Why Can't We Taste Spoons?

A Short Story of Stainless Steel and Cheerios That Don't Taste like Pewter

Image: Donovan Govan

Technology

One relatively recent innovation that not many people think about is the fact that we can't taste spoons. Think about it. That is extremely convenient. Pewter spoons have a taste, steel spoons have a taste, spoons hewn from wood all have a flavor they impart on everything you eat. It wasn't until stainless steel that was had truly tasteless utensils. Stainless steel was not only one of the most important alloys developed, but it almost wasn't discovered by a person called Harry Brearley.

Brearley was a metallurgist working in the early 1900's, who was tasked with finding an alloy better suited to make gun barrels. In his shop, he would make alloy after alloy with many different metals, and after testing them for hardness and gun barrel suitability, he would cast them into a corner of his shop where they would pile up for weeks before he found the time or will to discard them. As he was disposing of one such pile of rusty gun barrels, he noticed one that was still as bright and flawless as the day he produced it.

Working backwards, he was eventually able to trace back that gun barrel to an alloy of steel and a substance called chromium. In a plain steel gun barrel, the steel reacts with oxygen in the air, creating iron III oxide, better known as rust. The rust layer will eventually peel off, exposing more bare steel underneath, which then undergoes the same process. This is why rust can eat through metal so effectively. Not so with the alloy of steel and chromium. The chromium in the metal interacts with the oxygen in the air to create a chemically inert substance called chromium oxide. This layer of chromium oxide that forms on the surface of the barrel does not peel away, and effectively stops the process of rusting. Best of all though: chromium oxide is non toxic and does not have a taste. Hoorah! Tasteless utensils!

The reason soup is so delicious

Cheers, 

     - Scott


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Linkstorm

This is just a long list of interesting things around the internet I've run into. Enjoy.

A great explanation of how objects orbit each other, rather than one orbiting another


An visually amazing video envisioning a future human presence in space, along with commentary


Here is a video showing bee development in great detail from NatGeo. (Warning, bugs)


This guy decided to make a working version of Thor's Hammer, Mjölnir that you can only pick up if you're worthy.


The cutest little self-folding origami robot


A parody of "Space Oddity" using only the ten hundred most common words. (Like this webcomic)


Clickbait! Men's fashion from the 70's you "won't be able to unsee."


Where does fortune telling cross into harmful territory? This article talks about one case that absolutely does


Why every state flag is wrong. Just wrong


One of the coolest sinks I've ever seen


The relationship between humans and machines, through chess.



Here is what the ARES III mission site from the book and now movie "The Martian" actually looks like.


The making of the worlds most complicated watch


This is the best video I've seen of an exoplanet orbiting a star.


An interesting Star Wars fan theory


An interesting take on the crossword puzzle, no clues




Cheers,

      - Scott



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How Big is the Death Star?

I recently became curious about the death star. It’s fictional, I know; but I kept asking questions: What would it take to supply such a large space station? What about to build it? Does it have enough gravity to walk along the surface? Come along down this rabbit hole with me.

Image: JMAS

Note: the Death Star I chose to look at in this article is the larger Death Star II (160 km in diameter vs. 120 for Death Star I). Death Star II is the one Lando Calrissian destroys above the forest moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi, not the one that the Luke destroys in A New Hope. 

The Physics

I started this journey by looking up the specs of the Death Star and calculating its volume, mass, surface gravity etc… I soon found an oft-quoted stat online that mentioned the Death Star’s volume was “17.16 quadrillion cubic meters.” This surprised me because the answer I got was an order of magnitude lower. After looking into it, I found out this calculation had been done using 160 km as the radius, not the diameter, yielding an incorrect answer. Below are the correct stats for the Death Star:

Diameter* ………………..……… 160 km

Volume …………………..………. 2.1 quadrillion m³

Mass** ………………….…………1.6 quadrillion kg

Surface gravity …………………. 0.0002 % of Earth

Total Crew* ……………………… 2,471,647 (This is strangely specific)

*According to Wookiepedia

**Assuming 1/10 of the volume is steel

Earth and the Death Star to Scale

The first thing that struck me that the Death Star is small. I know the movie compared the Death Star to a "small moon," but the Death Star is much smaller than I imagined, on the scale of Jupiter's tiny moon Janus, or, appropriately (it looks just like the death star), Saturn's moon Mimas.

