Power meringue
Researchers in South Korea and the US have cooked up a recipe for meringue that you can then use to make electrical batteries.
Extract albumen from raw eggs, after removing the yolk and chalaza (the twisted strips that attach the yolk to the shell). Whisk with a hand mixer in a steel bowl. Wait 5 minutes. Gradually add an equal amount (by weight) of white sugar, whisking for 15 minutes to produce a porous albumen foam. Bake in a convection oven at 100掳C (212掳F) for 2 hours. Then bake in an argon-filled oven at 800掳C (1472掳F) for 2 hours more, before letting the meringue cool to room temperature.
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That鈥檚 the fun, kitchen-skills part of a study called .
The researchers intimate, without resorting to plain language, that this meringue is intellectually delicious from a chemical engineering perspective. Writing in the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, they say: 鈥淟i-S batteries with interlayers utilizing meringue-derived hierarchically porous carbon (MHPC) not only facilitated electrolyte penetration but also improved the transport of Li-ions.鈥�
This isn鈥檛 the first research paper that discusses meringue and electrical devices. It is at least the second. A 2022 paper in Modelling and Data Analysis is called . The word meringue appears only in the title. It makes no mention of eggs, sugar or a whisk. This meringue has yet to reveal its secrets to the world.
Public relations equation
鈥淚t will cost up to $21.5 billion to clean up California鈥檚 oil sites. The industry won鈥檛 make enough money to pay for it鈥�, reads the headline of a by news site ProPublica.
Such revelations 鈥� of things costing much more than the public had been told 鈥� can bring a knowing smile to anyone who loves equations. Here鈥檚 why. It is a reminder, first, that in the field of economics (like everywhere else), what you choose to leave out of your equations matters and, second, that it might be a long time before people realise what is missing.
The art 鈥� the engineering, really 鈥� of how to remove things from your equations is called public relations. In 2016, Diana Ingenhoff at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and Alexander Buhmann at BI Norwegian Business School showed readers of Public Relations Review how to properly cook up or boil down equations, in their paper .
Ingenhoff and Buhmann stated what may be an essential truth about the abstrusities of their craft. (Yes, abstrusities. Public relations is peppered with intellectual challenges that might stun a string theorist or a neuro-philosopher.) They said: 鈥淢easuring and evaluating outcomes (such as image, reputation, trustworthiness, or legitimacy) is a demanding task since these target constructs are no manifest phenomena, but rather complex intangibles that have to be defined, specified and operationalized carefully to produce meaningful results.鈥�
If that strikes you as too complex to follow or swallow, muse instead over a simple thought expressed by researcher Yungwook Kim, then at Illinois State University, in the 2001 paper . Kim said: 鈥渋t is difficult to explain a complex reality with a single equation.鈥�
Falling off to sleep
Stephen Ferguson contributes a dangerously relaxing addition to Feedback鈥檚 nascent catalogue of trivial superpowers.
He says: 鈥淚 can fall asleep in any moving vehicle. While serving in the Falklands I found I could sleep in a Chinook helicopter which caused me to miss where I was supposed to get off, which in turn caused the pilot to have to turn around and take me back. The Loading Master was very angry with me and shouted that it cost 拢5K an hour to fly and I had just wasted 拢2K (this was in 1984). While working on the Isle of Man I found I could also fall asleep while riding a bicycle. And yes this did cause me to fall off 鈥� repeatedly. I fell into ditches, hedges and cycled into a farm gate.鈥�
Nap time
Gillian Metheringham reports another sleep-related trivial superpower. She says: 鈥淚 am able to nap whenever I feel a wave of sleepiness overcoming me and then wake up after a defined number of minutes, feeling fully rested and ready to continue the day. The only requirement is for me to say the number of minutes (e.g. 10 minutes) aloud to myself first and look at a clock to orient myself. I admit that while I was still working, I would sometimes go into the women鈥檚 loo and sit on the toilet lid for exactly 10 minutes, emerging bright-eyed well before anyone started looking for me. I have only actually tested this with 10, 15 and 20 minutes.
I must say, while this superpower pales in comparison with those possessed by Marvel characters, it has been un-trivial in its usefulness to me over the years.鈥�
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