The Fastest Way to Cool Down Beer

This is about the science... Really... Truly...

Beer. I prefer to drink it cold.

Unfortunately, sometimes the beer which I have is warm. This usually happens when we are planning a party, because I buy a bunch of beer on pallets at Costco.

I mean, I don't buy it on pallets. It is on pallets at Costco, and I buy one case of 24 bottles.

The time-tested way to cool down some beer is to put it into the freezer. That works, but has three shortcomings:

1) It takes an hour. 
2) Frozen beer.
3) Exploding beer.

My recent experiments with the heat transfering properties of water (Hairdryer vs. Bowl of Water) encouraged me to try improving on this beer-cooling method. Instead of cooling the beer with very cold air, I decided to try cooling the bottles with very cold water.

I was certain that cold water would work better than the freezer. I prepared three bottles of Heineken. All three bottles started in a 12-pack in the garage, where I assume they settled to the same temperature. I opened the first bottle and took the temperature of the beer inside. It was 82°F (28°C). Warm. This was my starting temperature.

I prepared a cold bath. For the "ice bath" beer, I used three cups of tap water (24 oz) and ten ice cubes.

12345 ...12

I cleared out a little spot in the freezer and was ready for the test to begin. With superhuman agility, I dropped one bottle into the ice water and stood one up in our freezer.

The race. was. on.

Cooling beer takes FOREVER. Luckily I had some rum and Coke handy to pass the time.

Even with 10 cubes, the ice bath wasn't very impressive. The beers were still sealed shut, but I could check the temperature of the ice water bath. The temperature was falling. As the ice melted, it quickly cooled the water from room temperature, 75°F, down to 60°F. Condensation began to form on the outside of the ice bath. In 15 minutes, as the last ice cube disappeared, the water approached 52°F.

After 20 Minutes

After 20 minutes, it was time to check the results. I opened the beers and tested the temperature of their contents.
The ice bath beer was colder.

Although both glass bottles felt cold, the beer from the freezer had only dropped to 63°F! (17°C) The icewater-cooled beer was down to 56°F! (13°C)

It wasn't even close. Why hadn't I been cooling beer like this before now? The freezer is for fools!

The bottles were open now, but I decided to continue the experiment for another 20 minutes.

The freezer beer went back into his freezer and the ice-water bath got another ten ice cubes. I mixed myself a singapore sling... and waited.

Twenty minutes later, the freezer was starting to have a genuine deliciousing effect.

I measured the bottles. The freezer beer was now down to 48.5°F (9°C), just a shade warmer than the ice bath beer (47.5°F (8.6°C)

The ice water was almost at its limit when it came to cooling power. It was hard to imagine the beer getting any closer to freezing temperature (32°F 0°C) when the ice water itself wasn't there yet.

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Opinions vary on the subject, but I pretty much draw the "cold enough" line at 55°F (13°C). If the beer is warmer than that, I'll pass. Of course, it is hard to judge the temperature until after you open the bottle...

The results of this experiment demonstrates that if you only have 20 minutes to cool down beer, use an ice-water bath instead of the freezer. It is faster.

If you have 40 minutes, both setups work with about the same level of effectiveness. After 40 minutes, the freezer will work faster, eventually dropping the temperature of the beer to freezing.

I really like the ice-water bath method. Next I wanted to try aluminum cans!

I was curious what the difference would be if I was using aluminum cans rather than glass bottles full of beer. Any metal is more conductive than glass, and aluminum is particularly conductive.

Here's a short list of the thermal conductivity of some materials. Thermal conductivity is measured in watts per meter kelvin.

Thermal resistance is highly dependant on the thickness of the insulating material, so the paper-thin aluminum will be much easier for the coldness to pass through than a quarter-inch of glass.

Glass bottles are great for drinking, and the glass is a good insulator for when you are trying tokeep the beer cold, but when you are trying to cool down the beer, that insulation works against your efforts to pull all the heat out.