The second thing that caught my attention was the very low surface gravity. If I was out walking along the surface of the Death Star, I would weigh about the same as a large grain of sand. If I had one or two friends with me, we could lift the Titanic off the surface. If you could get enough traction, you could simply walk into orbit (1.15 m/s). The Death Star is massive for a space station, but because there are a lot of empty spaces, it just doesn’t have that much pulling force.

The Crew

What about the crew? How much do they need to eat? How much waste needs to be disposed of?

First off, let's look at butter. Butter is the one of the most calorie rich foods out there, so if we assume everyone just eats butter, we'll get our most conservative estimates.

A stick of butter contains about 800 calories, and an adult human needs a little less than three sticks of butter to survive for a day (do not try). By volume, about 10 people need a liter of butter per day. This means that the Death star requires about a quarter-million liters of butter per day to feed its personnel. That's about 7 Boeing 747 cargo planes' worth of butter, which seems manageable. You would need another 2 and a half planes for the water, but overall, that seems pretty reasonable.

According to Wookiepedia, the Death Star has a 3-year store of food (assuming Earth years, even though Earth is in a faraway galaxy in the distant future), which in butter terms is about 1 Hindenburg.

Overall, no real problems arise when stocking the Death Star with food and water, even if the calorie density is much less than that of butter.

What about waste? One average US citizen in 2008 produced about 2 kilos of food per day. On the Death Star, this equates to 5 million kilos over the whole population, or less than half of the daily trash output of New York City.

A good way to think of the Death Star is about one "Chicago" of people (new unit). The Death Star needs about the same amount of food, and generates the same amount of waste as a large city.

The Death Star has about 1,600 Dropships that, if operated around the clock, could supply food and water to the entire Death Star. Waste could simply be expelled into the atmosphere of the forest moon of Endor. Then it's the Ewok's problem.

Image: David Kingham

The Cost

The answer to the question of how much the Death Star would cost to build started with flawed numbers, so I've redone the calculations.

The current (Sept. 2015) cost of steel is 140 US dollars per tonne. To put our weight in tonnes from kilos, we can just knock off three zeros, getting us 1.6 trillion tonnes of steel, coming in at 224 trillion dollars just for the steel. To lift this amount of steel into orbit would cost 35 quintillion dollars and take 70 billion US Shuttle flights. and to avoid collapsing the global steel market (and to make things cheaper), let's just grab an asteroid with that amount of steel and hollow it out to make our death star.

Image: Josef Ďurech, Vojtěch Sidorin

16 Psyche

16 Psyche should do nicely; it's mainly nickel and iron, 200 km across, and we could find some carbon and smelt steel to make our Death Star. That should keep the total bill under a few trillion to get the raw materials together. As far as turning these elements into the Death Star, that's pretty much out of reach with the planet's current resources.

Overall, it seems that most aspects of the Death Star are out of our reach, and without a bent for galactic domination, I think we should leave the construction of Death Stars to galactic empires in the distant past, and we should focus on, say, getting to Mars. That's a good starting point.


     Cheers,
   
          - Scott

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What Would Happen If the Sun Disappeared?

This question has been answered all over the internet, and the short version that is often given is "everyone dies." This is true. This is also just the tip of the iceberg. Lots of things happen and most don't involve humans. For the things that happen to humans, here are a few good articles:

Pros:
XKCD, Sunless Earth

Cons:
PopSci,  If the Sun Went Out, How Long Would Life On Earth Survive?

After the sun went out, a few things would happen quite quickly. Due to the speed of light, at the moment when the sun went out, we would still see its light for 8 minutes and 20 seconds, or long enough to listen to "It's the End of the World as we Know It" by R.E.M. about twice. Because gravity travels at the speed of light, we would stay in our orbit for the same 8:20 until we started moving in a straight line tangent to that orbit into space.

Image: NASA/SDO (AIA)

Fig.1

<sidenote>
If you were in the U.S. on the night side of Earth when this happened, you wouldn't feel much of a change in the motion of the Earth, or a drop in temperature, so there is roughly a 40% chance that you would first hear about the sun going out on either Facebook or Twitter. </sidenote>

Shortly after the sun's disappearance, the human world descends into existential chaos, and for excellent reason; we're not long for this universe. If you had previously come to terms with your demise, and the recent change in timescale didn't bother you too much, you could get out a pair of binoculars or a  telescope and point it at Jupiter or Saturn for a once-in-a-lifetime view. The sun has gone out, but light from the newly non-existent sun is still illuminating these planets, and if you watched them carefully, you could watch them blink out, reflecting the last of the sun's light, and be the last human to ever see them (Fig. 2).

