The penguin pooing pressure calculation that won the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for fluid dynamics has been calculated anew by a different group of scientists. The new study is: “Projectile Trajectory of Penguin’s Faeces and Rectal Pressure Revisited,” Hiroyuki Tajima [@HiroyukiTajima3] and Fumiya Fujisawa, arXiv 2007.00926v1, 2020. The authors, at Kochi University and at the […]
Tag: penguin
Why he calculated the internal poo pressure of a penguin
Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow tells why he and his colleagues calculated the internal pressure of a penguin. He then confides that there remain questions worth answering: …The pressing question had been that of the pressure of course, but what still puzzles me is why the streaks were found all around the nest and not just in […]
“What Colour is Penguin Guano?” [research study]
A new study reports progress on an old chestnut of a question: “What Colour is Penguin Guano?” W.G. Rees, J.A. Brown, P.T. Fretwell, and P.N. Trathan, Antarctic Science, vol. 29, no. 5, October 2017 , pp. 417-425. (Thanks to Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of Cambridge and […]
The smell of macaroni [part 2]
Q. How do Macaroni penguins smell? A. Pretty bad. For example, Lindeboom [1984] estimated that 220 kg NH3-N was volatilized daily from a rookery on Subantarctic Marion Island occupied by 350000 macaroni penguins, and reported that the odor was apparent up to 10 km from the source. More details can be found here. Previous article: […]
A Wetsuit for a Penguin
Pierre the plumage-challenged penguin needed some protection from the cold whilst swimming in chilly waters. A bespoke wetsuit was fashioned for him by Pamela Schaller, Senior Aquatic Biologist at the California Academy of Sciences, Steinhart Aquarium, US. Pierre’s story – with pics — is here, in Schaller’s paper called “How and Why to Make a […]
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, […]
Warped penguin diagrams
“….one evening, after working at CERN, I stopped on my way back to my apartment to visit some friends living in Meyrin where I smoked some illegal substance. Later, when I got back to my apartment and continued working on our paper, I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So […]
Penguin-huddling, seen at high speed
You may believe that there’s nothing like the sight of thousands of penguins huddling together, viewed in time-lapse video. A new study says that there are quite a number of things like that, coordinated traveling waves being the essence of it. The Cosmic Log blog reports on that report: It’s a great deal for the […]