2 Burst results for "Karen Hoffman"
60-Second Science
"karen hoffman" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"This is scientific Americans 62nd science. I'm Karen Hoffman. Doing science isn't easy. It takes an enormous amount of time and energy to collect and analyze data. At least, that's the way it usually works. This is one of those examples that we joke that we can snap our fingers and get data. That's because sad balm and his students just wrapped up a study of the physics of finger snapping. They found that the right amount of friction is key to a successful snap. Their work appears in the journal of the Royal Society interface. Boneless lab at Georgia Tech focuses on ultra fast motion in nature. Organisms can achieve really, really fast motions, and we are curious about how they're able to do this and how we may extract those principles for perhaps synthetic systems. There are science may be hardcore, but their lab meetings include time to be a bit more playful. We have something called super happy fun time. And this will talk about something typically non scientific just to kind of diffuse the situation after a typically intense scientific discussion that a student presents. A couple years back. Their talk turned to the movie infinity wars. In the climax of this Avengers flick, supervillain Thanos forever alters the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a snap of his massive metal clad fingers. But something about the scene left bumble, scratching his head. And I said, you know what? I'm willing to make a bet that if you had metallic gauntlets like Thanos has, I would suspect that it's actually very difficult to store energy in a controllable way. Energy that then has to get released quickly. If you really want to snap. So raga, a student in bob was lab, set up an experiment. He put some reflective dots on his finger so that he could automatically track the finger movement when you take a side view video with a high speed camera just to be able to extract out the velocities and accelerations, because the first thing they wanted to know was just how fast is this Jersey hepcat gesture? We discovered that the finger snap takes about 7 milliseconds to put that into context that's 20 times faster than the blink of an eye, a blink of an eye is glacially slow. It's like about a 150 milliseconds. Even more impressive than its speed was its acceleration, which was three times faster than the throwing arm of a big league baseball pitcher. So here we have a snap done by scientists, so we know professional athletes. We paid to go to the gym. And we're about almost three times an acceleration faster. So that kind of led to this question, how are we able to perform the seemingly extraordinary feat of acrobatics and human dexterity? To find out, they started to fiddle with friction. First, raghava and his grad student mentor Elio Chile used some moisturizer to make their fingers a little more slippery. And they found that the resulting snaps were not so snappy. So then they went the other way. Counterintuitively, we thought of friction is great. Let's put some high friction rubber pads thinking if I increase the fraction I'm going to get a louder snap perhaps. But that also squelch the snap. Because you waste too much of the stored energy trying to get your fingers to slide past each other. And so it turns out that in our experiments that we find that the skin friction is kind of this optimal sweet spot and this Goldilocks zone that gives you enough energy, but also detaches quickly to give you the snap. And as for Thanos? If you put copper symbols which we had to test autonomous hypothesis, turns out that the compressibility of the finger pads is important as well. If you have these rigid surfaces, although the friction is the same as the skin, not being compressed, affects the grip and storage of energy. And so you get a very weak or not really a satisfactory snap. Pamela wonders whether there's also something special about the shape of our hands that gives us this ability. Or can other primates do it too? I have written so many emails to so many anthropologists, zo keepers. He's even gone back to the movies. What if I saw and Planet of the Apes, these apes sitting on top of a horse and snapping? Well, that would be okay for me because somebody at least imagined it, right? Maybe they did their homework. Maybe it was described in some journal somewhere by a naturalist. If you've ever seen a chimp snap, please let baumann know. In the meantime, he'll continue to pursue projects that captivate his curiosity. Life is still short to do boring stuff. I think it's more enjoyable for me to say, oh my God, like how cool is that? And I think when nature pushes the limits of physics and engineering, there are interesting things to be gleaned out of it. Plus, you can explain your findings, like. My parents now get it. Well, I think they do. For scientific Americans,.
The Opening Bell with Steve Grzanich
Health officials trying to find link in McHenry County Legionnaires' cases
"Tunein wbz news time five o'clock let's get to the newsroom and vic vaughn thanks the fair skies in seventy two degrees at o'hare health officials in one for north west suburb are investigating an outbreak of legionnaires disease so far there's nothing to connect those who fallen ill not at this point and that's what we're trying to ascertain investigate susan choruses with the mchenry county department of public health she says they'd confirmed nine cases over the past month that's as many cases as the county saw in all of two thousand sixteen residents and first responders in suburban madison wisconsin gathered last night to pay their respects to thirty four year old firefighter corey bar his body was transported in a procession from the dane county medical examiner's office to a funeral home he was killed in the line of duty and a sun prairie gas explosion tuesday in the town's historic downtown district a federal judge in chicago is ordered the reunion of two brazilian boys with their fathers the family lawyer karen hoffman these these two families it's been it's really been unspeakably devastating to be separated for so long and not know when they're gonna see their parents are when the parents are going to see the children they've been held in chicago there were separated nearly two months ago from their fathers at the us mexico border after crossing into the us illegally the judge gave the justice department until one forty eight this afternoon he said if that deadline is admit he'd call an emergency hearing friday morning boys fathers are both locked up on charges a small plane used interstate fifty five is a crash landing spot yesterday afternoon near the downstate town of lincoln the pilot was trying to make it to logan county when the plane lost power he hit a car with a landing gear in the process it knocked out the driver's window but no one was injured federal the federal aviation administration rather is investigating a train partially severed a boy's foot when he tried to get his football off the tracks it happened yesterday afternoon near eighty seventh and south dolphin it's not yet clear whether it was a metra commuter or canadian national freight train the boys hospitalized him recovering at comber children's hospital let's get it update.