The Bavarian Pickle-Juice Experiment is using salty waste-water from pickle-making to keep roads from becoming icy. Ig Nobel Prize winner Elisabeth Oberzaucher alerts us to this, with the comment “Waste from the food industry keeps roads ice-free – I’m curious to see what comes out during the testing phase.” The publication Geo reports [in German, […]
Tag: ice
Why don’t ice skaters get swollen hands? An hypothesis
If you were to take part in a prolonged inline roller-skate street journey involving the rhythmic swaying and waving of your outstretched arms in a circular arc, you might end up suffering from oedema (a.k.a. edema). As did Doctor Sody Naimer [pictured] of the Department of Emergency Medicine, Neve Dekalim, Goosh Katif, and Ben-Gurion University […]
Frost on Ice
Another case of nominative determinism: If you want to make steps towards understanding the highly complex issues regarding how when and why ice cracks, you’ll probably need the help of an expert on the subject. Who better to turn to than Professor Frost of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire, US, […]
Bernard Vonnegut, Ice-17, Ice-9, chicken-plucking, and tornadoes
Bernard Vonnegut, that most surprising atmospheric scientist, gets appreciated in an Italian-language essay called “Ice Numbers“, by Franco Bagnoli of the University of Florence, published in Ciencia y Cultura. Here’s a machine translation of bits of Bagnoli’s essay: At the end of 2016, at the Institute of Complex Systems of the CNR in Florence, Italy, a new […]
Vibrostimulating the Latvian bobsleighers can produce victory (study)
With the Winter Olympics about to begin, what better time to ask, ‘Do Latvian bobsleighers have a unique advantage? Specifically, the RE21 from the Latvian Academy of Sport Education? [photo at right] Details were revealed in a 2011 paper for the LASE JOURNAL OF SPORT SCIENCE 2011/2/1 | 3 by Uģis Ciematnieks, Nauris Ķeizans, Sandis […]
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 […]
Ice music and ice cream music, and a former rodeo rider
Ice cream and ice can be used as, or as part of, musical instruments. Here are two instances. This patent concerns an invention in the field known (in a phrase auto-translated from the original Chinese into English) as “cartoon belt music ice cream”: “Cartoon music ice cream,” Chinese patent application 2476961 Y, filed May 16, […]
Langmuir and Vonnegut together
This photo from General Electric shows a Nobel Prize winner and an eventual Ig Nobel Prize winner working together. GE describes it: “Thinking Outside the Cold Box: How a Nobel Prize Winner and Kurt Vonnegut’s Brother Made the Clouds Snow at GE in the 1940s… Irving Langmuir, Bernard Vonnegut, and Vincent Schaefer are seeding a […]
Dr. Altschuler on … Applied Ice Cream Headaches
Cluster Headaches are said to affect around 0.1% of the population and are characterised by very intense pain, usually on just one side of the head. The discomfort is so extreme that even the most experienced physicians might struggle to comprehend degree of suffering of the patient – unless, that is, they were also experiencing […]
Frigid contraints (British, mapped)
Vaguely in the tradition of the theatrical play “No Sex Please. We’re British” comes this monograph: “Dating constraints on the last British-Irish Ice Sheet: a map and database“, Hughes, A.L.C, Greenwood, S.L. and Clark, C.D., v2011, 2011, 156-183. 10.4113/jom.2011.1145.