Cocktail Party Physics

crown jewels

They say that diamonds are a girl's best friend, but actually, it depends upon the girl in question. Jen-Luc Piquant, for instance, prefers emeralds and sapphires as adornments to her fine pixelated self -- although she likes the occasional splash of diamond in her tiara, and she wouldn't say no to a rare blue or yellow diamond should a well-heeled virtual Cyber-suitor offer one to her. I, on the other hand, have quirkier tastes. True, I adore the wedding ring the Spousal Unit chose for me, but it's as much for the unique asymmetry of the piece -- designed to sit at an elegant angle on my finger -- as for the three very pretty diamonds arranged therein. And whenever I check out the window displays of high-end jewelry stores, the glittering wares -- many retailing for tens of thousands of dollars -- strike me as garish, and frankly leave me cold.

Truth be told, I prefer the less flashy, more natural stones. Rubies? All but the most expensive varieties tend to be pinkish in tone. Give me the rich deep red of the mundane garnet any day. Like my good friend Peri, I am enthralled by opals, a.k.a., Nature's home-grown photonic crystals -- about which I have written extensively. Fine turquoise can be counted upon to catch my eye if it's in an unusual setting, and especially if it's the coveted Bixbee Blue variety native to the copper mines of Arizona:

Even better is the deeper, darker blue of lapis lazuli; jasper; malachite; jade; and quartz, which has the added value of being piezoelectric. But sterling silver and semi-precious stones are just a small part of Nature's jewelry-inspiring bounty. For instance, I occasionally wear a pretty dragonfly pendant -- real laminated dragonfly wings set into a silver "body" -- that never fails to elicit admiration from like-minded women. We are legion. As with our shoes, we like our jewelry to reflect our individuality, as well as accessorizing our outfits. If, like me, you love jewelry that reflects your love of science, rejoice! There are some truly unique offerings out there these days.

By far my favorite pieces in my own jewelry box are a matching sterling silver set based on ammonite fossils: pendant, cuff bracelet, and ring. Ammonites are extinct marine creatures especially prevalent in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods (they went extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago). They look a lot like the modern Nautilus, but are actually more closely related as a species to octopus, squid and cuttlefish. Sometimes they are even iridescent, if conditions have helped preserve their mother-of-pearl coatings; in rare instances, they can be polished to resemble gemstones. I bought my pieces years ago, and was pleased to find business is still thriving for a similar online store specializing in unique fossil jewelry. There's a lovely pendant with black onyx and Moroccan ammonite (pictured below), for instance, and a cephalopod fossil ring (PZ Myers could present it as gift to his infamous Trophy Wife). 

Ammonite appeals to me on so many levels: visually, on a tactile level, plus it has a long, rich mythological history. The creatures owe their name to Pliny the Elder (who died around 79 AD); he called them ammonis cornua ("horns of Ammon") because the Egyptian god Ammon was frequently shown wearing ram's horns and ammonites are tightly coiled like ram's horns. They are revered in the Hindu religion, and were known as "snakestones" in medieval Europe since they were believed to be petrified snakes -- the result of divine acts of intervention perpetrated by Saint Hilda or Saint Patrick. Personally, I covet this custom-made silver bracelet with semi-precious stones and ammonite fossils, even though it's already been snatched up by some lucky woman (hey, at least I saved $630).

 

If ammonite just isn't your thing, there's plenty of other styles from which to choose. The best known science-themed jewelry maker (and it's even affordable) in science blog circles is Molecular Muse, which made a splash a couple of years ago when it debuted its series of pendants and earrings based on popular molecules: caffeine, for instance, and serotonin, not to mention cocoa and resveratrol. The latter is a molecule commonly found in the skin of grapes, and thus, red wine -- which several studies have shown may reduce the risk of cancer when consumed in moderation. Plus it makes an awfully pretty necklace (note the garnet teardrop at the tip):

Jessica of Bioephemera (one of my favorite blogs) has an especially keen eye for this sort of thing. Check out her recent post spotlighting the wares of Nervous System, a jewelry company founded by two MIT grads. The pieces combine "nontraditional materials like silicone rubber and stainless steel with rapid prototyping methods," and find "inspiration in complex patters generated by computation and nature." Jessica picked this algae filament necklace to highlight: 

Ah, but she outdid herself this past week by digging up a truly unique find: bejewelled sterling silver "skeleton hands," half bracelet, half gauntlet, retailing at a paltry $24K courtesy of Delfina Delettrez. One word: WANT!!! Oh, Delfina, why do you tempt me so? Until the Spousal Unit and I win the lottery, I must admire longingly from afar. The only thing cooler would be my very own Witchblade.

