A long time back, a loyal reader (whose name is sadly lost in the mists of time) sent me a link to a bizarre sports drink that, like many others, promises you’ll train harder/faster/stronger/better, but unusually, claims to do this by rejigging your digestive system to mimic that of a big bug.
The makers of Hornet Juice Sports Drink claim it is based on the activities of the Giant Hornet, an endurance athlete amongst insects that can “fly 50 miles a day”. The makers of Hornet Juice believe this is down to the hornet’s diet of an amino acid mixture secreted by their larval. By recreating this mixture, they claim:
Hornet Juice activates the metabolism of fat for energy right from the start of your physical activity. This results in your glycogen being conserved, enabling you to maintain a steady pace to the very end.
Presumably because what’s good for an inch-long flying insect must also be good for a six-foot tall running human. And I guess reconfiguring your entire digestive system is a safe and advisable pastime, too. Ah, there’s nothing like a bit of cargo cult science to put a smile on your face. Seriously though, don’t they remember what happened to Timothy West in Tales of the Unexpected?! (anyone got a video link to this?)
April 22nd, 2008
I enjoy trawling through my statistics, much in the same way that Scrooge McDuck used to swim through his gold coins in those old cartoons. And the last time I visited the vault for a dip, I was thrilled to see SciencePunk.com has clocked up 10,000,000 hits so far this year. That’s four times as many as the whole of 2007! Sweet.
April 22nd, 2008
What do you do if you have a shed, a warm day, a propane cylinder and a manly thirst for a cool beer? Why, you perform the only manly solution - construct a jet powered beer cooler! Simon Jansen explains:
Not being built for playing rugby I have had to go with the shed. I may not know a rugby hoop from a cricket stick but I know my shed like the head of my hammer. A shed is a place where a kiwi bloke spends much of his time alone surrounded by his tools, current and past half finished projects and the collection of parts and material usually referred to by others (typically wives/girlfriends) as ‘that pile of junk’.
A session in the shed is typically an all day affair. Starting very early in the morning and going through until late at night when the light fades to the point that you can’t see and hit your thumb with a hammer a bloke will not leave his shed for anything (Hint: Empty paint cans can be very useful here). All supplies must be taken in at the start of the shed session. And the most essential of these supplies is beer.
But how to keep the beer cold?
From here Simon progresses to the only logical, manly, solution:
I knew from some long forgotten physics lecture that when a liquid expands into a gas it will draw heat from its surroundings. And I happened to have a source of a suitable liquid right in my shed in the form of a LPG cylinder (liquid petroleum gas). Obviously it would not do to evaporate vast quantities of a flammable gas into the closed confines of my garage. That would probably be dangerous. What I needed was a way to remove the dangerous gas. The solution was obvious. The gas is flammable so why not burn it. Burning the gas with a normal burner would not use up the gas fast enough to give me any serious cooling. What I needed was a way to use up a lot of fuel very, very quickly.
What I needed was a jet engine!
See the rest of the story here.
April 22nd, 2008