The Burnt Pancake Problem — a mathematical problem whose history Simon Singh recently put in context, in an article in The Guardian — can be attacked by using bacteria. This paper explains how: “Engineering bacteria to solve the Burnt Pancake Problem,” Karmella A. Haynes [pictured here], Marian L. Broderick, Adam D. Brown, Trevor L. Butner, […]
The Candy-Fish Sustainability Experiment
Candy fish gain an additional and/or alternative kind of value in this study: “Ecological and evolutionary effects of harvesting: lessons from the candy-fish experiment.” Beatriz Diaz Pauli [pictured here] and Mikko Heino, ICES Journal of Marine Science, vol. 70, no. 7, 2013, pp. 1281-1286. (Thanks to investigator Martin Aker for bringing this to our attention.) The […]
How to Kill People
“How to Kill People” is a TV documentary made in 1960. The underlying theme: how to design weapons that kill people, but — as the occasionally-coughing on-camera host George Nelson, himself an influential product designer, explains — does not murder them. The passing years have added blurrgh-blurrgh-blurrghiness to the sound track: (HT Paola Antonelli) BONUS […]
Jazzing up the Jabłoński diagram
Kenneth Janson reports, in the Chemistry Blog: The Jablonski diagram, first introduced by Aleksander Jabłoński in 1933, is a graphical depiction of the electronic states of a molecule and the transitions between those states. The y axis of the graph is energy, which increases from the bottom (ground state or S0) to the top (singlet […]