#afactaday2024

Contact me anyhow anytime!!

#1436: during his record-breaking sprint, Usain Bolt only touched the ground for 43% of the time, which means he was accelerating for less than half of the 9.58s. adding more legs means you can get faster: the world record for the four-limbed sprint is getting better and currently projected to overtake the two-limbed record by 2050. at the cutting edge of technique is Kenichi Ito (100m WR 15.7s), who's studied how African four-legged monkeys move. he goes around town and does his chores on all four limbs to practice the technique - once he got shot at on a walk in the mountains because someone thought he was a wild boar.

#1415: a vole clock is a way of measuring really large amounts of time. the vole evolved so rapidly over the past few million years, and we have such a good idea of precisely how it evolved, that finding teeth of a vole at an archaeological site is enough to accurately date the site to extents that carbon-14 can't. it dated Boxgrove Man, a Sussex residency site and the first record of humans in England that long ago, to 500,000 years give or take only 25,000. however, it's not perfect: because evolution isn't linear, some argue that statistically speaking it's not any better than other methods of biochronology and palaeontology and gives a lot of false precision.

Network Rail did a fantastic funny report of trespassers on the railway. one such trespasser was a rather large tortoise called Solomon, who was particularly speedy apparently. animals trespass four times a day on average - but humans over fifty. don't trespass on the railway, folks!

#1376: when you get near your front door, it's likely that you suddenly need the loo - dubbed "key-in-the-lock urgency", this is thought to be a case of classical conditioning, like Pavlov's famous dogs. what's interesting is that some are thinking that this mechanism can be used to treat and prevent Over-Active Bladder Syndrome, by negating these psychological conditions or even reversing them. running water also triggers a strong Pavlovian response (you'd expect stronger than key-in-the-lock because it's pretty much every time you go to the loo, ever) - but it's also thought to have a physiological effect too, relaxing your bladder muscles or something like that.

the reason i say perchance is because recent research is disputing statistically that there is insignificant correlation between the paradoxical amphetamine responses and ADHD.

#1338: in 1942 everyone in Britain was asked to send in photos they'd taken on holiday in northern France. they collected more than ten million, and used them as recon and scrutinised over the details. officers and infantry used them to orient themselves before they dropped. but they weren't very helpful at first: they could be misleading, especially because most were over 20 years old and people didn't tend to take holiday pics of military bases. for the D-day preparations, they used Combined Ops Assault Pilotage Parties - secret divers who'd go in on tiny submarines in the winter of 1943/44 and pop their heads up to survey the shore at night. in combination, they had a pretty good idea of the five beaches as they went in. shortly before the landings themselves, the first people to approach France were "frogmen" - Landing Craft Obstacle Clearance Units (LCOCUs, pron. "lock-youse") swam in advance and manually disarmed underwater obstacles: about 2,500. the defenses the frogmen had to disarm were very elaborate: far out, there were "belgian gates" (basically huge hidden fences), then logs pointing out to sea with mines on top so spike incoming craft. then a bit shallower, a row of ramps sloping upwards to capsize boats, and finally a row of "Czech Hedgehogs" (anti-tank defenses that look like those jumping jack things you roll).

#1273: ice is really weird. for one, water can exist below 0°C in high pressures, which is fairly unique to liquids. at roughly 0.006 atmospheres and 273.16°K, the triple-point between water, steam and ice means you can have all three coexisting - this is how the Kelvin was formerly defined. but if you thought it was just about the three states of matter - well that'd be boring. there are actually 19 (phase is a better word) of just ice! under various pressures and temperatures, the molecules rearrange into different structures with different properties (and there are some weird proton shenanigans going on too). for example, ice XI is a hydrogen-ordered form of ice I(h) - the latter is the one you're probably familiar with unless you're an experimental physicist. the former actually comes in two varieties - orthorhombic, at low temperatures (found on exomoons) and hexagonal, at 10M atm of pressure. this doesn't even touch the amorphous states! also, ice is predicted to become a metal at 15M atm. as insane as that might sound, it's not the weirdest thing - the most common form of ice in the universe is low-density amorphous ice, which is a liquid, but about as viscous as typical melting glass (think glass-blowing). new ices are being discovered all the time - in 2023, medium-density amorphous ice was discovered.