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To Boldly Go Where No Mento Has Gone Before
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Aug 30, 2008 02:30 PM
from the bubbles-act-different dept.
from the bubbles-act-different dept.
rjwoodhead writes "This past weekend, my entire family learned what it's like to float in freefall aboard G-Force One (recently featured on the Mythbusters' Moon Hoax show). Being science-lovers, we wanted to do some kind of original experiment. So we decided to test whether the Diet Coke & Mentos reaction was affected by the lack of bubble convection in microgravity. At the link you can find the story of how the experiment evolved and how we talked Space Adventures into letting us fool around with sticky and corrosive cola and candy inside their nice clean airplane, as well as high-speed video of the results."
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Sex would have been easier to clean up... (Score:5, Funny)
...and more fun too, or so I'm told.
Re:Sex would have been easier to clean up... (Score:5, Funny)
The experiment was conducted on an aircraft that provides zero gravity for periods of only 30 seconds at a time. That might not be a problem for you, but most people would be left unsatisfied.
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Re:Sex would have been easier to clean up... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Sex would have been easier to clean up... (Score:5, Funny)
The experiment was conducted on an aircraft that provides zero gravity for periods of only 30 seconds at a time. That might not be a problem for you, but most people would be left unsatisfied.
Are you kidding? Just _thinking_ about 0 G's gets me off.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Some cultures discourage the act of having sex with your entire family.
Re:Sex would have been easier to clean up... (Score:5, Funny)
Some cultures discourage the act of having sex with your entire family.
How do they know who my entire family is? And why mine?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Ask and ye shall receive. http://www.fugly.com/videos/1424/poontos.html [fugly.com]
Re:Sex would have been easier to clean up... (Score:4, Informative)
Funny, but NSFW. Please mark that, as it can get people who work Saturdays in trouble (not me, but others)
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Re: (Score:2)
Hmmmm.
The thread is about sex in zero gravity.
To be on topic, it's supposed to be NSFW, duh.
And you can tell from the URL that it's a video.
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Hey, my work IS sex, you insensitive clod!
P.S.: Now it's your turn to imagine, how's I'm getting out of this again... :D
Re:Sex would have been easier to clean up... (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe not for your family.
Parent
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Or a loser. Do you really think he has any experience to compare it to?
Price (Score:3, Informative)
He says 4 grand in the blog - and over at the zero g site it says 5200 when taxes are included, so it looks like prices have been bumped up. I'm still going to start saving up for it though.
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Re:Price (Score:4, Interesting)
A friend is a private pilot and used to have access to a Cessna 150 Aerobat. He took me up and we went into a couple of zero-G arcs. It's astoundingly cool! And in a little Cessna it was far less than a hundred dollars an hour to play around in.
Of course, this does have its drawbacks compared to the Vomit Comet. Being a tiny(!) plane, there's no space for a passenger to actually float around the cabin. I unbuckled the seat belt so I was lifted off the seat for a while. A few objects in the cabin floated around a bit. But the little Cessna cannot achieve the speeds and altitudes required to follow a zero G parabola for more than about ten seconds at a time.
Even if it could, there's a bigger problem. Fuel intake is the limiting factor. Regular planes have a rigid fuel intake inside the gas tanks near the bottom, and the fuel sits on the bottom of the tank. The Aerobat uses "clunk tanks" similar to model planes - weighted flexible hoses in the gas tanks to ensure the fuel and intake hose are on the "bottom" of the tanks even when the plane is inverted. Both types of tanks rely on gravity to keep the fuel and the intake together. Without gravity, neither the fuel nor the intake hose are under any physical obligations to meet up with each other, and the engine can run dry. That's generally considered a "bad thing."
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I occasionally do zero-gee parabolas in a glider. While running out of altitude can be a downer (pun intended), I never have problems with fuel flow!
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I realize it's not exactly the same thing, but....
For five grand you could pay for all the training you need to get an actual pilot's license, and then you could go up and do as many zero-gee parabolas as you want. They won't last thirty seconds, and you don't get a big chamber to float around in doing weird experiments. But on the other hand you'll have a pilot's license to do all sorts of other fun things with, and your cumulative zero-gee time could be vastly higher!
What's with the TSA apologist BS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever you may think about the rules that the TSA enforces (and I agree with Bruce Schneier in that regard), the fact of the matter is that the frontline staff that you deal with have little or no freedom to apply common-sense discretion, and are often placed in situations where they don't have the time, or the background knowledge, to make an informed decision, which means that the default answer is "no". When you couple that with the fact that anyone can be having a horrible day, and some small percentage of people are jerks to begin with (a smaller percentage than most people assume), and multiply by hundreds of thousands of people going through security a day, it's a recipe for horror stories.
