Science desk
< September 1	<< Aug \| September \| Oct >>	September 3 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

September 2

Does fluctuations in brightness of bulb visible if it done like this?

AC current means frequency more than 0. So at less frequency of AC (below 50hz), fluctuations in brightness of bulb visible to human eyes? Rizosome (talk) 01:38, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As suggested in Utility frequency, if it drops below 60 or 50 it can produce noticeable flickering. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:54, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

See also Flicker fusion threshold. Whether flicker is perceived at 50 Hz depends strongly on the depth of the modulation. The power delivered is proportional to the square of the current, which for alternating current means that the power frequency is twice that of the frequency of the current. In a formula,

\left(\exp j\omega t\right)^{2}=\exp j(2\omega )t.

This means that the effective (light strength) frequency for incandescent light bulbs is twice the nominal frequency, so 50 Hz AC becomes 2 × 50 Hz = 100 Hz. Also, for such bulbs, the filament cools down only very little when the current passes through zero, so they keep emitting light with only minor changes in intensity and the flicker is not perceptible to the human eye. It will probably remain imperceptible at 35 Hz. With some older types of fluorescent tubes that basically went on and off, the flicker could be annoyingly noticeable also at 60 Hz. Some older CRT displays also had perceptible flicker at these frequencies. --Lambiam 09:58, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Edward Sonstadt

Edward Sonstadt was a British chemist. He made magnesium ribbons for photography in 1860s. Does anyone have his photo? Thanks in advance.

Gold anchor chain

Is it possible to make an anchor chain out of solid gold (as described in Alexander Green's novel of the same name), or would it break under the weight of the anchor and/or the stress placed on it by the momentum of the ship? If this is in fact possible, would it be a good way to hide stolen gold (as also related in the same novel)? 2601:646:8A81:6070:5CE9:B4CB:370A:7A2C (talk) 06:43, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Mechanical the strength of gold is only about a fifth of a steel, that could be used for an anchor chain. Links of a golden anchor chain therefore would have to be scaled up accordingly (cross-sections, five-fold). This would increase the weight of the chain fifteen times, so it probably wouldn't be manageable for that certain actual use any more. However, it's just lying around on the ship it could still serve as sort of hiding place. --87.147.179.79 (talk) 12:29, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

How did you calculate the 15 times? scaling the cross section with 5 scales the volume with 5^(3/2), which my calculator makes as ~11.2. A quick calculation shows that, with a yield strength of 80 MPa (N/mm2), to anchor a 10 tonne boat you'd need shackles with a total cross sectional area of 1226mm, or about 13mm radius for 2 circular sections. That is a lot bigger than the steel chains you'd use but a useful ruse in calm weather. I'd hide it at the bitter end of the chain and not (actively) use it. Rmvandijk (talk) 13:45, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I did mean with ″cross-section″ the ″cross-sectional area″. And for the material-strength I made an estimated guess (is that a correct English expression?), thus as steel is about five times stronger. Same regarding the densities, thus as gold is about three times denser than steel: 15 results from 3 times 5. --87.147.179.79 (talk) 19:02, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This isn't the Language desk ;) but: are you thinking of the English phrase educated guess? —Tamfang (talk) 00:54, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

When you say "novel of the same name", it might help to have mentioned the name. I guess it's The Golden Chain (a phrase not previously appearing in this section) by Alexander Grin. —Tamfang (talk) 00:53, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ancient horses

Were there any differences in appearance between ancient horses (classical antiquity until Roman times, e.g. those in cavalry) and modern horses due to selective breeding (assuming the same breeds perhaps)? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 18:16, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The Nisean horse breed was apparently large and robust. Following the rather patchy links from that article, it seems to be possibly of the archetype "forest horse" which is also called "hypothetical warmblood subspecies" in History of horse domestication theories, and may have been the ancestor of the Latvian horse and the Groningen horse. So that gives you a vague and dubious impression of what some horses from classical antiquity looked like. Horses in the Middle Ages says "During the Decline of the Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages, much of the quality breeding stock developed during the classical period was lost due to uncontrolled breeding and had to be built up again over the following centuries," confirming at least that there was such a thing as horse breeding in classical antiquity. Card Zero (talk) 19:27, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Classical-era horse breeding was certainly a thing. Xenophon had something to say about it in his ~355 BCE textbook On Horsemanship (which in translation is very readable) and there are surely other surviving classical treatises on the subject (about which I'm not an expert). Further, we have quite a few equine carvings and statues from the classical era, which illustrate how horses then looked, and differed from wild breeds. We have been selectively breeding horses for more than 5,000 years. See also List of horse breeds#Archaic types. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.0.2 (talk) 15:52, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That last link you gave is about the Middle Ages, when horses were classified by how they looked and what they were for, and so they weren't being selectively bred, at least not deliberately. (Or should that be "not carefully"?) That's why I was unsure to what extent the ancient Greeks (etc.) were selectively breeding them. Card Zero (talk) 20:06, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Qualifying for organ/tissue donation

