Fun links
Take a break from job searching and go read something interesting.
Have an interesting piece of trivia you want to include here? Send it to us at candidates@otherbranch.com (we won't use your email for anything if you do this).
Space
A planetary scientist’s blog on how planets are born and die - and how you can engineer solar systems with hundreds of habitable worlds.
Quasi-stars are a hypothetical variety of ultra-massive and ultra-luminous star that might have existed in the early Universe. Modern stars are balanced by gravity fighting radiation pressure from fusion; a quasi-star would have been balanced by radiation pressure from a black hole at its core accreteing infalling matter.
Two of Saturn's moons, Janus and Epimetheus, share two closely-spaced orbits, so close that they would collide if one passed the other. But that never happens: every four years, they swap orbits, with the more-distant moon dropping into a lower orbit and the closer moon rising into a higher one.
One unique star shows high abundances of elements not normally found in stars, including highly radioactive elements with lifetimes far shorter than the life of a star. We don’t know why.
5 million years ago, a particularly bright star passed near the Solar System. It was bright enough to cast shadows, was visible in the daytime sky, and outshine Jupiter and Mars at their brightest.
The oldest known sample of the Earth was found on the Moon.
The Moon's gravity is so uneven that a level can hang as much as a third of a degree off of vertical in certain places. The effect is so strong that nearly all Lunar orbits are unstable and eventually crash into the Moon's surface.
Solar radiation pressure can result in a positive feedback loop on an asteroid's rotation, resulting in it spinning faster and faster. Eventually, the centrifugal force is too much for the material of the asteroid to withstand, and it shreds itself into smaller fragments.
Space
A planetary scientist’s blog on how planets are born and die - and how you can engineer solar systems with hundreds of habitable worlds.
Quasi-stars are a hypothetical variety of ultra-massive and ultra-luminous star that might have existed in the early Universe. Modern stars are balanced by gravity fighting radiation pressure from fusion; a quasi-star would have been balanced by radiation pressure from a black hole at its core accreteing infalling matter.
Two of Saturn's moons, Janus and Epimetheus, share two closely-spaced orbits, so close that they would collide if one passed the other. But that never happens: every four years, they swap orbits, with the more-distant moon dropping into a lower orbit and the closer moon rising into a higher one.
One unique star shows high abundances of elements not normally found in stars, including highly radioactive elements with lifetimes far shorter than the life of a star. We don’t know why.
5 million years ago, a particularly bright star passed near the Solar System. It was bright enough to cast shadows, was visible in the daytime sky, and outshine Jupiter and Mars at their brightest.
The oldest known sample of the Earth was found on the Moon.
The Moon's gravity is so uneven that a level can hang as much as a third of a degree off of vertical in certain places. The effect is so strong that nearly all Lunar orbits are unstable and eventually crash into the Moon's surface.
Solar radiation pressure can result in a positive feedback loop on an asteroid's rotation, resulting in it spinning faster and faster. Eventually, the centrifugal force is too much for the material of the asteroid to withstand, and it shreds itself into smaller fragments.
Space
A planetary scientist’s blog on how planets are born and die - and how you can engineer solar systems with hundreds of habitable worlds.
Quasi-stars are a hypothetical variety of ultra-massive and ultra-luminous star that might have existed in the early Universe. Modern stars are balanced by gravity fighting radiation pressure from fusion; a quasi-star would have been balanced by radiation pressure from a black hole at its core accreteing infalling matter.
Two of Saturn's moons, Janus and Epimetheus, share two closely-spaced orbits, so close that they would collide if one passed the other. But that never happens: every four years, they swap orbits, with the more-distant moon dropping into a lower orbit and the closer moon rising into a higher one.
One unique star shows high abundances of elements not normally found in stars, including highly radioactive elements with lifetimes far shorter than the life of a star. We don’t know why.
5 million years ago, a particularly bright star passed near the Solar System. It was bright enough to cast shadows, was visible in the daytime sky, and outshine Jupiter and Mars at their brightest.
The oldest known sample of the Earth was found on the Moon.
The Moon's gravity is so uneven that a level can hang as much as a third of a degree off of vertical in certain places. The effect is so strong that nearly all Lunar orbits are unstable and eventually crash into the Moon's surface.
Solar radiation pressure can result in a positive feedback loop on an asteroid's rotation, resulting in it spinning faster and faster. Eventually, the centrifugal force is too much for the material of the asteroid to withstand, and it shreds itself into smaller fragments.
