Cocktail Party Physics

the mother of invention

So, last night the Time Lord and I participated in the San Diego Science Festival with a conversation about "Exploring Your Inner Geek." We organized the discussion around the topic of "The Pleasure of Getting Things Right," which included chatting about our experiences at the intersection of science and Hollywood. I bring it up because science fans who didn't catch last week's episode of Bones missed another fantastic episode showcasing nifty real-world science -- on a par with the time Jack Hodgins and Zack dropped a frozen turkey from the second floor. In this case, a blizzard hits the DC area and the fictional Jeffersonian Lab loses power -- right in the middle of a time-sensitive murder investigation. How can the team do the required tests without electricity or their usual high-tech equipment? Well, necessity is the mother of invention and all that, so... they improvise! And they draw on all kinds of cool science tricks in the process.

They crush up Hodgins' beetles (to his great distress) to create a makeshift dye capable of highlighting small fissures along the bones being studied. And to get the most recent numbers dialed off the murder victim's dead cell phone, the team gathers a bushel of potatoes and hooks them all together to create a battery. This is one of the most basic science experiments in the book, and it was a very inventive way to incorporate it into the story line. Apparently, someone once built a 500-pound potato battery to power his sound system: "The potato provides phosphoric acid, which enables a chemical reaction causing electrons flow from copper to zinc. The zinc came from galvanized nails and copper came from small pieces of copper."

 You can also build a makeshift battery from a lemon, or a pickle -- Gil Grissom once made use of the latter trick in an episode of C.S.I. Pickles contain salt water, which is rich in charged particles (ions). Triggering a chemical reaction will turn this classic sandwich garnish into a makeshift battery, causing it to glow as it heats up, and probably smoke a bit as it gets hot enough.

There's lots of variations on the basic experiment, including this one, courtesy of San Francisco's Exploratorium science museum, which uses a pickle, a pencil and a piece of aluminum foil (along with a couple of alligator-clip leads) to set off a simple buzzer. The aluminum and the graphite in the pencil chemically react with the ions in the pickle, triggering a flow of electrons between the two materials.

Regardless of your choice of foodstuff, the fundamental physics at work is the same. Just like any other battery, the pickle (or lemon, or potato) uses two metals suspended in an ion-rich liquid to separate electrical charge, and converts chemical energy into electrical energy by a spontaneous transfer of electrons between them, which can be harnessed to perform some useful task, like illuminating a standard household light bulb.

My favorite part of the episode was the Bones scientists' solution to not being able to x-ray one of the victim's bones in particular using the standard equipment. Instead, they drew on a pretty recent (2008) scientific paper on triboluminescence (a.k.a., "the Wint-O-Green Life Saver Effect") observed in scotch tape. The simplest explanation of this phenomenon is that when molecules are crushed or torn asunder, electrons are forced from their atomic fields and start colliding with nitrogen molecules in the air. The collisions cause a transfer of energy from the electrons to the nitrogen molecules, which begin to vibrate (an "excited state"). The nitrogen molecules want to get rid of the excess energy so they emit light, usually in the ultraviolet range, but there's usually a small amount of visible light as well.

Or, as Wikipedia succinctly puts it: "electrical fields are created, separating positive and negative charges than then create sparks while trying to reunite." It's rather like a lightning strike, in fact. The effect is usually observed with asymmetrical crystals; when those materials are scratched, crushed or rubbed, the chemical bonds are broken and a small flash of light is emitted. Hence the name triboluminescence from the Greek tribein ("to rub") and the Latin lumen ("light").

And sometimes the light that's emitted is in the x-ray regime! I blogged about this back in November 2008, when physicists at UCLA first announced that unspooling a simple roll of Scotch tape produces sufficient X-rays to make clear images of their fingers. Seth Putterman and several students constructed a device to unspool the 3M brand Scotch adhesive tape at a steady rte of about 1.3 inches per second, and placed it in a vacuum. They measured emitted light and X-rays.

Surprisingly, the tape did not emit X-rays continuously, but in short bursts -- enough energy to produce an X-ray image of a finger in a second. (A dental X-ray takes about one-third of a second.) As you can see, it's not a very detailed image, whereas the Bones contingent achieved an excellent x-ray of the bone in question -- that's fiction for you.

The next step for the UCLA team is to build a device that brings two pieces of tape together, and then rapidly separates them -- at a rate of around 1000 times per second -- using a piezoelectric device. The idea is control the effect, and hopefully miniaturize it for potential applications.

Something similar happens with cloth tape, which displays a glowing line where the end of the tape is being pulled away from the rest of the roll. Putterman's team found most brands of clear adhesive tape also give off x-rays, albeit with a different spectrum of energies. Duct tape does not, and at the time, they hadn't gotten around yet to testing masking tape. Apparently you also get triboluminescence when you tear off the piece of tape at the end of a roll of photographic film.

Potential applications for this unusual discovery include nucelar fusion. The idea is that energy from the breaking adhesive could somehow be directed away from the electrons to heavy hydrogen ions that would be cunningly implanted into the tape. Those ions would accelerate and (hopefully) collide with sufficient force that they could fuse, emitting energy in the process. But fear not! Ripping off a piece of Scotch tape is not exposing us to dangerous radiation on a daily basis in the workplace -- unless you happen to work in a vacuum. Air molecules otherwise intercept the X-rays, rendering them harmless pretty quickly.

A more realistic possibility is finding some way to exploit the phenomenon in simple medical devices to destroy tumors with bursts of x-rays. Putterman's UCLA group is eying a potential application to detect x-ray emissions from composite materials as they start to fatigue (i.e., become more prone to cracking); current methods, which work very well with metals, don't always reveal weak areas in composites in time to prevent a crisis. Since composite materials are increasingly used to build airplanes, I, for one, would support any new technology capable of telling ground crews whether or not the plane I'm boarding is likely to break into pieces mid-flight, 37,000 feet in the air.

The point of all this is, getting the science right (with a few minor liberties) on Bones isn't 100% necessary for the writers to build a successful episode. But they care about those kinds of details; they take pride in their work. Also, it adds to the verisimilitude of this fictional world, and helps viewers engage in the willing suspension of disbelief. And it also sheds light on the characters: you just know Hodgins et al. were science fair nerds who followed their passion all the way through grad school. And now they're working scientists who are helping put criminals behind bars, and bring closure to the families of the victims, thereby making the world a better place. What better inspiration could there be for today's young people to seek to emulate?

 

i like coffee, i like tea

The Spousal Unit gave a mind-bendingly good -- and incredibly persuasive -- talk on Sunday to the Caltech Skeptics Society on "Particles and People," outlining the term he coined recently to describe his intriguing new science-based worldview: dysteleological physicalism. Google it today! How persuasive was he? Let's just say Jen-Luc Piquant had a "Saul on the Road to Tarsus" experience and will be seeking to convince her fellow avatars across Cyberspace to embrace supervenience (it's akin to my recent blog post on introducing the physics concept of duality into our public discourse). And I was reminded all over again why I fell for the guy in the first place. He's smart, articulate, witty, charming, and always uses coasters to avoid staining the coffee table.

Trust me, that last one can be a deal-breaker if you're the Coaster Queen. I've amassed quite the collection of novelty coasters over the years; my current faves are tumbled marble squares imprinted with classic winery labels. And now I covet my very own set of "interactive coasters," after reading about them in Technology Review. A couple of postdocs at Newcastle University came up with the idea after attending a science conference in Germany and noticing far too many people sitting in isolated groups, not interacting. (They should have hung out with the science writing contingent. Those people know how to party.) Apparently there's been at least one attempt at designing "interactive badges" at conferences as an icebreaking strategy, but users understandably balked at entering their personal information.

The coaster scheme invented by Tom Bartindale and Jack Weeden involves a partially transparent "smart bar" surface, with an infrared light source, a camera and a projector just underneath. So the bar surface can detect when one of the special coasters is placed on the bar, and automatically assigns that coaster a gender and sexual preference. Now the coaster has been activated -- evidenced by a halo around it created by the projector that displays lines of text -- and it will try to "chat up" any nearby coasters with a series of very bad pick up lines. ("Are you a parking ticket? Because you've got 'fine' written all over you.") Apparently Bartindale and Weeden Googled "bad chat-up lines" for material. They have a sense of humor. (Why yes, there's a list of bad physics pickup lines, many of which are very bad indeed: "What's your resonance frequency?") The receiving coaster then rates the pick-up line; if the sending coaster scores badly, the receiving coaster will refuse to talk to it anymore. Nice to see these guys programmed rejection into their science experiment. At least the rejected coaster doesn't get a drink tossed in its face.

Why am I such a fan of coasters? Probably because a tiny part of me dies inside whenever I see a nice tabletop permanently stained with wine rings -- or, for that matter, coffee rings. (Image at right by Michael Naples, from his A Painting a Day blog.) On the upside, turns out there's some interesting physics going on with the latter.

I wrote a couple of blog posts back in November about nifty papers presented at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, but never got around to blogging about one of the coolest: three physicists who have been studying the physics of coffee ring formation (a.k.a. "the coffee ring effect") with an eye towards developing useful tools for "microphysics" -- a rather vague term that seems to incorporate such areas as industrial coatings, electronic fabrication, and drug development.

Fundamentally these are all deposition processes. So it all comes down to being able to control particles suspended in fluids at tiny size scales to ensure -- if we're talking about coatings, for example -- that they are deposited uniformly across a given surface. And as any physicist working in this area can tell you, that's easier said than done. I mean, how complicated can coffee rings be, really? The answer is, not very, if all you care about is not staining the table.

But if you're trying to understand what's going on at the micro-level so well that you can make the micro-droplets do whatever you want -- well, then it gets complicated, because you're dealing with a complex system. To figure out what causes those coffee stains, you need (a) a scanning electron microscope, and (b) high-performance computers capable of doing some pretty advanced mathematical modeling (or you've got to be pretty fast with a pencil and paper). Those were the tools of Shreyas Mandre (Brown University), Ning Wu (Colorado School of Mines), and L. Mahadevan and Joanna Aizenberg, both from Harvard. They used an SEM to study microscopic glass particles in a solution in the lab, and combined those findings with mathematical models to describe characteristics of the ring patterns that formed. What did they find?

The team found that during ring deposition, a particle layer of uniform thickness is deposited if the concentration is above a certain threshold. Below that threshold the deposits form non-uniform bands. The threshold is formed because evaporation at the solid-liquid interface of the rim occurs faster than a replenishing flow of water from the center of the droplet can replace the evaporating rim fluid. This leaves the particles on the rim high, dry -- and deposited.

Having trouble visualizing it? Go on, you folks who don't use coasters: pick up your coffee mug and check the inevitable ring pattern left behind. Now wait until the liquid has evaporated and note the darker ring around the perimeter. It's darker because the particles in that ring are much more concentrated than those in the center.

The effect occurs with other liquids too, which means it might be possible to use that telltale ring as a disease marker in biosensing, using blood, salive or other bodily fluids -- which contain microscale and nanoscale molecules or particles that can be indicators of disease (or lack thereof). Being able to control the effect at such small scales would mean being able to pack thousands of biosensors on a single lab-on-a-chip, possibly even testing for multiple diseases at once. And since the technique relies on the natural process of evaporation, there's fewer complicating factors to deal with, like electrical power sources or moving parts.

