the science of skymall

Okay, so pretty much all the bloggers at the Cocktail Party suck of late when it comes to keeping things current. We're trying. But life has a way of throwing curve balls and I know I'm not the only one desperately juggling a myriad of activities that keep interfering with blogging. For instance, there was all that traveling I did last month, with spotty Internet access. And did I mention I'm now revising The Damn Book? (As a result of everyone's input here and on Facebook, it's now titled The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Outbreak.) The Spousal Unit has been helpfully pointing out all the niggling errors of nuance in my initial draft; let's just say I have a habit of getting things not quite wrong, and not quite right (my very own personal superposition of states).

Here's a handy travel tip: be sure to pack sufficient reading material for your six-hour return flight to Los Angeles. After whipping through a new (forthcoming) biography of reclusive mathematician Grigory Perelman, I found myself at loose ends halfway through my flight home, even after perusing the in-flight magazine detailing glorious three-day vacations in exotic locales I could never afford. So I found myself browsing the Skymall catalog in desperation. You know the one: it features merchandise you never realized you needed, from a variety of outlets, all readily available for order on the in-flight phone. It also features no small measure of Science!

Let's leave aside the obvious scientifically dependent products -- all those radio-controlled model airplanes and such -- and focus on other examples of "found science" in Skymall. Because we love a challenge...

Solar Recharger (Item #WGN132J). Okay, this one is pretty obvious; solar cells and photovoltaics are all the rage in renewable energy circles these days, because they can turn natural sunlight into electricity. (I sometimes fantasize about having the funds to outfit our Southern California townhouse in solar panels, since why let the constant sunlight go to waste? But they are prohibitively expensive.)

Sunlight hits the cell and is absorbed by a compound semiconductor material (pure silicon is not a good conductor of electricity, so impurities are deliberately introduced). That infusion of energy knocks electrons loose from the silicon atoms, and these free electrons are then steered by one or more electric fields so that they all flow in the same general direction. The biggest problem with solar cells, for years, has been not just the high cost, but the poor conversion efficiencies. Thanks to the laws of thermodynamics, converting from one form of energy to another always incurs some losses -- often quite substantial. Scientists have been chipping away at this problem for decades, and efficiencies are now almost on a par with conventionally generated electricity -- in the lab at least. Still, the progress is encouraging.

Sanitizer/Germ-Eliminating Toothbrush Travel Kit (Item #72478J). Tired of those cheap plastic toothbrush cases that really don't do much to protect the bristles from invading germs? Never mind that the human mouth is riddled with bacteria -- in this antimicrobial world, germs are instruments of evil and must be killed! This handy little device sanitizes with ultraviolet light -- i.e., electromagnetic waves with frequencies higher than what we perceive as the color violet.

Fun historical fact: we've known about UV light since 1801, when the German physicist Johann Ritter noted that paper soaked in silver chloride darkened when exposed to invisible "chemical rays"; he called them de-oxidizing rays, as distinguished from "heat waves" -- we now know them as UV and infrared radiation. The UV light used for sterilization generally has wavelengths below 200 nm; another German named Victor Schumann found those in 1893. According to Wikipedia, "UV light at those germicidal wavelengths causes adjacent thymine molecules on DNA to dimerize. if enough of these defects accumulate its replication is inhibited, thereby rendering it harmless, even though the organism may not be killed outright." In English: UV light damages the DNA structure of germs and basically sterilizes them by preventing them from reproducing. It's the kinder, gentler way to sanitize: the germs live out their empty, all-too-brief non-replicating lives on your toothbrush bristles, only to have their dead selves washed down the sink's drain at day's end. Oh, the humanity.

Silestone Natural Quartz Counters. Speaking of antimicrobial surfaces, the Skymall catalog also offered a plug from E-Counters for Silistone (95% natural quartz, 5% polymer resins) countertops, with special Microban coating to do just what UV light does: penetrate the microorganism's cell wall and prevent it from being able to reproduce. Granite has been all the rage for kitchen remodels for at least the last decade, and it's more resistant to heat than quartz, but it's also more porous, and thus needs to be treated and sealed on a regular basis. (The kitchen countertops in our new house are polished concrete and hardwood -- much more sustainable, and actually quite pretty.)