Earth
Follow a droplet anywhere in the United States on its journey to the sea.
On a pure ocean world, the tides would form nice even patterns. But the Earth’s coastlines create a boundary condition, resulting in a complicated and beautiful pattern of resonances throughout the Earth’s oceans.
Under the right conditions, cooling lava forms thin, brittle strands so sharp they can give you splinters.
A former mine in northern California has a pH of -3.6. Yes, minus.
At very high altitudes, particularly in the Andes, spires of snow and ice spontaneously align with the Sun in the sky.
A rare meteorological phenomenon called "crown flash" results in aurora-like streamers extending up from a thundercloud - and twitching with every lightning strike.
An island off the coast of Brazil is *covered* in snakes - to the extent that it is closed to the public for their safety.
Pools of extra-salty water can form in the deep ocean. They're almost devoid of oxygen and unmarked to sea life, which will wander in, suffocate, and be preserved by the salt, creating long-lasting underwater graveyards.
In Uganda, the already-quite-large Nile River is forced through a gorge only 7m wide.
Small kangaroos are now naturalized in Scotland, where they’ve been happily living since the 1920s.
Earth
Follow a droplet anywhere in the United States on its journey to the sea.
On a pure ocean world, the tides would form nice even patterns. But the Earth’s coastlines create a boundary condition, resulting in a complicated and beautiful pattern of resonances throughout the Earth’s oceans.
Under the right conditions, cooling lava forms thin, brittle strands so sharp they can give you splinters.
A former mine in northern California has a pH of -3.6. Yes, minus.
At very high altitudes, particularly in the Andes, spires of snow and ice spontaneously align with the Sun in the sky.
A rare meteorological phenomenon called "crown flash" results in aurora-like streamers extending up from a thundercloud - and twitching with every lightning strike.
An island off the coast of Brazil is *covered* in snakes - to the extent that it is closed to the public for their safety.
Pools of extra-salty water can form in the deep ocean. They're almost devoid of oxygen and unmarked to sea life, which will wander in, suffocate, and be preserved by the salt, creating long-lasting underwater graveyards.
In Uganda, the already-quite-large Nile River is forced through a gorge only 7m wide.
Small kangaroos are now naturalized in Scotland, where they’ve been happily living since the 1920s.
Earth
Follow a droplet anywhere in the United States on its journey to the sea.
On a pure ocean world, the tides would form nice even patterns. But the Earth’s coastlines create a boundary condition, resulting in a complicated and beautiful pattern of resonances throughout the Earth’s oceans.
Under the right conditions, cooling lava forms thin, brittle strands so sharp they can give you splinters.
A former mine in northern California has a pH of -3.6. Yes, minus.
At very high altitudes, particularly in the Andes, spires of snow and ice spontaneously align with the Sun in the sky.
A rare meteorological phenomenon called "crown flash" results in aurora-like streamers extending up from a thundercloud - and twitching with every lightning strike.
An island off the coast of Brazil is *covered* in snakes - to the extent that it is closed to the public for their safety.
Pools of extra-salty water can form in the deep ocean. They're almost devoid of oxygen and unmarked to sea life, which will wander in, suffocate, and be preserved by the salt, creating long-lasting underwater graveyards.
In Uganda, the already-quite-large Nile River is forced through a gorge only 7m wide.
Small kangaroos are now naturalized in Scotland, where they’ve been happily living since the 1920s.
Culture
A survey of medieval Islamic cuisine from al-Andalus to Persia.
An Alaska Native man invented an entire writing system for his language within five years of his first exposure to writing.
The Charlie Sheen of turn-of-the-century China.
An illiterate fugitive murderer former samurai once tried to help Saint Francis convert Japan to Catholicism.
A secret recording of former Nazi nuclear scientists reacting to the bombing of Hiroshima.
Modern England is Protestant in part because Mary, Queen of Scots, sucked at cryptography.
Tribes in Papua New Guinea once developed an elaborate secondary language for use around specific kinds of tree, due to religious beliefs that some words harm the trees or anger local spirits.
Seasickness was a major concern for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The solution? An Aboriginal Australian folk remedy developed into a mass-produced drug under tight military secrecy.
The doodles of a seven-year-old schoolboy from 13th century Russia.
In English, the subject of a transitive verb ("Alice saw Bob") is the same as the subject of an intransitive one ("Alice slept"). But in many languages, intransitive verbs are grammatically similar to the *object* of a transitive verb instead.
