Tertiary Source

The Greenland and Antarctic landmasses are under a mile of ice. Supposedly if this weight were removed the landmasses would "rebound" out of the mantle. How high would they go?

To an outside observer, an object dropped onto a black hole never actually crosses the horizon; it approaches the horizon asymptotically and light from it becomes more and more redshifted. Suppose I drop a room-temperature blackbody in a hole. How long does it take before the redshifted temperature is colder than the Hawking temperature of the horizon?

Sensitivity to market fluctuations: a disadvantage to overly progressive taxes?

A metric for cheap eating: calories per dollar?

Yesterday's solstice was the day when the northern hemisphere gets less solar irradiance than any other. In most countries this is "midwinter," but in the United States it's "the first day of winter." When did this label change?

A jugful of water adds some thermal inertia and makes an empty refrigerator cool more efficiently. A tubful of water ought to do the same thing for drafty old house. How big is the effect?

My fan-driven humidifier makes my house feel colder. How much heat does it pull to vaporize the water it does?

Suppose I replace an incandescent light bulb with a more expensive, more energy-efficient, longer-lived light — a CFL, an LED, whatever — based on the expectation that it'll cost less over its life. How old does my incandescent bulb have to be before I actually save anything?

If Hawking's connection between black holes and thermodynamics is right, astrophysical black holes --- for which general relativity predicts everything bizarre happens well inside the horizon, and for which there are observational evidence --- are at the zero-temperature limit. What's the "warmest" black hole for which there is observational evidence? What's the transition "temperature" where quantum gravity starts to matter?

An observation by Consumer Reports, that breakfast cereals marketed to children aren't terribly nutritious, has gotten some evening-news press. The main contribution of the Consumer Reports release seems to be that they bought a bunch of cereal and read the nutrition labels. What's new here? Has the composition of existing products been tweaked? Have some sweeter brands been introduced to replace healthier ones? How do these sorts of news blobs correlate with sales, or with marketing spending?