I started with a six pack of tall cans of warm Coors Light from a gas station. The start temperature for these cans was 78.8°F (26°C).

I don't think I've ever wanted beer less than when I was handling these warm cans of Coors Light.

I restarted the experiment, placing one can in the freezer...

...and one can in a jar with 3 cups of water and 10 ice cubes.

The race. was. on. again.

Knowing that the canned beer would change temperature much faster, I only waited 10 minutes to open the cans and test the temps.

The temperature difference was even more impressive with beer cans. Check out these results on the chart below.

The beer in ice water had dropped dramatically in temperature, from 79°F (26°C) to 50°F (10°C)! Awesome.

The beer in the freezer had lost 15 degrees. It was losing heat faster than the freezer bottle had, but the ice-water bath was having an even more extreme effect on the metal can than it had on the glass bottle.

In ten minutes, the cans of beer in ice-water had gone from warm to cold, from bad to good.

I put them back for another 10 minutes of cooling.

A second ten minutes really proved the case for an ice water bath. The freezer beer was down to 54°F, but the ice bath beer was down to 43°F!

My cans of Coors Light featured this two-stage temperature indicator. The can on the left came out of the freezer. The can on the right came out of the ice-water bath. The indicator on the left isn't even showing the can as "cold", where the can from the ice water is registering as "super cold"!

In the photo above, check out the difference in condensation on the cans!

With two experiments complete, and four beers sacraficed in the pursuit of knowledge, I can wholeheartedly declare that a bath of ice water is the fastest way to cool beer down to a pleasant drinking temperature.

The freezer is colder, but surrounding a can of beer with cold air is never going to cool it off as fast as dunking it into a vat of cold water.

Unless, of course you are making beer slushies.

Related Links:

• Icebreaker! The Ultimate Frozen Drink Temperature Challenge!
• Using Salt and Ice Water to Cool Down Beer
• Where Is the Coolest Place to Store Things in Your Car?
• How Much Backwash is left in the glass after you drink?

Image: Shutterstock/Valentyn Volkov

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This post was originally published on Cockeyed.com's Science Club, created by Rob Cockerham who has worked doing internet tech support for MCI, as a graphic designer for iConvention, for Blue Moon Printing, EDS, and Hewlett Packard. His latest job is at Intel.You canfollow Cockeyed.com on Twitter here or like his Facebook page here.

This post has been republished with permission from Rob Cockerham.

This Handheld 3D Printer Could Let Doctors "Draw" New Bones

The original Gizmodo article is here.

Waving a magic wand over an injured bone to create a custom, living repair patch sounds like something out of I, Robot. But researchers have created a handheld 3D-printing pen that could someday do just that. It's not magic, it's science.

The BioPen, developed at Australia's University of Wollongong, holds two different "inks:" one made of human cells, the other a protective, UV-activated structural gel. The pen layers the cells inside the protective gel, which hardens under the device's built-in UV light. Instead of the current weeks-long process of harvesting and growing replacement cartilage tissue, the compact, handheld device could enable doctors to "draw" functional material directly on to a damaged bone.

The benefit, as with most 3D-printed organs and body parts, is total customization. Instead of mass-produced orthopedic implants, which don't work exactly like human tissue, a matrix of human cells printed directly onto an injured bone would create actual, functional cartilage. And with the right mix of cells, growth factors, and drugs in the ink wells, doctors could even draw replacement tissue that would grow into functioning nerve or muscle tissue, with the protective scaffold biodegrading as the cells grew and matured.

Scientists Have 3D-Printed Mini Human Livers for the First Time Ever

The dream of one day completely doing away with frustratingly long transplant lists in favor of made to order, 3D-printed organs is closer to…Read…

How 3D Printers Are Cranking Out Eyes, Bones, and Blood Vessels

At the dawn of rapid prototyping, a common predication was that 3D printing would transform manufacturing, spurring a consumer revolution that would… Read…

Someone’s Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet

BGP hijacking is an “exceedingly blunt instrument” to capture traffic, and is “about as subtle as a firecracker in a funeral home,”

The full Original Wired article is available here.