Culture
A survey of medieval Islamic cuisine from al-Andalus to Persia.
An Alaska Native man invented an entire writing system for his language within five years of his first exposure to writing.
The Charlie Sheen of turn-of-the-century China.
An illiterate fugitive murderer former samurai once tried to help Saint Francis convert Japan to Catholicism.
A secret recording of former Nazi nuclear scientists reacting to the bombing of Hiroshima.
Modern England is Protestant in part because Mary, Queen of Scots, sucked at cryptography.
Tribes in Papua New Guinea once developed an elaborate secondary language for use around specific kinds of tree, due to religious beliefs that some words harm the trees or anger local spirits.
Seasickness was a major concern for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The solution? An Aboriginal Australian folk remedy developed into a mass-produced drug under tight military secrecy.
The doodles of a seven-year-old schoolboy from 13th century Russia.
In English, the subject of a transitive verb ("Alice saw Bob") is the same as the subject of an intransitive one ("Alice slept"). But in many languages, intransitive verbs are grammatically similar to the *object* of a transitive verb instead.
Culture
A survey of medieval Islamic cuisine from al-Andalus to Persia.
An Alaska Native man invented an entire writing system for his language within five years of his first exposure to writing.
The Charlie Sheen of turn-of-the-century China.
An illiterate fugitive murderer former samurai once tried to help Saint Francis convert Japan to Catholicism.
A secret recording of former Nazi nuclear scientists reacting to the bombing of Hiroshima.
Modern England is Protestant in part because Mary, Queen of Scots, sucked at cryptography.
Tribes in Papua New Guinea once developed an elaborate secondary language for use around specific kinds of tree, due to religious beliefs that some words harm the trees or anger local spirits.
Seasickness was a major concern for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The solution? An Aboriginal Australian folk remedy developed into a mass-produced drug under tight military secrecy.
The doodles of a seven-year-old schoolboy from 13th century Russia.
In English, the subject of a transitive verb ("Alice saw Bob") is the same as the subject of an intransitive one ("Alice slept"). But in many languages, intransitive verbs are grammatically similar to the *object* of a transitive verb instead.
Physics
A highly interactive walkthrough of fluid dynamics around an airfoil, from the basics to full airplane flight.
Radioactive decay is normally affected very weakly by the chemical environment of an atom. But one extreme exception is known: rhenium-187 normally has a half-life three times longer than the current age of the Universe. But when fully ionized, this half-life drops by nine orders of magnitude!
If you illuminate an object with a point light source, there is a tiny bright spot right in the middle of the resulting shadow.
The (molar) heat capacity of nearly all solids hovers at around 3 times the ideal gas constant. This turns out to not be a coincidence.
You can generate enough electricity to generate arcs in ordinary air just by dripping water through metal hoops.
Physics
A highly interactive walkthrough of fluid dynamics around an airfoil, from the basics to full airplane flight.
Radioactive decay is normally affected very weakly by the chemical environment of an atom. But one extreme exception is known: rhenium-187 normally has a half-life three times longer than the current age of the Universe. But when fully ionized, this half-life drops by nine orders of magnitude!
If you illuminate an object with a point light source, there is a tiny bright spot right in the middle of the resulting shadow.
The (molar) heat capacity of nearly all solids hovers at around 3 times the ideal gas constant. This turns out to not be a coincidence.
You can generate enough electricity to generate arcs in ordinary air just by dripping water through metal hoops.
Physics
A highly interactive walkthrough of fluid dynamics around an airfoil, from the basics to full airplane flight.
Radioactive decay is normally affected very weakly by the chemical environment of an atom. But one extreme exception is known: rhenium-187 normally has a half-life three times longer than the current age of the Universe. But when fully ionized, this half-life drops by nine orders of magnitude!
If you illuminate an object with a point light source, there is a tiny bright spot right in the middle of the resulting shadow.
The (molar) heat capacity of nearly all solids hovers at around 3 times the ideal gas constant. This turns out to not be a coincidence.
You can generate enough electricity to generate arcs in ordinary air just by dripping water through metal hoops.
Biology
A single-celled organism about the size of a human hand.
A fish parasite formerly thought to be a protozoan turns out to be a highly mutated jellyfish. It’s only a few cells in size, has abandoned universal animal genes because it lacks a body plan, and may have come from a jellyfish cancer rather than from normal jellyfish reproduction.
