Experimenting with food

Mayonnaise’s texture is great for mimicking what a gasoline capsule goes by when it’s blasted with lasers to ignite nuclear fusion, Emily Conover reported in “Mayonnaise can even make clear nuclear fusion experiments” (SN: 10/5/24, p. 5).

Reader Linda Ferrazzara puzzled if mayo qualifies as a non-Newtonian fluid, one whose viscosity adjustments reckoning on the stress utilized to it. In that case, can even researchers as a replacement employ oobleck — a non-Newtonian fluid fabricated from cornstarch and water ­— as a stand-in for nuclear gasoline capsules in experiments? Ferrazzara requested. Oobleck can even very successfully be less complicated to lend a hand consistent between experiments than mayo, which has a quantity of formulations reckoning on the logo.

Mayonnaise is a non-Newtonian fluid, says mechanical engineer Arindam Banerjee of Lehigh College in Bethlehem, Pa. But oobleck would no longer work for fusion experiments. The substance will get thicker, or extra viscous, when hit by an open air power — a phenomenon called shear thickening. So it “would freeze up after we go our experiment,” Banerjee says. Mayo is the reverse: It will get much less viscous.

Repeatability is major to the group’s scientific job, so the presents used in every experiment can even restful be successfully-characterized and consistent, Banerjee says. “We have used Hellmann’s Precise Mayonnaise for the closing 12 years. We measure properties of every and each batch and comprise chanced on them to be remarkably consistent. We attain no longer manufacture our comprise mayonnaise,” he says. “Ahead of deciding on mayonnaise, we tried yogurt. But my college students on the moment were no longer in a design to copy the yogurt consistency and thus the properties were a quantity of, ensuing in immense variations in seen behavior.”

Machines manufacture errors

A quantum computer improved its results by over and over correcting its errors midcalculation, Emily Conover reported in “A quantum computer fixes its errors” (SN: 10/5/24, p. 6).

X user @Lightning456243 requested how a quantum computer can title its comprise errors.

“Quantum computers ravishing their very comprise errors by inserting some redundancy of their files and periodically checking whether or no longer the concepts is restful self-consistent,” Conover says.

Classical computers attain this too by copying bits, which comprise a value of both 0 or 1. As an illustration, 1 might well even be copied three instances to become 111. If one amongst these bits will get unintentionally flipped (voice, 111 turns into 110), the mismatch between the three bits would present an error. By taking a seek at which value is the majority, the pc can title which bit needs fixing.

The complexities of quantum physics complicate this job, however quantum computers likewise encode files redundantly, Conover says. As adverse to straight away copying individual quantum bits, on the replacement hand, the computers unfold the concepts between a pair of quantum bits which might well well be entangled, or linked (SN: 6/20/20, p. 18).