Glass is not a high-viscosity liquid at room temperature: it is an amorphous solid, although it does have some chemical properties normally associated with liquids. Panes of stained glass windows often have thicker glass at the bottom than at the top, and this has been cited as an example of the slow flow of glass over centuries. However, this unevenness is due to the window manufacturing processes used in earlier eras, which produced glass panes that were unevenly thick at the time of their installation. It is common to find old windows which are thicker at the sides or the top.[114][115]
Wikipedia has a pretty good list of Common Misconceptions, with references explaining why they aren’t true, and what the real story is. Unlearning a wrong fact is one of the hardest things to do as a human being, so do yourself a favor and unlearn something wrong today.
The newest issue of the journal Intelligence has the largest review ever of research on the so-called Mozart Effect, the popular idea that listening to classical music can enhance the intelligence of people in general and babies in particular.
The review is titled “Mozart Effect, Schmozart Effect,” which should give you some idea of its conclusion: there ain’t no such thing.
But even if listening to Beethoven won’t make us smarter, the history of how the Mozart Effect ultimately became fashionable does have something to teach us. It’s a story about careful science, less careful journalism, and of course, death threats.
And so kicked off a decade of people believing that Mozart makes them smarter because people jumped far too early to broad conclusions based on a very simple very specific investigation.
Last year, high school science teacher Ron Dantowitz of Brookline, Mass., played a clever trick on three of his best students. He asked them to plan a hypothetical mission to fly onboard a NASA DC-8 aircraft and observe a spacecraft disintegrate as it came screaming into Earth’s atmosphere. How would they record the event? What could they learn?
For 6 months, they worked hard on their assignment, never suspecting the surprise Dantowitz had in store.
On March 12th, he stunned them with the news: “The mission is real, and you’re going along for the ride.”
The full write up, the video and spectrographs they got, are all up on NASA’s website.
It’s really worth checking out all the pictures and statements from the kids. It’s really impressive how fixed the scientist archtype is fixed in people’s heads, and you can see this from the before pictures.
Baking powder and baking soda. Both of them are used so frequently in quick baking projects that unless you are a recipe developer, rarely do you consider what each of them actually does for your finished product. How come my scones call for baking powder, but my buttermilk biscuits call for a mixture of powder and soda? Is there an easy way to substitute one for the other if I don’t have both on hand? And why do I have to bake my muffins right after mixing the batter?
This edition of the Food Lab is a quick and dirty guide to how they work, and how they affect the outcome of your recipe. For those of you who want an even quicker and dirtier guide, jump straight to the summary at the bottom of the page.
Great article, that includes a decent amount of science on how breads work.
NYTimes has an decent article on some of the data sharing rules around science in general, and the Kepler mission in specific. The Kepler team wants an extra 6 month embargo on data sharing because there were some delays in getting rolling.
Compare and contrast the 12 month embargo on data sharing, and the fact that extending it to 18 months is enough to warrent a Times article vs. the 17 yearexclusivity of software algorithms. I wish people would get more riled up about the later.
They plan multiday projects, often built around classic and popular stories like the Three Little Pigs, and take students step by step through the engineering process: design, build, test, evaluate.
“They have to have the thinking skills of an engineer to keep up with all the innovation that’s constantly coming into their world,” Ms. Morrow said.
First graders were recently challenged with helping a farmer keep rabbits out of his garden.
In teams of four, they brainstormed about building fences with difficult-to-scale ladders instead of doors and setting out food decoys for the rabbits. They drew up blueprints and then brought them to life with plastic plates, paper cups, straws and foam paper.
Then they planned to test their ideas with pop-up plastic rabbits. If the fences were breached, they would be asked to improve the design.
“It gets your brain going,” said Elizabeth Crowley, 7, who wants to be an engineer when she grows up. “And I actually learn something when I’m doing a project — like you can work together to do something you couldn’t do before.”
I’m hoping the Race to the Top program spurs more of this kind of thing.
This is a point that you’ve started to see resonating recently among both economics and science folks, Thomas Friedman is famous for it as well. Science illiteracy is the biggest threat to the future of this nation, because it is the science and technology innovation engine that has made us the economic power that we are. If we want to stay a great nation, we need to keep that engine running.
The video was recorded at this year’s world science festival in NYC. I’m really going to have to get down there next year.
While the magnets and why questions video tends to get more internet play, this one is short (4 minutes) and makes you realize something very important: plants don’t come from the ground, they are built out of the air.
News reports of the failed attempt to contain the oil-spewing equipment on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico have referred obliquely to things like “ice crystals” or an “icy slush” clogging the hardware that was intended to cap the leak. Anyone who is paying attention would recognize that there’s a bit of a problem here, in that, even at the temperatures and pressures of the ocean at the site, the water there is very much in its liquid phase, as are the hydrocarbons that are spewing through the leak. The methane that caused the original explosion remains gaseous down to -161°C. The “ice” that’s forming is actually a solidified mixture of methane and water called a clathrate. Clathrates have also been in the news because of a potential role in climate change, so it seems like an opportune time to explain what they are.
Ars Technica goes on to explain the chemistry of these Clathrates, and how they can exist at the bottom of the ocean.
And, on the subject of the oil breach, it’s a damn shame that it’s going to take the destruction of most of the marine industries in the Gulf, and large parts of the ecosystem, for people to realize off shore drilling, in both safety and trade offs, is a more complicated issue then “drill, baby, drill.”
