March 10, 2016 at 02:37AM

Today I Learned: 1) There are multichannel pipettes that can switch between spacing for 96-well plates (the usual multichannel pipette spacing) and for 384-well plates (which have wells closer together)! #pipettes (Also, there are 96-well pipettes. They pipette 96 wells at once. Mind. Blown.) Thanks to Andrey Shur! 2) There have been a number of controlled, blind studies to determine whether Stradivarius violins are detectably "better" than either other good contemporary violins or good modern violins. According to those studies, Stradivariuses are consistently on par with other super-good violins, but never unambiguously better. Also, many of the better-quality Stradivarius violins (made between 1700 and 1725) are named after famous owners, such as the General Kyd Stradivarius, Lipinsky Stradivarius, and Lady Blunt. These exceptionally famous violins are so well-known that a number have been stolen and then recovered after merchants recognized the violin on sale and reported them to their proper owners. Also, today I learned that Stradivari is the name of the family that built the Stradiviarius violins in the 1600s and 1700s. Thanks to Mengsha Gong for getting me to look up Stradivarius Information. 3) ...the story of the crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401. This is the most ridiculous crash story I've ever heard, on several accounts. Here's what happened. Flight 401 was doing just fine on its way in to Miami International Airport, right up until it made the landing approach. What the pilots didn't know was that an indicator light had burned out that normally would tell them when the landing gear was down. When they started their approach, the landing gear went down normally, but the indicator light didn't come on like it was supposed to, even after cycling the poor landing gear several times. Instead of manually deploying the landing gear, the Captain of Flight 401 decided to abort the approach, settle into a holding pattern, and check out the problem. Two of the three crew members disassembled the light assembly to check it out while a third went below decks to check manually whether the landing gear was down. So far so good. The only problem is that the crew set the plane to the wrong autopilot -- instead of instructing the plane to hold altitude, they set it to a mode that keeps the plane on whatever course you set with the yoke. Somehow, the yoke was accidentally pushed forward enough to send the plane on a slow decline. If it had been a steep decline, the pilots probably would have noticed. If it had been daytime, the pilots probably would have noticed that the ground was approaching. It wasn't, and it wasn't, and the crew was too distracted by the faulty light to notice that they were losing altitude. For around five minutes, Flight 401 slowly drifted to the ground. Less than ten seconds before impacting the ground, records from the flight voice recorder indicate that the pilots noticed something was wrong with their altitude. Then they hit the ground at 227 miles per hour. The other ridiculous thing about this incident, in my mind, is how many survivors there were. Of the 176 people on Flight 401 when it crashed, only 99 died -- that's a 44% survival rate for a crashed plane. Not too bad, considering the circumstances.