Image: NASA

Fig. 2

When I initially thought about this, I suspected that you would get lovely vistas in cities with the Milky Way sprawled out over the sky, but this is only partially true, and only for the day-lit side of the earth. Light pollution wouldn't just go away; many lights in the cities are on all day, and many more are activated by a light sensor and would turn on immediately, and others would soon be manually activated. So much for that silver lining...

Image: savmonks

Fig. 3

How would the humans fare? Humans are plucky and rather fond of surviving (Fig. 3), so there are a few schemes that could prolong our existence for a while (before problems develop), but in a few hundred years (wild guess) we'd probably all be gone. Without plants undergoing photosynthesis, the food chain collapses and there is no longer any energy input to the ecosystem. Without life replenishing oxygen, the Earth loses oxygen on the timescale of thousands of years. The Earth eventually becomes cold enough that the nitrogen in the atmosphere condenses onto the surface and eventually freezes into solid nitrogen. That seems like the end of the story, but there's more.

On the Earth's surface, the main source of energy is the Sun, but within the planet itself is where the real heat lies. When the Earth formed, it gravitationally collected material, differentiated, and to this day, there is still radioactive material heating the interior of the Earth. This internal source of energy is available to a select few creatures that live near the sea floor, near hydrothermal vents.

These entire ecosystems would lose two sources of nutrients: marine snow, and whale falls (just what it sounds like), but retain the third, chemosynthesis. These ecosystems would probably be able to limp along, form a new equilibrium, and stick around for millions, maybe billions of years as the Earth went aimlessly drifting through space, carrying its living cargo.

Right then was where I was going to stop, but I then thought about where the Earth may drift off to. Depending on when the sun disappeared, and where the Earth was in its orbit, the Earth could potentially end up anywhere along the plane of its orbit. I downloaded a copy of the free-to-use Stellarium and learned how to use it to answer this question of where the Earth may end up after drifting through space.

To find objects that the Earth may run into, in Stellarium, I placed myself on the equator, on the equinox, and looked directly East or West. This particular East-West line puts the me tangent to the Earth's orbit, so anything appearing along this line is a potential target.

Let's start with a few of the closest objects Earth could potentially encounter.*

Among the closest was a star in the constellation Aquarius (below). This struck me because if Earth is captured in a tight, stable orbit around this pair of stars, we could become an arid planet with 2 suns, just like Tatooine, from Star Wars. This star system is about 100 light years away, and would take about a million years to get to.

Image: Stellarium

If we want some company, there are a few exoplanets that are relatively nearby that we could go visit. This one is a "Hot Jupiter," or a large planet very close to its star. it's about 100 light years away, and we could reach it in just over a million years. We honestly would probably want to leave this one alone. (Sidenote: It was one of the first extrasolar planets discovered)

Image: Stellarium

A more homey planetary system we could visit is is HD 164509b. I've heard it's lovely there; it's a Sun(ish) star being orbited by a Venus(ish) planet. We'd fit right in. It would take us about 1.7 million years to get to this planet 169 light years away.

Image: Stellarium

Here's where things get interesting. In 9 million years, we could potentially reach a Reflection Nebula known as Messier 78 (900 light years away). This nebula is quite lovely and would make a great backdrop for our floating tomb:

Image: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/T. Stanke et al./Igor Chekalin/Digitized Sky Survey 2

My personal favorite part of the sun disappearing is that there is a tiny chance we will be heading straight for this:

Image: ESO

Two beautiful spiral galaxies about to collide with each other. These galaxies are going to spend the next few billion years passing through one another and eventually forming an elliptical galaxy. The downside, however, is pretty insurmountable. Due to their extraordinary distance, and our meandering pace, we couldn't possibly get to them in time to observe this interaction. In fact, it would take us over 3 trillion years, or 220 times the age of the universe to get there. By then these galaxies may not even exist, let alone be in the same spot.

Here's the upshot: if we left our galaxy right now, and started to travel, we would be able to see Andromeda colliding with the Milky Way from pretty close by, (about 20 galactic radii). That view might just make the whole thing worth it...

