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Why Peanuts ‘Dance’ When Dropped in Beer When peanuts are dropped into a glass of beer, they sink to the bottom before floating up and "dancing" in the glass.
Scientists investigated this process in a study involving the alcoholic drink beer. It appeared recently in the publication Royal Society Open Science. The scientists say the research helps them understand mineral extraction or bubbling magma in the layer of Earth called the crust.
Brazilian researcher Luiz Pereira is the study's lead writer. He told the French news agency AFP that he first had the idea when passing through Argentina's capital Buenos Aires to learn Spanish.
It was a "bartender thing" in the city to take a few peanuts and drop them into beers, Pereira said.
Because the peanuts are more dense than the beer, they first sink to the bottom of the glass. Then each peanut becomes what is called a "nucleation site." Hundreds of tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide form on their surface. The bubbles act as flotation devices that carry the peanuts upward.
"The bubbles prefer to form on the peanuts rather than on the glass…," said Pereira, a researcher at Germany's Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
When the bubbles reach the surface, they burst.
The peanuts sink again before newly formed bubbles send the peanuts up again. Like a dance movement, the peanuts continue sinking and floating until the carbon dioxide runs out, or someone drinks the beer.
“Beer-gas-peanut system”
In the experiments, the team of researchers in Germany, Britain and France examined how peanuts acted in what they called the "beer-gas-peanut system."
They found the larger the "contact angle" between the curve of an individual bubble and the surface of the peanut, the more likely it would grow.
But it cannot grow too much — less than 1.3 millimeters across is best, the study said.
Pereira said he hoped that "by deeply researching this simple system, which everyone can grasp, we can understand a system" that would be useful for industry or explaining natural processes.
For example, he said the flotation process was similar to the one used to separate iron from ore.
Air is injected into a mixture in which a mineral, such as iron, "will rise because bubbles attach themselves more easily to it, while other (minerals) sink to the bottom," he said.
The same process could also explain why volcano scientists find that the mineral magnetite rises to higher layers in Earth's crust than would be expected.
Like peanuts, magnetite is more dense and should sit at the bottom. But the researchers suggest, a high contact angle causes gas bubbles that carry the mineral up through the magma.
Science is never settled, especially when beer is involved.
So, Pereira said the scientists hope to create a better model of the dancing peanut action by continuing to experiment with “different peanuts and different beers."
I'm Dorothy Gundy.View -
AI Helps Make a Beatles ‘Last Record’ Beatles’ cofounder Paul McCartney said this week that artificial intelligence (AI) has recaptured the voice of former Beatles member John Lennon from old recordings. Lennon was murdered in 1980.
Music that includes Lennon’s voice from the past will become what McCartney calls “the last Beatles record.”
The 80 year-old artist spoke to the BBC. He said the AI technology was used to separate the band members’ voices from background sounds in an old recording. Film director Peter Jackson was making a documentary series about the band at the time. The series, The Beatles: Get Back, came out in 2021.
McCartney told BBC radio that Jackson was able to separate Lennon’s voice from the musical sounds in the recording. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’.”
He added, “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would do.
McCartney did not identify the name of the demo song that Jackson used for the process. But the BBC and others said it was likely to be an unfinished 1978 love song by Lennon called Now and Then. The demo was included on a cassette with the words “For Paul.” The BBC reported that McCartney had gotten the cassette from Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono.
McCartney described AI technology as “kind of scary but exciting.”
Last year, the same technology permitted McCartney to sing a virtual duet with Lennon. The performance took place at the Glastonbury Festival in Britain.
Holly Herndon is an artist with a doctorate in composition from Stanford University in California. She used AI machine technology on her last album, 2019's Proto. She suggested that the Beatles' recording was likely created using a process called “source separation.”
"Source separation has become easier to do with machine learning,” Herndon said. The process lets a user take a voice from a recording and isolate it so that it can be paired with new music, she explained.
That differs from a deepfake vocal. “A deepfake is an entirely new vocal line,” she said. It comes from a machine learning model trained on old vocal lines, Herndon said.
McCartney is set to open a show later this month at the National Portrait Gallery in London of his private photographs. He took them took during the early days of the Beatles at the start of “Beatlemania,” when the band rose to worldwide fame.
The show is called Eyes of the Storm. It includes more than 250 photos McCartney took between 1963 and 1964. They include pictures of Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Lennon, as well as Beatles manager Brian Epstein.
I’m Caty Weaver.View -
Why Are Thousands of Subreddits Going Dark? Reddit is a social media website where people with common interests can have conversations by posting comments, videos and images. Posts are grouped into communities, called subreddits, based on different subjects.