But for all my love of semi-precious stones, ideally I'd like my jewelry to be at least somewhat sustainable. So I was thrilled when noted entomologist May Berenbaum (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) contacted me a few weeks ago about an organization called Conservation through Poverty Alleviation International (CPALI), dedicated to developing wild silks as sustainable renewable income sources in Madagascar. Madagascar, as you may know, is a "hotspot" of biodiversity, and 90% of its species dwell in its forests, which are at risk from the "slash and burn" agricultural practices; apparently less than 10% of the original forest remains. The production of yarns and silks could provide an alternative to impoverished local farmers for generating income in a way that does not, in the long run, destroy their livelihood (not to mention all manner of rare species).

Moth silk in particular shows promise as a raw material for unique textiles and jewelry and other decorative objects, although at the moment, production isn't high enough for this to be a realistic thriving business. Market demand needs to be developed. To that end, CPALI now has an online store, Rainforest Silk, which sells a few head scarves and shawls spun from moth silk. Some truly lovely patterns can be woven using silk harvested from three species of moth (Atherina suraka, Hypsoides singularis, and "ginger" Borocera):

May also sent me some photos of truly eye-catching (and sustainable!) jewelry incorporating moth silk and cocoons. Like this ethereal Tim-Burton-esque set of earrings (I don't wear earrings, but if this comes in pendant form, the Spousal Unit now knows my dearest birthday wish):

Here's a pendant made with black sapphire and gold, as well as moth silk:

And here's a ruby and silk pendant that looks a lot like gold filigree, except even finer:

With support from the National Geographic Society, CPALI has been hard at work demonstrating the feasibility of using the silk moths of Madagascar as a tool for conserving the region's rich biodiversity. Long-term, the goal is to establish small-scale local businesses that use the forest resources sustainably. To date, they've identified specific sites where the favored food plants of the three target moth species are abundant, and have set up a learning and training center in Morantsetra for farmers interested in rearing larvae/silk cocoons -- the same food plants can be grown in the family garden along with dietary staples like manioc, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and peppers. It's not big business yet, but the niche "eco-fashion" market is as good a place as any to start. I, for one, welcome the decorative possibilities offered by the Moths of Madagascar.

two tickets to ride

 I think it's fair to say that all the bloggers at the cocktail party pretty much suck of late when it comes to regular posting. Life happens, yanno? We're doing our best. But Diandra and I did manage to carve out some time this past week for a special Cocktail Party Physics double feature diavlog on BloggingHeads.tv's Science Saturday. We chatted about NASCAR physics, of course, with a bit of Hollywood and science gossip tossed in for a hint of flavah, and griped a great deal about the sad state of science and math education. You'll also get some tidbits on my calculus-book-in-progress, Dangerous Curves: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Calculus.

I must admit that, despite my best efforts, I will never be a mathematical wizard. But hey, at least I can take a basic derivative now! And that's a lot more than I could say even two short years ago. For some insight into what worked for me in terms of getting my brain around all that math-y abstraction, check out the diavlog. And here's an amusing exchange in which Diandra expounds upon the cultural differences between physicists and NASCAR engineers. Enjoy!

sing a dirge for the unused adipic acid

I'm just wrapping a 70+ hour work week. Our offices and labs were moved this weekend.  The labs, machine shop, and clean room are bright and cheery with spectacular views of tree tops and mountains...perfect for creative work. Okay, the RF lab is a bit more like a bat cave, but it's much bigger than the previous location, with tons more storage space. 

I spent ten days in the clean room, carefully packing fibers into padded ESD bags. I was instructed to treat every widget in every cabinet as if it were a premature infant, and to gingerly place every rusted screw into plastic as if it were a warm isolette. I practically had to whisper. Of course, once move day came, crazed scientists were heaping these precious fibers and widgets onto filthy carts as if they were sandbags guarding against an imminent flood, and hoping for the best. 

I am exhausted. I need a vacation, a pedicure, and a cherry coke. 

I also need to rant. I have to get this off my chest, as it is making me crazy.

