A serendipitous observation in a Chemical Engineering lab at Penn Engineering has led to a surprising discovery: a new class of nanostructured materials that can … Read More ›
Even more surprising: the droplets didn’t evaporate quickly, as thermodynamics would predict.
“According to the curvature and size of the droplets, they should have been evaporating,” says Patel. “But they were not; they remained stable for extended periods.”
With a material that could potentially defy the laws of physics on their hands, Lee and Patel sent their design off to a collaborator to see if their results were replicable.
I really don’t like the repeated use of the phrase “defy the laws of physics.” That’s an extraordinary claim, and it needs extraordinary proof, and the researchers already propose a mechanism by which the droplets remained stable under existing physical laws, namely that they were getting replenished from the nanopores inside the material as fast as evaporation was pulling water out of the droplets.
I recognize the researchers themselves aren’t using the phrase, it’s the Penn press release organization trying to further drum up interest in the research. But it’s a bad framing. You can make it sound interesting without resorting to clickbait techniques like “did our awesome engineers just break the laws of physics??” Hell, the research is interesting enough on its own; passive water collection from the air is revolutionary! No need for editorializing!
Yeah, science communicators need to not evaluate themselves by the same metrics as newspapers and magazines. Getting people to click and share should not be the metric of success.
Yeah, why pretend physics are being broken when we could instead discuss the fact that we’re one step closer to having moisture farming as a profession!
I really don’t like the repeated use of the phrase “defy the laws of physics.” That’s an extraordinary claim, and it needs extraordinary proof, and the researchers already propose a mechanism by which the droplets remained stable under existing physical laws, namely that they were getting replenished from the nanopores inside the material as fast as evaporation was pulling water out of the droplets.
I recognize the researchers themselves aren’t using the phrase, it’s the Penn press release organization trying to further drum up interest in the research. But it’s a bad framing. You can make it sound interesting without resorting to clickbait techniques like “did our awesome engineers just break the laws of physics??” Hell, the research is interesting enough on its own; passive water collection from the air is revolutionary! No need for editorializing!
It also somewhat instils distrust in science IMO, goes along the “eggs were bad for our health just 10y ago” type of argument
Those Egg Council creeps got to you too, eh?
Yeah, science communicators need to not evaluate themselves by the same metrics as newspapers and magazines. Getting people to click and share should not be the metric of success.
Yeah, why pretend physics are being broken when we could instead discuss the fact that we’re one step closer to having moisture farming as a profession!