Balloons : what do they mean to you? Harmless playthings? Medical devices? Educational tools? Or means for attending to the properties and spaces of air and geographies of atmosphere? For the latter, see the work of professor Derek McCormack, of the School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford, UK, who focusses on balloons as vehicles […]
Tag: atmosphere
Earth’s magnetosphere has a banana current, they say
Comes news of a banana current above us: “The Magnetospheric Banana Current,” Michael W. Liemohn, Natalia Yu Ganushkina, Roxanne M. Katus, Darren L. De Zeeuw, Daniel T. Welling, Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, epub February 15, 2013. The authors, at the University of Michigan, reports: “It is shown that the banana current, a current […]
Cooking: The drop of the steak, the sizzle of the analysis
XKCD tries to answer the question “From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?” This graph is a small part of the analysis: This is an example of both temporarily-haute cuisine and temporarily-fast food. BONUS (barely related): Another example of drop-cooking, compared […]
Reassessment of the role of penguin emissions
The time has come, the walrus said, for a reassessment of the role of penguin emissions: “A reassessment of the budget of formic and acetic acids in the boundary layer at Dumont d’Urville (coastal Antarctica): The role of penguin emissions on the budget of several oxygenated volatile organic compounds,” Michel Legrand [pictured below], Valérie Gros, […]
Atmospheric Cocaine: The Italian Experience
“Are You Inhaling Secondhand Coke?” asks Elizabeth Norton’s report in ScienceNow, going on to say; We’ve all seen those color-coded air-quality charts on the news—warnings about smog, ozone, and pollen. Now it may be time to add a new alert to the list: illegal drugs. Researchers have found that regions with greater cocaine and marijuana […]