Have I mentioned that I'm the Safety Officer at my job? I drew the short straw because I took some safety classes during my years at JPL, and had a general idea that shit with the suffix -ethane will probably not react well to a lit match. So I print out all the MSDSheets, keep an inventory, update regulatory agencies with our inventories, and periodically walk through the labs and ask people to pick their crap up off the floor before someone trips and cracks their skull open on the concrete. Mostly I just make sure the eyewash is fresh and the first aid kits have full supplies of band-aids.

I'm also a secretary, the document review department, and up until recently, I was also the purchasing department, company librarian, marketing assistant, and a conference secretary. Such is the way with small companies. Everyone pitches in, everyone wears a half dozen hats. 

The Safety Officer hat is the ugliest one I wear. When I'm wearing that hat, I transform into something like Millhouse Van Houten with a Hall Monitor sash. I become a joke, a pain-in-the-ass, and suddenly, my usually open and affable tech staff become cagey and less likely to answer a straight question than a politician running for reelection in Illinois. Safety Officer = Enemy. Bureaucrat. Humorless killer of fun. 

Seriously, I don't get it. Reasonable questions are treated as accusations. Chemicals are hidden in nooks and crannies, I suppose out of fear that I will have them taken away, or make them fill out some sort of paperwork, or...I don't know what else. It's bananas. 

During the move I found epoxies that had expired the year I graduated from college, and when I moved them to the recycling bin, arguments broke out about whether or not they might still be used. 

Me: You haven't opened this box in a decade. It went bad seven years ago.

Scientist: Still, we could use it. 

Me: It went bad seven years ago. If you actually need this epoxy, I will buy you a new kit and it will be here the next morning. 

Scientist: But that would be a waste of money when we have this.

Me: IT WENT BAD SEVEN YEARS AGO.  

A horrible look of pain crossed his face as I placed it in my bin of chemicals to be picked up for recycling. It reminded me of hoarders I've seen on the news who look as if they've had an arm torn off when the health department comes in to remove hundreds of cats or stacks of mildewed newspapers. My scientists are perfectly reasonable about many things, but our chemical inventory and my insistence on keeping careful records of what we have, what we need, and when we need to recycle reduces them to crazy cat-lady status.

I found hydrofluoric acid stashed in the back of an epoxy fridge, a tank of deuterium carefully hidden behind a cart, and a few unopened, never used in the history of the lab, bottles of adipic acid. 

And you know what? I don't give a shit that they have these things. I really don't. Also, since I do the purchasing, I already know you have it. Why are you squirreling it away, hiding it?  I only want to get rid of the stuff we don't use and don't need so we can keep our status as a conditionally exempt small quantity generator. It makes the paperwork lighter. 

If you need it, I'll make sure you have it. I will take care of the mountains of paperwork, inform all the regulatory agencies, and you'll never know it. You'll just get your cylinder, tube, jar, bottle, or jug as fast as it can be delivered, and go about your merry way making science out of widgets and goo. 

So what's with the look of terror, the stuttering, the panic, and the defensive whine when I ask, "Are you using this adipic acid? We have three unopened bottles of it."

"WHAT? It is NOTHING! Look! You can use this to clean your pots and pans! It is harmless!" says my scientist.

First, I'm not putting adipic acid in my Circulon pots and pans. Second, I didn't ask whether or not it was harmless, harmful, explosive, toxic, a threat to the continuing rule of mankind, blah blah yawncakes. 

I just want to know if we keep ordering this shit because you don't know you already have some because you keep hiding it from me on a back shelf as if I'm the Chemical Grinch come to steal Corrosivemas. 

So two of the three bottles went into the recycling. All in all, I had three drums of complete horse shit taken away.  Expired epoxies, dirty acetone, countless half used bottles of goo used for projects that ended years ago. 

When the chemical transport and recycling team came to box up the things that were being moved or taken away, we talked about some of the worst jobs they had ever done. Sometimes it's the "home chemist" puttering around in their garages for fifty years while chemicals crystallize and become time-bombs. Streets get blocked off while hazmat teams shake their heads and remove unmarked barrels of ick. 

It reminded me of JPL founder Jack Parsons, blowing himself to smithereens at home, probably stoned on peyote, tinkering with rocket fuel. 

When the bottles and cylinders arrived at the new facility, I carefully wiped down the bottles, placed flammables in the huge steel cabinet, polished the fume hood and lined up the corrosives, put the epoxies in their refrigerators, and neatly laid out all the commonly used stuff in easy reach. The furniture movers wheeled the benches in, giving wide berth to the Scary-Looking Tubes of Certain Death. Cylinders were strapped into their earthquake-proof nooks, safety goggles unpacked, gloves, coats, and other personal protective gear laid out in the dressing rooms. 

