It’s back to school season, and at my house that’s already meant a lot of math. Both of my kids are taking quantitative science courses along with math courses, so every few nights I’m getting to help with math-related homework of one sort or another. It’s an interesting opportunity to see what I remember and don’t remember from when I took those classes, and what comes easier with more experience and what doesn’t. Fundamental principles seem to stick better than specific techniques. For example, I helped my son with a physics problem by setting up a system of five equations with five unknown quantities. Was that the simplest way to solve it, or was there some shortcut I was forgetting? I don’t know, I just knew my way would work.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Back to Math Class
Science Corner: There’s Science in Those Hills
Probably the biggest (or at least buzziest) science news of the moment is the possibility of a room temperature superconductor. You may remember we went down this particular road a few years ago. At that time, superconductivity was achieved at not-quite-but-close-enough-to-room temperature but with radically impractical pressures. This time, the candidate material (LK-99) is a superconductor at warmer-than-room temperature and ambient pressure. The catch for the moment is some uncertainty about confirmation and reproducibility.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: There’s Science in Those Hills
Science Corner: It *IS* a question of where he grips it!
Something has been pulling the fake flowers off of our hummingbird feeder. Raccoons are the primary suspect. Hummingbirds don’t seem strong enough, and don’t need to tug at petals to feed. Also, the vandalism occurs overnight. Oh yeah, and there are the incriminating raccoon paw prints all around the feeder. Seemed pretty cut and dry. But then a headline about how “some hummingbirds are flower robbers” caught my eye. Maybe hummingbirds do engage in more than nectar sipping.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: It *IS* a question of where he grips it!
Science Corner: You’ll Kill More S. aureus with Honey AND Vinegar
Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.
– Men in Black
In the film, Tommy Lee Jones’ Kay wants to make Will Smith’s Jay consider what else he might be wrong about (beyond the existence of aliens). In doing so, Kay reinforces two related ideas: knowledge only ever accumulates, and by extension those who came before us were universally more ignorant. Neither one of those is entirely true (nor is it true that 500 years ago the Earth was widely considered to be flat). Knowledge can be lost. A popular example is concrete; we still have not definitively answered the question of how Roman concrete lasted so much longer than our modern attempts. The original recipes for Damascus steel and Greek fire are also gone even if we may have good hypotheses for what they might have been, and we apparently forgot how to prevent scurvy multiple times. Now, when contemporary antibiotics are losing their utility due increasing resistance, we are rediscovering effective antibacterial treatments from our medieval ancestors.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: You’ll Kill More S. aureus with Honey AND Vinegar
Science Corner: Weltraumgötterdämmerung
This summer’s installment of “If you don’t teach your kids theology, Marvel Studios will” comes in the form of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Sure, it’s not a Scorsesian theological treatise. At times it felt very much like a roller coaster ride–an impression helped along by the fact that just a month ago I was riding an actual Guardians of the Galaxy coaster with filmed story elements featuring the same cast. But every now and again, this technicolor space opera takes a breath between virtuosic cadenzas of violence and Zune tunes for a melodramatic musing. The question weighty enough to pull away from the black hole of bombast: What does a creator owe its creation?
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Weltraumgötterdämmerung