DailyDirt: Everyday Scientific Mysteries

Studies

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are all kinds of scientific complexities around us. Just try to seriously answer all the questions that a curious five-year-old can come up with, and you’ll get a feeling for how little we actually know about the world around us. Thankfully, we have some modern scientific equipment to help sort out these minor mysteries. Here are just a few answers for some common phenomena.

• The physics of dried out coffee rings has been clarified. Yay! Now there’s at least some reasonable explanation for why coffee drops dry out into dark-edged rings. [url]
• Maybe Southwest Airlines’ method of boarding isn’t optimal, but compared to some Monte Carlo simulations, it’s not too bad. Did it really take an astrophysicist to prove that boarding by blocks of rows isn’t the most efficient way to pile into a plane? [url]
• If you’ve ever wondered what the difference between the green-yellow and yellow-green crayons was, here is your answer. This is what you get when you stick 24 Crayola crayons in a spectrophotometer. [url]
• To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: boarding, coffee, crayons, measurements, monte carlo
Companies: southwest