Following my mention that Olivia Neutron Bomb’s grandpa was Max Born, I received a note from Nancy Greenspan who has written a biography of the great physicist no less. Visit her site for more details and be sure to click Solvay information and view the footage of all those big names of C20 physics from the meeting with her narrative.
Category: Science
What the !$%� do they know!?
What the Bleep makes its UK debut soon and gets slated by my old New Scientist mucker Marcus Chown.
One thing the movie claims (among many other ludicrous things) is that loving thoughts make for beautifully symmetric crystals whereas asymmetric and ugly crystals form from polluted water, or water that has been “subjected to” unhappy thoughts.
It’s obviously pseudoscientific claptrap, linking spirituality, consciousness, and quantum mechanics, but crystallographer Rick Bagshaw of the University of Toronto admits that “the more you swear at uncrystallized samples, the worse the outcome.” So, his negative empirical evidence almost backs up the film!
Of course, a deficit of crystallisation is the last thing a crystallographer needs, so Bagshaw has adopted “a more loving tone” for the sake of crystal growth.
I’m going to keep a check on Bagshaw’s publication frequency to see whether bigging up his crystals leads to bigger crystals.
Charcoal Production Process
Another intriguing search brought a reader to the sciencebase science news site, they were looking for the charcoal production process apparently, anyway, I don’t believe I have a ready-made article on the subject so instead would like to direct you to the Wikipedia entry on Charcoal.
Another reader was looking for the molecular structure of oxygen. In molecular form it is either O2 (the stuff we breathe, dioxygen) or O3 (ozone, the stuff it’s best not to breathe, but without which we’d all fry under the sun’s UV), but it oxygen also has radical and ionic forms. Again, Wikipedia is a good place to look for such information – Oxygen
AOL users don’t care about science!
According to America Online’s top searches for Spring this year, most of its users are looking for baseball players, diets, holiday destinations, wedding-related stuff, tax forms, proms, flowers, and other such matters. The nearest they get to anything academic is homework and university searches (Duke is the most popular search apparently). I didn’t see one mention of science, technology, nor computing. But, what is very worrying is that no one was looking for money off vouchers and online coupons, which is odd given the number of visitors the Sciencebase online coupons site gets each day (many of those from AOL). AOL unveils hottest searches for spring 2005, but to be honest the lack of certain subjects suggests to me that this is not a complete list by any means.
Google.org
The philanthropic wing of Google is coming soon, get your grant-writing pens at the ready: Google.org
The foundation’s aims are to use the power of information and technology to address global challenges: climate change, poverty and emergent diseases. Google is working with partners in each of these fields and investing resources as well as tapping its employees’ strengths to advance five major initiatives:
- Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (RE
- Accelerate the Commercialization of Plug-In Vehicles (RechargeIT)
- Predict and Prevent
- Inform and Empower to Improve Public Services
- Fuel the Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs)
Google’s commitment amounts to 1% (as cited in 2004, when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote to prospective shareholders about their vision for the company) of equity and profits. As of January 2008, Google.org has committed over US$75 million in grants and investments aimed at the five projects listed above.
Olivia Newton John “Born again”
I’m in shock! Cambridge-born singer with the Aussie accent, Olivia Newton John, star of Grease (the movie) and Xanadu, is the granddaughter of Nobel physicist Max Born.
However, another site cites her maternal grandfather as being Welshman Max Born, allegedly a professor of German at Cambridge and Melbourne.
I plucked up the courage to visit her “official” site, where it is confirmed that it’s Max the physicist and not Max the Welshman. Thank goodness for that, otherwise there would have been no credence to the nickname she received among pre-teens during the 1970s of Olivia Neutron Bomb.
Antibacterial Research Should Be Focused on Facts, Not Fear
Most people will have seen the ludicrous healthscare stories that emerged when scientists discovered the almost ubiquitous bacteride, triclosan, releases small amounts of chloroform (a suspect carcinogen infamous for its anaesthetic effects in TV thrillers). I say ludicrous, because the amounts that are released are so small and presumably nothing compared to the much greater amounts of “chemical nasties” released by household air fresheners, shoe polish, bleach, etc etc. However, when you see a statement from The Soap and Detergent Association (SDA), you have to wonder if they protest too much. Antibacterial Research Should Be Focused on Facts, Not Fear. Then again, I don’t think so, the mainstream media loves a scare story and this is a gift on a plate, virtually unfounded hyperbole pandering to the chemophobic multitude.
Good and bad news for chemistry texts
It was rather heartening to learn that a study by researchers at two Pittsburgh universities has demonstrated that newspaper and magazine articles do a better job of teaching students how chemists work than most high-school textbooks. But, at the same time its’s rather disheartening that if students are not reading outside the curriculum box then they are going to leave education with a very distorted view of what chemists do. Source: Chemists say high school texts fall short
Chemistry of Popping Popcorn
If you’re like me, you loathe having to pick out the unpopped kernels from a big stack of popcorn. Now, one of the most powerful techniques in chemical science, X-ray diffraction, could lead to a much more satisfying experience next time you settle down with a bucket of popcorn. The technique has provided new insights into why some popcorn kernels pop and why others are dysfunctional.
According to Bruce Hamaker, crystallographer Rangaswamy Chandrasekaran and colleagues at the Whistler Center for Carbohydrate Research and Department of Food Science, Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, moisture loss from popcorn kernels is the underlying cause of much disappointment and broken teeth for fans of the puffed corn product. There can be no worse sensation than when reaching the bottom of a bucket of popcorn you pluck out a few unpopped kernels rather than the expanded seeds. Indeed, unpopped kernels could be said to be one of life’s great tragedies. More…
Meanwhile, the chemistry of popping popcorn aside, here’s a video showing you how to make popcorn with your iPhone:
UPDATE: Lifehacker has a nice simple method on how to filter out the unpopped kernels from microwaveable popcorn.
Nuclear distance
Should we be picking on the BBC? I think so. Not content with persisting with Fahrenheit AND Celsius in their weather forecasts, they are still mixing and matching between metric and imperial distances.
This article on nuclear waste disposal discusses options for getting rid of nuclear waste under the ground at a depth of between 300m and 2km. It then goes on to tell us “on average people in Britain live about 26 miles away from one of more than 30 radioactive waste sites”, the implication being that we might be able to picture how far 2km underground is but would be less comfortable knowing that we’re just 26 miles from a waste site as opposed to the much more distant 41.8429 kilometres. Whoops…fell into the conversion trap didn’t I? Anyway, what do they mean by average? Mean? Median? Mode? We ought to be told.
For more instances of mix and match units and over indulgence in significant figures, check out the archives on our sibling tech blog.