Isegoria

"Genography" Puts European Ancestry on the Map:

[Population geneticist John Novembre of the University of California, Los Angeles] and colleagues compared 500,000 SNP [single nucleotide polymorphism] differences among 1387 Europeans. To ensure that the people they examined had their roots firmly set in a certain region, the team looked at individuals whose grandparents hailed from the same region as they did. The scientists then employed a statistical technique known as principle component analysis, which allows large amounts of data with multiple variables to be condensed onto a two-dimensional space. Individual points were marked as two-letter abbreviations corresponding to the region of Europe to which each subject claimed ancestry (see image).

The result was a map of Europe — fuzzy, but unmistakable.

(Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok.)

Philip Ball explains the paradox of dry water and powdered methane:

Methane gas hydrate forms naturally when water is mixed with methane at high pressure and low temperature. Huge deposits of the crystalline substance exist in the deep sea, where they could provide vast fuel reserves. But rising global temperatures increase the chances of the hydrate decomposing, releasing the greenhouse gas and accelerating further warming. This mechanism has been proposed as a cause of dramatic environmental change in the distant past.

Using methane gas hydrate as a kind of solid methane for storage and transport has been mooted before. The Japanese company Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding has a pilot project for producing natural-gas hydrates on board ships that would then transport the gas from remote marine deposits — and using some of the stored gas to power the ships themselves.

The problem is that the hydrate forms only under cold, pressurized conditions, and then very slowly. Typically, a skin of the material forms at the surface of water and prevents further growth. The formation rate can be speeded up by vigorously mixing the gas with water, but that is costly and cumbersome.

Cooper and his colleagues have got round this problem by finding a way to break the water up into many tiny, stable droplets, massively increasing the surface area in contact with gas. They do this by converting water to dry water by stirring it up with a special form of silica, called hydrophobic fumed silica.

This consists of tiny grains of silica — the same basic material as sand — coated with a chemical layer that makes them water-repellent. The silica particles cover the surface of water droplets and stop them from coalescing.

“If you’ve ever seen water drops in dry dust, it’s the same thing”, says Cooper. “They form a ball with the dust on the surface.” The resulting dry water is a very odd substance. “It looks like a powder”, says Cooper, “but if you wipe it on your skin, it smears and feels cold” as the water is released.

The researchers found that their powder soaks up large quantities of methane at water’s normal freezing point, producing crystalline methane gas hydrate within the silica-coated drops. A litre of methane gas can be stored in about 6 grammes of the material. This storage capacity, they say, is very close to the target set by the US Department of Energy for such materials, and compares well with that of other candidate storage media.

And crucially, it is made from cheap raw materials, helping to make this method economical relative to other, more exotic potential methane-capture materials such as designed molecular frameworks.

Mark Dominus shares an excerpt from Robert Recorde’s The Whetstone of Witte, which includes the world’s first use, in 1557, of the equals sign:

Howbeit, for easie alteration of equations. I will propounde a fewe exanples, bicause the extraction of their rootes, maie the more aptly bee wroughte. And to avoide the tediouse repetition of these woordes : is equalle to : I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a pair of paralleles, or Gemowe lines of one lengthe, thus: =====, bicause noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle.

He recommends reading it aloud:

The only tricky things are the spelling and the word “Gemowe”. Reading aloud will solve the spelling problem. “Gemowe” means “twin”, like in the astrological sign of Gemini.

He notes that he learned something surprising by going back to the original document:

I knew that the German “umlaut” symbol was originally a small letter “e”. A word like schön (“beautiful”) was originally spelled schoen, and then was written as schon with a tiny “e” over the “o”, and eventually the tiny “e” dwindled away to nothing but two dots. I have a German book printed around 1800 in which the little “e”s are quite distinct.

And I had recently learned that the twiddle in the Spanish ñ character was similarly a letter “n”. A word like “año” was originally “anno” (as it is in Latin) and the second “n” was later abbreviated to a diacritic over the first “n”. (This makes a nice counterpoint to the fact that the mathematical logical negation symbol ~ was selected because of its resemblance to the letter “N”.) But I had no idea that anything of the sort was ever done in English.

Recorde’s book shows clearly that it was, at least for a time. The short passage illustrated above contains two examples. One is the word “examples” itself, which is written “exãples”, with a tilde over the “a”. The other is “alteration”, which is written “alteratiõ”, with a tilde over the “o”. More examples abound: “cõpendiousnesse”, “nõbers”, “denominatiõ”, and, I think, “reme~ber”. (The print is unclear.)

I had never seen this done before in English.

Science Proves Exotic Cars Turn Women On, Keith Barry reports:

The study was commissioned by the ultra-exclusive British insurer Hiscox (we swear we’re not making this up), which was curious to know how people respond to high-end luxury cars. “We knew owners of luxury cars felt a connection with the sound of their vehicles,” says Steve Langan, managing director of the insurance company. “We have now scientifically proven the physical attraction people feel when it comes to cars.”

To test the theory that high-performance cars get people hot, Moxon had 40 men and women listen to recordings of the three Italian exotics and a Volkswagen Polo. Everyone had significantly more testosterone after hearing the exotics, and all of the women were turned on by the Maserati. The guys, on the other hand, were drawn to the Lamborghini.

“We saw significant peaks in the amount of testosterone in the body, particularly in women,” Maxon says, noting that even women who said they had no interest in cars were turned on. “Testosterone is indicative of positive arousal in the human body so we can confidently conclude from the results out today that the roar of a luxury car engine actually does cause a primeval physiological response.”