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Recent news reports about a predicted decline in the sun’s magnetic activity pose the question, asking if the earth will be cooling off because of it. Let’s ask the Bad Astronomer, Dr. Phil Plait.
The answer — spoiler alert! — is almost certainly “no”. I want to make sure that’s clear, because I will bet essentially any amount of money that some climate change denial sites will run with this story and claim that we don’t need to worry about global warming. That’s baloney, and what follows is why. The reasons take a minute to explain, but of course that’s where the cool stuff (haha!) is. So let’s take this one step at a time. And if you have the attention span of an E. coli bacterium, you can skip down to the conclusion section.
What follows is a pretty comprehensive but simply written explanation of the sun’s magnetic cyle and its effect on Earth’s temperature. Link
Remember mood rings? They were fun for a while, but kind of useless. Now the same kind of technology has an important purpose. In research sponsored by the government of Australia, a team of scientists have developed fabric that monitors temperature and shows it by changing color. Bandages made from this fabric can relay information about the healing process underneath.
Their invention could reduce the $500 million cost of chronic wound care in Australia.
“We hope that the dressing could lead to more rapid and effective treatment of chronic wounds such as leg ulcers, saving time and money, as well as improving patient well-being,” says the lead inventor Louise van der Werff, a CSIRO materials scientist and Monash University PhD student.“We’ve created a fabric that changes colour in response to temperature – showing changes of less than 0.5 of a degree. We expect that, when incorporated into a bandage it will allow nurses to quickly identify healing problems such as infection or interruptions to the blood supply, which are typically accompanied by a local increase or decrease in temperature,” she says.
A bandage manufacturer is working with the team, and expects the product to be in the testing stage in about six months. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Louise van der Werff, CSIRO)
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This stop-motion film by Dave Green shows what happens when the refrigerator thermostat malfunctions. It’s a horror story. -via The Daily What
Minnesotastan put this graph with his town’s historical average high and low temperatures on his refrigerator to remind the family that they will get better, as they always do. The arrows are moved along every week.
It doesn’t surprise me that the earliest humans recorded winter solstices, that they monitored the sun’s positions, that religious festivals were created to celebrate rebirth from apparent death. There’s an immense satisfaction in telling oneself that one has made it through the most difficult time, and that things are now going to get better.
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When you chew a piece of mint gum and then take a drink, the drink seems colder than it would otherwise. It’s not colder, that’s an illusion from your brain and a protein called TRPM8.
TRPM8 doesn’t just respond to cold temperatures, though. It also activates in the presence of menthol, a waxy, crystalline organic compound found in peppermint and other mint oils. (It responds to other “cooling agents,” too, like eucalyptol and icilin. Why, exactly, is unknown; menthol just happens to fit the cellular “lock.”)
Read about how this works at mental_floss. Link
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York are cooking up a recipe that may reach seven trillion degrees Celsius at its peak! It’s called the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, or PHENIX. The heat is produced by slamming particles of gold together at close to the speed of light. The result is a glop of subatomic particles they call plasma.
Particle physicists, cosmologists, and even string theorists are all trying to understand why quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons (which in turn build atoms), behave this way at such high temperatures. Why doesn’t the mixture turn into a gas, like water turns to steam at 100 degrees Celsius? How hot would it have to be to vaporize? And if the universe was filled with this liquid goop shortly after the Big Bang, how did it eventually turn into stars, planets, and people?
“We get giant discussions and even some vociferous arguments,” says Jacak. “The big question for us is what is going on inside [this substance] and how does it work. On the experimental side we’re trying to measure its properties, and one of the first properties you could measure is its temperature.”
The subatomic substance only exists for a tiny fraction of a second at a time,so it must be done over and over again. Link -via Digg
The temperature at Russia’s Vostok research station in Antarctica read -128.6F (-89.2 C) during the winter of 1983. This is the coldest temperature ever recorded on earth. The winter temperature at Vostok averages a mere -54F. Why the mercury dipped so low has puzzled scientists for 26 years.
But scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in Russia were able to solve the mystery with a computer model developed to simulate the future evolution of the Antarctic climate, along with weather charts and satellite imagery of the area.
They found that relatively warm air that normally flows over the Southern Ocean onto the high Antarctic plateau almost came to a halt during this period. A flow of cold air circling Vostok was preventing the mixing of this warmer air from lower latitudes, isolating the station and causing near optimum cooling conditions.
Adding to this was the absence of a heat-trapping cloud cover and the presence of a layer of tiny particles of ice suspended in the air (known as diamond dust), allowing more heat from the continent’s icy surface to be lost to space.
We often describe our social relationships in temperature metaphors, like “cold shoulder” or “warm memories” or even “she’s hot!” This is no coincidence. An experiment last year from the University of Toronto showed that thinking about an incident where the subject felt socially excluded led them to estimate the room’s temperature to be lower than those subjects who recalled a better experience. Three more experiments from Hans IJzerman and Gün R. Semin of Utrecht University show the converse to be true as well: warm or cold temperatures affect how people perceive relationships. In the first experiment, subjects rated a relationship on the social proximity, or overlap, between the subject and a person they were asked to think about.
The participants had been divided into two groups at the beginning of the experiment. Those in the warm condition had been given a warm drink to hold when they entered the room, while those in the cold condition had been given a cold one. It was found that the perceived degree of overlap with the known other was significantly greater for those participants handed a warm drink at the start of the experiment than those handed a cold one. Similarly, another recent study found that those who hold a hot cup of coffee judged others to be more generous and caring than those who held a cup of iced coffee.
Get yourself a nice hot cup and read about the other two experiments at Neurophilosophy. Link
(image credit: Flickr user bitzcelt)
Why do we yawn? Andrew Gallup, a researcher at Bingham University, explained that we yawn to prevent our brains from overheating:
If your head is overheated, there’s a good chance you’ll yawn soon, according to a new study that found the primary purpose of yawning is to control brain temperature.
The finding solves several mysteries about yawning, such as why it’s most commonly done just before and after sleeping, why certain diseases lead to excessive yawning, and why breathing through the nose and cooling off the forehead often stop yawning.
The key yawn instigator appears to be brain temperature.
"Brains are like computers," Andrew Gallup, a researcher in the Department of Biology at Binghamton University who led the study, told Discovery News. "They operate most efficiently when cool, and physical adaptations have evolved to allow maximum cooling of the
brain."
Link – Thanks Geekazoid!
(That’s a cute baby named Livia, yawning like a lion. Photo: patata1017 [Flickr])
