• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

You Might Be Able To Use A Mug Of Hot Drink As A Particle Detector

November 20, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A video from science YouTuber James Orgill, better known by the channel’s name The Action Lab, has demonstrated how you might be able to use a mug of hot drink as a particle detector.

If your aim is to detect and see the effect of particles that happen to be passing through your kitchen, that’s actually pretty easy. All you need to do is make a “cloud chamber“, and for that you only need a few cheap and readily available parts, including a plastic tub or cup, some felt or a sponge, some isopropyl alcohol, and the most difficult part to obtain: dry ice.

Advertisement



By soaking the felt or sponge in the alcohol and securing it to the top of the tub, then placing the tub on top of a surface above the dry ice, you create your cloud chamber. 

At the top of the chamber, the liquid slowly evaporates into a gas. But as it sinks to the bottom of the chamber, the cold ice makes it want to turn back into liquid form. In the bottom of the chamber, the air becomes supersaturated. When a particle travels through it, it can knock off some of the electrons of the molecules within the gas. As the molecules become charged, the alcohol gas becomes attracted to it and forms tiny droplets, resulting in streaks in the cloud chamber showing you the particle’s path. 

In this setup, you can see all sorts of particles, including radon atoms – the larger streaks you see – and muons – the small long streaks. It’s pretty cool.

Advertisement

But there may be an easier way to see the effects of cosmic rays using ingredients you are far more likely to have in your kitchen: a nice hot mug of cocoa.



Under the right lighting, you can see a layer of droplets form on top of a mug of cocoa, tea, or coffee – possibly held up by the steam rising from beneath, or due to a difference in the electric charge of the droplets compared with the bulk of the liquid. If you watch your mug for a while, you may notice that cracks form on the surface, which look an awful lot like particle streaks in a cloud chamber. 

The phenomenon has been known about since at least 1922, when Japanese physicist Torahiko Terada wrote an essay titled A Cup of Hot Tea. However, the mechanism is still not definitively known, and suggestions range from cosmic rays to convection forces in the liquid.

Advertisement

“Droplets individually and collectively vanish. In a collective event, the vanishing front propagates at approximately 1 m/s, which is close to the capillary surface wave speed of the water with a wave-length of 0.1 ~ 1 mm,” one team explained on the topic in a paper published in Scientific Reports. 

“Whether a vanishing event triggers a collective event or not, it is not clear what causes a droplet to vanish in the first place; the reason may be fluctuations in the evaporation flow or an electric disturbance that is caused by a cosmic ray if the droplets are levitated by the electrostatic force.”

It is possible that the disrupting event is cosmic rays, though that isn’t entirely clear. 

“The observed concurrent events are likely to be triggered by a common disturbance in the levitation force because it is highly improbable that more than one event occurs in less than 10 ms in a small area of the microscope field of view,” the team continued.

Advertisement

Orgill conducted his own informal experiments on hot drinks, and came to a similar conclusion. Key to this was that gamma radiation did not appear to have an effect on the drink. However, bringing an electrostatic charge close to the chamber did have a pronounced effect on the vapor, similar to inside a cloud chamber. As explained in the study above, this could indicate that cosmic rays are involved, as it suggests the droplets are levitated by the electrostatic force.

However, Orgill noticed that the patterns tended to appear along natural convection of the liquid, suggesting it could be down instead to convective forces within your drink.

“There must be enough turbulence that this causes the drops to touch and have a coalescing pattern,” Orgill said in the video. “So it seems that this isn’t very much cosmic rays causing it but a combination of electric charges interacting with the convection cells in the liquid. So what do you think? Why do you think the drops levitate and what causes these cascading patterns when they disappear?”

Either way, it’s a pretty interesting phenomenon, all taking place in your morning coffee.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Was Jesus A Hallucinogenic Mushroom? One Scholar Certainly Thought So

Source Link: You Might Be Able To Use A Mug Of Hot Drink As A Particle Detector

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Domestic Cats Keeping Making Hybrids. That’s A Problem, And Yes – That Includes Some Pets
  • These Strange Little Lizards Have Toxic Green Blood, And No One Knows Exactly Why
  • How Does 2-In-1 Shampoo And Conditioner Work?
  • There Are 2-Billion-Year-Old “Millennium Rocks” In A Suburb, Hundreds Of Miles From Their Primeval Home
  • “That’s A Hellfire Missile Smacking Into That UFO”: Strange Video Emerges From US UAP Hearing
  • In 40,000 Years, Voyager 1 Will Have A Close Encounter With Gliese 445
  • Abnormally Long Gamma Ray Burst Unlike Anything We’ve Seen Before Baffles Astronomers
  • Critically Endangered Shark Meat Is Being Sold In US Stores For As Little As $2.99
  • Infectious Mouth Bacteria Lurking In Artery Plaques Could Be Behind Some Heart Attacks
  • What Would You Reach If You Kept Digging Under Antarctica?
  • First Visible Time Crystals Ever Made Have Astonishing Complexity And Practical Potential
  • “Something Undeniably Special”: The Chi Cygnids, A New Five-Yearly Meteor Shower, Peak This Month
  • A 200-Meter-Tall Event We Didn’t See Sent Signals Through The Earth For Nine Whole Days
  • Why Are So Many Volcanoes Underwater?
  • In 1977, A Hybrid Was Born In A Zoo. What It Taught Us Could Save One Of The Planet’s Most Endangered Species
  • How To Park A Dangerous Asteroid So It Doesn’t Bite You Later
  • New Study Finds Evidence For What Every Parent Knows About Bluey
  • New Breakthrough Takes Plastic Garbage And Turns It Into Tool For Carbon Capture
  • NASA To Hold Press Conference About New Perseverance Rover Discovery Tomorrow
  • Strange Halos Have Formed Around Barrels Of Chemicals Dumped Off LA’s Coast Over 50 Years Ago
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version