...if we could possibly survive. The only things that could survive would be in the ocean under miles of ice, but in a few billion years, maybe some intelligent life will evolve and make a foray out beyond the ice to see this great collision unfold.

Super-intelligent Trout

Cheers,

    - Scott


*Due to the fact that the objects I chose were within a half a degree of tangent means that there is a vanishingly small chance that the Earth would even get within a light year of the nearest one, but it's fun to think about nonetheless.






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Have We Found Planets Using Math?

Planets Found by Math

Urbain Le Verrier

Ancient peoples have always known about Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn because you can easily see them with you eyes. The discovery of Uranus was the first time a planet was found that needed the aid of a telescope to be see. William Herschel discovered this planet in 1781.

In the next century, another planet was discovered, and this one was discovered in a very interesting way. The credit for finding planets is usually thought to go to the first person to point their telescope at it, but this case is a little different. In the 1845, Urbain Le Verrier looked very closely at the orbit of Uranus, and discovered it to be slightly off from what was known from Kepler about planetary motion. Soon after, he had a hypothesis that another planet beyond the orbit of Uranus could account for the perturbations in the orbit he observed. Le Verrier contacted Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory and told him to point his telescope at a particular location at a particular time to look for this eighth planet.

Johann Gottfried Galle

Sure enough, when Galle peered through the telescope lens on September 23^rd in 1846, there sat Neptune, 1° away from Le Varrier's predicted position. Interestingly, the director of the Cambridge observatory, James Challis, later realized he too had seen Neptune on two separate occasions before that, but failed to recognize it as a planet.

This, however, was not the only planet found by math. Later on, small perturbations were noticed in the orbit of the planet Mercury, again by Le Verrier. A small planet was hypothesized, this time inside the orbit of mercury, too close to the sun to see. This theorized planet was given a name – Vulcan.

Yes, the one and same, though the hypothesized planet came before the Star Trek series by more than a century (and was the Roman god of fire, volcanoes, and metalworking well before that). This planet does not actually exist. We have since sent spacecraft close enough to the sun to see any potential Vulcanoids, and to date have found none. So what of the perturbations of the Mercurial orbit? The answer is relativity. Because Mercury is so deep in the sun's gravity well, it experiences relativistic affects, and this accounts perfectly for the precession observed in its orbit.

Image: Terry Virts

LLAP

Cheers,

    - Scott

LINKSTORM:

Can you unlearn how to ride a bike? (yes)

Life on the ISS just got better, there is now coffee, and mugs

We are going to Pluto!

This map is amazing. How cloudy is the Earth?

Videos of space physics. Things behave differently in freefall.

T Handle

Gyroscopic Platform

Symphony of Spheres

Finally here is a volcano erupting! Hail Vulcan





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How Random is a Deck of Cards?

A Humble Deck of Cards

Here is a short post about a humble deck of cards. Statistically speaking, after 7 riffle shuffles (below) of a deck of cards, a deck of cards is appropriately shuffled, meaning that the deck could now be in any one of 10⁶⁸ possible arrangements.

Image: Johnny Blood

To put that number in perspective. If there were a quadrillion galaxies (10¹⁵), each galaxy with a trillion suns (10¹²), each sun with a trillion planets (10¹²), each planet with a trillion inhabitants (10¹²), and each inhabitant shuffled a deck of cards every second, and had been doing this since the beginning of the universe (10¹⁷), we would only now be expecting to be getting repeats.

Every shuffled deck of cards, to an extraordinary significance can be said to be truly unique, that is no deck of cards has ever been in that order before, nor will any ever be in that order again.

Except the order that new decks come in. That happens all the time.

Cheers,

     - Scott

What Can We Learn From Twinkling Starlight?

When you look up at the night sky, the stars twinkle. This is interesting, but not what I am talking about today. If you are curious why the stars twinkle from here on Earth check out this video:

There ya go. Now, the 'twinkling starlight' I'll be mainly talking about is related to exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars other than our own. If you look carefully at stars from outside our atmosphere, or correct for atmospheric effects, the stars still twinkle, but for what I think is a much more interesting reason.

Do you want to know something interesting about starlight?

Great!

