Cracking Up
[lead: make newsy? or cultural ref? find subhead …] [background] There's an entire field devoted to the study of cracks and fractures in various materials; …
[lead: make newsy? or cultural ref? find subhead …] [background] There's an entire field devoted to the study of cracks and fractures in various materials; …
NOTE: This post originally appeared on Scientific American's blog network on April 15, 2015. [URL] Fans of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke know and love …
[Originally posted at our new home at Scientific American.] It's Chemistry Day at the Scientific American blog network, and while casting about for a relevant …
[Note: The following is adapted/updated from a 2006 blog post — because Jell-O never goes out of style.] One of my favorite scenes in the …
[Caveat for the easily offended: today's blog post is mildly NSFW.] The Time Lord is off gallivanting in Avignon with his fellow cosmologists, leaving Jen-Luc …
You may have noticed a few changes to the blog this week, most notably the departure of my esteemed co-bloggers who came on board in …
UPS used to run commercials bragging that they kept their planes immaculately clean because a clean plane has less drag and saves energy. They didn't …
One of my more distinct childhood memories is of visiting my grandmother's house in Lewiston, Maine, a small-ish (back then) town in the southern part …
Remember "I want my MTV"? Not missing that much anymore, but since moving to West Virginia, I am missing my JTV. JTV – Jewelry television …
Quick: what’s the difference between an ‘amu’ (atomic mass unit) and a ‘Da’ (Dalton)? Answer: Nothing. They both represent one-twelfth of the rest mass of an unbound carbon-12 atom in its nuclear and electronic ground state, a.k.a 1.66×10−27 kg. This is very slightly less than the mass of a proton or a neutron (approximately 1.67×10-27 kg). When first invented, the Dalton was intended to be a fundamental unit such that one hydrogen atom had a mass of one Dalton. Helium would be two Daltons, lithium would be three Daltons, etc. Of course, then we realized that every atom had different numbers of protons, neutrons and electrons, which mean that there was no simple universal mass. It would be so much easier to memorize if everything on the periodic table was a simple multiple of a fundamental quantity.