Jun 29, 2012
The ultrasonic mosquito, the mixed-up radio show and the Brazilian
Self-professed cyberpunk Jonty Campbell sent me a link to a site reporting that the Brazilian adventure-travel magazine, Go Outside, has collaborated with Sao Paulo radio station, Band FM, to broadcast a music program that suppoedly repels mosquitoes. The radio station purportedly broadcasts a continuous tone at 15 kilohertz, which the site says is “inaudible to humans”, but “repels mosquitoes because it mimics the sound of dragonflies — …
I discussed Mendeley when it first launched and I perceived it as a kind of “Napster for Research Papers”, although more accurately you might think of it as “iTunes in the Cloud for PDFs”. Anyway, I’ve accumulated quite a few PDFs during my 20+ years as a science writer. I’m gradually adding papers to my Mendeley account, which will add to their meta-database.
Back in the 20th century, around the time quantum physics was emerging, Niels Bohr tried to explain the pattern of elements that make up the Periodic Table based on the order in which each atom’s “shells” fill with electrons. Unfortunately, the theoretical filling order governed by the so-called Aufbau principle doesn’t actually work experimentally and chemists had to adopt a sloppy version of the principle to make the Periodic Table …