Phoenix: Cooling down the buildings, but maybe not the city

People use air conditioning to, on a small scale, cool off . This report measures the degree and degrees to which it can, on a larger scale, do the opposite: “Anthropogenic Heating of the Urban Environment due to Air Conditioning,” Francisco Salamanca [pictured here], M. Georgescu, A. Mahalov, M. Moustaoui, and M. Wang, Journal of […]

Winter/Summer Suggestion that Contagious Yawners are Cooling Their Brains

Another attempt to explain the mystery of why people yawn: “A thermal window for yawning in humans: Yawning as a brain cooling mechanism,” Jorg J.M. Massen [pictured here], Kim Dusch, Omar Tonsi Eldakar, Andrew C. Gallup, Physiology & Behavior, epub 2014. (Thanks to @ThatNeilMartin for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University […]

Curling brush research (studies of Olympian sports technology)

With the curling competitions at the 2014 Winter Olympics about to get underway, what better time to look at the work of Brett A. Marmo, Mark-Paul Buckingham, and Jane R. Blackford of the School of Engineering & Electronics and the Centre for Materials Science & Engineering, at The University of Edinburgh, UK, who have performed […]