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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. |
| Occasionally, I like to share articles about the most profound inquiries into reality. Like this one from BBC: When you see pasta, your brain probably doesn't jump to the secrets of the Universe. Then you don't know my brain. Though it's usually beer that makes it jump to the secrets of the Universe. You might think physicists only ask the big questions. Yes, and this is one of them. But physicists, of course, have ordinary lives outside of the laboratory, and sometimes their way of questioning the Universe spills over to their daily habits. There's one everyday item that seems to especially obsess them: spaghetti. Come on, now. Just admit you like it. You don't have to claim it's "for science" like I do when I concoct a new cocktail recipe. The steady torrent of spaghetti science helps to demonstrate that deep questions lurk in our ordinary routines, and that there are plenty of hungry physicists who can't stop asking them. Me, I've always wondered why tomato sauce is hotter than anything else around it. It's basically food napalm. Like, maybe you have a pizza in the oven. You can pull that sucker out and touch the crust right away. Get any of the sauce on your hands, though, and you're looking at second-degree burns at least. Yes, I've looked it up and it has to do with heat capacity and water content combined with viscosity, or some shit like that, but that just pushes the question over to the next subject. Italian food: fueling scientific inquiry since 200 BCE. For example: how thin can spaghetti get? The article answers this question, though not without confusing the issue by using both SI and imperial units. Just stick with millimeters, okay? Spoiler: the thinnest comes in at 0.4mm. But recently, a team of researchers at the University College London wondered if 21st Century lab equipment could do better. They used a technique called "electro-spinning". First, they dissolved flour into a special, electrically charged solution in a syringe. Then they held the syringe over a special, negatively-charged plate. That's all very special. The world's thinnest spaghetti is just one recent example of how physicists can't seem to stop plying their tools on everybody's favourite carb. But physicists using their noodle on their noodles is no new thing. I would have been severely disappointed if the BBC had not made the "using their noodle" pun. You may think the BBC is a stodgy and serious news outlet, but I know better. Hell, their video player has a volume control that goes to eleven. In 1949, Brown University physicist George F Carrier posed "the spaghetti problem" in The American Mathematical Monthly, which he deemed to be "of considerable popular and academic interest". Essentially, the problem amounts to: "Why can't I slurp up a strand of spaghetti without getting sauce on my face"? His problem is he was American. Only Americans slurp spaghetti. Maybe Brits, too, but definitely Americans, and it's Wrong. You're supposed to twirl it around the fork and eat it neatly. This leads to another massive physics problem, though, which is the mathematics of strand entanglement. For now, no theoretical physicist has attempted the more complicated problem of two dogs slurping from either end of the same spaghetti strand. See? What'd I tell you? A Disney movie reference, of all things. The great mid-century American physicist Richard Feynman helped unlock the riddles of quantum mechanics, explaining how the elementary particles that make up atoms interact with one another. But Feynman's enormous contribution to spaghetti physics is less widely known. One night, Feynman wondered why it's almost impossible to break a stick of spaghetti into two pieces instead of three. I'd actually seen an article about this phenomenon before. I might have even blogged about it; I can't remember. But again, though Feynman was undeniably a genius (I believe he was even smarter than Einstein), he was also American, and thus didn't know that you're not supposed to break the spaghetti before cooking it. My (Italian-American) mother taught me to break a bundle of dry spaghetti in half before putting it in boiling water, so it fits horizontally in the pot. Yeah, well, it must be the "-American" part that thought that was a good idea. I guess Feynman did the same, but it's an outrage to many of the world's spaghetti-eaters. Kind of like putting pineapple on pizza. There are a few other examples of spaghetti science, then: Spaghetti physics even goes beyond the pasta itself – sauce is loaded with its own scientific mysteries. When eight Italian physicists met while doing research abroad in Germany, they found a shared frustration in the classic Roman dish cacio e pepe. Such a simple dish with few ingredients, and yet very difficult to perfect. "This is actually a very interesting problem," says Daniel Maria Busiello, co-author on the cacio study. "So we decided to design an experimental apparatus to actually test all these things." The "apparatus" consisted of a bath of water heated to a low temperature, a kitchen thermometer, a petri dish and an iPhone camera attached to an empty box. They invited as many hungry friends as they could find to Di Terlizzi's apartment and hunkered down to cook a weekend's worth of cacio e pepe. That. That is why I love science. The physics they used connects the clumping of cacio e pepe to ideas about the origin of life on Earth. And that. Not mentioned in the article: strand entanglement. I really want to know if they've solved the math behind that. It has nothing to do with quantum entanglement, though. ...or does it? |
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