Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for today is for a breezy day, with a high of sixty-three degrees.

There will be a charter school listening session at the Cravath Lakefront Center this afternoon, from 4 to 6 p.m.

There’s also a district-wide science night tonight, at the high school, from 6:30 – 8 p.m. Here’s my science-oriented contribution, from Wired‘s science news: how elephants run. The story, entitled, ” Video: Elephants Run Like No Other,” describes their unique running technique:

A biomechanical analysis of running elephants has revealed that Earth’s largest land animals do some strange things at high speed.

Unlike every other quadruped, they use all four legs for braking and propulsion, rather than rather dividing those tasks between hind and front legs.

Elephants also prove to be extremely inefficient while running. Compared to animals like horses, they perform quite poorly. Then again, given their size, running itself is quite an achievement.

“It’s pretty cool that they can run at all. And they do it in such a weird way,” said John Hutchinson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of London.

In a study published March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hutchinson’s team videotaped six Asian elephants as they ran across mechanical plates that measured the force of each stride. By combining gait models distilled from the video with force measurements, they could quantify the elephants’ biomechanics.

Here’s a video of the Hutchinson’s observations:

Link:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid46203255001?bclid=46205328001&bctid=74491839001

On this day in 1867, Secretary of State Seward came to an agreement with Russia to purchase Alaska, at a cost of around seven million dollars. That’s less than a single office building today, and the building would lack reserves of oil, other diverse plants and animals, and a famous former governor. more >>

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast today calls for a sunny day, with a high of fifty-three degrees.

In the City of Whitewater, there will be a meeting of the Alcohol Licensing Commission at 6 p.m. tonight.

Over at Wired, there’s a story about how purchasing groceries (and tracking inventory) may become much easier. In “New RFID Tag Could Mean the End of Bar Codes,” Lisa Grossman writes that

Lines at the grocery store might become as obsolete as milkmen, if a new tag that seeks to replace bar codes becomes commonplace.

Researchers from Sunchon National University in Suncheon, South Korea, and Rice University in Houston have built a radio frequency identification tag that can be printed directly onto cereal boxes and potato chip bags. The tag uses ink laced with carbon nanotubes to print electronics on paper or plastic that could instantly transmit information about a cart full of groceries.

“You could run your cart by a detector and it tells you instantly what’s in the cart,” says James M. Tour of Rice University, whose research group invented the ink. “No more lines, you just walk out with your stuff.”

RFID tags are already used widely in passports, library books and gadgets that let cars fly through tollbooths without cash. But those tags are made from silicon, which is more expensive than paper and has to be stuck onto the product as a second step.

“It’s potentially much cheaper, printing it as part of the package,” Tour says.

There’s a long way to go, and this research isn’t store-ready; it’s still a proof-of-concept effort. There’s also been talk before about RFID tags in stores, but it’s remained only talk. Still, this has come so far not by government mandate, but through the discoveries of scientists that cannot be assured through regulation or business pressure.

(Photo of a currently-used RFID tag.)

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for Friday calls for a sunny day, with a high of forty-one degrees.

On this day in 1953, Dr. Jonas Salk announced that he had tested (successfully) a vaccine against polio. The History Channel has the details:

In 1952–an epidemic year for polio–there were 58,000 new cases reported in the United States, and more than 3,000 died from the disease. For promising eventually to eradicate the disease, which is known as “infant paralysis” because it mainly affects children, Dr. Salk was celebrated as the great doctor-benefactor of his time…

Salk, born in New York City in 1914, first conducted research on viruses in the 1930s when he was a medical student at New York University, and during World War II helped develop flu vaccines. In 1947, he became head of a research laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh and in 1948 was awarded a grant to study the polio virus and develop a possible vaccine. By 1950, he had an early version of his polio vaccine.

