Important news of the day thread

[Karnidge 2]

 

Ugandan MPs have passed a controversial anti-pornography Bill that will ban miniskirts and other clothing deemed to be sexually explicit.

[grungy-gonads 54]

Well they are a bit scary.

[Tubby Beaver 209]

Africa......a truly awesome continent with amazing and diverse flora and fauna....but damn it's messed up

[pie-eater 207]

They jolly well need a taste of Abenomics!

 

[gifugill 0]

Can you cook fries in space?

 

Think reaching Mars is a challenge, how about cooking a decent meal on the way? Enter the weird science of cooking in space, starting with the humble chip.

 

If humans ever voyage to a planet far bigger than Earth, the journey is sure to be arduous and full of danger. But there’s a consolation: french fries cooked at the planet’s surface will be crispier.

That’s one way of interpreting new research investigating how unusual gravity changes the physics of deep-frying. It may be a slightly glib way of reading the results, but the gastronomic preferences of future astronauts are the genuine motivation for experiments conducted by chemists John Lioumbas and Thodoris Karapantsios of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. That’s why their work is supported by the European Space Agency.

Preparing food in space presents unique challenges. Apart from the obvious difficulties of floating crumbs, liquids and peelings, the basic physics of cooking is different. For example, in zero gravity there’s no convection in hot fluids to redistribute the heat, so they experience highly localised heating unless you stir. Preparing drinks like percolated coffee is a challenge, because there’s no gravity to pull the water down through the granules. And if you wanted to cook with a naked flame – perhaps unlikely inside a space station – the shape of the flame would be compact and round, rather than elongated and tear-shaped.

 

Given the constraints, plenty of thought has already gone into methods of improving food preparation in space, to enhance tastiness and healthiness while keeping fuss and waste to a minimum. Fully sealed food preparation units have been proposed that dispense with the need for a human chef to do any chopping or squirting altogether.

 

Still, astronauts sometimes lament the drabness of their pre-prepared space meals, and have even expressed cravings for fries.

That’s part of the reason why Lioumbas and Karapantsios decided to study deep-frying in space. In their initial experiments, they decided to cook in increased gravity rather than zero gravity, because they want to map out the whole landscape of how gravity influences the cooking process to get some idea of the overall trends and patterns as the tug of gravity changes. They are now working on the same questions in microgravity experiments – gravity much weaker than that of the Earth.

For frying and boiling, convection is an essential part of the process. The rate at which foods heat up in water or oil is affected by the way hot liquid circulates. On Earth, the hot liquid at the base of a pan rises because it’s less dense than the cooler liquid above. Yet this convection won’t happen in zero gravity. Conversely, in increased gravity convective effects should be more pronounced.

 

Gravity simulation

The researchers wanted to know how these differences affect the way chips fry. While achieving low gravity is difficult unless you go into space (or want to brave the free-falling Vomit Comet aircraft used by space agencies, which is enough to put anyone off their fries), artificially increasing the force of gravity is relatively easy. You simply attach the apparatus to the arm of a rapidly spinning centrifuge.

Lioumbas and Karapantsios fixed a deep-fryer containing potato sticks in half a litre of hot oil onto the end of the 8m-long arms of the Large Diameter Centrifuge at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. This device could generate the equivalent of a gravitational force of up to 9g – nine times that at the Earth’s surface.

 

The researchers monitored the temperature just below the surface of the potatoes, where the crust of the chip forms, and also examined the thickness and profile of the crust under the microscope. Convection currents are created both within the pan as a whole and from the rising of bubbles that grow on the potato surface as the oil begins to boil. As the g-force rises, these bubbles become smaller and more numerous and they rise faster. However, when it reaches 3g, the bubbles are so small that they get stuck to the potato by capillary forces, and so further increases in gravity make little difference.

 

Good to know.

[muikabochi 208]

Hearing someone wail that they are “world’s unluckiest” is not uncommon in our self-indulgent age.

But Erik Norrie was a man actually bestowed with this title by the global media earlier this year, after he was nearly killed by a shark off the Abaco Islands in the Bahamas. Even though the shark removed part of his leg, and Norrie (who was out spear-fishing for his family’s dinner at the time) lost a lot of blood, the incident didn’t warrant the honour on its own. The “world’s unluckiest” bit came after it emerged that Norrie’s life has seen him struck by lightening, bitten by a rattlesnake and punched by monkeys – twice.

