Today in Science Blog Posts
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Hygroscopy of Brown vs. White Sugar, the Banana Bread Test
Physics in the kitchen: We bake 2 loaves of vegan banana bread to compare the hygroscopic properties of white and brown sugar. Get details — and the recipe! — on the blog.
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Infrared Pothole Repair: A More Permanent Solution
Potholes are an annoying reality for anyone who drives a car. We discuss how potholes form in asphalt and a potential way to permanently repair them using infrared technology.
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Vinyl Records: A Sound All Their Own
Here’s a piece of music trivia: Vinyl records can be traced back to the development of the phonoautograph in 1855 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.
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Designing Future Technologies with Gallium
Here’s a piece of element trivia: Gallium’s existence was first predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1871, but it was not discovered spectroscopically until 1875 by Lecoq de Boisbaudran.
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Magnetic Cooling Technology in Refrigeration
Is your refrigerator running? Then you better go catch it (and see if it uses magnetic cooling technology, which offers a greener approach to preserving foods)!
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Selective Laser Sintering for Prototype Production
A type of 3D printing called selective laser sintering is used to produce everything from metal prototypes and plastic, ceramic, and glass materials to coffee! Learn about modeling this process.
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The Hygroscopic Swelling Effect
If you put a quarter cup of rice in a pot of water, you end up with half a cup of rice. This isn’t magic — it’s simply hygroscopic swelling at work. Learn more about this phenomenon.
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What Is a Packed Bed Reactor?
Absorption, distillation, stripping, separation processes, catalytic reactions — the list goes on! All of these chemical processing applications require the use of a packed bed reactor.