Of all the tech innovations coming out of McDonald’s, we never would have expected the humble drinking straw needed a redesign. But that’s exactly what a team of robotic and aerospace engineers did as part of a marketing push for the burger chain’s new Chocolate Shamrock Shake. For those who aren’t familiar: the new menu item is a layered fifty-fifty combination of McDonald’s standard chocolate milkshake with the minty seasonal favorite on top. The Chocolate Shamrock has actually enjoyed secret menu status for a while now, but Mickey D’s is bringing it to the mainstream for the minty green shake’s yearly St. Patrick’s Day appearance. The redesigned STRAW — short for “Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal, ” of course — is meant to alleviate the most basic of problems: having to wait for your shake to melt a bit before you can get the perfect mix of chocolate and mint flavors. While a conventional straw will only slurp up one part of the shake at a time, engineers from JACE Engineering and NK Labs carefully engineered the STRAW’s J-shaped snorkel design and side openings to suck in both layers at once. According to McDonald’s, their new tubular sipping device required some fairly complex computational fluid dynamics simulations to get the flow right and make sure it works just as well at the bottom of your shake as it did on the first sip. The Chocolate Shamrock Shake was released alongside a couple other new minty, Shamrock-infused beverages earlier this month, but the STRAW itself will get a nationwide release next Tuesday.
Read the original post:
McDonald’s has re-engineered drinking straws
Solandri writes: We’ve only been able to measure the Earth’s magnetic field strength for about two centuries. During this time, there has been a gradual decline in the field strength. In recent years, the rate of decline seems to be accelerating, leading to some speculation that the Earth may be losing its magnetic field — a catastrophic possibility since the magnetic field is what protects life on Earth from dangerous solar radiation. Ferromagnetic particles in rocks provide a long-term history which tells us the poles have flipped numerous times. But uncertainties in dating the rocks prevents their use in understanding decade-scale magnetic field fluctuations. Now a group of archeologists and geophysicists have come up with a novel way to produce decade-scale temporal measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field strength from before the invention of the magnetometer. When iron-age potters fired their pottery in a kiln to harden it, it loosened tiny ferromagnetic particles in the clay. As the pottery cooled and these particles hardened, it captured a snapshot of the Earth’s magnetic field. Crucially, the governments of that time required pottery used to collect taxed goods (e.g. a portion of olive oil sold) to be stamped with a royal seal. These seals changed over time as new kings ascended, or governments were completely replaced after invasion. Thus by cross-referencing the magnetic particles in the pottery with the seals, researchers were able to piece together a history of the Earth’s magnetic field strength spanning from the 8th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE. Their findings show that large fluctuations in the strength of the magnetic field over a span of decades are normal. The study has been published in the journal PNAS. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 