Not that the committed Christian from Florida is moaning about it. “It’s called the shark-bite diet,” he quipped after the Bahamas incident. “You can lose two pounds in three seconds.”

What’s more, Norrie is grateful to the Almighty for the experience. “I’ll be honest, I’m saying ‘Thank you’ that He did, because I know something great will come from it. And I gotta believe this is part of my journey.”

[SheldonB 0]

Punched by monkeys?!

[Karnidge 2]

...though they might have been apes.

[kokodoko 67]

Man woken by snake slithering over stomach

 

A partially immobile Victorian man has described his terror after waking to find a deadly brown snake slithering over his bare stomach.

 

John Watson, of Summerfield, north of Bendigo, said he thought he was dreaming when the world's second most venomous snake stirred his sleep Thursday morning, the Bendigo Advertiser reports.

 

"I went to sleep at 5am and I woke up and looked down and here is a big, fat brown snake right over my stomach," he told the newspaper from the same chair he had been napping in at the time.

 

"It could have been there, I don't know how long – I was asleep.

 

"It was almost surreal. God has let me get away with beating death 100 times."

 

Mr Watson, who suffers from Emphysema, said the metre-and-a-half-long reptile continued to make its way across his belly and down the side of his recliner.

 

Frozen with fear, he said he forgot to trigger the panic alarm he wears 24 hours a day around his neck.

 

"I had to make all these decisions in a spilt second," he said.

 

Mr Watson managed to pry himself from the chair and call a neighbour for help.

 

"Ten minutes elapsed and he turned up with a long spade but he couldn't see the snake," he said.

 

The neighbour eventually tracked down the snake to behind the fridge and removed it from the home.

[iiyamadude 6]

a Victorian man? From another era?

[kokodoko 67]

yes 1896... They are a bit backward in Bendigo...

[Tubby Beaver 209]

Bendigo......thats where the characters in Neighbours all moved to when they were written out of the script

[kokodoko 67]

that is correct... Paul Robinson is still in Ramsay street afaik...

[grungy-gonads 54]

Is Mrs Mangle still in it?

[Tubby Beaver 209]

she lives in Bendigo

[brit-gob 9]

I suppose it's too long for Bouncer to be around.

 

Perhaps Bouncer Jr. Or Bouncer Jr Jr.

[big-will 7]

A Kenyan death row inmate chopped off his own penis after missing out on a presidential pardon.

After telling fellow prisoners that he would not need the organ anymore, Francis Karuri chopped off the appendage and then continued his work, before passing out on the floor in his cell.

He was discovered by guards and taken to the Kenyatta Nation Hospital to be treated for the wound, and unconsciousness due to loss of blood.

 

[@tokyo 14]

A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men.

 

The study found that more than half of the men measured had penises that were shorter than international standards for condoms.

 

It has led to a call for condoms of mixed sizes to be made more widely available in India.

 

The two-year study was carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research.

 

Over 1,200 volunteers from the length and breadth of the country had their penises measured precisely, down to the last millimetre.

 

The scientists even checked their sample was representative of India as a whole in terms of class, religion and urban and rural dwellers.

 

[Tubby Beaver 209]

 

Glad I am "normal" size....my old roommate found it difficult to have sex whilst he was in Japan due to him being a tad large for local ladies!!

[@tokyo 14]

Anyway, it sounds like he at least tried.

[HelperElfMissy 42]

Would suck it be that Indian guy..'excuse me Miss lovely pharmacy assistant...can you tell me where the itty bitty condoms are located'....

It wouldn't happen. Need to sell them in an assorted sizes pack, and there would be a fair bit of wastage

[pie-eater 207]

Tell them to come to Japan and buy them here! Problem solved!

So my friend told me anyway.

And if he's right, there must be a few mini willies over here too.

[Tubby Beaver 209]

Anyway, it sounds like he at least tried.

 

He did but it often resulted in failure

[pie-eater 207]

Never Give Up!

 

I bet Shakey and Shinzo Abe don't and look at the success they have earned.

[grungy-gonads 54]

Well, I have an whoppingly enormous appendage, obviously. I must just be a supreme swordsman!