This is just a summary of that article:

In 2008, two security researchers at the DefCon hacker conference demonstrated a massive security vulnerability in the worldwide internet traffic-routing system — a vulnerability so severe that it could allow intelligence agencies, corporate spies or criminals to intercept massive amounts of data, or even tamper with it on the fly.

The traffic hijack, they showed, could be done in such a way that no one would notice because the attackers could simply re-route the traffic to a router they controlled, then forward it to its intended destination once they were done with it, leaving no one the wiser about what had occurred.

Now, five years later, this is exactly what has happened. Earlier this year, researchers say, someone mysteriously hijacked internet traffic headed to government agencies, corporate offices and other recipients in the U.S. and elsewhere and redirected it to Belarus and Iceland, before sending it on its way to its legitimate destinations. They did so repeatedly over several months. But luckily someone did notice.

And this may not be the first time it has occurred — just the first time it got caught.

BGP hijacking happens in some form or fashion every day, but it’s usually unintentional — the result of a typo in a routing announcement or some other mistake. And when it does occur, it generally results in an outage, as the traffic being routed never reaches its destination. This was the case in 2008 when Pakistan Telecom inadvertently hijacked all of the world’s YouTube traffic when it attempted to prevent just Pakistan citizens from reaching video content the government deemed objectionable. The telecom and its upstream provider mistakenly advertised to routers around the world that it was the best route through which to send all YouTube traffic, and for nearly two hours browsers attempting to reach YouTube fell into a black hole in Pakistan until the problem was corrected.

In April 2010, another outage occurred when China Telecom distributed an erroneous announcement for more than 50,000 blocks of IP addresses, and within minutes some of the traffic destined for these domains got sucked into China Telecom’s network for 20 minutes. After analyzing the details, Renesys concluded that this incident, too, was likely a mistake.

But the incidents this year have all the characteristics of an intentional intercept, Renesys says.

BGP hijacking is an “exceedingly blunt instrument” to capture traffic, and is “about as subtle as a firecracker in a funeral home,” Renesys has noted in the past.

In all the years Renesys has been monitoring internet traffic, analysts had never seen anything that looked intentional before. Generally, Madory says, mistakes look clumsy and show obvious signs of being mistakes. They also generally last minutes, not days as these did, and they also generally do not result in traffic being re-routed to its legitimate destination, as occurred in these cases.

“To achieve this thing where you can get [hijacked] traffic back to its destination, . . . you have to craft your [BGP] messages in a way that you control how far it propagates or where it propagates,” he says. “And we can see these guys experiment over time, modifying different attributes to change the propagation until they’ve achieved the one that they want. We’ve never seen anything like that, that looks very deliberate where someone is tweaking the approach.”

As Renesys warned on its blog: “We believe that people are still attempting this because they believe (correctly, in most cases) that nobody is looking.”

What's it like to jump from 128,000 feet?

It’s been one year since Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner made the highest jump of all time. The Red Bull Stratos project was part science, part adventure, and of course part caffeinated beverage promotion overload. In the end, the successful leap from 127,851 feet set a new height mark, and Baumgartner became the first person ever to exceed the the speed of sound in free fall.

But the flight wasn’t without its drama. As many watched live last year, Baumgartner entered a spin about a minute into the flight. A relatively mild instability beginning about 25 seconds into the jump appeared to stabilize as he accelerated towards his top speed of Mach 1.25 (844 mph). But as Baumgartner continued to fall through the very thin air, the lack of control was apparent and the spin progressed into something that looks much worse from his point of view than it did from the outside.

In the video above, you can see him transition onto his back, and the rate of spin accelerates (along with his heart rate), as he passes about 90,000 feet.

Soon thereafter, he begins to use his arms in an effort to control the spin, much as a figure skater can change their rate of rotation on the ice. Baumgartner tries using just one arm at a time to regain control, and eventually the veteran skydiver manages to stabilize his free fall after more than 20 heart-pumping seconds.

