New Scientist published a special with pictures of 9 different, amazing cloud formation and a brief description of how these clouds form.
Photo credit The Cloud Collector’s Handbook by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, via NewScientist.
Tag Science
Breastfeeding may boost grades. Mum I can have some more, please?
According to a study, published in the Journal of Human Capital, breastfeeding can lead to an increase in grades. Researchers analyzed the breast feeding histories and high school grades of 126 siblings from 59 families.
The study … looked at the academic achievement of siblings — one of whom was breast fed as an infant and one of whom was not — found that an additional month of breastfeeding was associated with an increase in high school GPA of 0.019 points and an increase in the probability of college attendance of 0.014.
Source: UPI.com.
Smaller raindrops often travel faster than the speed of light. Scottie, accelerate to Warp Speed 4
Gravity defeated:
Common sense dictates that larger raindrops should fall to the ground faster than smaller ones because they weigh more and can better overcome wind resistance. But anecdotal meteorology data have shown that when drops land, smaller ones are sometimes going just as fast as the biggest ones.
Analysis of around 64.000 raindrops in new Mexico has shown that the smaller raindrops defeat the speed of velocity:
Like the speed of light, the terminal velocity should be an absolute limit. But in a paper in press at Geophysical Research Letters, the team reports many observations of so-called superterminal drops, which form when larger drops collide and break up into bunches of small drops. Those smaller drops can then travel for a time as fast as the larger drops. For example, drops with a diameter of 100 micrometers are supposed to be limited to a terminal velocity of about 30 centimeters per second. But the researchers observed such drops hitting the ground at 3 to 4 meters per second.
Via ScienceNOW.
Mayor decides best way to avoid another Hudson crash is to kill all the geese
Mayor Michael Bloomberg seems to have discovered a way to avoid a repeat of the US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River last January. The plane crashed/made a safe landing in the Hudson river after which lost all thrust after a collision with a flock of geese shortly after takeoff.
Obviously the simplest way to prevent another almost-catastrophe would be to kill all the geese. Officials will launch a gas attack on as many as 2.000 Canadian geese. After the geese are caught they will be killed on an off-site location using CO2 gas.
I’m pretty sure both WWF International and PETA have been looking forward to this announcement.
Via NYT.