...and then he describes how they were pre-briefed and OK with everything...except some clay. Yeah, you heard that right. They were briefed ahead of time, there was no terrorist risk, and these asshats objected to clay because it looked like plastic explosive.
This has nothing to do with the people going through security, and it's only partly the rules. It is absolutely not okay for a TSA agent to "have a bad day" and do anything except apply TSA policies in a humane but consistent manner. If they can't do so on a "bad day", they need to find a different job.
TSA screeners and management absolutely LOVE the fact that despite being badly paid, undereducated, and almost always minorities- being a TSA agent places them at the top of the food-chain in an airport. Their words and decisions are that of god, and with a word they can transform anyone's business trip or vacation into sheer hell. Like the case where TSA screeners forced a new mother to drink her own breastmilk to prove it wasn't an explosive or poison.
They're also, in many cases, dumber than fenceposts. The guy whose Audi key was confiscated because it was a "switchblade", the Macbook Air fiasco...I'm sure there are thousands of similar incidents we never hear about.
For chrissakes, these people banned NAIL CLIPPERS and thought liquid binary explosives were possible to deploy on a plane because they'd seen in the movies that the baddies had these scary devices that mixed different colored liquids...
Re: (Score:2)
The Road To Idiocracy starts with one step.
With the TSA being the first downhill grade to help speed things up.
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and thought liquid binary explosives were possible to deploy on a plane because they'd seen in the movies that the baddies had these scary devices that mixed different colored liquids...
As John Carmack points out [slashdot.org], it is not only possible to have explosives like this, it's not very difficult.
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The problem is not whether such an explosive can exist. The problem is whether such an explosive could be mixed in an airplane bathroom without anyone noticing and remain unexploded long enough for Our Villain to get it out of the bathroom and up next to the skin where it might do some serious damage.
Everything I've heard about such binary explosives indicates that the outcome is an explosion while mixing the stuff in the bathroom, one badly injured terrorist, and one trashed airplane lavatory.
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Don't do it... just remember, the Democrats have fallen just as far... they are beating the same old dead horse of all the stupid, failed politics of the mid 20th century and calling it "change".
Did you listen to Obama's speech? With certain (admittedly important) exceptions, he sounded more Republican than the Republicans. He called for lower taxes, more personal responsibility, cutting spending, taking care of veterans, on and on.
Another thing I liked is that he's calling for the elimination of oil impo
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No, we get upset at the TSA for doing their job badly.
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So you're saying that if TSA's policy was to kick you square in the nuts as you go past, you would "attack the policy", but be perfectly fine with the guy who's actually putting his foot in your crotch?
Umm, can you define the TSA job for me? (Score:4, Informative)
As a nice, bright and shiny illustration of just how safe you are with these people being given free reign is illustrated by the story of how the TSA grounded 9 planes [aero-news.net]. My favorite quote: "TSA agents are now doing things to our aircraft that may put our lives, and the lives of our passengers at risk".
I am yet to be convinced there is a measurable return on investment for the money wasted on TSA, investment in HUMINT would have been a better use of the budget. and THAT annoys me most when those morons do their usual.
I guess the use of room temperature IQs is essential to stop anyone from thinking about what they're doing, but the result is that they give the impression of being people rejected for writing parking tickets because they were too stupid.
Parent
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It is a price for security.
That's a funny use of the word "price". Normally when you pay the price for something, you get that something in return. I see no evidence that the price we pay constantly to the TSA results in getting security in return.
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No, we don't give them flak over what they do in order to keep people safe. We give them flak over what they do in order to trick some people into thinking they're safe. It's all theater, and the laws of nature don't care about appearance.
Diet Coke sticky? corrosive? (Score:3, Interesting)
I always thought the people take diet coke instead of normal coke precisely because it is not sticky, because it does not contain sugar. And I also used to believe that most of the corrosive behaviour of coke also comes from the sugar. But that's just me.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There may not be any sugar in diet coke, but it's still kinda messy. Still, mix it with the sugar in a Mentos, and you can bet it's gonna get real sticky. Also, the corrosive nature of coke originates not in the sugar, but in the Phosphoric acid (H3PO4) [bu.edu] it contains.
(To be fair, that MSDS is for an 85% solution - about 1500 times stronger than coke)
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It should be noted that with high concentrations of various chemicals, just because the % concentration is 1500 times higher does not mean the "strength" is 1500 times higher. 85% phosphoric acid is incredibly dangerous, vastly moreso than accidentally spilling 1500 times the volume of coke on your skin (1mL versus 1.5L.) Though 1mL of 85% phosphoric acid wouldn't kill you, it'll do a lot more damage than 1.5L of coke.
