Spoons. Frying pans. Industrial-sized irons. The blogosphere has been awash lately with the eclectic mix of objects that stick to a six-year-old Croatian boy’s stomach. In an unfortunately serious story, CBS reported that “Magnet” boy can carry upwards of 55 pounds of metal on his chubby little frame. What they forget to mention is that the boy’s “magnetic” abilities miraculously extend to mostly non-metal objects too, such as plastic TV remote controls and cell phones.

(more…)

When the height is right, tea leaves zip up the
waterfall and go for a swim in the upper container.

It’s not just salmon that can leap nimbly up waterfalls, according to a new study in the physics arXiv: wee particles like tea leaves and industrial contaminants can flow upstream if conditions are right.

Cuban scientists first noticed this strange phenomenon while brewing yerba mate by decanting pure water from one container into another containing the tea leaves. Mysteriously, tea leaves sometimes appeared in the water container.

(more…)

Next time you get the urge to redecorate, hire an algorithm. A new program developed by computer scientists can take a jumble of furniture and arrange it into a variety of realistic configurations using just a few simple rules, like “the TV must be visible from the couch,” “the lamp should be near the desk,” and (important, but oft-overlooked) “doors must be able to open.” You can then choose your favorite arrangement without having to heave the couch across the room more than once. (more…)

Take your hands off the bicycle handlebars and your bike won’t notice. Hop off and give it a shove, and chances are it’ll keep skimming along all on its own (as long as you don’t push it over en route to your faceplant). Ever since bicycles were invented in the 1860s, people have been wondering: what makes bikes so spookily stable?

Popular explanations are that the spinning wheels behave like gyroscopes or that the front wheel making contact with the ground just behind the steering axis stabilizes the bike. But take both of those properties away, researchers reporting in Science ($) have found, and the bike still rolls merrily onward. (more…)

I feel younger already!

If all those vague exercise benefits like heart health and improved mood aren’t enough to get you moving, maybe this will be: By taking that morning stroll, you’re slowing down the rate at which you’re aging and netting yourself extra time—whole picoseconds of it. And you know it’s true, because Einstein said so.

(more…)

Should we be strapping these to our torsos?

We’re all a little bit radioactive now. Thanks to atom bomb tests in the mid-20^th century, it’s possible to use radioactive (but harmless) carbon-14 to date not only bristlecone pines and putative Noah’s Arks but also, in a recent Karolinska Institutet study, Grandma and Grandpa’s artery fat.

The technique used in this study—radiocarbon dating—is widely employed by archaeologists and geologists to determine when organisms like fossilized trees or plants lived. All organisms absorb carbon-14 along with normal carbon-12 in a ratio that mirrors how much of each type is present in the atmosphere. (Carbon-14 is produced naturally in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays, and then mixes throughout the atmosphere and into the oceans.) When an organism dies, the carbon-14 starts to decay at a known rate—half the atoms become nitrogen-14 in about 5,700 years—and the amount left in the tissue when it’s dug up can be used to back-calculate its age.

(more…)

The SATs might have made you hate analogy problems, but this one sure is tasty.

That clangy thing taking up space in the bottom of your Guinness or Tetley’s can might soon be done away with and replaced by a coffee filter.

The ball inside the Guinness can, called a widget, contains a pocket of nitrogen gas held under pressure. When some lucky person opens the can, the pressure is released and the gas shoots out into the beer through a small hole and creates the foam.

You may now be thinking, Wait a minute—most beers seem to have plenty of gas bubbles even without some fancy widget. The thing is that Guinness and similar brews need the widget because nitrogen bubbles are smaller than those filled with carbon dioxide, the bubbling gas in other fizzy drinks. The small nitrogen bubbles make Guinness’ foam deliciously thick and creamy, but it’s harder to get the gas to come out of solution. The widget forces lots of excess nitrogen into the beer, setting off a well-timed bubble eruption.

(more…)

You might think seafaring Vikings–who traveled hundreds of miles on rough seas between 750 and 1050 AD–would be adrift on cloudy days: not only did they lack compasses, but they were often traveling so far north that the sun never set, and thus couldn’t use stars to navigate. But scientists are finding new evidence to support the existence of what was once considered a mythical navigational tool: the sólarsteinn, or sunstone.

It all starts with an Icelandic legend about a man named Sigurd. As Nature News reports:

The saga describes how, during cloudy, snowy weather, King Olaf consulted Sigurd on the location of the Sun. To check Sigurd’s answer, Olaf “grabbed a sunstone, looked at the sky and saw from where the light came, from which he guessed the position of the invisible Sun.” In 1967, Thorkild Ramskou, a Danish archaeologist, suggested that this stone could have been a polarizing crystal such as Icelandic spar, a transparent form of calcite, which is common in Scandinavia.

(more…)

The speed of light may define a meter and atomic clocks may define a second, but a century-old cube of metal still defines the kilogram–at least, until scientists give this antique lump a 21st-century makeover.

As far as the kilogram is concerned, the year is still 1879, but scientists are meeting in London this week to discuss a change for this humble unit. As the Guardian reports:

“The kilogram is still defined as the mass of a piece of platinum which, when I was director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, I had in a safe in my lab,” said Terry Quinn, an organiser of today’s meeting. “It’s a cylinder of platinum-iridium about 39mm high, 39mm in diameter, cast by Johnson Matthey in Hatton Garden in 1879, delivered to the International Committee on Weights and Measures in Sevres shortly afterwards, polished and adjusted to be made equal in mass to the mass of the old French kilogram of the archives which dates from the time of the French Revolution.”

(more…)

A paper that explores the unlikely coupling of warm wine and the electric properties of iron is currently making its rounds on the media circuit—leading us to conclude that people get excited about science when there is alcohol involved.

“Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make incredibly discovery,” declares the (slightly inaccurate) headline on io9. “’Tis the season to be pickling your liver in alcohol,” announces the (slightly irrelevant) opening line of a CNET article.

The researchers’ experiment—led by Keita Deguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan—involved first submersing an iron alloy in various hot alcoholic beverages, and then finding the temperature at which the treated alloy starts to display superconducting properties. A superconductor is a material that has no electrical resistivity, allowing electrons to flow through it with essentially zero friction.

The paper abstract, which was published on arXiv, gives an overview of the experiment’s findings and method (although there’s no mention of beverage consumption that might have inspired these scientific antics):

“We found that hot commercial alcohol drinks are much effective to induce superconductivity in FeTe_0.8S_0.2 compared to water, ethanol and water-ethanol mixture…. Any elements in alcohol drinks, other than water and ethanol, would play an important role to induce superconductivity.”

(more…)