Determining whether or not hot water can freeze faster than cold water may seem like a no-brainer. After all, water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius. And wouldn’t water hot enough to kill E. coli bacteria (about 120 degrees Fahrenheit or 50 degrees Celsius) take a longer path than cooler water at a fall New England beach (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Celsius) towards a frigid future as ice? While a logical assumption, it turns out that hot water can freeze before cooler water under certain conditions. This apparent quirk of nature is the ‘Mpemba effect,’ named after the Tanzanian high school student, Erasto Mpemba, who first observed it in 1963. The Mpemba effect occurs when two bodies of water with different temperatures are exposed to the same subzero surroundings and the hotter water freezes first. Mpemba’s observations confirmed the hunches of some of history’s most revered thinkers, such as Aristotle, Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, who also thought that hot water froze faster than cold water. Evaporation is the strongest candidate to explain the Mpemba effect. As hot water placed in an open container begins to cool, the overall mass decreases as some of the water […]
CHICAGO — A new study has found that five times as many high school and college students are dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues than youth of the same age who were studied in the Great Depression era. The findings, culled from responses to a popular psychological questionnaire used as far back as 1938, confirm what counselors on campuses nationwide have long suspected as more students struggle with the stresses of school and life in general. ‘It’s another piece of the puzzle - that yes, this does seem to be a problem, that there are more young people who report anxiety and depression,’ says Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor and the study’s lead author. ‘The next question is: what do we do about it?’ Though the study, released Monday, does not provide a definitive correlation, Twenge and mental health professionals speculate that a popular culture increasingly focused on the external - from wealth to looks and status - has contributed to the uptick in mental health issues. Pulling together the data for the study was no small task. Led by Twenge, researchers at five universities analyzed the responses of 77,576 […]
The dark-haired, negligee-clad, life-size robotic girlfriend comes complete with artificial intelligence and flesh-like synthetic skin. Standing five feet, seven inches tall, the doll weighs 120 pounds, comes with five ‘personalities, is ‘ready for action her developers said. Aspiring partners can customise her features, including race, hair colour and breast size. Roxxxy, who can chat with her flesh-and-blood mate about subjects including Manchester United, also elicits comments depending on how she is touched. The anatomically-correct robot, who can even snore, has an articulated skeleton that can move like a person but can’t walk or independently move its limbs. There is Wild Wendy, who is outgoing and adventurous, Frigid Farrah, who is reserved and shy, a young unnamed doll with a naïve personality, ‘matriarchal kind of caring Mature Martha and S & M Susan, who is geared for more adventurous types. Coming with a laptop the doll, priced between US$7,000 (ã4,350) to US$9,000 (ã5,993), was unveiled at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas at the weekend. Douglas Hines, the robot’s football loving inventor, said the real aim was to make the doll someone the owner can talk to and relate to. ‘She […]
Chinese banks have cemented their position as the most highly valued financial institutions, taking four of the top five slots in a ranking of banks’ share prices as a multiple of their book values. China Merchants Bank, China Citic, ICBC and China Construction Bank lead the table, followed by Itaú Unibanco of Brazil, all with a price-to-book multiple of more than three. Over the past six years, the average price-to-book value of the biggest 50 banks has halved from two to one. This means that investors believe the average bank is worth no more than the value of its balance sheet. Most western banks are trading at well below their book value. But investors are attaching a growing premium to emerging markets banks, led by China Merchants, the most highly rated of the biggest 50 banks by market capitalisation, on a multiple of 4.3, according to Bloomberg data. At the start of the last decade, the US dominated the rankings. The top five were Bank of New York Mellon , Lloyds of the UK, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. Only last year US Bancorp topped the table and Wells […]
Security experts believe dissent against Hamas is growing in the Gaza Strip, prompting Hamas to relax its resolve against rocket fire into Israel, Army Radio reported Monday. Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter was followed by relative calm, with rocket attacks from the coastal enclave a rare occurrence. However, over the last week, in a dramatic escalation, Gaza militants fired over 20 rockets and mortar shells into Israel, to which Israel retaliated with air strikes. On Sunday, an Israel Air Force strike in the central Gaza Strip killed three Palestinian militants, including a senior field commander, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed a ‘powerful response’ to any attacks from the coastal territory. Security officials told Army Radio on Monday that Israel’s plan to build a security fence along its southern border with Egypt – to prevent the entry of ‘infiltrators and terrorists’ as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it on Sunday – and the delays in the closing of an Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange deal, have swayed public opinion against the ruling party in Gaza. Meanwhile, in contrast to previous Israeli attacks on Gaza, Sunday’s operation drew no condemnations from any Palestinian group, and […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