Six months before the DFD meeting (that would be May 2010), PhysOrg.com ran a story about a UCLA team studying the coffee ring effect with an eye towards applying it to biosensing. Lead researcher Chih-Ming Ho told PhysOrg.com that "Before we can engineer biosensing devices to do these applications, we need to know the definitive limits of this phenomenon. So our research turned to physical chemistry to find the lowest limits of coffee-ring formation." The idea here is that particles move to the perimeter of a droplet as the water evaporates, resulting in a ring pattern, but if the droplet is small enough, the water evaporates so fast that the particles don't have time to move to the perimeter, and you end up with a concentrated center stain.

Ho's team conducted an experiment with latex particles of various (small) sizes suspended in water and poured it on a specially designed surface with checkerboard squares of alternating water-loving and water-repellant squares. They found that the threshold for 100-nanometer particles is a droplet measuring around 10 micrometers (10 times smaller than a human hair, to use the classic science writing analogy). That's the point where the water evaporated so quickly that the particles didn't have time to drift to the perimeter. (Check out the image above for a visual representation of their results.) The whole coffee ring effect fascination has been around since 1997, incidentally, when graduate students in Sid Nagel's lab at the University of Chicago started investigating after Nagel broached the topic to them over lunch one day. (I'm guessing Nagel doesn't use a coaster.)

There's tons of science involved in brewing coffee, too. Until quite recently, the Spousal Unit had a rather inelegant approach to making his morning cup of coffee. Let's just say that while he always ground the coffee beans fresh each morning -- a must for anyone who cares about good coffee -- the rest of the process involved placing the grounds into a loose coffee filter inside a plastic funnel and positioning it over a mug, then pouring hot water into it.

It worked fine, but the Spousal Unit also loves fancy gadgets, and started scouring the Internet for the perfect coffee making machine, combining aesthetic form with function at a reasonable price. That's when he came across syphon coffee makers, quite possibly the most labor-intensive, gadgetry-obsessed, snobbish approach to making coffee ever invented. But the gadget in question is oh-so-pretty, so very scientific in its operating principles, and -- by all accounts -- results in one hell of a brew.

The syphon method (also known as a vacuum brewer, vac pot, siphon, or syphon coffee maker) has been around since the 1930s, when (Wikipedia tells me, without providing further details) someone named Loeff of Berlin invented it. Its use was a bit too complicated for the average household coffee drinker, but hipster coffee enthusiasts were around even then; siphon coffee has always had its fans, usually of the well-heeled variety. Listen to the folks at Coffee Geek rhapsodize about it:

"Almost everything about using a vacuum coffee maker is sensory involved: aromas, fragrance, motion, touch, action. Grind the coffee, add it to the top vessel. Add cold (or hot) water to the bottom. Put the bottom on a heat source. Add the top vessel with its attached siphon. Watch. Liquids defy gravity. The brew gurgles, but it's not boiling. Remove from the heat source. Watch the coffee move back down, or "south." Watch the bottom vessel's brewed coffee gurgle as air is drawn through the spent grounds to release the built up vacuum. Remove top vessel. Smell. Ahhhh. Pour. Taste. More ahhh."

As the name implies, the method relies on vapor pressure and creating a vacuum to brew the coffee; it exploits the expansion and contraction of gases. There are two chambers: a bottom container where you put the plain water, and where the final brew will come to rest, and a top container with a siphon tube attached, where the actual brewing will take place. You also need something like a rubber gasket to act as a seal so you can create a partial vacuum, a filter, and a heating source (usually a cloth-wick alcohol burner, gas or electric stovetop, or, if you're a true purist, a specialty butane burner).

As the water in the bottom container heats up, it starts converting to a vapor -- a phase transition -- which expands and starts to compress. Since it can only compress so much, it needs to relieve that pressure, and the only route available is through the siphon tube -- but there's a bunch of water in the way. So the gas pushes the water through the tube into the top chamber, where the coffee grounds live, and starts brewing. At some point the water level in the bottom container will be lower than the siphon tube, and vapor pours into the top chamber, creating ideal brewing temperatures of around 90-95 degrees Celsius (185-204 degrees F). When the coffee is done brewing, just remove the heat source, so that the water vapor starts to contract. This creates negative pressure in the bottom container and the brewed coffee travels back down the siphon tube the bottom container, through the filter.

Voila! You have what many consider to be the perfect cup of coffee. Needless to say, while admiring the artistry and gadgetry involved in the syphon coffee process, the Spousal Unit also is not a morning person. He needed something a bit simpler for his morning cup of joe. So instead we have a sleek, shiny, stainless steel contraption that is "Morning-Person Proof." It's still a vast improvement over a coffee filter stuffed inside a plastic funnel, and should the Spousal Unit have a craving for siphon-brewed coffee, well, there's an Intelligentsia coffee house a mile or so away.

 

Syphon, Intelligentsia from The D4D on Vimeo.

And just in case tea drinkers are feeling left out, there's science to the art of brewing the perfect cup of tea, too. Christopher Hitchens has weighed in on this recently, citing no less an authority than George Orwell, who published "A Nice Cup of Tea" in The Evening Standard on January  12, 1946 outlining 11 "golden rules" to follow. But Hitchens can reduce those to one: make sure the water is boiling.

Ground [coffee] beans are heaver and denser, and in any case many good coffees require water that is just fractionally off the boi. Whereas tea is a herb (or an herb if you insist) that has been thoroughly dried. In order for it to release its innate qualities, it requires to be infused. And an infusion, by definition, needs the water to be boiling when it hits the tea. Grasp only this, and you hold the root of the matter."

Lest you question how much Orwell or Hitchens knows about the science of brewing tea, let me point you to an excellent PDF paper by a young grad student in mechanical engineering named Daniel Ives, describing an experiment he conducted as part of a flow visualization class.

He placed a clear glass of hot water against a white paper background, and then sprinkled a teaspoon of hibiscus tea leaves onto the surface. Hitchens would object right here: the tea should already be in the cup (or teapot), and the water should be boiling at contact. But Ives needed to take "before", "during" and "after" pictures to document the diffusion process (as dictated by Fick's laws of diffusion). He's doing science, not making the perfect cuppa -- although an interesting follow-up experiment might be a multiple "taste test" of various brewed teas to test Hitchens' hypothesis about how the water must be boiling.

Anyway, Ives' photos capture both the aesthetics and the fluid flows of a brewing cup of tea quite nicely. His anaylsis invokes the Archimedes Principle describing buoyancy:

The hibiscus flowers, like tea leaves, contain various water- soluble particles. When placed in contact with water, the hibiscus flowers become hydrated and swell. The absorbed water acts as a solvent, pulling various solutes from the flowers into the water. the water that closely surrounds the flowers becomes saturated with a high concentration of solutes compared to the rest of the water in the glass.... As the streams of water containing a high concentration of solute particles flow downward, they mix with the bulk water. Over time, the solutes will diffuse throughout the glass until there is an equilibrium concentration of solutes in the water.

Here's where Archimedes comes in. The tea leaves have a higher density than water at 85 °C, so they will have an upward buoyancy force equal to the weight of water they displace. This is countered by a downward gravitational force for each particle in the tea leaves, and that gravitational force is greater than the buoyancy force. So the water saturated with "leached solutes" sinks in the glass. Ives concludes: "However, because the volume of each particle is so small, the net downward force is very small, leading to a very small downward acceleration of each particle by Newton’s Second Law of Physics."

Eureka! There you have it: the science behind the perfect cup of tea. Why not brew yourself a nice cuppa this evening? Don't forget to use a coaster.

 

the unbearable lightness of LEGO

Is there anything LEGO can't build? Jen-Luc Piquant is positively giddy over a recent find while trawling Twitter. It seems science journalist Adam Rutherford (who once visited us here in Los Angeles and got to be all fabulous, attending film premieres and all) and some pals have put together a behind-the-scenes video of a guy who built a working replica of the famed (in certain circles) Antikythera Mechanism -- entirely out of LEGOs.

Allow me to plagiarize one of my own earlier posts to give you a bit of background. In 1900, a Greek sponge diver named Elias Stadiatis discovered the wreck of an ancient cargo ship off the coast of Antikythera island in Greece. He and other divers recovered all kinds of artifacts from the ship. A year later, an archaeologist was studying what he thought was just a piece of rock recovered from the shipwreck, and noticed there was a gear wheel embedded in it. It turned out to be an ancient mechanical device -- perhaps the earliest example of a geared device -- now known as the Antikythera mechanism and housed in the Bronze Collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. The device was originally housed in a wooden box roughly the size of a shoebox, with dials on the outside and containing a complex assembly of gear wheels within. Its very existence offers strong evidence that such technology existed as early as 150-100 BC but the knowledge was subsequently lost. Similar machines with equivalent complexity didn't appear again until the 18th century.

It took decades just to clean it off, and in 1951, a British science historian named Derek J. de Solla Price began his life's work investigating the theoretical workings of the device. Based on X-ray photographs of the fragments, he published a handful of minor papers before the first major paper appeared in Scientific American in June 1959.

Entitled "An Ancient Greek Computer," the article detailed Price's hypothesis that the mechanism had been used to calculate the motions of stars and planets -- making it the first known analog computer.  A November 30, 2006, article in Nature included a new reconstruction of the device based on the high-resolution X-ray tomography conducted by the study. Based on the new discoveries, the mechanism has been pretty much confirmed to be an astronomical computer used to predict the positions of heavenly bodies in the sky.

And here's where the LEGO comes in, because now that the Antikythera Mechanism has been cleaned off, x-rayed, and reconstructed (at least on paper), those "blueprints" could be used to build a real working model with moving parts and everything. Out of plastic building blocks. The ancient Greeks didn't have LEGOs, otherwise I'm sure they would have done exactly what Andy Carol did. Per the Small Mammals blog:

This is a 2000-year-old analog computing device reconstructed out of Lego. It predicts solar and lunar eclipses, accurate to within two hours — all using plastic gears. Andy Carol, its designer, builds mechanical computers out of Lego as a hobby. He made this device basically because Adam Rutherford, an editor and producer at Nature, dared him to. When Adam heard that Andy had actually built the device, he called me and said, “Well, clearly we have to make some sort of film about this thing now.”

That was almost a year ago.

Read on to find out exactly how they did it. A year they spent on this -- just the film part! -- and the painstaking effort and professionalism definitely shows. This is so many kinds of win, I really have nothing much to say about it, other than to go all Keanu on you: "Whoa. Duuuudes....." Adam et al., you are my heroes.

chill, baby, chill

Ah, innovation! What would we do without this driver of new technology and new consumer markets? Science is the breeding ground for said technological creativity, and even those scientists who focus primarily on curiosity-driven basic research -- such as theoretical physics -- often find their curiosity piqued by the challenge of finding a solution to a real-world problem. 

Take, for example, Albert Einstein, best known to the general public for devising the world’s most famous equation: E=mc².  But his contributions to physics extend over an impressively broad range of topics, including Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, special and general relativity, and stimulated emission, which led to the development of the laser. Less well known, even among physicists, is his work with Leo Szilard to develop an energy efficient absorption refrigerator with no moving parts.

