Japanese doctor turns hot toddy into superconductor catalyst
After a party for a colleague, the Japanese scientist found that FeTe0.8S0.2 (composed of iron, tellurium, and tellurium sulfide), when soaked in warm booze overnight, shows signs of increased superconductivity — another in a long line of liquor-enhanced discoveries that could have far reaching effects on everything from consumer electronics to public transportation. Dr. Takano decided to test the material (known to become a superconductor after soaking in water) in the leftover alcohol from the party: beer, red wine, white wine, sake, shochu, and whiskey. As it turns out, red wine has the highest superconducting volume fraction at 62.4 percent — nearly four times higher than the ethanol-water control samples.
4 Responses to “Booze: Is There Anything It Can’t Do?”
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Does anyone else remember BeerFoam? Someone at a midwest (I think) university was working on a foamable concrete for quick construction, back in the mid 70s (I think). Nothing was working, and one weekend day at the lab they were watching a football game instead of really working. One of the guys poured a can of Coors into the latest remnant of a failed experiment and they went back to the game. After the game, just like in the old movies, they found a good hard structural material all over the table. The worry (in the article I read, which I think was in the Wall Street Journal or Fortune) was that they couldn’t figure out how much beer to use.
Come to think of it, I’ve not heard of it since them. That should tell us something.
I’ll go have a glass of red wine, and toast superconductivity.
Howcome you didn’t put this under awesomeness? It certainly belongs there 🙂
and if he is really good he’ll do something like this next:
“The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub- Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood – and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess’s undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren’t going to stand for this – partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sort of parties.
Another thing they couldn’t stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:
If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea … and turn it on!
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.
It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass. ”
(quoted from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
> (quoted from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
And don’t think I hadn’t thought of that very thing… wanted to post a screenshot from the original TV series of one of those failed parties, but I was too lazy to look one up or make a screenshot of my own.