Specifically, it's a pecan pie with the topology of a sphere, made up of 20 triangular sub-pies.
The baker/architect, a professor of computer science at UC Irvine, made isoceles-triangle-shaped pie pans out of sheet metal, then connected them with extra-strong magnets. He reports "surprisingly little slump" during serving.
Check out some of the winners of the second annual Science Dance Contest, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Contestants choreographed and performed dances illustrating their Ph.D. theses.
This is my favorite, the winner in the graduate-student division: Sue Lynn Lau, of the University of Sydney, Australia, and some friends interpreted her thesis, titled “The role of vitamin D in beta cell function.”
(The Sugar Plum Fairy is feeding the beta cells marshmallows, a.k.a glucose.)
Go geeks! You never see anything like this on "Dancing with the Stars."
I wouldn't have a clue how to dance this thesis: “Resolving pathways of functional coupling in human hemoglobin using quantitative low temperature isoelectric focusing of asymmetric mutant hybrids.”
But here is the winner in the professors' division, Vince LiCata, a biology professor at Louisiana State University, with his interpretation of said thesis, which he calls, "A Molecular Dance in the Blood, Observed."
The music is perfect; it's Laurie Anderson, "Born, Never Asked," from the album Big Science. (Years ago, I had an excerpt from "O Superman" as the outgoing message on my answering machine for months, until my friends begged me to remove it.)
These 3-D portraits are smaller than a grain of salt. Each "nanobama" is a vertical stack of about 150 million carbon nanotubes, unusually strong hollow cylinders about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair.
University of Michigan professor John Hart and his colleagues began by converting Shepard Fairey's iconic red, white and blue poster of Barack Obama to a line drawing. They shrunk the drawing and printed it on a glass plate with a laser. Then they shined ultraviolet light through the glass plate on to a silicon wafer to create a pattern on which to grow the carbon nanotubes.