I have been registered as an organ donor on my driver's license, for decades. Now, I am a six year (breast) cancer survivor, plus I'm in my early 60s. Are my organs/tissues still of use, despite my previous cancer? This seems possible. ^[1] But what about a person's age, in regards to various organs and tissues?

Also, I "read something" where the child of an end-of-life, unconscious/comatose parent, said they were dissuaded from providing their parent with opioid medications, because this would prohibit the organs from being transferred to a person who needed them. (Do opioid meds truly ruin the organs?) Haven't found the answers, thus far, in WP articles. Thanks, Tribe of Tiger ^{Let's Purrfect!} 19:49, 2 September 2021 (UTC) [reply]

References

^ "Can I Donate My Organs if I've Had Cancer?". www.cancer.org.

It's good to hear you're doing well. There have been well-reported cases of cancer survivors whose organs were transplanted into someone and the cancer recurred. It's likely that the cancer survivor's immune system was successfully keeping the cancer in check, but there were a few cancer cells lurking around which could cause cancer when transplanted into someone immunosuppressed. I can't find the specific paper I'm thinking of, which is annoying as I think I remember a lot about it-if I recall right it was published by a team at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee and concerned a melanoma survivor who'd died for unrelated reasons. I think it was published around 1999-2001. This is, of course, not medical advice and these judgments are up to clinicians able to make decisions based on a person's specific situation, the level of risk that's acceptable and the risk/benefit tradeoffs. I would keep your donor card, basically. (If I remember rightly, what the doctors did was take the people who'd received this person's organs off the immunosuppressant so that their immune system would learn to recognise the transplanted organ and cancer cells both as non-self.) Blythwood (talk) 23:08, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Negative prices for electricity

It seems that when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and there are not enough people turning on their AC, sometimes the electricity gets so cheap that you actually need to pay to get rid of it. Why's that? Why not handle that surplus of energy by attaching 2 wires to a big chunk of steel and let it melt? Even if you won't use the stored energy and open a window to release the heat, you'd still make money in a way that the electricity companies must have thought about themselves. So, what's so hard about getting rid of excess electricity? Joepnl (talk) 20:46, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It's that electricity companies are in many countries obliged to supply electricity. They aren't allowed to go "eh, not worth it right now, we're making a loss" and just turn your power off. Negative prices are energy company 1 finding they have to keep a power station or a solar panel running when few people want the energy. More explanation here. Blythwood (talk) 22:35, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Surely there are bitcoin miners camped around the power plants waiting for such moments ;). 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:2B99 (talk) 22:43, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Blythwood That explains why too much electricity is generated once in a while. Not why it's so hard to get rid of it when you produce too much and would actually pay to fix that problem. And yes, certainly a win-win situation for bitcoin miners :) Joepnl (talk) 23:00, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I have to admit I'm not an electrical engineer so I'm not an expert on the physics. Ideally yes, as you say, you'd have something like pumped storage or molten salt storage. Blythwood (talk) 23:14, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The situation in Australia is as you describe. I do not know why commercial wind or solar operators don't just switch off their systems when the price goes negative. They are proposing to start charging residential solar systems if they supply 'unwanted' electricity. Many unknowns. Here's an example, where in Vic the price had maxed out, yet Tasmanian operators were being charged for supplying electricity

Greglocock (talk) 00:29, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Based on [1] (and a few other less complete sources that I found using the search "electricity negative spot prices"), the answer is that power transmission lines are so designed that excess power in one area might be impossible to transport onto another area (where potential "power sinks" would reside). I am also pretty sure that "bitcoin miners" (as well as more generally high-power consumers) need to run their "plant" more often than "whenever prices are negative" to break even on their capital expenditure; and they potentially have some cost and/or delay associated with switching the plant on or off.