Szilard was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1848, the son of a civil engineer. In 1916, he enrolled as an engineering student at Budapest Technical University, but his education was interrupted the following year, when he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the war, he attended the Institute of Technology in Berlin -- not so much by choice, as because of "racial quotas" (he fled Berlin in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution) -- where he met Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Szilard earned his doctorate in physics in 1922, and he and Einstein became close friends.

His dissertation was in thermodynamics, and in 1929 he published a seminal paper, “On the Lessening of Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by Interference of an Intelligent Being” – part of an ongoing attempt by physicists to better understand the “Maxwell’s Demon” thought experiment first proposed by James Clerk Maxwell. It contained a description of “Szilard’s engine,” a hypothetical heat engine that violates the second law of thermodynamics by continuously turning the heat energy of its environment into work.

This was the example the Spousal Unit featured in a blog post just before the Thanksgiving holiday, about a new Maxwell’s-Demon-type experiment conducted by Shoichi Toyabe and collaborators in Japan, that appeared recently in Nature. Alas, as with many things in the nuanced field of thermodynamics, the result was misinterpreted in several press accounts as converting information into energy. Per the Spousal Unit: "That’s not quite right — it’s more like using information to extract energy from a heat bath." And he cited Szilard's Engine to illustrate the difference:

Consider two pistons with the same number of gas particles inside, with the same total energy. But the top container is in a low-entropy state with all the gas on one side of the piston; the bottom container is in a high-entropy state with the gas equally spread out.You see the difference — from the top configuration we can extract useful work by simply allowing the piston to expand. In the process, the total energy of the gas goes down (it cools off). But in the bottom piston, nothing’s going to happen. There’s just as much energy inside there, but we can’t get it out because it’s in a high-entropy state.

In 1929, Leó Szilárd used a similar setup to establish an amazing result: the connection between energy and information. The connection is not that “information carries energy”; if I tell you some information about gas particles in a box, that doesn’t change their total energy. But it does help you extract that energy. Effectively, learning more information lowers the entropy of the gas. That’s a loosey-goosey statement, [we love that the Spousal Unit says stuff like "loosey-goosey"] because there is more than one way to define “entropy”; but one reasonable definition is that the entropy is a measure of the information you don’t have about a system. (In the piston above, we know more about the gas in the low-entropy setup, since we have a better idea of where it is localized.)

Anyway, the point is, that early dissertation work of Leo's proved useful when it came time to design a new kind of refrigerator. Szilard had a knack for invention, applying for patents for an x-ray sensitive cell and improvements to mercury vapor lamps while still a young scientist. He also filed patents for an electron microscope, as well as the linear accelerator and the cyclotron, all of which have helped revolutionize physics research. Szilard’s most important contribution to 20th century physics was the neutron chain reaction, first conceived in 1933. In 1955, he and Enrico Fermi received a joint patent on the first nuclear reactor, which the US Patent Office compared in significant to the patents issued for the telegraph and telephone in the 19th century.

Einstein wasn’t a stranger to the patent process, either, having worked as a patent clerk in Berlin as a young man. He later received a patent with a German engineer named Rudolf Goldschmidt in 1934 for a working prototype of a hearing aid. A singer of Einstein’s acquaintance who suffered hearing loss provided the inspiration for the invention.

The impetus for the two men’s collaboration on a refrigerator occurred in 1926, when newspapers reported the tragic death of an entire family in Berlin, due to toxic gas fumes that leaked throughout the house while they slept, the result of a broken refrigerator seal. Such leaks were occurring with alarming frequency as more people replaced traditional ice boxes with modern mechanical refrigerators which relied on poisonous gases like methyl chloride, ammonia and sulfur dioxide as refrigerants. Einstein was deeply affected by the tragedy, and told Szilard that there must be a better design than the mechanical compressors and toxic gases used in the modern refrigerator. Together they set out to find one.

And now, a brief primer on how your refrigerator works. One of the neat things about thermodynamics is that if you can create a large enough differential -- for example, a big difference in temperature between two compartments -- you've got yourself a handy energy source to tap into should the need arise. Refrigerators work on a simple concept known as the Carnot cycle. Gas -- usually ammonia or freon these days, not the toxic gases more common during Einstein's era -- is pressurized in a chamber, said pressure causes that gas to heat up, this heat is then dissipated by coils on the back of the appliance, and the gas condenses into a liquid. It's still highly pressurized, sufficiently so that the liquid flows through a hole to a second low-pressure chamber.

That abrupt change in pressure makes the liquid ammonia boil and vaporize into a gas again, also dropping its temperature -- thereby keeping your perishable foodstuffs nicely chilled. The cold gas gets sucked back into the first chamber, and the entire cycle repeats ad infinitum -- or at least as long as the appliance is plugged in. That's always the catch, you see. The refrigerator is not a truly "closed system": it gets a constant influx of energy from the wall outlet that enables it to operate continuously. Left on its own, without that crucial influx, and the interior would cease to be nicely chilled, and all the food therein would perish.

To address the toxic gas concerns, Einstein and Szilard focused their attention on absorption refrigerators, in which a heat source – in that time, a natural gas flame – is used to drive the absorption process and release coolant from a chemical solution, instead of a mechanical compressor. An earlier version of this technology had been introduced in 1922 by Swiss inventors, and Szilard found a way to improve on their design, drawing on his expertise in thermodynamics. His heat source drove a combination of gases and liquids through three interconnected circuits.

They still needed some version of a Carnot cycle. Anyone who lives at high altitudes (Denver residents, we're looking at you!) knows that water boils at lower temperatures when the air pressure is lower, as is the case in the Mile-High City. (Air pressures are higher at sea level.) The Einstein-Szilard fridge exploited this effect, using just pressurized ammonia, butane and water, with no need for electricity to operate the appliance (depending on your choice of heat source), and no moving parts -- thereby eliminating the possibility of seal failure.

One side contained a flask filled with butane (the evaporator), which was then injected by a new vapor (the ammonia) just above the butane, creating that all-important differential. This would decrease the boiling temperature, and as the liquid water boiled off, it sapped energy from its surroundings -- chilling the compartment in the process.

One of the components the two physicists designed for their refrigerator was the Einstein-Szilard electromagnetic pump, which had no moving parts, relying instead on generating an electromagnetic field by running alternating current through coils. The field moved a liquid metal, and the metal, in turn, served as a piston and compressed a refrigerant. The rest of the process worked much like today’s conventional refrigerators.

Einstein and Szilard needed an engineer to help them design a working prototype, and they found one in Albert Korodi, who first met Szilard when both were engineering students at the Budapest Technical University, and were neighbors and good friends when both later moved to Berlin.

The German company A.E.G. agreed to develop the pump technology, and hired Korodi as a full-time engineer. But the device was noisy due to cavitation as the liquid metal passed through the pump. One contemporary researcher said it  “howled like a jackal,” although Korodi claimed it sounded more like rushing water. Korodi reduced the noise significantly by varying the voltage and increasing the number of coils in the pump. Another challenge was the choice of liquid metal. Mercury wasn’t sufficiently conductive, so the pump used a potassium-sodium alloy instead, which required a special sealed system because it is so chemically reactive.

Despite filing more than 45 patent applications in six different countries, none of Einstein and Szilard’s alternative designs for refrigerators ever became a consumer product, although several were licensed, thereby providing a tidy bit of extra income for the scientists over the years. And the Einstein/Szilard pump proved useful for cooling breeder reactors. The prototypes were not energy efficient, and the Great Depression hit many potential manufacturers hard. But it was the introduction of a new non-toxic refrigerant, freon, in 1930 that spelled doom for the Einstein/Szilard refrigerator. The economics supported the freon-based mechanical compressor technology, and that's what most folks still use today.

Interest in their designs has revived in recent years, fueled by environmental concerns over climate change and the impact of freon and other chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer, as well as the need to find alternative energy sources. In 2008, a team at Oxford University led by Malcolm McCulloch (an electrical engineer who is passionate about green technologies) built a prototype as part of a project to develop more robust appliances. They modified the design slightly, replacing the types of gases used, in hopes of quadrupling the efficiency of Einstein and Szilard's original design. McCulloch is also toying with the notion of using a solar-powered heat pump to make the appliance even more energy efficient.

Meanwhile, other scientists at rival Cambridge University have explored cooling via magnetic fields, with no need for adding extra energy, in yet another modified design of the Einstein-Szilard fridge. "Ours works in a similar way (to freon fridges) but instead of using a gas we use a magnetic field and a special metal alloy," project manager Neil Wilson told Green Optimistic in 2008. "When the magnetic field is next to the alloy, it's like compressing the gas, and when the magnetic field leaves, it's like expanding the gas. This effect can be seen in rubber bands -- when you stretch the band it gets hot and when you let the band contract it gets cold."

And finally, a former graduate student at Georgia Tech, Andy Delano, also built a prototype of one of Einstein and Szilard’s designs as part of his master's and doctoral thesis work. "Literally, you heat one end and the other gets cold," Delano explained at the time. He researched the refrigeration cycle and modeled it on a computer, using his own money to build the prototype. His then-roommate just happened to be majoring in civil engineering, and helped weld the prototype together, while his brother (another Georgia Tech alum) drew on his industrial design degree to create an animated version of Einstein and Szilard's original patent diagram, bringing the movement of the various fluids to life. Delano's version used electric resistance heaters as the heat source, mostly for convenience, but a small gas burner or solar energy sources could also be used.

It took months for Delano and his partners to finish building the prototype, but good news -- it worked right off the bat. Well, almost: at first, he got ice, so he tweaked the mix of chemicals to get a chill, not not an outright freeze. It does bode well for the possibility of creating a refrigerator/freezer combination in the future -- although that future is probably still pretty far off. Still, all these prototypes are further proof of principle that Einstein and Szilard were clearly onto something -- they were just 70-odd years too soon.

[Comic below: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. If you're not reading the strip regularly, why not?]

missed me by a millimeter

Co-blogger Lee might not have time to blog much these days -- hey, she's swamped doing double teaching duty, with uber-long commutes -- but she did find time in between grading stacks upon stacks of student papers to send me an awesome video link called "Millimeters Matter," showing various insects being smacked with itsy-bitsy tarts launched by a mini-trebuchet. Her comment: "Someone is a major geek with too much time on their hands... and an Easy Bake oven."

She has a point. Check out the video below. Whoever made it (ad agency?) had to (1) build a tiny trebuchet, (2) calibrate said device appropriately to fling a plethora of tiny tarts, (3) make those tiny pastries (which may indeed involve the equivalent of an Easy Bake oven), and (4) corral a host of insects to suffer the ignomy of being hit with various pie fillings. Apparently it's an ad for Samsung electronics, and this isn't its first foray around the blogosphere: Cynical C posted it back in 2007. Jen-Luc Piquant has no idea if actual insects were harmed while making this video, but her attitude is, hey, they're insects. Nature will probably make more. (Except for bees -- colony collapse disorder is actually a serious problem, and apparently there's a viral cause. Who knew?)

But here's a burning question, raised by one of the commenters in YouTube, who claims the device in the video isn't "really" a trebuchet as technically defined: i.e, it has no counterweight. Honestly, it's difficult to tell for sure, since the actual catapult is only featured briefly at the start of the video. I guess it depends on what one expects said counterweight to look like.

