Curious Hygrometers and Barometers

Designing Community Atmosphere Barometers

The World of learning is undergoing radical changes. Increasingly Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) support new temporal and spatial learning configurations. Traditional face-toface learning situations offer a variety of ways for people to provide informal feedback contributing to the establishment and maintenance of a community atmosphere. ICT supported distance education presen...

Evaporative microclimate driven hygrometers and hygromotors

A strip of paper placed on a hand spontaneously curls upwards. This simple observation illustrates the ability of a relatively homogeneous hygroscopic structural material, paper, to sense and respond to the microclimate near a non-equilibrium system, a moist evaporative boundary layer. We quantify this interaction using a simple experiment and show that it can be understood in terms of a minima...

Rats and Guinea-Pigs in Plague "Barometers"

killed in very large numbers, and although this has been going on for about three years, rats are still coming in at much the same rate, and there is hardly any decrease noticeable in their number. Considerable sums of money have been spent in payment of rewards and entertainment of a special staff, but all this money has been and is being spent without doing much good in so far as the rat popu...

Construction Material Monitoring with «optical Hair» Hygrometers

Molecular Clouds as Cosmic-ray Barometers

It is generally assumed that the flux of cosmic-rays observed at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere is representative of the flux in the Galaxy at large. The advent of high sensitivity, high resolution γ-ray detectors, together with a knowledge of the distribution of the atomic hydrogen and especially of the molecular hydrogen in the Galaxy on sub-degree scales, as provided by the NANTEN survey,...