Granite is gorgeous, and will probably always be popular for home remodels despite being so high-maintenance, but I'd like to give a shout-out to the scientific relevance of quartz, or, as the Irish call it, grian cloch ("stone of the sun"). In ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder called quartz "water ice," since he believed it to be permanently frozen; it's understandable, since raw quartz has the spiky look of ice crystals turned to stone. And quartz is often found near Alpine glaciers, yet not in volcanic regions.

It took the foundation of modern crystallography in the 17th century to change that perception, when Nicolas Stenos looked a bit more closely at quartz and made the remarkable discovery that no matter how distorted a quartz crystal might appear, the long prism it forms always makes a perfect 60-degree angle. Nature knows what it is doing, people. And of course, quartz has natural piezoelectric properties, producing an electrical charge when it is squeezed -- hence the widespread use of quartz in clocks and watches.

Special Brownie Baking Pan (Item #81606J). Don't you just hate it when you're baking a batch of brownies and they're soft and chewy in the center, but hard and maybe even a little over-browned at the edges? Wouldn't it be great to have a baking pan made of cast aluminum with a handy non-stick finish that distributed the heat from the oven evenly as the brownies baked? And since nobody likes the outer edges of brownies, problem solved with a nifty "double-S" shape; now everyone can enjoy the nice chewy centers! Seriously, I'm a fan of this new trend in foolproof baking. One of my favorite pieces of cookware is a special scone pan from Williams Sonoma that distributes heat evenly, so my scones come out perfect every time -- even in the new gas stove, in which the flames make contact with only parts of the pan first before the heat spreads out over the rest of the surface. 

Uneven heat distribution is why food will burn in some places and remain somewhat uncooked in others -- who hasn't ended up occasionally with a bit of meat that is charred on the outside and practically still mooing in the center? The point is that thermodynamics is critically important to good cooking, which is why constant vigilant is required: stirring, turning, poking, and of course, investing in good "induction friendly" cookware.

Cordon bleu chefs favor copper cookware, since copper is the most thermally conductive and thus provides the most even heating. Copper is highly reactive, however, so copper cookware requires a thin layer of tin or other protective layer to keep the copper from reacting with acidic foods. Copper is also high maintenance: unless you like that verdigris look, you'll need to polish your copper regularly. (I finally gave up and replaced my copper teakettle with a more low maintenance stainless steel variety.)

Other popular cookware varieties include cast iron, which has the disadvantage of rusting easily, but a good cast iron frying pan is de rigeur for a well-equipped kitchen. (And, as demonstrated in an opening scene from Season 1 of Six Feet Under, a cast iron skillet makes an excellent murder weapon for the frustrated housewife married to a nattering bore.) Stainless steel is a cheap alternative, but because it's basically an alloy, it has poor thermal conductivity; manufacturers try to address that shortcoming by incorporating a copper or aluminum disk at the base.

Carbon steel is an excellent choice for flash-cooking pots and pans, such as woks, crepe pans, or paella pans, because in those cases you want one section of the pan kept at a different temperature than the rest. Looking for the perfect stockpot for killer homemade soups? You can't go wrong with enamel over steel, which combines the excellent heat conduction of carbon steel with a non-reactive, non-sticky cooking surface. And finally, bargain hunters who want the performance of copper without the high maintenance and high price tag can opt for clad aluminum cookware. Cladding is just a technique for making pots and pans with a thin layer of conductive material (usually aluminum or copper), covered by a non-reactive material like stainless steel. 

T-2 Skull Blu-Ray discs, Skynet edition (Item #0122361022981). Count us among the diehard fans of Terminator 2: Judgement Day -- a rare sequel that actually surpassed the original Terminator film, and not just because Linda Hamilton rocked the hard-body look (with big gun accessories). Even so, we're not sure how we feel about this collectible, limited edition, 14-inch T-800 Endoskull with creepy glowing red eyes, holding six discs of the Blu-Ray Skynet edition of Terminator 2. Sure, the original film was only two hours, but now you can watch multiple versions in high-definition and indulge in a full 8 hours' worth of interactive content. Or you can have some semblance of a life.

Blu-Ray takes conventional DVD players to the next level, just as high-definition is becoming ubiquitous. A high-def film takes up five times more bandwidth than a conventional digitized film, and Blu-Ray disks offers that much of an improvement in storage capacity. A quick perusal of the Internet would tell you that DVDs store video and audio information in "pits": spiral grooves running from the center of the disc out to the edges. The other side of the disk thus has "bumps," and scanning those bumps with laser light enables the DVD player to "decode" the information and play it back for our viewing pleasure. DVD players use red laser light to read and write data; Blu-Ray players use blue (duh!) laser light, which has a shorter wavelength and hence a smaller beam, so it can read and record information in much smaller pits or grooves than red laser light. 