For those who don't know much about catapults, that term applies broadly to many different devices: trebuchets, ballistas (which look remarkably like giant crossbows), and mangonels, among them. They all are designed to fling heavy objects over long distances, and historically were used as weapons of war -- pretty darned effective ones, too, when the machines were well-designed. They are distinguished by the projectile mechanism. Ballistas and mangonels are so-called torsion devices: a cord is twisted tightly and then released, causing the projectile of choice to fly off into the wild blue yonder. (With any luck, it hits its target.) In contrast, the trebuchet gets its power from, well, gravity, in the form of a counterweight that is released, causing the lever to whip around like a sling to launch a projectile.

It's simple physics: a lever and fulcrum principle, combined with what amounts to an amped-up slingshot. Think about a typical seesaw (lever) in a playground, carefully balanced on a point (fulcrum) about which it rotates -- or rather, moves up and down. Now think about what happens when a much heavier child sits on one end while a small child sits on the other. If the weight difference is significant enough, and the heavier child sits down abruptly, it's entirely possible that the unfortunate smaller child could be thrown from the seesaw, thereby becoming a projectile.

That's pretty much what's happening with a trebuchet, except the fulcrum is positioned a bit closer to the much-heavier counterweight for the most efficient energy transfer. At the other end of the lever is the sling holding a projectile. Dropping the counterweight sets the lever in motion, the sling is pulled along with it, and when it reaches a given angle, the projectile is released. (Finding the optimum angle is one factor among many when it comes to building a successful trebuchet.) In fact, according to the folks at Real World Physics, it's akin to the physics of a golf swing, performed upside down.

There are countless hobby enthusiasts today that love trebuchets and other catapults, even designing and building their own. The popular Punkin Chunkin competition, featured every year on The Science Channel, draws many such people into this arcane world. You can find online classroom activities based on comparing a trebuchet and catapult, courtesy of NASA, and plenty of instructions and design tools, in case you want to take a stab at building your own.

In fact, USC string theorist Nick Warner is such an enthusiast: he once told me of building a trebuchet in the backyard with his daughter -- and with that kind of brain power brought to bear on the challenge, I'm sure the resulting machine was quite effective. And that pretty much makes him one of the Coolest Dads Ever in my book.

When it comes to assessing performance, it's really all about range, which in turn depends on things like mass, shape and size; wind speed; the elevation of whatever's doing the hurling; and lots of other factors. Competitors who enter Punkin Chunkin can launch their pumpkins using any mechanical means, usually slingshots, catapults, trebuchets, or pneumatic air cannons. (The pumpkin has to be very firm, because the launch doesn't count if the pumpkin splatters in mid-air, dubbed "pumpkin pie in the sky.") An air cannon holds the current world record: apparently it chunked a pumpkin 4,623.43 feet in 2009, although Wikipedia tells me there's an even longer result pending verification: the same machine achieved a range of 5,545.43 feet just last month.

Small wonder that for several centuries, the trebuchet was the weapon of choice for laying siege to medieval castles. (The projectiles tended to be much larger than your average pumpkin, but the ranges achieved were still impressive.) The earliest version, called a traction trebuchet, was known in Ancient Greece and China around the 4th Century BC. It required many men to pull the lever instead of a counterweight, in order to launch a projectile. The counterweight version appeared in the 12th century, and was far more effective, flinging objects weighing as much as 350 pounds against medieval fortresses. Use two such machines in tandem, and it was possible to launch a projectile every 15 seconds. That kind of damage adds up over time. The trebuchet was a devastating weapon, and only fell out of favor with the advent of gunpowder-based weapons (like cannon).

For instance, in the summer of 1191, Richard the Lionheart used one his favorite trebuchets against the city of Acre during the Crusades. He called it "Bad Neighbor" (Malvoisine), and the accumulated impact of all those projectiles breached the city wall and supposedly shattered the "Cursed Tower." His other favorite trebuchet was nicknamed "God's Stone-Thrower" -- consider them the Fat Man and Little Boy of the Crusades. Another English king, Edward Longshanks, had a trebuchet built called "Warwolf" that he used in the siege of Sirling Castle in 1304. Innovation has always been a hallmark of such machines: around 1187, an Islamic scholar named Mardi bin Ali al-Tarsusi described an unusual hybrid trebuchet: as it fired, it also cocked a separate crossbow, most likely as a means of protecting the men operating the machine during battle.

Stones were by far the most common projectiles, although attackers on occasion would launch diseased corpses and manure over castle walls in hopes of infecting the people huddled behind them -- an early form of biological warfare. And if you're the henchmen of the French aristocrat, Louis de Lombard, in Monty Python's Holy Grail, you pitchez la vache -- hurl cows and other farm animals over the walls at one's enemies. Because the trebuchet isn't just for laying siege to a castle -- it's also an awesome defense against an invading army, or just a random group of knights in search of the holy grail.

 

bringing back babbage

In 2002, cyberpunk authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling collaborated on a historical thriller, The Difference Engine, in which the 19th century inventor Charles Babbage perfected his steam-powered Analytical Engine. It's an awesome, visionary read, detailing an alternate history in which the computer age arrives a century earlier, Lord Byron becomes prime minister instead of dying of syphilis at 32, and a rebellious group of subversive, anti-technology Luddites -- the Insane Clown Posse of their day perhaps? -- conspires to overthrow the intellectual elite in power. We can only imagine how our daily lives, science, and the course of history may have been altered if Babbage’s ingenious engines had given us comparable computing power in the 19th century.

Except there is exciting news! Plans are afoot to raise funds to finally build Babbage's Analytical Engine, the last and most complex of his many designs for "thinking machines." This is not entirely unprecedented. In the 1990s, a team of scientists at London’s Science Museum, led by Doron Swade, built a working model of Babbage's second Difference Engine (the precursor to the Analytical Engine), using only the materials and tools that would have been available in Babbage’s day.  And it worked. The machine is now prominently displayed in the museum, and Swade wrote a marvelous book about his experiences: The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. Here's Swade talking with Wired about his model Difference Engine:

As impressive a feat as building the Difference Engine was, the Analytical Engine is even more impressive. John Graham-Cumming, a programmer and science blogger, now hopes to realise Babbage’s vision. Various folks have assembled different elements of the engine over the last 173 years, but this would be the first complete working model. Graham-Cummings told the London Telegraph, "The big difference between it and machines which came 100 years later was that the programme was stored externally, in punch cards. It is basically a giant number-crunching machine–which is effectively what modern computers are today, it’s just that those numbers appear to us as words or images on a screen.”

Just who was this visionary whose designs were a century before their time? Well, Babbage's personal motto may have been "Born To TInker." The son of a wealthy London banker, he was one of those kids who loved to take apart his toys to see how they worked -- probably with the usual mixed results when it came time to put the toys back together again. He had a knack for math, too, teaching himself algebra before attending Cambridge University’s Trinity College. He loved numbers and found minute details endlessly fascinating, even compiling a collection of “jest books” to scientifically analyze “the causes of wit.” I guess nobody had the heart to tell him that explaining a joke never works.   He even cracked the supposedly unbreakable “Vigenere” cipher around 1854, considered by many historians to be the most significant breakthrough in cryptoanalysis since the 9th century. 

Babbage could be tiresome, even pompous, but he could also be quite charming. Once, as a “diversion,” he drew up a set of mortality tables, now a basic tool of the modern insurance industry. “A man with such a head for numbers and flair for flattery was bound to end up in life insurance,” historian Benjamin Woolley quipped in his biography of Ada Lovelace (a Babbage fan and collaborator), The Bride of Science.

He wasn't handsome, either: the poet Thomas Carlyle, who once described Babbage as “a cross between a frog and a viper.” But despite his physical shortcomings and pedantic tendences, Babbage had a strong romantic streak, marrying the woman he loved without his father's permission, and suffering the consequences: being cut out of the will (giving up his chunk of the substantial family fortune in the process).

So, he wasn't wealthy, but he loved his wife, and he was sufficiently well off financially to pursue his love of invention. Among other things, he invented a speedometer and a “cowcatcher,” a device that could be affixed to steam locomotives to clear cattle from the tracks.

Babbage first conceived of the idea of a calculating engine in 1821, when he was examining a set of mathematical tables with astronomer John Herschel (the son of William Herschel). Such tables were used to make calculations for astronomy, engineering and nautical navigation, but they were calculated by hand and were riddled with errors. So the answers were often wrong, no doubt causing any number of shipwrecks and engineering travesties. “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!” Babbage exclaimed in exasperation after finding more than a thousand errors in one table. And so began his lifelong quest to mechanize the process.

Then Babbage learned of a novel scheme employed by the French mathematician Gaspard Riche de Prony. France had recently switched to the metric system of measurement. This gave scientists a much-needed standardized system to measure and compare results, but it also required a whole new set of calculating tables with which to carry out increasingly complex scientific calculations. So de Prony established calculating “factories” to manufacture logarithms the same way workers manufactured mercantile goods.

These human "computers" were mostly out-of-work hairdressers who had found their skills at constructing elaborate pompadours for aristrocrats much less in demand after so many former clients lost their heads (literally) at the height of the French Revolution. De Prony devised a rote system of compiling results based on a set of given values and formulae, and the workers just cranked out the answers in what must have been the world’s first mathematical assembly line. Babbage figured that if an army of untrained hairdressers could make the calculations, so could a computing “engine.” In fact, a mechanical calculator for adding and subtracting numbers, called the arithmometer, had only just been invented.

Suitably inspired, Babbage designed his first “Difference Engine,” which created tables of values by finding the common difference between terms in a sequence. Powered by steam, it was limited only by the number of digits the machine had available. His demonstration model was the size of a steamer trunk, with two brass columns supporting two thick plates sandwiching a complicated array of gears and levers. Small wheels with numbers engraved in their rims displayed the terms and results of the calculations. Babbage proudly displayed his prototype to the many visitors he entertained in his Dorset Street home, although most did not share his love of numbers.

In an effort to pique their interest, he put on a dog-and-pony show: he would announce that the machine would add numbers by two, then begin turning the crank. The wheels with the carved figures would begin displaying the predictable sequence: 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on. The machine would do this for roughly 50 iterations. Just when the audience was becoming bored and restless, the number would suddenly leap to a new, seemingly random value and then continue the adding-by-two sequence from there. It seemed miraculous, but really, all Babbage had done was program the engine to perform one routine for a given number of turns of the crank, and then to jump to a “subroutine" for another few turns before returning to the original routine.

Why was a full-scale version of this amazing machine never built?  Well, Babbage was a perfectionist who was never satisfied with his work, and continually revised his blueprints. He was more of a tinkerer than, say, a "finisher." He spent thousands of pounds of government funding to rebuild the same parts over and over. Eventually the British government lost patience with his lack of progress and decided to suspend funding for his work in 1832, terminating the project altogether in the 1840s.

Nor was the government inclined to look kindly on the successor to the Difference Engine: the Analytical Engine. This new, improved machine wouldn’t just calculate a specific set of tables; it would solve a variety of math problems. Babbage based his design on the cotton mill. There was a memory function called a “store”, and processing function called the “mill.”

