FYFD

Tag: mythbusting

  • Tapping a Can Won’t Save Your Beer

    Tapping a Can Won’t Save Your Beer

    It happens to the best of us: sometimes our beer gets shaken up during transit. One common reaction to this is to tap the side of the can repeatedly before opening, but a new scientific study shows that tapping doesn’t affect the volume of beer lost. Danish scientists tested over 1,000 cans of beer in randomized combinations of shaken, unshaken, tapped, and untapped, and observed no difference between tapped and untapped cans.

    The foam-up upon opening takes place in shaken beer because carbon dioxide bubbles form in the pressurized beer, especially along defects in the wall where bubbles can nucleate. When the pressure is released, the carbon dioxide becomes supersaturated and comes out of solution, especially into the pre-formed bubbles, which rapidly grow and overflow. In theory, tapping could disturb those bubbles before opening, but in practice, it makes no difference. Your best bet? Give the beer time to settle before you open it. (Image credit: Q. Dombrowski; research credit: E. Sopina et al.; via Ars Technica)

  • Reader Question: Oceans Meeting?

    Reader Question: Oceans Meeting?

    Reader favoringfire asks:

    Hi! Maybe you can help me: I’ve seen a pic revolving around Tumblr from the Danish city of Skagen showing the Baltic and North sea meeting. Where they meet the ocean is two very distinct hues of blue–what captions say are “two opposing tides with different densities.” Tides? Currents w/different temps often are often diff color from one another. But can “tides” be of different “densities???”

    After some searching, I think the photo above is probably the one you’ve seen represented as where the Baltic and North Seas meet. It turns out, however, that it’s not. It’s a photo from an Alaskan cruise taken by Kent Smith. Fluid dynamically, though, it’s still very interesting! What we see here is a sharp gradient between regions with very different densities. One side contains lots of freshwater from rivers fed by melting glaciers, which creates a very different density from the general seawater.

    It’s not true, however, that the two won’t mix. This border is not a static phenomenon but one that is ever-changing due to currents and the diffusion of one fluid into another. In a sense, this photo is very much the sea-level version of photos like these which show the massive scale of sediment transport and nutrient mixing that occur in our oceans.

    (Photo credit: K. Smith)