten, that's:
Amateur Mosquito Investigation (or Getting the Biting Bastards Back)
The situation is this. I live in the French alps at the moment, as I am working at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in the capacity of Junior Science Pimp (OK, assistant press officer). I am suffering from insect bites, delivered by species unknown, but the modus operandi fits mosquitos.
I did a quick search on the internet on the subject of insect bites and how to prevent them, and found a lot of old wives' tales, hearsay, and unsubstantiated anecdotes. The best site I have found on the subject (giving paper and experiment references) is here, but I will also be searching the scientific literature as soon as I have access to journal archives (it is a crying shame that access to these things is so expensive that only scientific institutions can afford licences to view them. We all deserve access to knowledge!), but in the meantime I am setting up a small experiment to see what, if anything, will repel the little individuals.
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?
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.
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.
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.