Thousands of popular Reddit communities, including groups about technology, gaming, and music, locked out their users recently in protest. People who organize the communities, called moderators, are protesting the company’s plan to charge for access to its data.
Starting next month, Reddit said third-party app developers, people who make apps but do not work for Reddit, will have to pay for its application programming interface (API). It is a programming system that permits a data provider and end-user to communicate with each other.
Costly to developers
Reddit plans to charge developers that require higher usage limits $0.24 for every 1,000 API calls or less than $1 per user every month.
One such third-party app is the Apollo app. It is popular among Reddit users as a way to get content from the official Reddit page.
Apollo said that with their current usage, the charges would cost more than $20 million a year. And the developer added that the costly charges have “made it impossible” to continue offering the service.
Christian Selig, the creator of the Apollo app for Reddit, said that the service will close on June 30.
Why is Reddit making the change?
One of the reasons that Reddit is making the change is generative artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI can create new content, like images, videos, music, text, or other forms of data.
Conversations on Reddit have a lot of data that can be used to train generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. While some of this data can be collected in an unstructured way, Reddit’s API makes it easier for companies to directly find and collect the data.
Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman told The New York Times in April that Reddit’s data “is really valuable.” And he said he does not want to “give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
Who is affected by the Reddit blackout?
Thousands of subreddits, including r/Music, r/gaming, r/science, and r/todayilearned, are protesting the move. They all have more than 30 million followers.
Unlike most other social media services, Reddit is heavily dependent on community moderators who police their subreddits for free to deal with offensive or illegal content.
And the moderators planned a blackout during which their pages will go private. That means millions of users will be left without access to those communities.
Huffman noted the anger among many moderators of Reddit communities. But he said the company cannot let companies use large amounts of its data for free and Reddit needs to be able to support itself.
I’m Gregory Stachel.View -
Engineering Schools Offer Money, View into Energy Crisis At a recent International Energy Agency conference in Paris, government and business leaders said the world is making progress on clean energy projects.
However, the world’s energy demands keep growing. The leaders said there is an “urgent” need for investment in green energy and making better use of already existing energy.
So, how are U.S. universities preparing their students to work on renewable energy projects?
VOA Learning English recently visited with students in the ThinkEnergy Fellowship at Case Western Reserve University’s Great Lakes Energy Institute. The university, known as CWRU, is in Cleveland, Ohio.
The students spent one year learning from energy experts and working on a final project where they presented an energy business “pitch” to their classmates and advisers.
Students receive money for being in the program, too, up to $10,000 for Ph.D. students. The money helps pay for school but also is supposed to be used as seed money for a business idea.
Who are the students?
The fellowship started in 2015. Each year, the program accepts 10 to 15 students at all stages of their academic careers.
Derin Fasipe is among the fellows. He is working on an advanced degree in biotechnology. He is also working to start a sustainable energy business.
Fellow Molly Egan will soon start her fourth year at CWRU. She studies chemical engineering and has an interest in wind energy.
And, fellow Natasha Rouse recently completed her Ph.D. studies. She will continue working on mechanical engineering, robotics and machine learning projects.
What is the goal of the fellowship?
Jonathan Steirer is the program’s operations manager. He said the goal is for students to “incubate” an idea and turn it into a business.
Non-science students, such as those studying business and arts can also apply.
When students from different academic backgrounds work together, Steirer said, a business student can learn a little about engineering and an engineer can learn about writing a business plan.
At the end of the program, Steirer said, some students find a new study path that leads them to a career in energy.
What projects did the students pitch at the end of the year?
One group proposed a less-costly hydrogen power business called “Nu-H2.” The group looked at “pink” hydrogen power, which is created with the energy that comes from already-existing nuclear power plants.
Another group thought of a small solar-powered engine that could cool the air in a single room. That company is Sol-Air Cooling. Most people live in small homes, so the product could make a big difference.
The third group worked on a solar energy marketplace for homeowners who want to use solar power without costly solar equipment. The group created a website for the marketplace called E-Gora.
Natasha Rouse worked on that project. She saw the business as a chance for average people to make a difference on the climate crisis.
“Frameworks like E-Gora will probably pop up in the next five, 10 years regardless. And those offer people kind of a lower-stakes way into this space. Right, you don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to put solar panels on your roof.”
Molly Egan worked on Nu-H2. For many energy projects, “the proof of concept and technology are … right there,” she said. But there are barriers to progress. She said the U.S. electricity grid is outdated as are rules about how to sell and provide electricity.