A species of plant that can see nearby leaves and mimic them. It even mimics artificial plants!
A major cause of coral reef erosion is a species of fish that simply bites through the rock, eats the resulting coral, and excretes gravel.
Common biological molecule NAD+ is a negatively charged ion, because biological nomenclature is a nightmare.
The cashew nut grows attached to a fruit called a cashew apple.
Only one species on Earth is (as far as we know) entirely alone in its ecosystem - a bacteria found in deep South African gold mines that feeds on radioactive decay products.
The only species to have gone extinct twice.
For a short period of time, 95% of living land vertebrates were from a single genus.
For an hour or so, the oldest living organisms on Earth dated to the early Triassic.
Biology
A single-celled organism about the size of a human hand.
A fish parasite formerly thought to be a protozoan turns out to be a highly mutated jellyfish. It’s only a few cells in size, has abandoned universal animal genes because it lacks a body plan, and may have come from a jellyfish cancer rather than from normal jellyfish reproduction.
A species of plant that can see nearby leaves and mimic them. It even mimics artificial plants!
A major cause of coral reef erosion is a species of fish that simply bites through the rock, eats the resulting coral, and excretes gravel.
Common biological molecule NAD+ is a negatively charged ion, because biological nomenclature is a nightmare.
The cashew nut grows attached to a fruit called a cashew apple.
Only one species on Earth is (as far as we know) entirely alone in its ecosystem - a bacteria found in deep South African gold mines that feeds on radioactive decay products.
The only species to have gone extinct twice.
For a short period of time, 95% of living land vertebrates were from a single genus.
For an hour or so, the oldest living organisms on Earth dated to the early Triassic.
Biology
A single-celled organism about the size of a human hand.
A fish parasite formerly thought to be a protozoan turns out to be a highly mutated jellyfish. It’s only a few cells in size, has abandoned universal animal genes because it lacks a body plan, and may have come from a jellyfish cancer rather than from normal jellyfish reproduction.
A species of plant that can see nearby leaves and mimic them. It even mimics artificial plants!
A major cause of coral reef erosion is a species of fish that simply bites through the rock, eats the resulting coral, and excretes gravel.
Common biological molecule NAD+ is a negatively charged ion, because biological nomenclature is a nightmare.
The cashew nut grows attached to a fruit called a cashew apple.
Only one species on Earth is (as far as we know) entirely alone in its ecosystem - a bacteria found in deep South African gold mines that feeds on radioactive decay products.
The only species to have gone extinct twice.
For a short period of time, 95% of living land vertebrates were from a single genus.
For an hour or so, the oldest living organisms on Earth dated to the early Triassic.
Human Geography
A tiny island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan has been abandoned for decades and is covered in almost untouched early-mid-1900s industrial buildings.
At the mouth of the Thames River, there's a sunken WWII-era American cargo ship that still contains 1,400 tons of high explosive. It's been sitting there untouched for eighty years because no one wants to touch it. Another ship that was disturbed blew up with enough force to blow a 150-foot crater.
The world’s most remote settlement is…a British hamlet?
You can technically follow a single highway from Japan to the EU - yes, including the water, and yes, including North Korea.
Only one country in the world - Portugal - both is not surrounded by another state and borders only one other state by land. Why not Canada? Because it shares a land border with Denmark after the resolution of a border dispute.
Human Geography
A tiny island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan has been abandoned for decades and is covered in almost untouched early-mid-1900s industrial buildings.
At the mouth of the Thames River, there's a sunken WWII-era American cargo ship that still contains 1,400 tons of high explosive. It's been sitting there untouched for eighty years because no one wants to touch it. Another ship that was disturbed blew up with enough force to blow a 150-foot crater.
The world’s most remote settlement is…a British hamlet?
You can technically follow a single highway from Japan to the EU - yes, including the water, and yes, including North Korea.
Only one country in the world - Portugal - both is not surrounded by another state and borders only one other state by land. Why not Canada? Because it shares a land border with Denmark after the resolution of a border dispute.
Human Geography
A tiny island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan has been abandoned for decades and is covered in almost untouched early-mid-1900s industrial buildings.
At the mouth of the Thames River, there's a sunken WWII-era American cargo ship that still contains 1,400 tons of high explosive. It's been sitting there untouched for eighty years because no one wants to touch it. Another ship that was disturbed blew up with enough force to blow a 150-foot crater.
The world’s most remote settlement is…a British hamlet?