Safety Officer is the worst part of my job, and the part I'm worst at. I hate having to tenderly negotiate through the weird hoarding nonsense, the "someday, we might possibly have a use for that thing we have never used and no one can remember why we ordered it" crap. There's a strange emotional tie to these substances that I don't get. We're not a poor lab, we're expanding. No one feels this way about empty boxes of Kim Wipes, old toner cartridges, or dried up sharpies. I can't find whatever empathy is required to help mourn the loss of the long-forgotten kit of glue. 

Should I sing a dirge? Perhaps play Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah? Throw a fistful of dirt on the box as I lower it into the recycling bin? Stop by the chemical recycling center and place a stone on the site in memory of the glue?

My grandfather had a similar mentality caused by depression-era fear of hunger. If half a box of Cheerios went stale, he'd put them on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven to crisp back up rather than toss them, even though he had no intention of eating them. Just to not "waste" them. Even though he didn't want them. The thought of tossing out "perfectly good food" was anathema. My grandmother would have to toss them when he wasn't looking. The same thing went for old gas caps, bits and pieces of cars long sold off, rusted screws. A shed full of "perfectly good" items that we could "possibly need someday." Perfectly good Cheerios. Perfectly good adipic acid. 

When my grandparents sold their home and moved into a condo, the shed full of "perfectly good" junk was hauled away, and no one ever desperately needed a gas cap for gas cap apocalypse that was never going to happen.

I have a strong feeling no one will ever work themselves up into a sweat over a desperate need for expired epoxy, either. 

brew masters

The Spousal Unit and I are all moved into our shiny new Echo Park townhouse, and as always happens with the packing and unpacking process, we got rid of a bunch of unnecessary items that had been languishing in storage the last two years. The move also prompted me to sift through my bulging blog fodder file, tossing out things that just haven't developed into actual ideas for blog posts, and combining several others on related topics into handy paper-clipped bunches for future reference. For instance, I seem to have collected an impressive array of items on various science-y aspects of beer, which forms the topic of today's monster post. Benjamin Franklin once observed, "Beer is living proof that God wants us to be happy," and we're all about sharing the joy here at the cocktail party.

First, a few words about beer's long and glorious history. It's one of the oldest beverages, a staple in ancient Egypt, where yeast was used both to make bread and beer. Those Egyptians made the most of their resources. Early forms of beer were flavored with things like wild rosemary, coriander, giner, anise seed or juniper berries, but by 400 BC or so, hops had become the staple for imparting flavor, aroma and stability to the brew. Hop is the flower of the hop vine (related to hemp), and has natural antiseptic properties, which might be why it proved so popular as a brewers' additive: they could have a lower alcohol content and still prevent spoilage, thereby expanding their profit margins.

The earliest reference to beer dates back to 6000 BC, with an actual recipe -- in verse, no less, called "The Hymn to Ninkasi", the goddess of brewing -- appearing on a 4000-year-old Sumerian tablet. The Anchor Brewing Company actually produced a limited edition beer based on the this recipe, which is no small feat considering how vague the "instructions" are:

The filtering vat, which makes

a pleasant sound,

You place appropriately on [top of]

a large collector vat.

Ninkasi, the filtering vat,

which makes a pleasant sound,

you place appropriately on [top of]

a large collector vat.

Okay, so maybe the ancient Sumerians triumph in the category of Earliest Recorded Recipe for Beer, but a pair of archaeologists at the Moore Archaeological and Environmental Services in Galway insist that the Irish also have a long tradition of brewing beer, possibly dating back as far as 2500 BC. In 2007, Billy Quinn and Declan Moore suggested that ancient sites in Ireland called fulacht fiadh may have been used for brewing a Bronze-Age ale, based on evidence they've uncovered at those sites. These are small, horseshoe shaped grass covered mounds, composed of burnt and fire cracked stones and a central pit or trough. There are as many as 4500 known fulacht fiadh throughout the country. Last year the archaeologists bolstered their case by conducting their own brewing experiments at the site, per this article in The Indian (h/t: Lighthouse Patriot Journal):

With a view to investigating their theory, the two researchers set out to recreate the process. They used an old wooden trough filled with water and added heated stones. After achieving an optimum temperature of 60 to 70 degrees Celsius, the researchers began to add milled barley, and after about 45 minutes simply baled the final product into fermentation vessels. The researchers added natural wild flavourings taking care to avoid anything toxic or hallucinogenic, and later added yeast after cooling the vessels in a bath of cold water for several hours.

