We anxiously await superconducting tequila: It's not actually the booze that's superconducting, but it can improve the superconduction of another material. This one's in the arXiv, so it hasn't been through peer review yet, but the procedures seem so straightforward that it's difficult to imagine they got things wrong unless all the authors have been hitting their samples, which included "ethanol-water mixtures and alcohol drinks (beer, red wine, white wine, Japanese sake, Shochu (clear distilled liquor) and whisky)."
The goal of the work was to improve the performance of a simple model superconductor, a mixture of iron, tellurium, and sulfur. Unfortunately, solubility issues cause problems, and the material has to undergo extensive water treatments before it supports superconductivity. Changing the treatment slightly by mixing some ethanol in must have seemed like a reasonable approach to accelerating the process. Why they thought booze might work better isn't obvious, but they checked, and it did. For the record, wine worked best, with reds outperforming whites.
Or you could just use a football fan's breath: Booze Superconducting research material may be easy to find in the bottle, but another of this week's papers went looking for it somewhere else, as is apparent in its title: "Can We Assess Blood Alcohol Levels of Attendees Leaving Professional Sporting Events?" The answer is yes, at least if the events are baseball and football. Alcohol could be detected on the breath of a full 40 percent of the fans, and that may be a low estimate. "Our sample size was small, partly because of the difficulty of getting fans to submit to a BAC test after a game," said an author. Risk factors for alcohol consumption? Tailgating and being under 35 years old. Tailgating increased the odds of being legally drunk by 14 times and, if these numbers hold up to the full stadium, about 5,000 people leaving a typical NFL game couldn't drive legally.
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Christina Applegate Shana Hiatt Tara Conner Drea de Matteo Trista Rehn
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