You can technically follow a single highway from Japan to the EU - yes, including the water, and yes, including North Korea.
Only one country in the world - Portugal - both is not surrounded by another state and borders only one other state by land. Why not Canada? Because it shares a land border with Denmark after the resolution of a border dispute.
Mad Science
A Cold War plan would have used a large chunk of the world's nuclear arsenal to blast a connection between the Mediterranean Sea and a below-sea-level portion of the Sahara desert to generate hydropower and create new arable land.
In the 1940s, the government of Idaho dropped hundreds of beavers wearing parachutes.
In the 1960s, the US tried to bore through the entire crust of the Earth to take a direct sample of the mantle. Sadly, it got lost in some classic LBJ corruption.
In 1985, the US Marshals arrested 101 wanted fugitives by telling them they won a contest and telling them to come collect Super Bowl tickets. The letters were signed "Michael Detnaw" ("wanted" backwards), targets who called in were redirected to a "Marcus Cran" ("narc" backward), and the hold music was "I Fought the Law".
The Sun’s gravity could be used as a gravitational lens, creating a gigantic telescope with which to view the distant Universe. It would be a very powerful telescope, magnifying by eleven orders of magnitude and allowing resolutions of 10^-10 arcsec - enough to view an exoplanet at the same resolution as looking at a globe from a few feet away.
A series of nuclear tests near Hawaii during the cold war resulted in brilliant fireballs easily visible in the Hawaiian skies - and luminous auroras from the resulting EMP lit up the tropics for several minutes afterward.
A proposal to use a beam of neutrinos, fired directly through the Earth, to detonate (or melt down) nuclear weapons in their silos.
In 1958, the US detonated a series of nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere in an attempt to create an artificial radiation belt that would detonate incoming ICBMs. (It didn’t work.)
The ESA has a currently active mission that (with luck) would permit a flyby of an interstellar comet like ‘Oumuamua. The lead time for such objects is so short that you can't plan a mission reactively - so they’re launching a probe ahead of time, parking it at L2, and waiting for one to show up.
Mad Science
A Cold War plan would have used a large chunk of the world's nuclear arsenal to blast a connection between the Mediterranean Sea and a below-sea-level portion of the Sahara desert to generate hydropower and create new arable land.
In the 1940s, the government of Idaho dropped hundreds of beavers wearing parachutes.
In the 1960s, the US tried to bore through the entire crust of the Earth to take a direct sample of the mantle. Sadly, it got lost in some classic LBJ corruption.
In 1985, the US Marshals arrested 101 wanted fugitives by telling them they won a contest and telling them to come collect Super Bowl tickets. The letters were signed "Michael Detnaw" ("wanted" backwards), targets who called in were redirected to a "Marcus Cran" ("narc" backward), and the hold music was "I Fought the Law".
The Sun’s gravity could be used as a gravitational lens, creating a gigantic telescope with which to view the distant Universe. It would be a very powerful telescope, magnifying by eleven orders of magnitude and allowing resolutions of 10^-10 arcsec - enough to view an exoplanet at the same resolution as looking at a globe from a few feet away.
A series of nuclear tests near Hawaii during the cold war resulted in brilliant fireballs easily visible in the Hawaiian skies - and luminous auroras from the resulting EMP lit up the tropics for several minutes afterward.
A proposal to use a beam of neutrinos, fired directly through the Earth, to detonate (or melt down) nuclear weapons in their silos.
In 1958, the US detonated a series of nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere in an attempt to create an artificial radiation belt that would detonate incoming ICBMs. (It didn’t work.)
The ESA has a currently active mission that (with luck) would permit a flyby of an interstellar comet like ‘Oumuamua. The lead time for such objects is so short that you can't plan a mission reactively - so they’re launching a probe ahead of time, parking it at L2, and waiting for one to show up.
Mad Science
A Cold War plan would have used a large chunk of the world's nuclear arsenal to blast a connection between the Mediterranean Sea and a below-sea-level portion of the Sahara desert to generate hydropower and create new arable land.
In the 1940s, the government of Idaho dropped hundreds of beavers wearing parachutes.
In the 1960s, the US tried to bore through the entire crust of the Earth to take a direct sample of the mantle. Sadly, it got lost in some classic LBJ corruption.
In 1985, the US Marshals arrested 101 wanted fugitives by telling them they won a contest and telling them to come collect Super Bowl tickets. The letters were signed "Michael Detnaw" ("wanted" backwards), targets who called in were redirected to a "Marcus Cran" ("narc" backward), and the hold music was "I Fought the Law".