That's why a Blu-Ray disc can hold as much as 26 GB of data. Plus, there's that added capability for interactive features, which are all the rage now for bonus features on Blu-Ray editions of films and TV series (check out Season 5 of Lost and Season 1 of Fringe for spiffy examples of this sort of thing -- or the Skynet edition of Terminator 2). You can connect directly to the Internet with your Blu-Ray, download extra features, and instantly skip to any spot on the disc. We can download movies directly from Netflix on our new Blu-Ray player, or indulge in the vast musical selections on Pandora from a single home entertainment source. Convergence is the wave of the future.

There were several other examples of products in the Skymall catalog that could serve as a jumping off point for science, but I leave those as an exercise to our readers. Next time you're bored on a long flight, try to see what "found science" you can spot. S'fun!

Comments

[John]

Can't go with you on the brownie thing. I search out the corner pieces because I love the crunchy bits and if I can't find a corner I will settle for an edge. I really don't like the soft, chewy parts. The crunchy parts have ever so much more character and flavor than the drab soft parts.

[MRW]

Nice post.

Minor quibble: Blu-Ray lasers are actually purple (405 nm)

[gg]

Hmm... SkyMall, SkyNet... coincidence? I think not! Now I've got this image of an apocalyptic future where robots roam the surface of the earth, forcing humans to buy weird gadgets on the internet.

On the topic of blu-ray DVDs, it's actually a nice and very simple exercise to estimate how much data a compact disc should hold, given the wavelength of illumination and the fact that a focused beam creates a spot roughly a wavelength across. I do this for a physical optics course I teach, and one finds remarkable agreement between the theoretical storage numbers and the actual disc storage for CDs, DVDs and blu-ray DVDs. (The agreement is 'remarkable' because there typically isn't a 1:1 relationship between surface area and # of bits of data, thanks to a high amount of redundancy built into the disc and the use of multi-layered discs.)

I'll have to remember to blog about this in the near future...

[Anonymous Coward]

To: MRW, 9:22AM

Major quibble: Purple is a combination of blue and red. No spectrally-narrow light source (like a 405 nm laser diode) is actually purple.

It is possible that your eye may perceive it as purple, but that's due to a malfunction in your eye (with your long-wavelength sensor firing due to short-wavelength stimulus) or in your mind. Or due to looking at it scattering off some substance (like any sheet of white paper) that will do some downconversion of the beam to longer wavelengths.

[thiotimoline]

More quibbling: It's actually violet. Unfortunately English does not make a distinction between violet as a pure spectral color of higher frequency than blue and violet as a particular mixture of red and blue. Without this distinction being made, the two colors may be perceived as shades of the same basic color. It doesn't help that spectral violet usually cannot be reproduced in print or on a CRT and has to be approximated as purple.

[MRW]

Anonymous coward: That's like saying that there's no such thing as a green wavelength just because your eye gives the same response to ~530 nm as it would give to a mix of ~570 and ~450. Downconversion of 405 nm by white paper, by the way, actually looks bluer (Yes, I've tried it). The reason: blue is a longer wavelength/lower energy than purple/violet.

There's a reason we call even shorter wavelengths ultraviolet, and it's not because they're a mix of ultrablue and ultrared ;)

As far as purple or violet - violet is just a shade of purple. See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_(color)
Yes, the shade of purple at 405 nm is violet.

[MRW]

I should say that with the purple/violet distinction, I'm talking about common usage, not the technical definition of specific fields.

At any rate, 405 nm light is not blue. But as I said, minor quibble, and maybe should have gone unmentioned.

[pworthen]

Toothbrush sterilizer: Won't the UV light damage the plastic of the toothbrush bristles?

[Danna Staaf]

Don't you just hate it when you're baking a batch of brownies and they're soft and chewy in the center, but hard and maybe even a little over-browned at the edges?

At first I thought you were joking! I love the combination of crispy edges and chewy centers. But it's possible I've developed this preference simply as a result of lifelong exposure . . .

Also, where did you get your granite/hardwood sustainable counters? We're doing a kitchen remodel right now and are rather flummoxed over all the countertop options.

[Oliver Schurr]

Hi Jen

What about that Perelman biography? Can you give a little more info on that? Just drop me a short e-mail, please?

Thanks

Oliver