But the Analytical Engine would use punched cards to control the cogs, based on the weaving cards developed to “program” looms to weave particular patterns -- essentially pre-Victorian floppy disks or CD-ROMs. When strung together, these cards would enable the machine to perform “loops,” whereby a sequence of instructions would be repeated over and over, or “conditional branching,” where one series of cards would be skipped and another read if certain conditions were met.

Babbage's design provoked a heated reaction from those who just couldn't grasp what he was after. Robert Peel, the head of England’s Tory administration at the time, denounced the Analytical Engine as a “worthless device, its only conceivable use being to work out exactly how little benefit it would be to science.” It would have required tens of thousands of parts, intricately assembled into a frame the size of a small locomotive. Some historians have speculated that Babbage’s machines were never built because they demanded a level of engineering sophistication that simply didn’t exist in pre-Victorian England. But it turns out it was mostly a question of money.

Frankly, it's still a question of money, since Graham-Cumming estimates it will cost about $640,000 to complete the project -- assuming there aren't any over-runs. He's sufficiently motivated that he's been soliciting donations from various sources.  The idea is to raise the money by this January so he can start building his Analytical Engine. And he's off to a great start, with around 1,600 supporters so far who have pledged funds to the project. He will base his project on the original Babbage blueprints (and we don't envy him the task of sifting through Babbage's many revisions), which will be digitized the better to decipher the inventor's many annotations. Then Graham-Cummings and hs team will build a 3D simulation of the gadget on a computer before attempting to build the real thing. Once he's done, he'll donate the machine to a museum -- hopefully the same one that houses Swade's Difference Engine. Keep Babbage's rebuilt machines together, I say. That's how he would have wanted it.

 

hollywood, red wine and carburetors

OK, Jennifer shamed me into finishing this with her excellent blog on the gas station nozzles and how they turn off automatically.  Finally.

I don't usually drink red wine. I've had some particularly bad experiences in the past.  (Limit yourself to less than three bottles, the Rocket Scientist chides me, but quantity is not the issue.)  A glass and a half of Cabernet and the next day I felt like elephants are doing the rumba in my head. I was told that the problem was variously with tannins or sulfites or something, but I've been persuaded that the reaction may be the result of my choosing bad red wines.  With advice from some more expert friends, I've been able to drink some red wines without reaction -- but I am still not a big fan of the astringent, raw alcohol-y taste relative to sweeter, milder white wine.

Wine is made by fermenting grapes. Fermentation is a fancy way of describing yeast eating sugar.  The yeast's waste products are ethanol (C₂H₅OH) and carbon dioxide.  Fermentation produces alcohol from the sugar or starch in pretty much any fruit, vegetable or grain via the same chemical reaction. The Japanese fermented rice, the Scots fermented barley, and the Americans corn (among other things).  Different starting materials produce different types of alcohol, with the taste determined by the complex chemistry of fermentation, as well as the minerals and other chemicals that are imparted to the plant by the soil.  Simpler sugars are easier to extract from the plant and ferment, which is why it is simpler to make ethanol from corn kernels than from switchgrass.

Wine color is determined by whether (or how long) the skins of the grapes are allowed to remain with the inside of the fruit during the fermentation and aging process. White wine doesn't use the skins at all. (No, it's not red grapes vs. white grapes!) I remember hearing that the most nutritious part of the potato is the skin, as it is rich in minerals.  Grape skins similarly contain a complex mixture of molecules that contribute to the eventual complexity of the wine's taste. The most obvious contributors to wine taste are acids, sugars and tannins, although there are many organic molecules that contribute to wine taste.

Interactions between esters, alcohols and acids produce fruity flavors, while tannins (polyphenol compounds) produce that astringent, dry quality I tend to dislike in red wine. Sugars, obviously, determine the sweetness. Short-chain aldehydes (hexanal, pantanal, nonanal) are hypothesized to produce grassy, nutty and orange-rose flavors; however, there isn't one-to-one correspondence between a molecule and a taste.  We understand very little of the correlation between the presence and quantity of molecules and the taste of the wine. It's not like we can do a chemical assay and predict what the wine will taste like based on the assay. There can literally be hundreds of different molecules in a wine that determine its taste.  The proportions of the molecules are very dependent on the year's growing season, which is one reason different vintages can taste very different.  Tannins are more in the skin than the pump of the fruit, so red wines have more tannins than white wines.

Tannins are polyphenols.  A phenol (shown at right) is a six-membered carbon ring with an OH group hanging off one vertex. 'Poly' means many, so a polyphenol is a bunch of phenols attached together.  In addition to the skin and seeds of the grapes, you can also get tannins from the barrels in which the wine is aged. There are a variety of types of tannins, with some being much less desirable than others. For example, winemakers crush the grapes carefully to that they don't break open the seeds and release a lot of tannins. Even though they can produce undesirable astringency, tannins help prevent oxidation of the wine, so you don't want to get rid of them entirely.

A young red wine has a lot of tannins and that is what imparts that raw puckery flavor; however, as the wine ages, the tannins polymerize (join together into long chains). The polymer chains form the sediment that you often find in red wines.  A wine that is designed to be able to be enjoyed without long aging will have lower levels of tannis, while one that is meant to be aged for decades will start off with a larger concentration of tannins and therefore be undrinkable until it's aged long enough to polymerize the tannins; however, the tannins are what allow the wine to last for decades without going bad.  Tannins react well with proteins, so red wines are paired with high-protein foods because that pairing minimizes their astringency.

Red wine is often decanted into another container as opposed to drinking pouring it directly from the bottle. One reason is to catch any sediment at the bottom of the bottle, but another reason is to allow the wine to "breathe".  Some people assert that aerating the wine prior to drinking it smooths the harsher aspects of the wine, specifically by allowing the tannins a chance to react with air. This would be more effective for highly tannic wines (cabs, Bordeaux, etc.) and not very useful for low-tannin wines.  Aeration also allows some of the aromas dissolved in the wine to make their way out and move to your nose. Some experts claim that aeration is actually bad because it removes too much aroma and flavor from the glass. 

There are two types of reactions going on in the wine after it's been bottled.  An element is oxidized when its electrons defect to another atom like oxygen. An element is reduced when it swipes electrons from another element, which may also be oxygen).  Oxidation polymerizes (joins together) the phenols to create tannins, but there are also reactions going on that change one type of phenol to another molecule or de-polymerize the phenols. Microoxidation (careful control over the amount of oxygen and the rate to which the wine is exposed) appears to affect the way the polymers polymerize, thus changing the astringency of the final wine.

You want some oxidation early on in the process:  the oxidation of ethanol to acetaldehyde, also know as ethanal, promotes tannins and pigment development.  But after that initial development, you really want the wine to be in a non-oxidative environment because too much oxygen produces hydrogen perodixe, which has a yucky off taste that covers up the rest of the wine.  An oxidation/reduction dance goes on for as long as the wine remains unopened and is determined primarily by how much oxygen is left in the wine bottle.  The final result is a chemical tango of highly reduced and oxidized chemicals that starts to change the moment you open the bottle.

The longer a wine remains open, the more likely it is to start oxidizing in a bad way, which is why red wines don't keep that well after opening. Timing is crucial.  You would think they could make a dip strip that would change color at just the right time, wouldn't you?  The heck with sensors to detect Sarin.  I want one that takes the guesswork out of red wine drinking.

All the business about screwtop wines goes way beyond questions of classiness.  Screwtops produce a really, really good oxygen-proof seal - but that means you may miss out on the early oxidation necessary to produce deep flavor.  On the other hand, you may also miss out on the oxidation of the nasty sulfur-containing compounds later that produce bad taste.  Similar issues have been raised about real vs. synthetic cork.

Sulfites, which are added to wine as preservatives don't actually prevent oxidation:  The sulfites bind with the oxidized molecules and that prevents you from tasting them, so you're drinking oxidized wine, you just don't know it.

 

This is where the venturi effect comes in.  Just before Christmas (yes, it did take me six months to get around to finishing this blog, yes, I had to fill a tax extension and no, they still aren't done because my life is going to hell, thank you so much for asking). I was in LA staying with Jennifer.  One of our outings involved our mutual friend David Saltzburg, who is the scientific consultant for the sitcom 'The Big Bang Theory'.  The show gave him a present that we decided to try out at a dinner that quickly turned into a science experiment. David got a 'Vinturi' wine aerator that purports to aerate wine better by creating a differential pressure as the wine is poured into glasses or decanted. I've drawn a schematic of the aerator below.

The key to the Vinturi is the Bernoulli principle, specifically the part of it that says that the pressure of a fluid depends on the fluid's speed. The faster a fluid moves, the lower the pressure. The corraloary to this is the Venturi effect: as a fluid flows through a narrow part of a pipe, its speed decreases and thus its pressure increases. The Venturi effect is named after Giovanni Battista Venturi (1746–1822), who was a professor of geometry, philosophy and physics at the University of Modena. Venturi not only did science (and math) himself, he also collected and published much of Galileo's work. The Vinturi is actually a Venturi.

The schematic below shows a bowl at the top with a large opening.  That opening constricts to a narrow opening, then enlarges again a little at the bottom. Coming out of the center of the side openings are two thin tubes that are open to the sides of the device. When you pour wine into the cup, the speed of the wine increases as it passes through the constriction. That decreases the pressure, which should draw air into the opening through the two horizontal tubes.

The wine is poured into the large cup at the top of the device, and travels faster as it goes through the narrow neck. The narrow neck has a lower pressure, and that allows air to entire through those side holes. If you look at pictures on the Vinturi web site, you can see lots and lots of little air bubbles in the wine flowing through the bottom part of the device.

Incidentally, this is the same way a carburetor works - a venturi created by airflow into the engine makes a region of low pressure that mechanically sucks gasoline into the flow and carries it into the intake manifold. The carburetor was invented by Karl Benz (Yes, of Mercedes-Benz) in 1885. The throttle on a carbureted car does not control the amount of fuel going inot the engine. It actually meters how much air is being pulled into the entire and the speed of the air (which determines the pressure), automatically puts the right amount of fuel into the airstream.

We did a scientific experiment in which we first poured red wine into three glasses without using the Vinturi and red wine into another three glasses using the Vinturi.  It was not a double-blind experiment because red wine stains terribly and we didnt' want to do too much damage to David's place.  We tasted the wine immediately after pouring and all three of us agreed that the wine that had been through the Vinturi was much better.  It was less acidic, less astringent than the un-Vinturied wine.  We let the original three (control) glasses sit for twenty minutes, let the bottle sit open for twenty minutes and drank all of the wine that had come out of the Vinturi pour.

After twenty minutes, we poured three new glasses and compared the control (sitting out in the glasses) with the wine that had been sitting in the bottle with what was left of the wine that had been aerated and sitting in the glasses for 20 minutes.  Are you with me?  I hope so because my notes because pretty hard to read at this point having finished off a third of a bottle of wine in the service of science.  The experiment was somewhat additionally muddled because none of us bothered to read the instructions and the pictures on the box can be a little misleading.  Plus, we did the one thing I tell student over and over not to do:  We used the equipment without understanding how it works.  It's important that you not block the holes in the side of the device.  If you pour too fast, or if your decanter is at a particular angle, it is possible to have overflow through the side holes, which is defeating the purpose of the device. 