The Sun’s gravity could be used as a gravitational lens, creating a gigantic telescope with which to view the distant Universe. It would be a very powerful telescope, magnifying by eleven orders of magnitude and allowing resolutions of 10^-10 arcsec - enough to view an exoplanet at the same resolution as looking at a globe from a few feet away.
A series of nuclear tests near Hawaii during the cold war resulted in brilliant fireballs easily visible in the Hawaiian skies - and luminous auroras from the resulting EMP lit up the tropics for several minutes afterward.
A proposal to use a beam of neutrinos, fired directly through the Earth, to detonate (or melt down) nuclear weapons in their silos.
In 1958, the US detonated a series of nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere in an attempt to create an artificial radiation belt that would detonate incoming ICBMs. (It didn’t work.)
The ESA has a currently active mission that (with luck) would permit a flyby of an interstellar comet like ‘Oumuamua. The lead time for such objects is so short that you can't plan a mission reactively - so they’re launching a probe ahead of time, parking it at L2, and waiting for one to show up.
Math
Given voter preferences on multiple policies and a majority voting system, and under relatively weak assumptions, a determined adversary can, by majority vote, move from ANY point in policy space to any other point through a series of majority votes - even if the new state is strictly dominated by the old state in the public’s eyes.
A handy formula for computing the area of polygons or polyhedra given the coordinates of their vertices.
The coefficients found in the continued fraction expansions of almost all real numbers all have the same geometric mean: about 2.68.
Deciding whether a Minesweeper board can be solved without guessing is NP-complete, because a Minesweeper board of sufficient size can encode logic gates and therefore embed circuit-satisfiability problems.
Every special function you’ve ever heard of is a special case of a single function with three parameters.
Math
Given voter preferences on multiple policies and a majority voting system, and under relatively weak assumptions, a determined adversary can, by majority vote, move from ANY point in policy space to any other point through a series of majority votes - even if the new state is strictly dominated by the old state in the public’s eyes.
A handy formula for computing the area of polygons or polyhedra given the coordinates of their vertices.
The coefficients found in the continued fraction expansions of almost all real numbers all have the same geometric mean: about 2.68.
Deciding whether a Minesweeper board can be solved without guessing is NP-complete, because a Minesweeper board of sufficient size can encode logic gates and therefore embed circuit-satisfiability problems.
Every special function you’ve ever heard of is a special case of a single function with three parameters.
Math
Given voter preferences on multiple policies and a majority voting system, and under relatively weak assumptions, a determined adversary can, by majority vote, move from ANY point in policy space to any other point through a series of majority votes - even if the new state is strictly dominated by the old state in the public’s eyes.
A handy formula for computing the area of polygons or polyhedra given the coordinates of their vertices.
The coefficients found in the continued fraction expansions of almost all real numbers all have the same geometric mean: about 2.68.
Deciding whether a Minesweeper board can be solved without guessing is NP-complete, because a Minesweeper board of sufficient size can encode logic gates and therefore embed circuit-satisfiability problems.
Every special function you’ve ever heard of is a special case of a single function with three parameters.
Chemistry
Some dyes change color depending on what you dissolve them in.
A thread exploring the very worst chemicals on Earth (paging Derek Lowe?)
Tin is so close to the line between metals and nonmetals that changes in temperature on human scales can shift it from one to the other. On a cold day, tin will spontaneously convert from its normal metallic form into a nonmetallic form that quickly disintegrates.
Chemistry
Some dyes change color depending on what you dissolve them in.
A thread exploring the very worst chemicals on Earth (paging Derek Lowe?)
Tin is so close to the line between metals and nonmetals that changes in temperature on human scales can shift it from one to the other. On a cold day, tin will spontaneously convert from its normal metallic form into a nonmetallic form that quickly disintegrates.
Chemistry
Some dyes change color depending on what you dissolve them in.
A thread exploring the very worst chemicals on Earth (paging Derek Lowe?)
Tin is so close to the line between metals and nonmetals that changes in temperature on human scales can shift it from one to the other. On a cold day, tin will spontaneously convert from its normal metallic form into a nonmetallic form that quickly disintegrates.