“Including the leftover liquid we could easily have produced up to 300 litres of this most basic ale,” said Moore. The researchers said that the results of their experiments suggested that the process of brewing ale in a fulacht using hot rock technology was a simple process, and that to produce the ale took only a few hours, followed by a few-days wait to allow for fermentation. Although Quinn and Moore’s theory is based solely on circumstantial and experimental evidence, both researchers believe that a primary use of the fulacht fiadh was for brewing beer.

The article doesn't say whether or not Quinn and Moore actually drank the fermented product of their experiment, but microbiologist Raul Cano did, and he then turned his experiments into a bona fide brewing company. Cano first made headlines back in 1995 when he successfully extracted living bacterium from a bee entombed in amber dating back some 24-45 million years -- the plot device underlying Jurassic Park, which is why Cano got so much attention (the film came out in 1995). Cano is the director of Cal Poly's Evnironmental Biotechnology Institute (EBI), and was thrilled when he successfully extracted more than 200 different kinds of microscopic creatures from inside a Lebanese weevil trapped into ancient Burmese amber. The tiny colony of bacteria and yeast had lain dormant for millions of years, and Cano was able to activate the ancient yeast to brew his own tasty fermented concoctions.

At the cast party for Jurassic Park: The Lost World, he served samples of T-Rex Lager, Stegosaurus Stout, Jurassic Amber Ale, and Ancient Ale. The crew was thrilled, and while his scientific colleagues were initially skeptical -- as scientists are wont to be -- since then, at least three independent experiments have verified that it is indeed possible to isolate and extract a living organism from ancient amber. (Note that this doesn't mean we'll be cloning dinosaurs any time soon. Any good DNA expert will tell you that extracted DNA is far too damaged for cloning purposes.)

One of those confirming scientists, Lewis "Chip" Lambert, is now Cano's partner in Fossil Fuels Brewing Company. The idea is to brew commercially viable beer using their prehistoric yeast, and use the proceeds to fund biofuels research. They teamed up with commercial brewer Pete Hacket of Stumptown, famed for its Rat Bastard Ale. A blind tasting director of Celebrator Beer News named Jay Brooks pronounced Tyrannosaurus Rat beer as "smoother, with softer fruity flavor characteristics [than Rat Bastard Ale] and just a touch of lemony sweetness that isn't tart" -- demonstrating that beer lovers might one day rival oenophiles when it comes to lurid descriptions of their favored beverages. Other reviewers have talked of a "weird spiciness at the finish," and described it as "smooth and spicy."

That unique flavor, says Cano, is partly due to the fact the ancient yeast can only metabolize a narrow selection of carbohydrates, unlike modern yeasts, which devour just about any kind of sugar it encounters. And he expects the ancient stuff will gradually evolve to more closely resemble its modern cousins in terms of a broader metabolism. That may alter the taste, so Cano is keeping a batch of the original yeast in storage, just in case. How such microorganisms survived for 35 million years trapped in amber remains a mystery, but suggests the tantalizing possibility that we could one day induce dormancy in infectious creatures, rather than killing them outright with antibiotics. If it can be induced by downing a tasty beer, so much the better.

Last October, news broke that a group of undergraduates at Rice University were using genetic engineering to create a beer that combats cancer, with the intention of entering their "BioBeer" in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition. (A team from Slovenia wound up winning the Grand Prize, but the Rice Students were runners up, and won for best presentation.) They call themselves the BiOWLogists, and got the idea while brainstorming ideas for their team entry in the 2008 iGEM competition. Grad student Peter Nguyen joked that they should try putting resveratrol into beer -- a chemical in wine that has reduced cancer and heart disease in laboratory animals.

It might have stayed a joke, except the students found that there's actually quite a lot of published scientific literature dealing with the modification of yeast with genes related to resveratrol, and they realized "You know, we could actually do this," according to junior Thomas Segall-Shapiro. They did indeed create a genetically modified strain of yeast to ferment beer and produce resveratrol at the same time. Yes, they brewed some test patches -- even though many team members technically aren't of legal drinking age -- but it wasn't fit for consumption because it necessarily contained chemical markers. "There's no way anyone's drinking any of this until we get rid of that," says Segall-Shapiro, adding that there's only one genetically modified strain of yeast currently approved for use in beer.

