Interesting Stuff Thread

ScienceMag wrote:

Today in questions no one has ever asked: What would french fries taste like if you made them on Jupiter? Luckily, the European Space Agency is on the case. Hoping that studying deep frying in different gravitational conditions will help them improve space food for future astronauts, scientists chopped potatoes into thin sticks and deep fried them in extra-virgin olive oil, one side at a time, in a spinning centrifuge that created conditions of up to nine times Earth’s gravity. Higher gravity levels significantly increased the heat transfer between the hot oil and the potato, shortening frying time and resulting in thick, crispy crusts, the team reports next month in Food Research International. In fact, the scientists may have discovered the ideal gravitational condition for creating crunchy fries: The crust reached its maximum thickness when the potato was fried at three times Earth’s gravity; any further increase in gravity levels did not improve the fry’s crispiness. But before you patent your idea for a hypergravity deep fryer, here’s the bad news: The bottoms of the fries were insulated from the oil by a layer of water vapor rushing out of the potato’s pores, resulting in a soggy-bottomed fry no matter what the gravity level. Perhaps the team’s upcoming experiments with deep frying in microgravity will finally create the perfect space fry.

vice.com wrote:

Dogs seem to have an awful lot of ritual before hunkering down and soiling the sidewalk. It’s not uncommon to see a dog owner—plastic bag in hand—rolling his eyes as his furry companion sniffs and spins, getting just so before hunkering down to do the least considerate thing possible.

But for whatever its worth, all that spinning is far from arbitrary. What dog owners witness is a small and furry version of the aurora borealis and a link between species and environment that’s as holistic and beautiful as a dog pooping can be. A team of Czech and German researchers found that dogs actually align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field when they poop. Proving at least that they’re really devoted to their work, the researchers measured the direction of the body axis of 70 dogs from 37 breeds during 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations over the course of two years, and found that dogs “prefer to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm magnetic field conditions.” They fittingly published their results in the journal Frontiers in Zoology. You might wonder why dogs bother to do this, and uh, so do the researchers.

Frontiers in Zoology wrote:

It is still enigmatic why the dogs do align at all, whether they do it ‘consciously’ (i.e., whether the magnetic field is sensorial perceived (the dogs ‘see,’ ‘hear’ or ‘smell’ the compass direction or perceive it as a haptic stimulus) or whether its reception is controlled on the vegetative level (they ‘feel better/more comfortable or worse/less comfortable’ in a certain direction). Our analysis of the raw data (not shown here) indicates that dogs not only prefer N-S direction, but at the same time they also avoid E-W direction.

This isn’t the only example of animals seemingly sensing the Earth’s magnetic field. Birds, turtles, and fish are known to use magnetic guidance while migrating. Cattle and deer are known to graze on a north-south axis—as with defecating dogs, this is magnetic north, not the geographic one. Some bats navigate using a magnetic compass and given the large ranges of the dog’s closest relatives in the wild, wolves, scientists suspected that canines might also sense the magnetic field. But this was perhaps the first time that magnetic sensitivity was proven in dogs, and it was also the first time that a predictable behavioral reaction to the fluctuations in the magnetic field—magnetic storms, often as resulting from solar flares—was proven in a mammal.

If you’re out walking your dog later, and he sidles up and pees on a tree facing east-west, don’t be terribly surprised. The magnetic consciousness was observed only in dogs off leash, in the middle of a field. All things considered, the owner matters more to the dog than the Earth’s magnetic field; a nice little ego-booster that you’ll need as you bend over to pick up warm dog droppings.

Some Guy named Cooper wrote:

It was spontaneous, and it did seem to be an outpouring of emotion, it was quite extraordinary to see the enthusiasm with which they cheered and clapped. But, that said, it reminded me almost of, I was thinking, would this ever happen in Ireland, we would never greet our political leaders in the way that this dictator was being greeted. But then I developed a flashback to when Pope John Paul II came to Ireland in 1979, it was almost that exact same outpouring of emotion and pure joy to see somebody come amongst their midst. And that was the sort of reaction that they had to him, that went on for a little while.