After that it’s a relatively calm — if you think breaking the sound barrier in an astronaut suit is calm — with three more minutes of free fall to the ground as the sky transitions from black to blue. Eventually he deploys his parachute and enjoys a few more minutes before touching down in the New Mexico desert.

In addition to the impressive POV video above, Red Bull has released a feature-length documentary about the Red Bull Stratos project that can be seen here.

Original Wired article is available here.

BioLite Camp Stove

I have been a fan of home made 'rocket stoves', but this is different...

It cooks whilst it's charging up your iPhone.

I Love it!

http://www.biolitestove.com/campstove/new-portable-grill/grill-features/

A practical Hydrogen car?

So why is it the government prohibits the sale of this hydride 6Li (Lithium 6)?
Watch this video...

Microsoft: The monohedral and the bizarre

Summary: It's obvious to all observers that Microsoft is in a state of transition and transformation. Ballmer has declared that now that there is 'One Microsoft.' E Pluribus Unum, dude. What's the next move?

This is a brilliant article by Ken Hess of ZDNet... I tip my hat to you. Read on...

Ken's full article is here.

In case you haven't noticed, Microsoft has been in a state of transition for a few years now. Their foray into open source software, their giving away of software, their new stance on competition and cooperatition; it's a whole new company. Microsoft is entering middle age. And with middle age comes the regular prostate exam and colonoscopy. Both of which involve discovery from the bottom up. Welcome to the new age of reason, Microsoft, we've been waiting for you. Grab your ankles and think pleasant thoughts.

The discovery that you're doing things wrong is painful. Microsoft has historically been just a bit behind the game in three key areas: virtualization, consumerization, and cloud computing. Now that they've caught up and surpassed other companies in technical features, it's time for the company to re-evaluate itself. Take a close look at where it is today and where it's going tomorrow.

It's kind of ironic that the catch phrase for Windows 95 was, "Where do you want to go today?", when it should have been, "Where do you want to be tomorrow?"

The realization that the world has passed you by isn't a good one. It requires restructuring, refocusing, and making some tough decisions in order to remain relevant and profitable. Some of those tough decisions always begin at the bottom and work their way skyward. This typically means layoffs for technical staff, salary adjustments, deleting bonus programs, removing redundant positions, and shifting of personnel from silos and towers to unified global strata.

I feel bad for the average Microsoft worker. I really do. Every large company experiences growing pains. But Microsoft has been experiencing more than its share for the past decade or so. I think though, that its pain is almost over. Middle age doesn't have to be full of aches, pains, and complaints. It can be a time of great and positive discovery. It can be a time of enlightenment. It can be the transitional and transformative time that Microsoft is now experiencing. 

 I think it's good that Microsoft is refocusing and reasserting itself as "One Microsoft". Microsoft was once the most powerful company on the planet led by the richest man on the planet. But that was a different time. Things have changed. Now there's cloud and big data and XaaS and consumerization. Yes, the dirtiest of all IT slanguage, consumerization. Since this blog is consumerization focused, I get the best opportunity to focus on that part of this transition. 

Why does consumerization come into play, you ask? It's very simple, you as a consumer, now have more power than ever before. Consumers can now shift a company from Fortune 500 to yesterday's news. You have to make people happy or they'll switch. Today, we have the power.

Microsoft now realizes that its power is gone, or at best is on the wane. No longer can it churn out products that we must love or lump. We can now choose. Sure we've always had a choice but never such good choices that we enjoy today.

Microsoft knew that.

And why not tighten the vise when you have one's victim's delicate parts in it? Anyone would. Although Microsoft took a good beating over doing what anyone would do. It took advantage of its top seed position, just as others have done in the past. But somehow Microsoft was a criminal for doing it too.

Now the tide has turned.

The old saying goes, "The customer is always right." And it's true. The customer is always right.

Apple has proved this. Microsoft had to learn it the hard way.

