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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
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Not exactly cutting-edge physics, but this PopSci article showcases scientists using their noodles.
When you’re boiling water for pasta, throwing a bit of salt into the water can help it boil a little bit faster–if only by a few seconds.
Not a good start, PopSci. Not a good start at all. That's not why you salt pasta water. It's for flavor and texture.  Not that it's completely false, mind you; it's just that the effect on time and temperature is negligible. But that doesn't affect the main points of the article.
With that, a white ring of salt deposits will often show up within the pan. A group of curious and hungry physicists harnessed the power of fluid dynamics to see what ingredients are necessary to create nicer looking salt rings–releasing larger salt particles from a greater height can help make more uniform salt deposits at the bottom of a pan. The findings are detailed in a study published January 21 in the journal Physics of Fluids.
And with that, we come one step closer to a Unified Theory of Everything.
Okay, no, now I'm the one lying, but at least I'm doing it for the sake of comedy.
A team from the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) were spending an evening playing board games and eating pasta, when they began to question what it would take for them to create uniform and “beautiful” salt rings.
I can't help but note the absence of Italy from these experiments.
The team set up a tank of boiling water in a lab and tested dropping in salt of various sizes at different speeds.
By "various sizes," I assume they mean fine-grained to coarse-grained.
“These are the main physical ingredients, and despite its apparent simplicity, this phenomenon encompasses a wide range of physical concepts such as sedimentation, non-creeping flow, long-range interactions between multiple bodies, and wake entrainment,” said Souzy.
Jargon is a compression algorithm. I'll just trust that they can indeed relate this to other physical phenomena.
Souzy also reports that he can use this data in the kitchen to “create very nice salt rings almost every time.”
Which is cool and all, but I have to ask: how does the pasta taste? |
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