February 03, 2016 at 02:12AM

Today I Learned: 1) Let me tell you the story of FDC Willard, one of the most famous published authors in low-temperature physics. The story of FDC Willard is inextricably bound to the story of Jack Hetherington, a low-temperature physicsist. In 1975, he submitted a paper of his for review, which happened to be a single-author paper. He learned from a friend of his during reviews that his paper would be rejected on editorial grounds because he had used the standard "we" throughout the paper, which was in this case improper as there was only one author. Jack didn't want to completely re-work the paper, so he decided to add a second author instead. Apparently having no colleagues in low-temperature physics who he wanted to add to his paper, he decided instead to add his cat, Felix domesticus cattus Willard, i.e. FDC Willard. The paper was accepted. Willard would later go on to first-author a paper on... well, frankly I couldn't decipher what it was about, but it was another low-temperature physics paper having something to do with helium 3. Thanks to Anders Knight on this one! 2) Enzymes are really useful for a lot of industrial chemistry. It's relatively common to mix up a big reaction vessel with some substrate, pour in a bunch of enzyme, and stir it around or heat it to produce a reaction, and the enzyme greatly reduces the energy required to do so. The product can be extracted, sold, and thus money is made. However, enzymes are expensive to produce. You really don't want to make a giant reaction vessel's worth of enzyme and then throw it away. You can filter out enzymes with some sort of antibodies or similar trick, but that tends to be expensive and inefficient. A generally better way to re-use enzymes (as I learned today) is to not just dump the enzymes in -- instead, covalently bond them to some solid thing, like a rod or paddle or mixing aparatus, which you can stick in the reaction vessel... and just pull out when you're done, ready to be re-used. Enzymes used this way are referred to as immobilized biocatalists. The tricky part is figuring how to attach the enzyme without destroying its function. Rumor has it that one surprisingly effective way to attach enzymes to a surface is... to bake them on! That's it. Just heat them a bunch. Apparently works better than it should, although I don't have a reference for that. Credit also goes to Anders Knights on this one. 3) Otto E. Rössler, inventor of the Rössler atractor (a rather famous system of simple differential equations with rather complex properties that's studied as a cannonical example of chaotic dynamics -- check out the wiki page for some cool snapshots of the system) is one of the most wide-ranging scientists I've ever encountered, and possibly one of the craziest. For example, he is one of the scientists most against the experiments in the Large Hadron Collider on the grounds that it could produce Earth-destroying black holes. Check out his blog, linked below. Among other things, it covers: cryodynamics (a "sister theory to thermodynamics"); ebola; the LHC; Interstellar; the ethics of curing elephant autism. http://ift.tt/1mc997p