Andrew Stafford took a look at the current state of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning pitch drop experiment. His report, in The Guardian, bears the headline ” ‘It’s literally slower than watching Australia drift north’: the laboratory experiment that will outlive us all“. The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to John Mainstone and […]
If a raindrop is less than 0.5mm in diameter, it’s drizzle – and if a drizzle particle is over 0.5mm, it’s a raindrop. That’s following the definitions of the National Weather Service Observing Handbook No. 8, Aviation Weather Observations for Supplementary Aviation Weather Reporting Stations (SAWRS), Manual Observations, October 1996. But quantifying drizzle is not […]
If you dribble a drop of ouzo (which ouzo vendors assure us is Greece’s most popular drink) a dribbling that can easily happen if you have drunk many drops of ouzo, what happens to that drop? A newly published study peers tightly at that question: “Evaporation-triggered microdroplet nucleation and the four life phases of an evaporating Ouzo drop,” Huanshu […]
Does a cat always land on its feet? That’s the title of a concocted article published some years ago in the Annals of Improbable Research. The article was part of last week’s discussion on the Science Friday radio program. A new BBC program called Life In The Air features this video of a cat righting itself […]