Heavy breathing (that’s smelly) in movie theaters, in response to what’s in the movie, is the subject of this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams — with dramatic readings by Harvard chemist Daniel Rosenberg — tells about: Predictably smelly breathing in movie theaters— “Cinema audiences reproducibly vary the chemical composition […]
Tag: chemistry
Chemical Sensors Attractively at One’s Fingertips
Chemists, some of them, do pay attention to their fingernails. A team at the University of California, La Jolla (an institution that seems to exist on April 1, when it apparently migrates from San Diego), has paid special attention. Details are in their study: “A Wearable Fingernail Chemical Sensing Platform: pH Sensing at Your Fingertips,” Jayoung […]
Colin Raston tells of Un-boiling an Egg, and the Ig Nobel Prize
Colin Raston tells how he and colleagues found a way to partially un-boil an egg, and of how this led to an Ig Nobel Prize, in this Flinders University video: The 2015 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to Callum Ormonde and Colin Raston [AUSTRALIA], and Tom Yuan, Stephan Kudlacek, Sameeran Kunche, Joshua N. Smith, William […]
Candied orange agony: “I continue to control the hell out of the variables”
Ann Finkbeiner writes about the tricky chemistry and physics of candied orange peel made according to the recipe of a Hungarian physicist’s grandmother. Here’s a passage from the middle of the lament: …The recipe no longer works. I continue to control the hell out of the variables. I use the same amount of orange peel, […]