BAN #194: Ear roaring, Star trailing, Egg cooking

[Spiral Galaxy M81 image credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona]

A Bit o’ Science

The entirety of science is too much for one sitting. Here’s a morsel for you.

Life is so weird. I notice odd things all the time, so many that they’ve piled up in that part of my brain where I file such things away, and sometimes forget about them. If something doesn’t happen very often, or conversely happens so often I don’t think about it, well, those collect dust in my brain vault.

Until someone randomly tweets a thing and the light goes on. In this case the circuit was completed by my pal Evan Hadfield:

OMG. I know that sound! I’ve been able to do this since I was little. I’ve always been curious about it, but never have that confluence of events of having it happen, thinking about it, actually doing some research about it, and having the opportunity to look it up.

[The tensor tympani muscle (underlined) connects the eardrum to the ossicles. Also, the next time someone insults me, I’ll call them an external meatus. Credit: Gray (1918)]

That link in the tweet goes to an article about the tensor tympani muscle, located in the ear. It connects the eardrum to the ossicles, those three teeny bones in your ear that help you win trivia contests (they’re the smallest bones in the body). When a sound wave hits your eardrum it vibrates, and that in turn vibrates the ossicles, which connect to the cochlea, a fluid-filled chamber in you inner ear. This part gets complicated, but the fluid triggers the cells in the Organ of Corti, which then send impluses to your brain that you interpret as sound.

The tensor tympani can help suppress some sounds (like chewing), by contracting and tensing up the eardrum. This makes it harder to send vibrations to the ossicles.

BUT. Some folks can control their tensor tympani in a limited way, which (if I’m thinking of this correctly) bypasses the eardrum, but still shakes the ossicles, creating sound. It’s low frequency, so it sounds like a rumbling sound, or the roaring of air forced through a small opening.

I can do this! I’ve wondered about it pretty much my whole life! It feels a little bit like the using the same muscles to pull my ears back; similar, but not exactly. Some people trigger their tensor tympani when they yawn, so you might hear that roaring sound then.

Remember, when you do this your eardrum is not sensing any sound waves, so in a way this sound isn’t real! It’s a misinterpretation of the vibrations sent to your brain as sound. So it sounds to me (har har) like it’s an aural illusion.

And, oh, that feeling when a long-simmering question gets answered. Sooooo satisfying.

SCIENCE!

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

All I really need to tell you is that Michael Shainblum has a new time-lapse night sky video out.

If you know, you know. If you don’t know then now you will.

Wow.

I love the effect of the streaking, where you see the stars leaving fading trails behind them. Conceptually, it’s pretty easy to do: Tell the software to display a frame, then display the next one with the previous one added in but at, say, 90% opacity, and continue doing that with each frame. You can change the opacity level to make it fade faster or slower, and cut it off at a certain number of frames (say, 30, so each frame is in one second of video at the standard 30 frames per second rate).

It’s not as simple as that, but that’s the idea. It makes for a lovely effect, especially with the crescent Moon in one scene starting at 00:23. Of course, the video starts out with just Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, doing that (plus a star near it) while all the others don’t streak. I assume there was some masking employed to do that, picking out certain pixels to apply that effect to while leaving the others intact. Again, it’s pretty dramatic.

Of course, this is all a neat demonstration of the Earth’s rotation. The stars move to the west as the Earth rotates to the east, our planet’s spin literally reflected in the stars. Lovely.

Check out his work at his website, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram!

Life Hacks

Not what you might expect from an astronomer, but in my defense I am alive

I was a latch-key kid (is that term still around? It means both parents worked so kids who came home from school were without supervision for a lot of the day), and the youngest of four children, so I didn’t get a lot of kitchen help when I was younger. I learned on my own how to make things, and because of that I was, um, not a great cook. There are a lot of tricks and tips to make cooking go from adequate to good, and from good to great, but I didn’t know any of those.

My wife, on the other hand, is a fabulous cook. Her baking is beyond delicious, and in recent years she’s been watching a ton of cooking shows and experimenting more in the kitchen. I’ve been eating far better recently than I have in my entire life.

One thing she’s been into lately is Korean stir fry, which is incredible, but also has the wondrous bonus of a fried egg sitting atop the mound of rice, veggies, and be-sauced meat. The yolk mixed into the bulk of the rice is incredibly yummy.

Now, when she cooks an egg it comes out so smooth and silky, whereas when I do it they’re always rubbery and weird. It turns out the secret to a perfect egg is actually pretty simple: low heat.

[On my way to perfectly cooked eggs. I deserve a… standing ovation. Credit: Phil Plait, from my Instagram account]

Seriously! I always cooked mine hot and fast, but that is the exact opposite of what you want. Instead, heat the pan at a low setting (in our case, level 3 out of 9 on our cooktop, so your kilometerage may vary). Once it’s at temperature, add oil (we use either olive or avocado), swish it around, and add the egg. Cover it if you want the yolk to cook a bit (I like it runny, but not raw). If the white starts to bubble it’s too hot! It’s also too late. Eat the mistake (that’s a good rule to make you learn, and we don’t like wasting food) but try a lower setting next time.

The difference is night and day. This also works for scrambled eggs as well. The texture is so so so much better.

I know, for a lot of you this might be a “duh” moment, but for me it’s a big deal, so I’m hoping it might be for others as well.

Bon apetit.

Et alia

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