Many years ago, T.C. Poulter revealed some loud surprises from Antarctica, in the study “Arctic and Antarctic Acoustics,” T.C. Poulter, Stanford Research Institute Biological Sonar Lab, 1966. Poulter reports: …first observed in the Antarctic in 1934 during the construction of a tunnel through the very porous, coarsely crystalline snow for communication during the winter night […]
A tidy stream of scholarship emerges from this 2017 thesis: “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow: Urin i konsten: om tolkning som händelse,” Jens Martin Svendsen, thesis, Faculty of Social Sciences, Stockholm Business School, Marketing, Stockholm University, 2017. The author writes: “Don’t eat the yellow snow—Urine in art: events of interpretationUrine seams to evoke feelings. Through […]
The snowfall from a snow-laden (from a snowfall) train is somewhat predictable—and so can be somewhat controlled, suggests this study: “Studies of Snow-Dropping from a Train on a Turnout due to Dynamic Excitations,” Tiia-Riikka Loponen, Pekka Salmenperä, Heikki Luomala, and Antti Nurmikolu, Journal of Cold Regions Engineering, vol. 32, no. 2, June 2018. The authors, […]
Given a selection of snowflakes – some with simple structures and others more complex – which do people prefer? To find out, Olivia C. Adkins, who is a Graduate Research Assistant at Western Kentucky University, US, and J. Farley Norman, University Distinguished Professor, also at Western Kentucky University, devised at set of experiments. They showed […]
Got old CDs? Looking for uses for them? Have you thought about their application in crime scene photography? “Tripod legs of cameras often sink into sand, mud, or snow. To avoid this, old CDs can be used by placing approximately three of them under the feet of the tripod. CD’s can also be used as […]
At first glance, snow globes might seem trite or trivial objects, however : “[…] on closer reflection, they are revealed to be symbolic realms that provide clues to the desires, dreams, nightmares, and memories of the cultures that produce them.” – explains professor Lindsey Freeman, a sociologist who teaches, writes, and thinks about cities, memory, […]
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 […]
In 2009, researchers at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, of the University of North Dakota, US, presented (in association with the Instrumentation Sciences Branch, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) details of their Snowflake Video Imager (SVI). It was fully described in a paper for the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology. The imager, which linked […]
Video of an autopsy of a snowman (via onetruemedia, HT Jennifer Ouellette): BUTT: For general background to this phenomenon, we recommend Dr Butt’s study: “Patterns of death among avalanche fatalities: a 21-year review,” Jeff Boyd, MBBS, Pascal Haegeli, PhD, Riyad B. Abu-Laban, MD MHSc, Michael Shuster, MD, John C. Butt, MD CM, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 2009 […]
Some researchers (many of them at the National Ice Core Laboratory Science Management Office) preserve ice cores. One, at least, preserves snowballs, as indicated in this report by KCCI in Des Moines, Iowa: Woman Keeps Pet Snowball For 33 Years Hunk Of Ice Stays In Bread Bag Prena Thomas… has a snowball that she made […]