Synchrotrons and many board games have at least one thing are common – objects are accelerated in a circle but going round and round is not the main point of either. In board games, the object is fun and in “Diamond: The Game” there is also an educational element.
Developed by Mark Basham and Claire Murray at the UK’s Diamond Light Source synchrotron and Matthew Dunstan at the University of Cambridge, the game puts players in the role of a researcher at Diamond. By visiting different beamlines while progressing round the board, participants learn about the diversity of science that is done at the facility – including physics, chemistry, cultural heritage, and more.
Research covered in the game include a study of Rembrandt’s painting of Homer, COVID-19 drug screening, and work on the degradation of the Tudor warship Mary Rose.
STEM careers
The game is for two to five players and takes between 20-30 minutes to play. Diamond is suitable for ages 10 and up, and its inventors hope that it provides a realistic picture of what it is like to be a scientist – ultimately encouraging more young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and medicine.
The game was play-tested by over 200 students and released online as a free-to-print game in 2020. The trio says that since then, Diamond has been played by more than 14,000 players in more than 30 countries worldwide. A boxed version of the game is now being delivered 100 schools in underserved areas of the UK.
In the true spirit of science, the researchers have published a paper about the game.
Burger flipping
It’s well into summer in the northern hemisphere so what better time than to get the barbecue out and fill the air with the smell of seared food. But what is the most effective way to grill a burger or a steak– flip the meat once or many times?
One school of thought is that you should flip only once as multiple times will mean less browning and therefore less flavour. Others, however, claim that regular flipping results in a more even cook and is also about 30% faster given that each surface of the meat is exposed to heat relatively evenly and with less time to cool down.
Mathematician Jean-Luc Thiffeault from the University of Wisconsin in the US has now created a “simple” model to demonstrate this speedy cooking time for flipped meat. Under the assumption that the burger is an infinite thin slab and has symmetric thermal properties – i.e. the same at the top and the bottom – he used a 1D heat equation to find that flipping the patty once results in a final cooking time of about 80 s. This reduces, however, for every subsequent flip so that some 20 flips results in a 20% drop in the cooking time.
Taking Thiffeault’s model to its mathematical extreme, the quickest cooking time finally reaches 63 s – or some 29% quicker than a one-flip. The only problem being that you have to flip the burger infinite times, which would challenge even the most experienced griller.
The research is described in a paper on arXiv.