Re:Mento (Score:5, Funny)
If "Mentos" is "the freshmaker" and not "the freshmakers" then yes, the singular form is "Mentos". I suppose that the plural would then me "Mentot".
Parent
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Mentot the MintTaker
World's lamest supervillain?
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Why is this news?
1) This is entertainment..slashdot.org
2) You must be new here.
3) It's better than the slashvertisement three stories back, though to be fair there was some M$ bashing two stories back.
Re:What's the music please? (Score:5, Informative)
I really, really should know this but...what's the music in the video?
In the comments of TFA it links to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carnival_of_the_Animals [wikipedia.org]
Parent
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More specifically it's the 7th movement (Aquarium) of The Carnival of the Animals.
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As in, the Harry Potter movies ripped it off from Camille Saint-Saens.
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Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was experimentation - not a failure. The blog says they're working on improving the design for next time - this is exactly what scientific experimentation should show. Initial postulate, experimentation, refinement based on results.
Far from a failure, and I certainly enjoyed reading about it and watching the videos.
Cheers,
Ian
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Or a tiny scrap of plastic wrapped around the coke, which they could unwind and then add the mentos using their stick.
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I still don't understand why, after their failure, they didn't just stick the mint-on-a-stick straight into the open bottle? If it had reacted violently, they could have just removed it.
Or was it that they only wanted to see a blob of free-floating diet Coke explode suddenly with a mint stuck in it?
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Or does it? They are putting diet coke on the mentos, not mentos in the diet coke. I imagine drizzling a small amount of diet coke on a mento back here on terra firma is a comparable non-event.
Re:G-Force-One does not simulate zero-G environmen (Score:2)
But.. becuase the ISS is in-orbit around the planet, it is still inside the event horizon of Earth's gravity well, making it's primary gravitational influence the Earth.
Holy crap! Nobody told me that the earth is actually a black hole... We're all DOOMED!
Re:G-Force-One does not simulate zero-G environmen (Score:2)
That is some bad trolling there.
If you are in a sealed container, with no way to measure outside the container, being in G-Force-One when it is in the free fall part of its flight is indistinguishable from being on the ISS, as far as gravity goes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgravity [wikipedia.org]
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When the plane goes into a dive, it matches the speed of an object in free-fall. This causes the environment around the people to "fall" at the same speed the people are falling, so they stay in the same space within the environment.
And how, pray tell, does that differ from the orbiting space shuttle, or the ISS?
IIRC, the shuttle's trajectory traces out an ellipse. The zero-G airplane traces out a parabola. But, its parabola is just an aborted ellipse; aborted because you crash into the thing you were attempting to orbit (because your parabola wasn't wide enough to miss the edge of the thing you were trying to orbit.)
(So once again, we learn that Douglas Adams was right: the key to flying is to throw yourself at the ground, and mi
Re:G-Force-One does not simulate zero-G environmen (Score:2)
The "equal gravitational pull" location is L1 (Lagrange Point 1) between the Earth and its moon. There is another between the Earth and Sol. Objects in L1s are susceptible to small forces however. L4s and L5s are much more stable, but are still orbits, so not clear of the primary's (Earth, Sol, ...) significant gravity well.
Re:G-Force-One does not simulate zero-G environmen (Score:5, Informative)
Your point may be technically accurate, but it's misleading. The only difference between a parabolic flight and an elliptical orbit is that one intersects the Earth, and one does not. Of course, that whole hitting the Earth part kinda sucks, so that's why the airplane pulls out of its dive.
In orbit, the acceleration due to gravity is still substantial. The only difference is, the velocity tangent to that vector is sufficient that you're always falling towards Earth, but you always miss hitting it. You're falling over the horizon.
"(Note that "in orbit" is still inside the event horizon of Earth's gravitational well.) "
Event horizon has a specific meaning, and none whatsoever when not talking about black holes. There is no "event horizon" of Earth's gravitational well. It simply gets arbitrarily small with increasing distance.
"Where experiments would become fascinating is in a satellite in an orbit above Earth that matches the angle and period of the moon's, at a distance that would cause an equal gravitational pull from both Earth and the Moon, and see what happens with two equal but opposite gravity sources effecting the experiment!"
That's not really an orbit, that's a Lagrange point. The effects will be indistinguishable from orbit. Inertial frames of reference are indistinguishable.
Parent
Mod parent -1 Utterly Clueless (Score:2)
'Nuff said.
Re:Parent translation (Score:5, Funny)
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