It's nice how beer seems to inspire all manner of creativity in both scientists and non-scientists alike -- not to mention science-and-beer aficionados like John Carnett, a staff photographer at Popular Science who invented his own all-in-one microbrewery that boils, ferments, chills and pours his own homemade brewskis:

In most home-brewing setups, each step in the process requires moving the beer to a new container by hand, which increases the chance of contamination and requires you to lift stuff. Carnett's machine keeps everything in the carts' closed system and requires only that he swap a few CO2-pressurized hoses to move the liquid along. It also employs a complex temperature-control system to regulate the fermentation (often done in a corner of a basement) to within a degree or two. A couple weeks later, the same system chills the beer on its way from keg to tap, so the Device is always ready with a cold pour and consumes no power when it's not serving or fermenting.

Last November, New Yorker writer Burkhard Bilger wrote a lengthy article on the rise of extreme beer for that magazine, profiling Baltimore businessman John Gasparine, who owns a flooring company. While traveling through southern Paraguay on quest for sustainably harvested wood, he found local wood-carvers favored palo santo (holy wood), "so heavy that it sank in water, so hard and oily that it was sometimes made into ball bearings or self-lubricating bushings," Bilger wrote. "It smelled as sweet as sandalwood and was said to impart its fragrance to food and drink."

Among the many uses of the wood was fashioning wine barrels. Gasparine is more of a beer man, and his favorite bar in downtown Baltimore served an unusual beer from a brewery called Dogfish Head, with the motto "Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People." Dogfish makes standard Belgian ales, but also experiments with beers brewed with oysters or arctic cloudberries, and sometimes aged its beer in oak barrels. Sensing a unique business opportunity, Gasparine wrote to the owner, Sam Calagione, suggesting he try fashioning a barrel out of palo santo. It wasn't an easy task to build a barrel to hold nine thousand gallons: the wood is three times harder than rock maple, and easily dulls saw blades.

But they succeeded, and the result was Palo Santo Marron, containing 12% alcohol with "hints of tobacco and molasses in it, black cherries and dark chocolate, all interlaced with the wood's spicy resin. It tasted like some ancient elixir that the Inca might have made." (Bilger, apparently, is an Off-Centered Beer Man.) It makes a nice addition to the Dogfish line-up which also includes 120 Minite I.P.A. (India Pale Ale), famed for being one of the strongest beers of its kind in the world, with 18% alcohol and 120 international bittering units, or IBUs. (Most India pale ales have 6% alcohol and only 40 IBUs.) In fact, Dogfish brews more beers with at least 10% alcohol than any other brewer, according to Bilger's article, and gets inspiration for bizarre ingredients from ancient recipes -- possibly even that old Sumerian tablet.

So much for the science and and craft of brewing beer. The bottles have their own underlying physics, evidenced by a demonstration at the APS March Meeting in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago that showed what's really going on when you break a beer bottle with your bare hands. I'm not talking about smashing a bottle on the edge of a pool table to create a makeshift weapon -- a move that's a staple of cinematic fight scene choreography. (Not that I've ever tried this myself, mind you, but I'm told by those who have tried it that it's easier said than done.)

It's also possible to fill a beer bottle with water, with just a small space near the top, jerk the bottle sharply upward while smacking the opening with your palm. Get everything just right and the bottom of the bottle will shatter while the rest of the bottle remains intact. The secret? Bubbles. Or more accurately, acoustic cavitation. It's a cool effect which is probably why videos of the trick can easily be found on YouTube.

As for the March Meeting demo, it all started a couple of years ago when Sunny Jung, an MIT mathematician, was attending a party at New York University with a few colleagues from MIT, NYU and Kent State. After a few Coronas, the conversation naturally turned to the "beer bottle trick" and possible explanations for the physical phenomenon behind it. The scientists first assumed that it as the pressure change created in the bottle with the hand strike, except when they tried the trick with ultra-pure water with no bubbles it didn't work, even if the bottle was struck with the same amount of force. Clearly the microbubbles created in the water by the upward jerk played a critical role, and they figured it had to be acoustic cavitation. (The pistol shrimp -- one of the loudest creatures in the ocean -- has one very large claw that, when snapped, creates bubbles with enough energy to stun its prey.)

