Comment Re:je ne suis pas d'accord (Score 1) 15
Your French colleagues at the Laboratoire d’nologie et Chimie Applique seem to disagree with you,
http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/jf101239w
Scientists Find a Better Way To Pour Champagne 15
BuzzSkyline writes "It's better to pour Champagne the way a good bartender draws a beer, by running it down the inside surface of the glass. The revelation, which appears in July 2010 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, flies in the face of age-old French traditions, which require the bubbly to be poured in a stream that free-falls straight down the center of a champagne flute. By using infrared thermography to image the carbon dioxide that escapes over the rim of a Champagne glass for various style pours, the researchers proved that the gentler, beer-like technique allows the wine to retain more of the dissolved gas that is critical to the whole Champagne experience."
Submission + - Is RFID really that scary? (pbs.org)
tcd004 writes: Defcon participant Chris Paget demonstrated his ability to capture RFID data from people hundreds of feet away for the PBS NewsHour. Paget went through the regular laundry list of security concerns over RFID: people can be tracked, their information accessed, their identities comprimised. Not so fast, says Mark Roberti of RFID Journal. Mark challenges Paget to point to a single instance where RFID was successfully used for nefarious purposes. The signals are too weak and the data is too obscure, according to Roberti. So who is right? Has RFID yet lead to a single instance of identity theft, illegal monitoring, or other security compromise?
Submission + - Scientists Find a Better Way to Pour Champagne (physicscentral.com)
BuzzSkyline writes: It's better to pour Champagne the way a good bartender draws a beer, by running it down the inside surface of the glass. The revelation, which appears in July 2010 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, flies in the face of age-old French traditions, which require the bubbly to be poured in a stream that free-falls straight down the center of a champagne flute. By using infrared thermography to image the carbon dioxide that escapes over the rim of a Champagne glass for various style pours, the researchers proved that the gentler, beer-like technique allows the wine to retain more of the dissolved gas that is critical to the whole Champagne experience.
Submission + - Physicists say cosmic rays effect length of day (physicscentral.com)
Flash Modin writes: If your Monday is dragging on too long, you might try blaming it on cosmic rays. In a paper published Friday by the journal Geophysical Research Letters, geophysicists from Paris and Moscow propose that the high energy protons and nuclei might have a surprising influence on Earth's length of day. The team claims that a previously noticed relationship between fluctuations in the length of day and the 11-year solar-cycle are actually caused by cosmic rays.The round-about argument is that cosmic rays effect cloud cover, which then changes the atmosphere's energy budget and has a significant enough effect on wind speeds to change the Earth's angular momentum. The net effect is only a few tenths of a millisecond, but the physicists claim the more important implication is in the overall debate over whether cosmic rays could be a cause of climate change by influencing cloud formation.
Submission + - First discovery by an @Home project (sciencemag.org)
pq writes: In a paper published today in Science, astronomers are reporting the discovery of a radio pulsar in data acquired at the world's largest radio telescope and analyzed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers in 192 countries for the Einstein@Home project. This is the first scientific discovery by a distributed computing project, and specific credit is being given to Chris and Helen Colvin of Ames, Iowa, and Daniel Gebhardt of Germany. More at MSNBC etc.
Submission + - Lasers Approach their Ultimate Intensity Limit (physicscentral.com)
Flash Modin writes: Death Star style superlasers? Don't bet on it. High power lasers currently in development appear to be nearing the theoretical laser intensity limit, according to new research set to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Ultra-high-energy laser fields can actually convert their light into matter as shown in the late '90s at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). This process creates an "avalanche-like electromagnetic cascade" (also known as sparking the vacuum) capable of destroying a laser field. Physicists thought it might be a problem for lasers eventually, but this work indicates the technology is much closer to its limit than researchers believed. A preprint is available on the arXiv.
Submission + - Physics Buzz: Observatory discovers cosmic particl (physicscentral.com)
Flash Modin writes: Physicists from the Pierre Auger Observatory have found that the source of elusive ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is cosmic particle accelerators from stars exploding in the Milky Way. These types of explosions have been seen in other galaxies before, but not our own. This story explains how the discovery was made because the observatory detected far more nuclei than it expected. Nuclei from stellar explosions usually disintegrate very fast, but these nuclei were trapped in a galactic magnetic field where they traveled for millions of years before striking the earth's upper atmosphere.
Comment Re:a spinning, laser powered catheter? (Score 2, Informative) 37
It does, literally, spin. Look at the video.
Comment Re:Smallest radiometer? Not at all. (Score 1) 37
Comment Re:Smallest radiometer? Not at all. (Score 3, Funny) 37
They meant a Crookes Radiometer.
Submission + - World'sTiniest Radiometer to Power Medical Scanner (physicscentral.com)
BuzzSkyline writes: University of Texas physicists have built the world's smallest radiometer. The minuscule radiometer is only 2 millimeters across and operates on the same principles as the common light-driven toy, which consists of spinning black and white vanes in a partially evacuated bulb. The researchers attached a mirror to their tiny radiometer and used it to rapidly scan a laser beam. Their hope is that they will be able to incorporate the radiometer into catheters to drive scanners that produce medical images of the interiors of blood vessels and organs. The devices would replace micromotors in conventional catheter-based scanners, eliminating the need to run potentially risky electrical currents into the body.
Comment Re:Don't see what the fuss is all about (Score 1) 393
Apparently, you haven't sailed before, because you can't sail directly into a headwind.
Submission + - Body Heat Energy Generation (physicscentral.com)
BuzzSkyline writes: Researchers in Belgium have developed devices to harvest the waste heat our bodies throw off in order to convert it to electricity to run devices such as a wristband blood oxygen sensor and an electrocardiogram shirt. As a side benefit, the power sources help cool you down and keep you looking cool, all while running sundry micropower devices. In fact, the researchers mention that the energy harvesting head band works so well that it can get uncomfortably cold. In that case, they say, "This problem is solved in exactly the same way as someone solves it on the body level in cold weather: a headgear should be worn on top of the system to limit the heat flow and make it comfortable." But it would be such a shame to cover up the golden heat-harvesting headband with a hat. The research was published last month in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.