Salk’s procedure, first attempted unsuccessfully by American Maurice Brodie in the 1930s, was to kill several strains of the virus and then inject the benign viruses into a healthy person’s bloodstream. The person’s immune system would then create antibodies designed to resist future exposure to poliomyelitis. Salk conducted the first human trials on former polio patients and on himself and his family, and by 1953 was ready to announce his findings. This occurred on the CBS national radio network on the evening of March 25 and two days later in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Salk became an immediate celebrity.

In 1954, clinical trials using the Salk vaccine and a placebo began on nearly two million American schoolchildren. In April 1955, it was announced that the vaccine was effective and safe, and a nationwide inoculation campaign began. New polio cases dropped to under 6,000 in 1957, the first year after the vaccine was widely available. In 1962, an oral vaccine developed by Polish-American researcher Albert Sabin became available, greatly facilitating distribution of the polio vaccine. Today, there are just a handful of polio cases in the United States every year, and most of these are “imported” by Americans from developing nations where polio is still a problem. Among other honors, Jonas Salk was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. He died in La Jolla, California, in 1995.

Good morning,

The forecast for Whitewater calls for a breezy day, with a high of forty-four degrees.

Yesterday Wired published about a fascinating, and apparently paradoxical, phenomenon: the contention that, sometimes, hot water will freeze faster than cold water. Over at Wired‘s science column, there’s a post entitled, “It’s True: Hot Water Really Can Freeze Faster Than Cold Water.”

Hot water really can freeze faster than cold water, a new study finds. Sometimes. Under extremely specific conditions. With carefully chosen samples of water.

New experiments provide support for a special case of the counterintuitive Mpemba effect, which holds that water at a higher temperature turns to ice faster than cooler water.

The Mpemba effect is named for a Tanzanian schoolboy, Erasto B. Mpemba, who noticed while making ice cream with his classmates that warm milk froze sooner than chilled milk. Mpemba and physicist Denis Osborne published a report of the phenomenon in Physics Education in 1969. Mpemba joined a distinguished group of people who had also noticed the effect: Aristotle, Francis Bacon and René Descartes had all made the same claim.

On the surface, the notion seems to defy reason. A container of hot water should take longer to turn into ice than a container of cold water, because the cold water has a head start in the race to zero degrees Celsius.

But under scientific scrutiny, the issue becomes murky. The new study doesn’t explain the phenomenon, but it does identify special conditions under which the Mpemba effect can be seen, if it truly exists….

Papers published over the last decade, including several by Auerbach, who performed his research while at the Max Planck Institute for Flow Research in Göttingen, Germany, have documented instances of hot water freezing faster than cold, but not reproducibly, says study author James Brownridge of State University of New York at Binghamton. “No one has been able to get reproducible results on command.”

That’s what Brownridge has done. One of his experiments, presented online, repeatedly froze a sample of hot water faster than a similar sample of cool water.

Note the word similar. In order for the experiment to work, the cool water had to be distilled, and the hot water had to come from the tap.

In the experiment, about two teaspoons of each sample were held in a copper device that completely surrounded the water, preventing evaporation and setting reasonably even temperatures. Freezing was official when sensors picked up an electrical signal created by ice formation.

Brownridge heated the tap water to about 100° C, while the distilled water was cooled to 25° C or lower. When both samples were put into the freezer, the hot water froze before the cold water. Brownridge then thawed the samples and repeated the experiment 27 times. Each time, the hot tap water froze first.

The experiment worked because the two types of water have different freezing points, Brownridge says. Differences in the shape, location and composition of impurities can all cause water’s freezing temperature — which in many cases is below zero degrees C — to vary widely. With a higher freezing point, the tap water had an edge that outweighed the distilled water’s lower temperature.

Because the experiment didn’t compare two identical samples of water, the mystery of the Mpemba effect is not really solved. “I’m not arrogant enough to say I’ve solved this,” Brownridge says. But he has set some guidelines about when the effect can be seen.

There’s still doubt about the effect, but it’s a fascinating possibility, and in a large group of people, one’s almost certain to find someone who insists it’s true. Here’s the reply to a person who insists as much: Well, perhaps, but it all depends on….