March 06, 2016 at 03:35AM

Today I Learned: 1) Apparently I've been cooking garlic wrong this whole time! 2) Tree rings are used to calibrate carbon dating. We know that a tree grows a new ring every year, so we can measure the carbon-14 fraction in different rings to calibrate how much decay to expect over different times (in woody tissues, at least). 3) For reasons I still don't entirely understand, flying at the speed of sound is much, much rougher and more unstable than either flying well below *or* well above the speed of sound. As a result, supersonic aircraft are designed to quickly accelerate through mach 1 to at least mach 1.05.