From the generation side (same source), it is not feasible to turn off power plants at a short notice, and furthermore certain power sources (wind and solar?) receive subsidies based on how much they produce, so that they are OK with selling at negative prices as long as it is not too negative. In the source the subsidies are a flat sum per MWh, but a guaranteed price for residential producers would cause the same effect. Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 08:44, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The best large-scale method of storing surplus energy is pumped storage, where conventional hydroelectric power plants are used "in reverse". See List of pumped-storage hydroelectric power stations for where this is used on a global basis. The key aspect is the efficiency of the storage/re-use cycle. The OP's suggestion of melting steel would be a case where it was difficult to re-use the stored energy. Mike Turnbull (talk) 11:04, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

One of the problems with pumped storage hyrdo is that it is land-intensive and requires a particular geography. There's concerns that it won't scale with increasing energy demands on the system; that is the need for more storage will quickly outstrip our ability to build reservoirs to pump water into. Also, you actually need water for that to work, and in many places that have lots of sun and wind where pumped hydro storage is a good idea to stabilize renewable energy, they have major water problems. Look up a recent picture of Lake Mead for example. If you're going to tuck a pumped storage hydro plant somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas or something like that, where is the water going to come from? --Jayron 32 11:09, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Electrical demand HAS TO equal electrical output. If there is excess electrical energy in the system, it has to go to another form of energy. If you don't have anywhere else for it to go, it becomes heat... and that heat does stuff like melt wires and other electrical equipment... bad times. You need to have other places for that excess energy to go. Batteries store the extra energy as chemical potential energy. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity stores that energy as gravitational potential energy. But excess electrical energy output HAS TO go somewhere, the first law of thermodynamics is a mean bitch like that. Energy must be conserved. So, if the electrical system doesn't have enough storage for your extra electricity that you want to generate, they need you to shut it down. They encourage that by charging you extra for the extra electricity you are making. Because if you keep making it, they have to find something to do with it, which costs them money. Most electrical systems are working on storage options and expanding capacity, but unless and until they get to the point where they can take your extra electricity, they don't want it. With many utilities, they will discount your electrical bill if you make your own solar, because your demand is still exceeding your production. However when large scale producers (i.e. not just you in your home) produce excess electricity, they aren't producing any demand. It's just a bunch of electricity from solar panels or turbines or something. They either have to shut down or pay the utility for storage. See this video from Physics Girl that explains both the infrastructure challenges and economics of this. --Jayron 32 11:09, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

One of the other storage methods becoming feasible where there aren't the facilities for pumped storage is battery technology. Remember Elon Musk's 100MWh installation in Australia?. It has been suggested, not entirely in jest, that when we all convert to electric cars, we can use their batteries for storage (keeping running costs down). Mike Turnbull (talk) 11:29, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Battery technology presents its own challenges, especially with regards to materials and scalability as well. There is something to be said that batteries in vehicles (which are going to be used to drive anyways) represent a real source of electrical storage available to the system in the future, but large banks of idle batteries, which could represent a part of the storage solution, do not represent enough of a solution. The actual solution will likely involve a diversity of storage option, no one of which represents a significant portion of the total, but all of which are necessary. --Jayron 32 12:47, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This problem of surplus energy is ongoing in the Orkney islands, which already generate up to 140% of their energy consumption with wind and tidal power, and could host the infrastructure to generate a lot more. However, they're constrained by the current (pun unavoidable) 40MW maximum capacity of their link with the mainland of Scotland (and Great Britain's National Grid, in turn linked to several other European counties' grids), as adding to this would be much more expensive than installing more wind and tide generators. The way forward may be to use the surplus to manufacture hydrogen from seawater, and export that.