So Jung and his cohorts had their working hypothesis and it was time to test it. They hooked up a high speed camera and microphone in a lab and did the trick again. The experiment revealed that when the beer bottle is struck all the liquid rushes rapidly upwardly, and as the pressure in the moving water dropped, thousands of tiny bubbles formed, clumping together at the bottom and imploding. "The force of all these collapsing bubbles becomes concentrated into a small area," Sung's collaborator Jake Fontana explained, who was able to calculate that the pressure generated at the bottom of the bottle was around 1000 pounds per square inch.

It's worth noting that not just any glass container will do. It's the shape of the beer bottle -- featuring a flat bottom and narrow neck -- that concentrates all those bubbles. And for those tempted to try this at home, Jung et al suggest wearing protective gloves and safety goggles, and performing the experiment over a nice big bucket to catch the shattering glass.

The other built-in risk factor for beer is, of course, the hangover. I haven't had too many of these, but the ones I've had were certainly memorable. They were not, however, due to over-consumption of beer, but to over-consumption of other liquor, notably, scotch and tequila. And my very first hangover arose from mixing alcohols: I started off with a beer, followed it with a kamikaze, then a margarita, and finished with a glass of cheap chablis, with predictably disastrous results. College students learn this mantra very quickly: "Beer before liquor, never sicker. Liquor before beer, never fear."  (Drink enough of anything, obviously, and the mantra becomes moot.)

Apparently there's a scientific basis for that mantra. One of the contributing factors to hangovers are congeners, toxic chemicals formed during the fermentation process. Not all alcohols are created equal when it comes to concentration of congeners: vodka has the least, followed by gin, while scotch whiskey, brandy, rum, and single malt scotch have four to six times more congeners than gin. Per the British Medical Journal, you're more likely to get a hangover from drinking brandy, followed by red wine, rum, whiskey, white wine, gin and vodka. And it really is not a good idea to mix booze, since this makes it harder for your body to process all the varieties congeners. 

As for taking "a hair of the dog that bit you" to remedy a hangover, this does work at easing the symptoms of a hangover, but ultimately it just postpones the inevitable. Drinking lots of water before retiring for the night can counter alcohol's dehydrating effects -- another contributing factor to hangovers -- and drinking coffee the next morning might only make it worse, since both alcohol and caffeine are diuretics.

Ultimately, the best defense is not to over-indulge in the first place. "Moderation in all things," as our good friend Epicurus once said. One leaves one's college years behind, and discovers the joys of quality over quantity. But I still want to drag the Spousal Unit to a new college hangout near USC called The Lab GastroPub. You can't go wrong with beer, victuals, and chalkboards filled with equations.

the origins

It's Poetry Month, peeps, and somehow, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and signed up to write a poem a day, from prompts, over at Writer's Digest's blog Poetic Asides with Robert Lee Brewer. Tonight I'm frantically composing at the last minute because I had a long day teaching and grading papers. There will be an instant replay tomorrow night, probably, but here's the first one, anyway. It's an origin poem, as per the prompt.  I thought, what the hell? Why not go for the ultimate origin? So I've committed science poetry, and I thought the Cocktail Party might be amused, though truthfully, there's nothing more tiresome than a poet declaiming their own stuff to a captive audience. Just pretend we're all sloshed and I have a lampshade on my head. (And it's a first draft, which even more egregious, so be nice.)

Start Here

It always starts with light
real and metaphor:
a minuscule point
floating
in the deeps,
one moment quiescent,
the next—
the universe
cracks open.
Fractions later, the shrapnel flies
at the speed limit of sight,
us and anti-us,
bangs around like bumblebees in a bottle
(those will come much later)
smashing itself
back to nothing first, then
smaller, hotter, faster, fortunately
more us than anti.
Baryons
shimmer into being,
condensing like raindrops
(again, much later). The universe
quarks.
A chill sets in, the particles dance
for warmth, and couple
the way everything does
in long, cold nights.
Hadrons and leptons snuggle;
deuterium is born,
grows up to be hydrogen.
Soon there’s a periodic family
at the table.

In the space of
a hundred breaths:
light and matter, and
all that matters.

© Lee Kottner, 2009

This poem brought to you courtesy of Chris LaRocco's and Blair Rothstein's Big Bang Page over at U of M. Meaning that's where I got my quick and dirty summary of the aforementioned events.

Cross posted over at Dowsing and Blogorrhea