Unfortunately, the price of this lesson, and all lessons, is very high.

The consumer now drives the market, not the vendor. You probably think that the market has always been consumer-driven. You'd be wrong.

It's the same lesson that Russia learned. One choice is not enough and quality does matter. You can't give people what you want to give them and expect loyalty or happiness. You have to give people what they want.

And the all-powerful consumer is a fickle beast.

This is where it gets "weird".

Do you remember when Blackberry was the "must have" mobile phone? I do. I had one and thought it was the greatest mobile device the world had ever seen. It was ahead of its time. Then the service took a couple of big hits and the fickle consumer jumped to other technologies almost over night. Now the company struggles in the single digit market share range. FYI, Blackberry, in my opinion has addressed its issues and is well worth another look, but that's another story.

Now Microsoft has to compete with Apple, a host of mobile device vendors, and itself.

Yes, itself.

It sounds crazy but Microsoft has committed the ultimate crime: competing with itself.

Windows XP was too good and Microsoft decided to support it for too long. Vista didn't have the uptake expected because of its too soon release and a myriad of problems. Windows 7 was the savior that rescued us from Vista but still XP hung on. A lot of people still use it, while others have only begun to convert to Windows 7.

And now there's Windows 8. Corporate uptake of Windows 8 might never happen. Once the Windows 7 conversions are fully realized, businesses might wait until Windows 10 to consider another major cutover. So, in the meantime, what does Microsoft do with Windows 8 or Windows 9?

One answer is to change support policy. Provide full support for an operating system for five years and extended support for two more. Seven years is long enough with one operating system. No company should be held over the fire for a decade or more for a product that should have been replaced years ago.

The alternative is for Microsoft to only create a new operating system every seven years, charge more for it, charge more for support or change its model completely to one of support tiers.

It might work something like this:

• Microsoft builds new operating systems every seven years and offers ten years of support, which gives companies that three year transition period they often need.
• Microsoft gives away its operating system software or charge a subscription for use. Crazy I know but wait, there's more.
• Setup tiered support for individuals, SMBs, and Enterprises that allows companies to pay for support on an annual or on a per incident basis.
• Only provide updates and patches for those who subscribe. Of course, certain critical patches would have to be made public to address major security issues with applications but not the operating system itself.
• Provide its own Microsoft-branded virtual desktops and servers to companies and individuals via subscription. All patching and updates would be handled from the data center and not left to the individual user or company.

I rather like the idea of subscribing to a desktop that I can use from anywhere and at anytime I choose. And the idea of a virtual infrastructure that's owned and supported by Microsoft appeals to me as well.

Microsoft must change its business model to meet the new consumer paradigm. Allow me to use a Microsoft desktop and servers from any device. Microsoft owns their own cloud that I subscribe to. I like it. Bizarre, yes. One Microsoft, definitely.

What do you think about Microsoft' restructuring? Do you think that they're playing catchup or is there something bigger brewing? Talk back and let me know.

MS Cloud background image used with permission from Meghan D. Cox. I placed the MS logo on top of the original image.

It’s Beyond Ridiculous That Email (But Not Mail) Has Been Left Out of Privacy Laws

• BY KEVIN YODER, TOM GRAVES, AND JARED POLIS
• 06.17.13

As with so many significant privacy violations of late by government agencies — from the NSA to the IRS — it’s become clear that technology has far outpaced law. Federal laws meant to protect our Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in [our] persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable search and seizure” do not adequately cover Americans’ property online.

Especially email. Under current statute, government agencies such as the IRS, DHS, SEC and many others are allowed to access emails and other private communications older than 180 days without obtaining a search warrant or demonstrating probable cause that a crime has been committed.

How is it possible that government can claim this authority, accessing our most intimate “soft” communications — but not, say, a “hard” letter lying around our houses?

The reason is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Originally intended to protect — not violate — the privacy of our digital communications, this act set standards for government access to private information (such as emails, private photos, documents) transmitted and stored on the internet with an online service provider.

