Posts tagged ‘yay science’

Mar 23

Of coffee rings and ballistic deposition

A friend mine shared a gorgeous video show how coffee rings form at a microscopic level.

Apparently he found the video through a impressive blog called Empirical Zeal that’s maintained by a Physics grad student. The blog post, entitled “The Universal laws behind growth patterns, or what Tetris can teach us about coffee stains,” does a nice job of introducing the notion of universality classes and has several links to some excellent articles on recent mathematical advances in the field.

The mathematics centers on the KPZ (Kardar-Parisi-Zhang) equation, which is well-described in this expository mathematical article by Ivan Corwin: “The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang Equation and Universality Class.”

Apparently there’s a coffee stain font by Mark Mustaine! (This image is taken from the Empirical Zeal post. Go read it!)

Mar 10

Stardust

Maybe it’s the recent flyby (and impact) that has space on people’s minds, but here are a couple of worthy links, but the sentiments one of my personal inspirations, Carl Sagan, seem to be popping up all over.

This morning for example, I read over at Brainpickings that there is a kids’ book out that seems to want to communicate a favorite notion:

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. — Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“You Are Stardust: Teaching Kids About the Universe in Stunning Illustrated Dioramas”

On that same theme, just last night on a drive up from Tampa, I caught a nice episode of NPR’s TED Radio hour, called “Peering into space“. These are a bit overproduced, striving but not landing on the mark set by Radiolab, but the people involved really are smart and interesting.

Aug 6