It's explained more eloquently in this recent video on Tom Scott's YouTube channel. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.0.2 (talk) 15:37, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

An excellent video I also considered linking when I linked Diana's video above. Thanks for that! --Jayron 32 15:42, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hurricane flood water

Where does most of the flooding from a hurricane come from? E.g. New York appears to be under 3 feet of water now, and of course Louisiana had it even worse. Is it ocean water that got swept in by the cyclone, or is it actually ultra powerful rain (i.e. evaporated water that recondensed)? Is it drinkable (like rain water)? Undrinkable because it's full of ocean salt? Or undrinkable pretty much everywhere (even filtered) because of contaminants on the ground getting into it? I'm in California under a drought, but I guess they can't send any of the hurricane water here regardless. Thanks. 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:2B99 (talk) 22:42, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It comes down as rainwater, buy where it collects it is largely surface runoff and therefore contaminated with any filth you will find on the ground. --Lambiam 01:58, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It can also be contaminated by sewage, since the normal sewer system (whether combined or not) will not be working properly. --184.144.99.72 (talk) 06:47, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I remember turds on the Embarcadero (San Francisco) after one particularly heavy storm. —Tamfang (talk) 01:07, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It depends, though there are typically two different sources of flooding in a hurricane:

Storm surge is water that is "pushed up" onto land from the ocean that is driven by the extreme low pressures and high winds of the hurricane. In coastal areas, such as where the storm makes landfall, much of the flooding is caused by storm surge rather than rain.
Rainfall itself can cause flooding, especially in areas where there is not a means to quickly dissipate the accumulating waters. In places like Philadelphia, for example, the Vine Street Expressway is an impermeable ditch that runs lower than the rest of the city. The massive amount of rain that fell (as quickly as 2-3 inches in one hour, over several hours) all finds the lowest point, which in that part of the city was the expressway, meaning that most of the rainwater ended up turning the expressway into a canal. The water filled the entire depressed roadway (5 meters or so of it) up to street level with water. Yes, there are storm drains, but these can only remove water so fast, they also get clogged with debris, and as a result, there's just no way for the water to drain fast enough. Look at images like [2] show the scope of the problem. Major cities like New York and Philadelphia have all of this sort of "artificial geography" that under these heavy rain conditions will just collect water, like depressed freeways or subway systems. That's why, even in an inland city like Philadelphia (or a well-protected coastal city like New York) you still get massive flooding; even if there was not a storm surge issue, you still get rainwater problems. --Jayron 32 18:10, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The NY subway has always had water pumps (and they're still good enough almost 100% the time) but most of the system is 80-117 years old, the street drain system is old and anthropogenic rain rates are starting to obsolete them. The recent tropical depression (remnant?) smashed the Manhattan, Newark etc weather stations' hour records for rain, adjacent hours almost as bad, 2/3rds inches in 5 minutes (!) at a minor weather station and half inch in at most 5-6 minutes in most of the city, that overwhelmed or bypassed the pumps to the point that one stairwell became like the scene in Titanic where the waterfall breaks the doors. Sandy of course was the storm surge variant, where most of the sub-"river"bed tunnels (up to 100-150ft below sea level) became filled with saltwater cause the sea level became higher than the lowest air shaft, station entrance or emergency exit. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:38, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

(after edit conflict)

Storm surge, as described by NOAA, "is caused primarily by a storm’s winds pushing water onshore" and is distinct from actual rainfall, which is also distinct from precipitable water, and forecasted precipitable water; and all of these are distinct from runoff, which is often defined as the actual depth of water above ground.

Depending on where you are and what the weather is doing and what is has been doing historically, the volume of water above ground - in other words, "the water that's causing the flood" at a particular spot - can be primarily attributed to any of these causes (or others). One of the jobs of a hydrologist is to subjectively and quantitatively analyze where each component of floodwater comes from, and how to mitigate its hazards.

The New York office of the National Weather Service regularly publishes a Hydrology analysis as part of their area forecast discussion, a text-product that gets updated multiple times per day (and more frequently when weather emergencies call for it).

The US Geological Survey also has responsibility for some aspects of hydrology science. Here's the main website for the New York Water Center. USGS uses different but related methodology, compared to the National Weather Service, so it's interesting to see how two communities of scientists study the same issue in different ways.

Nimur (talk) 18:17, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

[1] "Can I Donate My Organs if I've Had Cancer?". www.cancer.org.

[1]