Our preliminary conclusions were that aeration really does mellow out red wine.  The Vinturi increases the rate of aeration and thus mellows the wine faster than letting it sit around in a decanter or in glasses.  My working hypothesis is that the Vinturi isn't going to make a really bad wine drinkable and it isn't going to make a really exceptional wine any better; however, it may make a medium-grade wine better and let you drink it faster.  If you are and impatient, moderately well off person who likes impressing your friends with gadgets, go ahead and get one.  Run your own tasting and let us know what you think. 

The following week after returning home, I found that Vinturi offers two models:  one for red wine and one for white wine, the difference being that they have different sized holes.  My conclusion on that is a) I don't really taste much difference in most white wines after aerating them; b) the difference in hole size is pretty darned small; and c) the real danger is that if you let the aerator sit out after using it, it may be difficult to get the red wine entirely out and you run the risk of tainting your white wine with small amounts of red wine stain that have been oxidizing for a very long time.  So if you're fastidious about cleaning it after you use it, I really don't think you need two of the darn things.

BTW, this is David toward the end of the experiment wondering when Jennifer and I were going to leave so that he could wash the many, many wine glasses we used during our experiment.  I vaguely remember something about wanting to run an experiment about surface area of the wine in the glass and depth, based on some work I did on nanoparticle oxidation, but I think we used pretty much all the glassware he had on hand.  (And Jennifer took the pictures!)

Boy, all that writing has made me thirsty.  Think I'll head downstairs and run another experiment. 

nothing venturi'd, nothing gained

Entropy is a harsh mistress. Three years ago, when I moved to Los Angeles, I bought the first car I'd owned in 20 years: a brand new 2007 shiny red Prius. It was all downhill from there, starting with the first little ding, a scrap on the bumper, a new back fender thanks to some jerk who sideswiped the Prius in a parking lot, knocking loose the bumper, and then didn't bother leaving a note, and so forth. Sure, I bring it in for regularly scheduled tuneups, but hey -- things fall apart. Entropy happens, and I'm okay with that. And as a conscientious car owner, I've familiarized myself with the basics about how it works. But every now and then something happens that makes me realize how little I really know about my car.

Take last week, when I went to fill the car up with gas, and for some reason, the pump didn't shut off automatically when the tank was full, as pumps are supposed to do. Fortunately, I do know how many gallons per fill-up I normally get, so I sensed something was wrong and stopped pumping. It wasn't quite soon enough: gas began burbling out of the tank and running down the side of the car. This station had a mechanic on duty who helped me siphon out some of the excess gasoline, and rinse off the spilled gas.

Then he pointed out that I seemed to be missing the little metal doohickey that usually covers the tube leading to the gas tank --  you know, the thin piece of metal that you see whenever you unscrew the gas cap to insert the pump handle. His theory: the gas pump didn't stop automatically when the tank was filled because that piece of metal responds to the rising levels of gas in the tank, and the pump senses that rising back pressure and stops. Without that piece of metal, there was no way for the pump to know when to stop. Neither one of us could think of what the doohickey is actually called (and neither could the mechanic at the Toyota dealership), but apparently it's pretty vital. When it comes to car parts, size doesn't matter. Even a tiny piece can have serious ramifications if something goes amiss. 

I screwed in the gas cap and drove off, and brought the Prius in for repair a few days later, since it was due for another tuneup anyway. No doubt there's a few car buffs out there who've already figured out that the gas station mechanic was wrong about the cause of the trouble. The Prius doesn't have one of those metal doohickey things over the gas valve -- never had it, never will. The Prius repairman was a bit vague on the details, but apparently all that pressure sensing equipment is located elsewhere in the tank on the Prius. Which means that it wasn't my car that was at fault; it was the actual pump at the gas station that malfunctioned.

Being of a curious bent, once I got home, I turned to teh Google and started nosing around the Interwebz looking for information on gas pumps, gas tanks, and so forth. The ever-reliable How Stuff Works provided an excellent explanation for how gas station pumps work, as well as a brief summary of how it knows (ideally) when to turn off. It's purely mechanical: there's a small hole at the top of the nozzle, connected to a small pipe that leads back to the storage tank in the pump. A device called a venturi (basically a small pipe) is used to create suction at one end. If your car's tank isn't full -- which, at the outset, it probably isn't, otherwise why are you pumping gas? -- air gets drawn through that hole in the nozzle because of the vacuum that's been created. But eventually the level of gas in the tank gets high enough that it blocks the hole. Another bit of mechanics in the pump handle senses the change in suction, and the pump automatically turns off.

But what happens when that pressure sensing mechanism fails, as it did in my case? Well, the tank overflows. Duh. This is potentially a bigger problem in a Prius because rather than a solid tank, it has a flexible rubber fuel bladder, purportedly because it does a better job of preventing gas fumes from escaping. So when I over-filled my tank, I basically created a water balloon, and the flexible bladder squirted the excess fluid back out the way it came in. If this happens once, it's not such a big deal (although it did screw up my gas gauge reading for awhile), but routinely over-topping when you fill the tank can eventually lead to destruction of the vapor-capture system -- a pricey repair.

(Incidentally, that flexible rubber bladder is also why there's often such a big discrepancy between the "official" fuel tank capacity cited by Toyota for the Prius (11.9 gallons for the 2010 model) and real-world usage. That 11.9 gallons only applies in temperatures above 70 degrees F, apparently. In colder weather, the rubber gets more rigid, just like what happens if you put a rubber band into the freezer. It has less "give" and thus holds less fuel -- sometimes as much as 2-3 gallons less -- because of the above described mechanism that causes a gas pump to shut off automatically in response to back pressure from the tank.)

So there was nothing wrong with my Prius, after all, and now that's it had a full tune-up, it's purring along almost as good as new -- at least until entropy starts taking its toll again. And as a result of my little adventure, I stumbled across a physical concept that doesn't get bandied around much these days at cocktail parties (in the blogosphere or otherwise); the Venturi Effect.

The name derives from Giovanni Battista Venturi, an Italian scientist who started out as an ordained priest, going on to teach logic at a local seminary. Logic leads to geometry and philosophy, and eventually Venturi found himself teaching physics at the University of Modena in 1776 (he was contemporary with Lagrange and Laplace). Venturi championed Leonardo da Vinci's scientific achievements -- not just Leonardo's artistic gifts -- and also published many of Galileo's surviving manuscripts and letters.

There are scant details readily available about Venturi, but at some point he became intrigued by fluid flow and the work of Daniel Bernoulli, best known for developing the Bernoulli Principle detailing the relationship between a fluid's pressure and its velocity. But what happens when a fluid flows through part of a pipe, for example, that has been constructed? Well, the pressure drops -- not because the fluid is traveling more slowly through the constricted pathway, but because it is flowing more rapidly, in accordance with something called the equation of continuity. That's just a differential equation that describes the transport of some kind of conserved quantity, usually things like mass, energy, momentum, or electric charge. If something is conserved, that means that quantity -- say, of energy -- cannot increase or decrease, it can only move from place to place, or take a different form. Energy conservation also dictates the drop in pressure: per Wikipedia, "the gain in kinetic energy is balanced by a drop in pressure." And as someone who now has a passing familiarity with calculus, I was pleased to read that Venturi mathematically derived an equation for his eponymous effect from a combination of Bernoulli's principle and the equation of continuity.

So now we know why the pipe in gas pumps that keeps track of the rate of fluid flow is called a venturi. There's a similar device known as a de Laval nozzle: a tube pinched in the middle so that it forms a kind of hourglass shape, that can be used to get a hot pressurized gas to speed up as it passes through. You'll find de Laval nozzles in steam turbines, rocket engines, and supersonic jet engines, for example -- basically anything that involves the combustion of a hot gas.

As for the Venturi effect, it's well nigh everywhere. It can be found in those perfume atomizers wielded by aggressive shopgirls that spray you with unwanted scent as you maneuver your way through a department store, as well as the nozzles of fire extinguishers and automated pool cleaners that use water pressure flows to collect debris. It's used to regulate the slow of oxygen in scuba diving gear; in recoilless rifles; in the capillaries of the human circulatory system (blood flow); and in the barrel of modern clarinets, where it helps speed up air as it flows down the tube to produce better tone. The Venturi effect also comes into play in your car's carburetor. Diandra's the resident expert on automobiles at the cocktail party, so I'll let her explain:

A venturi is used to create a region of low pressure where the gas is mechanically sucked into air flow and into the intake manifold. The carburetor was invented by Karl Benz (Yes, of Mercedes-Benz) in 1885. The throttle on a carbureted car does not control the amount of fuel going inot the engine. It actually meters how much air is being pulled into the entire and the speed (which determines the pressure), automatically puts the right amount of fuel into the airstream.. Instead, it actuates carburetor mechanisms which meter the flow of air being pulled into the engine. The speed of this flow, and therefore its pressure, determines the amount of fuel drawn into the airstream.

A carburetor basically consists of an open pipe, a "throat" or "barrel" through which the air passes into the inlet manifold of the engine. The pipe is in the form of a venturi: it narrows in section and then widens again, causing the airflow to increase in speed in the narrowest part. Below the venturi is a butterfly valve called the throttle valve — a rotating disc that can be turned end-on to the airflow, so as to hardly restrict the flow at all, or can be rotated so that it (almost) completely blocks the flow of air. This valve controls the flow of air through the carburetor throat and thus the quantity of air/fuel mixture the system will deliver, thereby regulating engine power and speed. 

Oh, and there's one more interesting application for the Venturi effect, specifically for hardcore oenophiles: it's exploited in the wine aerators that are used as a speedy shortcut for decanting wine. We received one as a gift last year -- along with a traditional decanter -- and it fits neatly over the mouth of the decanter, essentially mixing air in the wine as it flows through the device. But the type that uses the Venturti effect is a handheld injection-style acrylic aerator -- similar to the devices used in engineering -- like the carburetor system Diandra describes above. That's a whole 'nother blog post in its own right, and I know Diandra's got one in the works. So I'll let a Florida wine-maker named Tim have the last word on wine and the Venturi effect:

Tim's Wine - The Venturi effect from Pixel 1080 on Vimeo.

gaga for science

It's been a busy spring. Among other highlights, the Spousal Unit and I made a whirlwind trip to New York City in March, so he could be on some obscure cable talk show or something. But we had the added treat of getting to see an excerpt from the modern opera, Hypermusic Prologue, featuring a libretto penned by none other than Harvard physicist Lisa Randall. She collaborated with Spanish composer Hèctor Parra, and artist Matthew Ritchie, on a reimagined segment of the full opera, tailored specifically to the museum's unique rotunda. Physics-inspired operas are rare enough; taking over part of the Guggenheim for the evening is even rarer. Afterward, the Spousal Unit was pondering his ideal collaborator should he undertake a similar project. He decided he'd like to do more of a "rock opera," collaborating with Lady Gaga.