Are there problems with this kind of fellowship?
There are similar programs at other universities, including Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Columbia University in New York City and the University of Rhode Island.
One engineering school leader likes the “fellowship” model but wonders if it goes far enough.
Ron Harichandran is the leader of the College of Engineering at the University of New Haven in Connecticut. He said most universities in the U.S. do not yet have a “clean energy” field of study. Maybe they should, he said.
He said the world needs major change in the way it produces and uses energy. But he worries that universities “are a little bit scattered” in how they are training students.
Perhaps, he said, mechanical engineers should be working on wind turbine projects. Electrical engineers should be learning how to move solar and wind energy back into the electric grid. Civil engineers should be learning about sustainable building methods and materials.
Harichandran said the fellowship programs are helpful for students who are not completely sure of their interest in energy projects. But there is no guarantee how students might use the money or that they will follow through on their projects.
After all, Harichandran said, the money the programs receive and provide to the students is a gift.
A better way
He suggested the fellowship programs start to think in the same way as some of the large U.S. government organizations that provide financial aid for science.
He mentioned research grants from places such as the Department of Energy, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). They can get strong results because they have clear goals and deadlines.
For example, a research team at CWRU recently won a grant of nearly $1 million from the NSF to work on a sustainable manufacturing project in Ohio.
Fasipe, one of the CWRU students, made similar comments. He said solving the world’s energy and climate change problem is “more complex” than just saying traditional energy production must end. He said costs must come down and businesses need to see that they can make money working in renewable energy.
I’m Dan Friedell. And I’m Faith Pirlo.View -
Microsoft Reports Progress with Project to Fight Online Misinformation American technology company Microsoft is reporting progress with a program that aims to fight misinformation online.
Leaders of the project recently spoke to The Associated Press about the effort. Microsoft teamed up with the nonprofit Trust Project last year to suggest tools to help users find trustworthy news sources. The Trust Project is a group of linked news organizations.
Microsoft and the Trust Project created advertisements that direct internet users to a list of eight “trust indicators” that can be used to judge websites. One indicator is whether opinion writing is clearly identified. Others provide guidelines for recognizing good reporting methods, identifying bias and finding quality news sources.
Microsoft said most of the people who saw their indicators said the guidelines improved their ability to judge which online news sources were trustworthy and which ones contained misinformation.
“This was a bit of an experiment for us,” said Ginny Badanes, director of Microsoft's Democracy Forward Initiative. The group is part of Microsoft’s efforts to get involved in online reporting and democracy. Badanes told The Associated Press, "The world is changing very quickly and people need tools to equip themselves.”
Services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have been blamed for fueling political divisions and reducing trust in democratic systems.
There are already many existing efforts that say they are aimed at fighting online misinformation. These include fact-checking services. These services seek to examine news stories gaining wide public attention and to explain whether they are true or not. But these services require a lot of research and workers, are not seen by many people, and are not likely to persuade people already distrustful of the media.
Another way to fight online misinformation is through the moderation efforts of technology companies themselves. But these efforts have failed to satisfy many critics of social media services. And legislative efforts to force technology companies to do more policing themselves have been slow to progress.
But some measures designed to increase critical thinking skills and media literacy have shown success. These are aimed at helping people learn how to identify misinformation themselves. Last year, Google launched a series of videos on YouTube in Eastern Europe that were designed to teach people how misinformation works. That campaign was recently expanded to Germany.
Sally Lehrman is a reporter and chief executive at the Trust Project. She told the AP there are important signs to look for when seeking trustworthy news organizations. These organizations will identify their sources, present diverse voices and require their workers to observe rules aimed at producing high quality reporting.
In the experiment, users of Microsoft products and systems, including email, were shown ads. Over a six-month period, the ads led to twice as many people visiting the project's site. About 62 percent of those who visited the site said it helped them feel more confident about judging online information.
Lehrman said she was pleased by the results of the indicator guidelines. She noted that short internet ads are a low-cost, easy answer compared to complex legislative efforts or policing attempts by tech companies themselves.
Lehrman said the need for media literacy programs is increasingly needed as new artificial intelligence methods make misinformation easier than ever to create and spread.
Lehrman said the research proves that many people will read ads that offer help in dealing with online misinformation. But she added that the ads must be effective in getting people's attention.
“Are we asking people to eat their broccoli? I always reject that because I think broccoli is delicious,” she said. “But we have to make it delicious.”
I’m Bryan Lynn.View