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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| This Wired article is fairly old, and published on my birthday, but neither of those tidbits of trivia are relevant. Why a Grape Turns Into a Fireball in a Microwave  Nuking a grape produces sparks of plasma, as plenty of YouTube videos document. Now physicists think they can explain how that energy builds up. No, what's relevant is that fire is fun. The internet is full of videos of thoughtful people setting things on fire. See? Here’s a perennial favorite: Cleave a grape in half, leaving a little skin connecting the two hemispheres. Blitz it in the microwave for five seconds. For one glorious moment, the grape halves will produce a fireball unfit for domestic life. Unfortunately, you can only see it through the appliance's screen door (that screen serves the important function of keeping most of the microwaves inside the microwave), and I don't know what it might do to the unit, so don't try this with your only microwave. Or at least, don't blame me if you have to buy a new one. I'm not going to pay for it. Physicist Stephen Bosi tried the experiment back in 2011 for the YouTube channel Veritasium, in the physics department’s break room at the University of Sydney. What's truly impressive is that Bosi, the grape, and the microwave oven were all upside-down. Off-camera, they discovered they had burned the interior of the physics department microwave. What'd I tell you? I'm not responsible if you blow up the one at work, either. Still, if the last person to use it committed the grave sin of microwaving fish, this might be an improvement. I should also note that the article contains moving pictures of the effect. These are cool, but you might hit a subscription screen. With my script blocker, I could see the text, but not the pictures. But it turns out, even after millions of YouTube views and probably tens of scorched microwaves, no one knew exactly why the fireball forms. As regular readers already know, this is the purpose of science. After several summers of microwaving grape-shaped objects and simulating the microwaving of those objects, a trio of physicists in Canada may have finally figured it out. At least they weren't upside-down. Sucks if they wanted to nuke some poutine, though. The fireball is merely a beautiful, hot blob of loose electrons and ions known as a plasma. The most interesting science is contained in the steps leading up to the plasma, they say. The real question is how the grape got hot enough to produce the plasma in the first place. And this is why some people think science sucks the joy out of everything. No, nerds: the fireball is the cool part. The science is merely interesting. Their conclusions: The grape is less like an antenna and more like a trombone, though for microwaves instead of sound. Huh. Never heard of a trombone exploding into a blaze of glorious fire, but I suppose it could happen. Better to save that fate for instruments that deserve it, like bagpipes, accordions, and mizmars. I joke, yes, but the article explains it rather well. If you have a subscription. Or can cleverly bypass that annoying restriction. The grape, incidentally, is the perfect size for amplifying the microwaves that your kitchen machine radiates. The appliance pushes microwaves into the two grape halves, where the waves bounce around and add constructively to focus the energy to a spot on the skin. Not explained: if the grape is "the perfect size," how come it works for grapes of different sizes? A common misconception is that the microwave acts on the grape from the outside in, like frozen meat defrosting, says physicist Pablo Bianucci of Concordia University, who worked on grape simulations included in the paper. I don't know where Concordia University is, so I can't make jokes about its location. Oh, wait, I could look it up. ... Oh, it's in SoCal. Grody. Anyway, I didn't know people still thought microwaves heated from the outside in. We can't all be physicists, but I was under the impression that it's fairly common knowledge that the wavy EM thingies work by exciting the water molecules throughout the... whatever you put in there. That's why it's usually faster to nuke a cup of water than it is to boil it on the stove. The work has more serious applications too, Bosi says. Look, not everything needs to be useful for something. But when it is, that's pretty cool. His experiments with grape balls of fire... And there we have it, folks: the real reason I saved this article to share with all of you. ...began and ended with the 2011 YouTube video, but his curiosity did not. “I’m impressed with the scientific depth of the paper,” wrote Bosi in an email. In particular, he notes that authors came up with mathematical rules for describing the grape hotspot. They could conceivably shrink these rules to a smaller scale, to create similar hotspots in nanoparticles, for example. Scientists use heated nanoparticles to make very precise sensors or to facilitate chemical reactions, says Bianucci. I'll take their words for it. During all their microwaving, they noticed that two grapes placed side by side repeatedly bump into each other, back and forth. They don’t know why that happens, and they’ll be studying that next, says Bianucci. Always something else to study. This is a good thing. Not mentioned in the article: how in the hot hell did anyone figure out that putting a grape, cut mostly in half but still connected by a tiny thread of grape skin, into a microwave would produce a "grape ball of fire?" It's not like we eat warm grapes. Even if we did, that's still a very specific configuration. Some mysteries, I suppose, will never be solved. And that's also a good thing. |
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