So I'm just putting that thought out there into the ether, on the off-chance Lady Gaga is intrigued by the notion of a rock opera on entropy, the big bang, the arrow of time, and the multiverse, and decides to give the Spousal Unit a call. I'm sure MoMA would be interested if the Guggenheim passed on the opportunity. I mean, the outfits alone would qualify as works of art, and Gaga is as much performance artist as musician. Everything she does is calculated to make an impression -- right down to her aversion to wearing pants of any kind. "When I'm writing music, I'm thinking about the clothes I want to wear on stage. It's all about everything altogether — performance art, pop performance art, fashion," Gaga once told MTV News. "For me, it's everything coming together and being a real story that will bring back the super-fan. I want to bring that back."

Oh, yes, I am a Gaga fan, and I know Jen-Luc Piquant totally hangs around backstage at Gaga's YouTube channel in hopes of catching a brief glimpse of her idol -- or at least the pixelated version thereof. But it wasn't always the case. Gaga has had a meteoric rise, and I confess that I'd really only caught snippets of "Let's Dance" and "Poker Face" as they were racing up the dance charts, augmented by her increasingly frequent appearances in celebrity gossip columns. These days, Gaga is everywhere, and "Poker Face" is one of the most parodied tunes on YouTube, but it was the release of her video of "Bad Romance" that turned me into a fan (along with millions of others). Not only is it a killer song you can't help but dance to, but the performance is fierce, intense, sexy, visually innovative, and just a wee bit sneakily subversive. Check it out:

See? She's a free bitch, baby. And she's only 24, and getting better and better musically (unlike certain other pop icons who shall not be named, Gaga can actually sing and play the piano very well). (BTW, check out this awesome rendition of "Bad Romance" by male a capella group On the Rocks, complete with nods to "Thriller.") But there's another reason I love me some Gaga. Science could use an image makeover from a true master of performance like Lady Gaga, who literally invented her persona from scratch and then demanded the world pay attention to her. I think the Spousal Unit is onto something. Bring back the super-fans of science! And use the tools of mass media and marketing -- music, fashion, performance art, and story-telling -- to do it. Especially fashion, because science and technology are definitely influencing fashion these days, in ways that should fit neatly into Her Ladyship's artistic vision via the Haus of Gaga. She already made a splash this past February by debuting her version of a shape-shifting "living dress" inspired by the designs of fashion icon Hussein Chalayan, a self-described techno-geek who tries to bring together technology, science culture, and fashion in some really intriguing ways. 

Chalayan's work was all the rage in Paris during the fall of 2006, when he debuted his "One Hundred Eleven" collection, with nods to 111 years of fashion in just five dresses that used technology to morph from, say, an 1895 look to something more common in 1900, and finally into a Roaring 20s flapper sheath. The Hour-Glass Dress morphs from a style reminiscent of Dior in the 1950s to a 1960s metallic sheath, and the grand finale during the 2006 Paris show featured a dress that disappeared entirely into a wide-brimmed hat, leaving the model pretty much naked on the runway (see video below). Chalayan has remained at the top of the field ever since with increasingly outre designs; his style is perfect for Lady Gaga -- and for the Spousal Unit's rock opera concept -- because it's the haute couture version of wearable electronics, designed in collaboration with a company called 2D3D.

2D3D director Rob Edkins described some of the underlying technology for Technology Review back in 2006:

"Basically, the dresses were driven electronically by controlled, geared motors. We made, for want of a better term, little bum pads for the models. So on their buttocks were some hard containers, and within these containers we had all the battery packs, controlling chips--the microcontrollers and microswitches--and little geared motors. The motors we used were tiny, about a third of the size of a pencil and nine millimeters in diameter. Each of the motors had a little pulley, and the pulley was then attached to this monofilament wire which was fed through hollow tubes sewn into the corset of the dress.

"Some of the corsets were very complicated. They had 30 or 40 of these little tubes running everywhere, carrying these little cables, each doing its little job, lifting things up or releasing little linked metallic plates. There was a huge amount of stuff going on beneath the clothes."

My personal favorite of Chalayan's creations -- particularly when it comes to what we'd need for a cosmology-inspired rock opera -- is his "Big Bang" dress, which debuted during the 2008 Paris Fashion Week. Its another mechanical dress, except this one projects moving spots of light to symbolize the birth of the universe. A glimpse of the underlying machinery is below, and you can watch a video of the dress in action over at Adam Wright's website (he collaborated with Chalayan on the dress). [Click "Fashion" on the right side, then click on "Hussein Chalayan: Big Bang."] 

He's also done a series of LED dresses, in which light-emitting diodes are incorporated into the fabric. Pop singer Katy Perry recently wowed the crowds when she showed up at the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a stunning LED gown. Really, that's almost as impressive as Meejin Yoon's "Defensible Dress," which has sensors woven into the fabric that can detect a person who is getting too close, thereby triggering "quills" to pop out and keep the intruder at a safe distance. (Yoon got the idea while working in Neil Gershenfeld's "Fab Lab" at MIT, and says she was inspired by the porcupine and the blowfish.)

Oh, but Chalayan didn't stop with morphing outfits and LED dresses; he also put together an architecturally inspired collection in 2009 featuring chairs and tables that transformed into wearable (at least in theory) garments. When was the last time you saw a tiered wooden skirt that doubled as a table? Chair covers that can turn into dresses? These are all elements that would be perfect for staging the Spousal Unit's hypothetical rock opera. Heck, if Chalayan prefers to focus on Galaxy/LED dresses for the performance, perhaps Neri Oxman can step in to help. Oxman is getting her PhD in design computation at MIT, and per io9, she specializes in "reactive architecture: surfaces, furnishings, and structures that change their own properties according to different stimuli. Her resin floors grow thicker where they need to support more weight; her composite walls rearrange their windows and stress lines based on local weather conditions. One of her best-known works, a chaise lounge called Beast, can adjust its shape, flexibility and softness to fit each person who sits in it."

Oxman incorporates so-called smart materials into her pieces. So does designer Marielle Leenders, who weaves wires containing shape memory alloys (like alloys of nickel and titanium) into her clothing to create, say, fabrics that contract under heat. So if you walk outside in a long-sleeved shirt, and it's warmer that perhaps you might expect, there's no need to roll up your own sleeves: the garment will respond to the increase in temperature and roll up itself. No kidding. No need for all those intricate cables, wires, motors and microcontrollers featured in Chalayan's designs! (Cracked.com has a problem with this concept. What's their problem? "You're an incredible lazy ass, that's the problem! What, you can't roll up your own sleeves?") It's still pretty ingenious on Leenders' part, and certainly preferable to Spray-On Fabric, or "Fabrican," which (according to the good folks at Cracked.com) "uses a pressurized formula that, when sprayed from an aerosol can, creates fibers that adhere to any surface and bind to create a piece of non-woven fabric. It can be sprayed onto a ... model, for example, to instantly create an entire dress or outfit right onto her body."

Then there's the tantalizing prospect of incorporating glitter-sized solar cells into fabrics to create clothing that produces electricity -- just the thing for charging your iPhone when you're on the go. That way you can be sure to get those all-important text messages sent by your sensor-lined underwear, alerting you to any unfortunate "accidents" you may experience. Per Discovery News:

"A firm in Australia called Simavita has invented a pair of electronic underpants for people who have incontinence that works to monitor and relay information about "accidents." Alerts are sent via text message over the institution's paging system. The underpants have a disposable element similar to a regular incontinence pad and include a detachable transmitter that relays readings from the pad's sensor strip over a wireless network to a central computer."

At least those mechanical dresses would have a built-in power source... so long as it was a sunny day. Ah, but what about more traditional means of ornamenting clothing? Beading and other kinds of adornment aren't just for clothing anymore; now you can place these things right onto the skin. Tattoos are old hat by now, although Gaga sports one quoting Rilke. It's even money that Gaga has already experimented with the new fashion trend of "vajazzling": "bedazzling" a certain sensitive area on women immortalized on Grey's Anatomy as the "va-jay-jay." Or maybe that's just a bit too tame for Her Ladyship. In which case, may I suggest the "dermatological embellishments" of Lauren Kalman, featured by Jessica Palmer at Bioephemera? Kalman is a metalsmith and mixed media artist who uses gold acupuncture wires to pierce the skin with mini-baubles in patterns that mimic certain skin diseases: a "rash of glistening blood-red stones set in gold," for instance to mimic an open sore. But since Gaga specializes in the gorgeously grotesque, she might like this, from an earlier series called "Hard Wear," in which golden crusts call to mind a heavily blistered mouth:

So that's a brief survey of cutting-edge, technology (and biology) inspired fashion to tempt Lady Gaga into considering a science-themed rock opera. For my part, I'm more on the grungy end of things; I'd probably want to work with the wild geeks of ArcAttack and their singing Tesla coils. They program the coils to perform electronic covers of tunes like the theme from Dr. Who (I'm still waiting for what I'm sure will be a killer version of the theme from Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Just watching the streaks of electricity emanating from the coils in time to the music is awe-inspiring enough, but these guys also devised a Faraday suit for their performances, enabling one of them (the one wearing the suit) to actually play with the arcs of electricity and not get electrocuted.

That suit that looks so much like a beekeeper's getup in the video below is actually what's known as a Faraday cage, an enclosure specifically designed to exclude electromagnetic fields. The 19th century British scientist Michael Faraday built the first one in 1836 to demonstrate his assertion that the charge on a charged conductor travels along the exterior surface and doesn't influence anything enclosed within it. It's essentially an application of "Gauss's Law": since like charges repel each other (opposites attract), electrical charge will "migrate" to the surface of a conducting form, such as a sphere. 

Faraday's 19th century version was an entire room coated with metal foil; he built it himself. Then he blasted the walls with high-voltage discharges from an electrostatic generator, and used an instrument called an electroscope to prove that no charge was present inside the actual room. As long as there are no gaps in the conductive "path," the electrical current from the lightning will never have much of an impact. The same thing is true of cars. If you happen to be sitting in a car when lightning strikes it, you'll probably be okay, as long as you don't stick your hand out the window to check and see if it's "still raining." The current will simply travel along the metallic exterior of the vehicle.

Be honest, now: wouldn't it be awesome to have a glitzed-up version of those singing Tesla coils on-stage with dancers and backup singers in spiffy tech-outfits, performing catchy dance tunes about time's arrow, entropy, and the birth of the universe? And for the finale, why not bring in the crack Caltech team -- working with Mindshare LA, an "idea factory that brings together scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and others to engage in creative brainstorming" -- that helped OK Go design their warehouse-scale, two-story Rube Goldberg device for the video version of "This Too Shall Pass"? It starts with a toy car pushing against a column of dominoes, and ends with the band being splattered by paint guns. All those cheering folks at the video's end helped design and build the contraption, using "ideas and materials anyone can come up with at home."

[The band] wanted the machine strung together from the kind of everyday stuff you might find at a yard sale and to run on mostly mechanical energy. No computers, fancy electronics, or high-tech gimmickry. The machine had to interact with the four musicians and even perform part of their song—an honor that ultimately went to a pulley-controlled whirling guitar whose neck plinks out part of the tune on water glasses. It had to function flawlessly during a lengthy camera take, like an Olympic figure skater performing a perfect program. It went without saying that the finished product had to be an eye-catching crowd-pleaser.