But ECPA was passed in 1986. Twenty-seven years ago, most Americans did not have a home computer or an email account. They did not all carry cell phones. “Facebook” described only the hardbound photo books of university freshmen and “Twitter” was an adjective used to describe the chattering of birds — such social networking sites did not even exist.

Whether they occur online or offline, our private communications should be protected. And that’s why we, a bipartisan group of representatives — Kevin Yoder (R-Kansas), Tom Graves (R-Georgia), and Jared Polis (D-Colorado) — have come together to introduce the Email Privacy Act. We’ve already gained a bipartisan group of 94 co-sponsors, and are pleased to join with our colleagues in the Senate, Senators Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee, who are pushing companion legislation that would modernize the ECPA.

Simply put, this bipartisan legislation would affirm what most Americans already assume — and have every constitutional right to believe — that their privacy is protected from unwarranted government intrusion.

The Email Privacy Act updates legislation written in a time when server storage was limited. Back then, an email user was expected to permanently download his or her email locally from a server for reading, response, and long-term storage. So the 180 day rule made sense, because email left on a server for that long could be reasonably viewed as abandoned. But that’s not the case today with people accessing and storing years and years worth of email through third-party servers.

Fundamentally, the Email Privacy Act would ensure that the Fourth Amendment protections Americans already have for mail, phone calls, and other paper/ hard documents are extended to their soft communications too. Specifically, our legislation updates ECPA by strengthening privacy protections for electronic communications stored by third party service providers such as Amazon, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and countless other cloud services. If government agencies want to obtain any of these communications, they would first need to obtain a warrant from a judge — not their self-anointed authority.

The constitution prohibits the government from accessing personal files stored in a cabinet or letters sent through the mail without a warrant. When the telephone was introduced into mainstream culture, our laws changed to protect the privacy of calls using such technology. But even though email is ubiquitous today, such electronic communications don’t have the same privacy protections as the — arguably far less used! — mail and landline phones do.

This is a real issue and must be addressed; Congress needs to act now to update our laws through the Email Privacy Act and reign in any overreaching by government agencies. It’s ironic that we have benefitted tremendously from technological innovations and advancements such as smartphones and always-connected networks but that our laws have not kept pace with the privacy realities of the 21st century.

Still, Americans deserve to have a reasonable expectation of privacy … despite what the NSA, IRS, or other government agencies believe.

Original article is here.

SPLITTING THE SEA: TURNING OCEAN WATER INTO HYDROGEN FUEL

Great work University of Wollongong...

UOW scientists have developed a novel way to turn sea water into hydrogen, for a sustainable and clean fuel source.

Using this method, as little as five litres of sea water per day would produce enough hydrogen to power an average-sized home and an electric car for one day.

The research team at UOW’s Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) have developed a light-assisted catalyst that requires less energy input to activate water oxidation, which is the first step in splitting water to produce hydrogen fuel.

A major limitation with current technologies is that the oxidation process needs a higher over-potential input, which rules out using abundant sea water because it produces poisonous chlorine gas as a side product under operational conditions.

The research team, led by Associate Professor Jun Chen and Professor Gerry Swiegers, have produced an artificial chlorophyll on a conductive plastic film that acts as a catalyst to begin splitting water.

The results were recently published in the journal Chemical Science.

Lead author, Associate Professor Jun Chen, said the flexible polymer would mean it could be used in a wider range of applications and it is more easily manufactured than metal semiconductors.

“The system we designed, including the materials, gives us the opportunity to design various devices and applications using sea water as a water-splitting source.

“The flexible nature of the material also provides the possibility to build portable hydrogen-producing devices.”

The development brings UOW’s energy research a step closer to creating an artificial leaf-like device that can efficiently produce hydrogen.

ACES Executive Research Director Professor Gordon Wallace said: “In today’s world the discovery of high performance materials is not enough”.

“This must be coupled with innovative fabrication to provide practical high-performance devices and this work is an excellent example of that,” he said.

Original article here