For the longest time, it was thought that our planet and our solar system were pretty unique. Aristotle laid down the thinking about many topics including astronomy for many centuries, and as it turns out he was wrong about a fair bit of it. While understandable for his time, by the 1600's, times were changing. In the early 1600's Galileo looked up at the moon with a telescope he made (didn't invent) and observed the moon's terminator, the area where light met dark. In the shadows he saw craters, bumps, and ridges; the moon wasn't a perfect celestial orb, it was its own world with its own unique features. Couple that with his discovery of moons orbiting Jupiter, and we were on our way to discovering other worlds, inferred from points of light.

*IC6.G1333.610s, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Both the cratering of the moon and the motion of the Jovian
moons were published by Galileo in 1610 in this pamphlet.

We have now sent spacecraft to nearly all of the thirty or so largest bodies in the solar system. With missions visiting the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, and the upcoming mission to Pluto, New Horizons, our curiosities about other worlds just took steps much farther afield.

Just as we could see other worlds in our own solar system, we can now look for worlds orbiting other stars using several methods of analyzing flickering starlight from their home star. With few exceptions, we cannot just take pictures of the planets because their star outshines them by many orders of magnitude, what we can see it the influence they have on their star.

Transit method -

One way to detect exoplanets is too find a planet that passes directly between its home star and us here on earth. A bit like a solar eclipse. When this happens, the planet blocks a little bit of the light, and the star dims. We can track the stars brightness and if it dims consistently and periodically we can tell that there is probably a planet orbiting that star. Here is what one of these dips looks like:

Image: Nikola Smolenski

The transit method is currently by far the most common way to detect exoplanets, but it has its drawbacks. Due to the fact that the planet has to pass between the star it is orbiting and the observer here on earth, it biased toward planets that orbit "edge - on" to us here on earth. Imagine flipping a coin, and taking a picture when the coin is exactly edge-on. Most of the pictures are going to show at least some of either the heads side or the tails side. This is roughly the same probability as a particular star system appearing exactly edge on to ours so the planet passes in front of the sun.

This method tends to be biased in finding large planets orbiting close to their stars. The larger and closer to its star that a planet is, the more likely it is to cross in front of the star and dim the light we see. These planets are known as "hot Jupiter" because they tend to be larger than Jupiter and closer to their star than Mercury is to our sun. This flies in the face of how we think planets developed, suggesting that hot Jupiters are quite rare. If this is the case, there could many, many more planets out there than we can currently find using this method.

It is important to note at this point that we cannot see the outline of the planet in front of the star. The only thing we can detect from here on earth is the slight dimming from a distant point of light.

Other Methods

Two more ways I'll briefly touch on on the radial velocity method and something called astrometry.

To describe the radial velocity method I first have to talk about the Doppler effect.

<sidenote>
I always thought "Christain Doppler and the Effects" would make a great band name
</sidenote>

There are plenty of great video about how this works, so I'll only go into it very briefly here. When a noise-making object approaches you, the sound waves "stack up" and compress on their way to your ears. This registers as a higher pitch. When the noise-making object moves away from you the sound waves "stretch out" and you register this as a lower pitch. This is why cars passing you make the characteristic "weeeee-yahhhhhh" sound.
The same goes for light. When an object is moving toward you, you register the compression of the waves as a "blueshift," the object literally looks a bit bluer. When the object travels away, the light looks redder, a "redshift."

TL;DR: Stars look bluer moving toward you, redder when they're moving away.

Alright, on to radial velocity. A large planet orbiting a star will cause the star to wobble a little bit, as seen below:

This is because the planet gravitationally tugs on the star, just as the star tugs on the planet. Notice how the star moves up and down. If we look at this star from earth, we can see it getting redder and bluer as it travels farther and closer to us, and from that, infer the presence of a planet by looking at the rate of the wobble.

On to Astrometry!

If you imagine looking at the system above from earth just as it is portrayed, you would see the star travelling in a little circle. If you look at both the foreground star as well as background objects, you can see the motion of the star and from that find out characteristics of the planet orbiting it.


This topic is difficult to convey through writing alone, so if you're interested check out YouTube for some great videos about exoplanets and exoplanet detection. Here are a few of my favorites:

Overall, it is truly amazing what we can discover merely by looking at twinkling starlight.


Cheers,

   - Scott



LINKSTORM:

IS THIS REAL LIFE?

An astronomy mystery solved - why the sun's corona is so hot

Leonardo Da Vinci's Resume

New from Tesla!

Ice cream in space

The Mythbuster's dummy Buster goes to space (not space, but at least... up)!




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