The whole thing was shot in an abandoned warehouse in our neighborhood, Echo Park. Even with so many creative brilliant minds at work, the team needed over 70 takes, done over two solid days and nights of filming. The elaborate device worked perfectly on only three of those takes, one of which became the final video. To date, it's had over 12.4 million views (a dozen of which are mine -- I can't stop watching it in wonderment).

And there you have: a movable feast of science-inspired elements to provide fodder for the Spousal Unit's Gaga-esque rock opera about cosmology. For those who remain unconvinced, earlier this year, Improbable Research featured a couple of interesting equations: one a GA GA equation in a CHinese paper on PCR algorithms for parallel computing, and the other a (made-up) formula re-interpreting the lyrics, such as they are, in "Bad Romance." It goes like this: (RAH(<2> (AH)<3> + [ROMA (1+MA)] + (GA)<2> + (OOH)(LA)<2>. I'm telling you, it's a sign....

my kind of town

If it's Thursday, it must be Berkeley. That's where I was a couple of nights ago, having driven up from Los Angeles to attend Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's first-ever Science Cafe, featuring Jaime Paglia, co-creator and showrunner for SyFy's hit TV series, Eureka, with a special Skype appearance by Colin Ferguson, who plays Sheriff Jack Carter on the show. Berkeley isn't exactly a small town, with plenty of hip shops and hangouts and excellent restaurants, not to mention loads of students at a major research university, plus a world-class laboratory. But it manages to retain the flavor of one -- so much so, that author Michael Pollan (a resident) once teasingly described it as "a town of hall monitors" whose motto should be "Welcome to Berkeley. Now stop doing that." That's kind of the essence of a small town, where everyone knows everyone else's business -- and more often than not, has an opinion about it that they're just dying to share.

Eureka is an affectionate paean to the small town, with a twist: it's population is made up of brilliant scientists (and their families), all of whom work at a vast, sooper sekrit lab called Global Dynamics that gets a large part of its funding from the Department of Defense, yet is dedicated to curiosity-driven research -- at least in principle. The show is a dramedy that combines elements of Northern Exposure and The X-Files, according to Jaime -- and I'd throw in a dash of Scrubs and Gilmore Girls to boot. In fact, it reminds me a little of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel without the mystical trappings, both of which combined drama with humor and featured terrific characters and smart, sassy dialogue. (Needless to say, I'm a Eureka fan.) "It's small town trappings with endless possibility," he says, and admits the show's premise is at least partially inspired by places like Los Alamos, Berkeley Lab, Livermore, Bell Labs, even Area 51.

There's definitely an over-arching mythology for Eureka, and among the tidbits Jaime divulged during the discussion is that we will finally get to explore the town's early origins in the upcoming season, which is slated to begin airing in July -- although he avoided specifics on exactly how the writers plan to explore that history. He also mentioned plans for a cross-over episode with another SyFy series, Warehouse 13, and I don't know if he was serious or not, but he toyed with the notion of a possible spinoff series focusing on the town's kids at the Tesla School.

I personally would love to see something like Eureka 90210, My So-Called Lab, or Saved by the Quark, because Jaime is right: the kids are some of the best characters, and we only occasionally get a glimpse of their lives. The high school science fairs in a town filled with scientific geniuses alone would make the show. And instead of jocks lording it over the geeks and nerds, being smart is cool, with academic achievement valued far more than athletics. In one episode, Carter's daughter, Zoe, is awaiting her IQ test results, and Carter reveals his own IQ is 111: "more than 100%!" It becomes the trendy high school insult for awhile (as in "That is sooo 111..."), although Zoe turns out to have a much higher IQ, and actually fits in quite well as time goes on.

For his part, Colin stumped the assembled science geeks by asking about Janelia Farm -- probably the closest thing to a real-world counterpart to the fictional town of Eureka. It's an interdisciplinary research campus founded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and it opened its doors in October 2006. Located near the town of Ashburn, Virginia, it's an attempt to capture something of the curiosity-driven basic research that typified Bell Labs during its heyday, when researchers could pursue intriguing scientific byways without worrying overmuch about potential payoffs.

The primary focus is neurobiology, and related science, so Janelia Farm isn't quite as free-spirited and open-ended as it claims. But it's still a departure from HHMI's usual modus operandi: supporting researchers at their home institutions. At Janelia Farms, the scientists come from all over the country on six-year contracts and get all their funding internally, bypassing the traditional grant process. They all live nearby and work together in the same building, too, which -- in theory -- makes it easier to collaborate across specialties.

Janelia Farm sounds like a fascinating experiment, despite the usual chorus of naysayers, but I can't imagine they'll ever grapple with the kinds of complications that routinely plague Eureka: AI attack drones gone rogue, everyone in town sharing each other's dreams, nanobots pervading the lab and taking on the form of the local stray dog, rips in the fabric of spacetime, and Fargo literally turning green. Jaime swears he'll never do killer plants, but he really wanted to have one episode where Carter became pregnant: "I just wanted to write that scene where he looks down and notices he's lactating." The SyFy honchos understandably nixed the idea. (Jaime is a father twice over, and his daughter not only memorizes the dialogue on Eureka, she's begun creating her own 8-year-old versions of spec scripts.)

Jaime is well-versed in the culture of science, since his father was a researcher with the UCLA Medical Center for decades, and even spent some time at NASA training to be a medical officer for future manned missions to Mars -- the program was scrapped, so Paglia Senior never got to go to space. Yet. Space tourism might still be on the horizon. The Eureka writers also get assistance from their technical consultant, JPL's Kevin Grazier (who also consulted on Battlestar Galactica); the writer's blog, Eureka Unscripted, currently has a two-part interview with Kevin posted that's quite a fun read. (Kevin's a fun guy.)

It's always an interesting dynamic weaving real science into science fiction, and the Eureka writers manage that balance very well -- Jaime tries very hard not to resort to the equivalent of "magic," even though the science as depicted on the show is very much fictional (and far more advanced than our own). But the story is always going to come first. Frankly, what Eureka does best is capture the culture of science: the almost childlike enthusiasm and sense of wonder about the world, and the endless curiosity that drives scientists to ask questions, test theories, all of which leads to even more questions. They worry about their funding, deal with family crises and lab mix-ups, and above all pursue interesting science. The scientists are also believably diverse (male, female, black, Asian, short, tall, chubby, plain, good-looking, and everything in between). Fargo might be the quintessential nerd, but Nathan Stark is tall, dark, handsome and brooding, and very much a slick "company man." Carter's love interest, Allyson, ends up heading Global Dynamics in Season 2, while Henry is the wacky experimentalist with the high ideas who serves as the town's conscience -- perchance even its "soul," if a town can be said to have one.

One of my favorite episodes is in Season 1, where Henry's old girlfriend visits with her husband, a brilliant (supposedly) scientist with a reputation for sweeping in and solving any challenge at the 11th hour. Except it turns out he's not that brilliant -- he just has better technology, namely, a mind-wiping device that can "steal" people's memories for a certain period of time... just long enough for them to forget the solution to a problem, so he can sweep in and pretend he solved it. He's done this to his own wife, of all people, stealing her own professional reputation and earning the accolades that should have come her way. The device he uses may be fictional, but the gender dynamic most certainly is not, and academic misconduct, while rare, does indeed happen.

The show does all of this without ever resorting to hidden agendas and overt "messaging," which make for lousy narratives. This being Berkeley, one questioner inevitably asked (a) why the show never deals with climate change, and (b) why there was no public transport system in Eureka. The answer to (b), per Colin, is that this would need to be done with CGI, which would be prohibitively expensive. As for (a), there has been at least one episode dealing with rogue weather patterns (and artificial weather), and c'mon -- Zoe tools around in a solar-powered car! Jaime also pointed out that if one looks closely in the pilot, Henry's gas station pumps biofuels. As for why Carter gets the job of sheriff when his female deputy, Jo, is passed over -- well, without Carter there wouldn't be a show, would there? And Jo's understandable resentment makes for great dramatic fodder, plus it reflects the kinds of issues that crop up in the real world. Or maybe, as Colin joked, Jaime is just a "sexist world hater." (The large number of strong, capable female characters on the show would belie that label.)

One of Jaime's favorite examples of this natural tension between getting the science right and telling a good story occurred when writing the episode "Blink," Eureka's version of a "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign (and a very effective one). Global Dynamic scientists under pressure to complete their projects by a deadline -- or risk losing their funding -- turn to a hopped-up form of speed. Jaime wanted to show one such user, having overdosed, moving so fast while running that he literally can run across the surface of Lake Archimedes without sinking. He asked Kevin how fast that would be. Kevin did some calculations and decided it would be around 565 MPH -- a speed at which the flesh would likely be flayed from the body, among other inflicted damage, so it was impossible. "Well.... I'm gonna do it," was Jaime's response, so Kevin sighed and gave him the basic outlines for a remotely plausible scenario.

With that one caveat (which applies to all science fiction, and fictional science), I think the science depicted on Eureka is pretty darn good. For instance, in one episode, the plot hinges on a prototype teleportation device that Global Dynamics abandoned due to complicated high-risk factors -- namely, that in order to teleport an object, one must destroy the original and rebuild it from scratch out of entirely new atoms in the new location. That's an aspect of quantum teleportation that rarely gets any prime-time play: people think it's as straightforward as what they see on Star Trek, but the quantum world is never simple, and the jargon in the series is generally pretty spot on, thanks not just to Kevin Grazier, but also Colin and co-star Joe Morton, who plays Henry. Both men are science buffs, and have been known to take issue with draft scripts where they felt the science was a bit too implausible.

Who wouldn't want to live in a smart house like S.A.R.A.H.? The acronym stands for Self Actuated Residential Automated Habitat, a literal "smart house" built inside an abandoned fallout shelter that serves as the residence of Sheriff Jack Carter. S.A.R.A.H. is an AI that can open and close the hermetically sealed doors, control internal lights and temperature, and make sure Jack has a nice cold beer on tap and a tape of the latest baseball game when he gets home from a hard day's work. In a pinch, she can diagnose injuries and compare current DNA samples against samples on file.

Jaime recalled that when he was first developing the series, he looked into the capabilities of a future "smart home" -- and discovered they already exist, sans the highly advanced AI. For instance, Georgia Tech has the Aware Home, an ordinary-looking two-story house tricked out with all the latest sensing equipment: cameras in the ceiling, microphones in the walls, and invisible trip wires in the doorways. And now there's even a "smart dollhouse", part of project called InterHome. Per a recent article in New Scientist:

Developed at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, the house is fitted with a network of infrared sensors connected to a central computer. By working out which rooms we tend to occupy at different times, software algorithms learn when we need the lights, heating or air conditioning systems turned on and, perhaps more importantly, when we don't, says Johann Siau, the project's coordinator. ...

InterHome also aims to boost home security. By connecting door and window lock sensors to the computer, it can send a text message to the homeowner if they have forgotten to lock the front door, for instance. Texting back will lock any doors or windows in question.

Before smart homes become ubiquitous, however, we might want to make sure the AIs behind them don't have S.A.R.A.H.'s rather mercurial temperament. She once locked Carter out when he forgot to call to tell her he'd be late, and when Carter considered leaving the town of Eureka, her abandonment issues kicked into high gear and she locked everyone inside -- using her laser defense system to zap the pizza delivery boy when he tried to escape. Keep your Smart Home happy, people... or else.