Trivia
The flag of Australia contains six star designs, one representing the British Commonwealth and five representing the Southern Cross (a southern-hemisphere constellation). Five of these stars are seven-pointed; the last is five-pointed. You'd think the odd one out would be the Commonwealth star, but it isn't - it's one of the five southern-cross stars. The reason for this is extremely obscure: the original Admirality flag used different points for all of the stars of the Southern Cross based on their brightness, but the design was too complex to produce, so they simplified all of them except Epsilon Crucis, the dimmest, into seven-pointed stars.
The discoverer of antimalarial drug artemisinin was named for a saying about the plant from which it is derived.
Modern Lake Chad is the remnant of a larger prehistoric lake - Lake Megachad.
The Earth's rotation has a mass of 2.3 x 10^12 kg - approximately the mass of the world's livestock.
The name for a line formed with three asterisks is a Dinkus.
A twenty-mule team contained eighteen mules.
The car company Mazda’s name is a multilingual, multi-millennial pun: the name of Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda, rendered in Japanese as mazuda, is a near-homophone of founder Jujiro Matsuda’s family name.
Absurdist author Albert Camus’ great-nephew once made a VHS tape to teach children to play the Pokémon TCG.
Despite never being part of Roman territory, there’s an ancient Roman bridge in Iran built by Roman POWs under the Sassanid dynasty.
The characteristic design of Ramune bottles (with the little marble in the neck) isn't originally Japanese. It was invented in London and was once the standard way to seal a pressurized bottle prior to the modern bottlecap.
Trivia
The flag of Australia contains six star designs, one representing the British Commonwealth and five representing the Southern Cross (a southern-hemisphere constellation). Five of these stars are seven-pointed; the last is five-pointed. You'd think the odd one out would be the Commonwealth star, but it isn't - it's one of the five southern-cross stars. The reason for this is extremely obscure: the original Admirality flag used different points for all of the stars of the Southern Cross based on their brightness, but the design was too complex to produce, so they simplified all of them except Epsilon Crucis, the dimmest, into seven-pointed stars.
The discoverer of antimalarial drug artemisinin was named for a saying about the plant from which it is derived.
Modern Lake Chad is the remnant of a larger prehistoric lake - Lake Megachad.
The Earth's rotation has a mass of 2.3 x 10^12 kg - approximately the mass of the world's livestock.
The name for a line formed with three asterisks is a Dinkus.
A twenty-mule team contained eighteen mules.
The car company Mazda’s name is a multilingual, multi-millennial pun: the name of Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda, rendered in Japanese as mazuda, is a near-homophone of founder Jujiro Matsuda’s family name.
Absurdist author Albert Camus’ great-nephew once made a VHS tape to teach children to play the Pokémon TCG.
Despite never being part of Roman territory, there’s an ancient Roman bridge in Iran built by Roman POWs under the Sassanid dynasty.
The characteristic design of Ramune bottles (with the little marble in the neck) isn't originally Japanese. It was invented in London and was once the standard way to seal a pressurized bottle prior to the modern bottlecap.
Trivia
The flag of Australia contains six star designs, one representing the British Commonwealth and five representing the Southern Cross (a southern-hemisphere constellation). Five of these stars are seven-pointed; the last is five-pointed. You'd think the odd one out would be the Commonwealth star, but it isn't - it's one of the five southern-cross stars. The reason for this is extremely obscure: the original Admirality flag used different points for all of the stars of the Southern Cross based on their brightness, but the design was too complex to produce, so they simplified all of them except Epsilon Crucis, the dimmest, into seven-pointed stars.
The discoverer of antimalarial drug artemisinin was named for a saying about the plant from which it is derived.
Modern Lake Chad is the remnant of a larger prehistoric lake - Lake Megachad.
The Earth's rotation has a mass of 2.3 x 10^12 kg - approximately the mass of the world's livestock.
The name for a line formed with three asterisks is a Dinkus.
A twenty-mule team contained eighteen mules.
The car company Mazda’s name is a multilingual, multi-millennial pun: the name of Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda, rendered in Japanese as mazuda, is a near-homophone of founder Jujiro Matsuda’s family name.
Absurdist author Albert Camus’ great-nephew once made a VHS tape to teach children to play the Pokémon TCG.
Despite never being part of Roman territory, there’s an ancient Roman bridge in Iran built by Roman POWs under the Sassanid dynasty.
The characteristic design of Ramune bottles (with the little marble in the neck) isn't originally Japanese. It was invented in London and was once the standard way to seal a pressurized bottle prior to the modern bottlecap.
