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A Microbe's-Eye View of Beer
fjordboy writes "After a hard days work and a couple of beers, don't we all really wonder what our draft would look like under thousands of times magnification? Maybe not, but after nine years of work and five million dollars, Michael Davidson of Florida State University has created a website of microscopic proportions that will satiate anyone's curiosity. His site, MolecularExpressions.com has galleries full of images of ordinary materials under extraordinary magnification. The list of materials includes beers from around the world, popular cocktails, snoopy and many more. The site has a wealth of images that are well worth a look. CNN has a brief description of the site and the work that went into it, but feel free to skip that and just gaze at an Irish favorite." Some pretty new galleries since the last time we mentioned it.
There are plenty of better stouts
...how a badly organized, hard to navigate website, can make its content seem so much worse.
To quote Einstein (or at least some web site that claimed he said this, consider this my revenge against profs that try to get me to properly reference things), "research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
However, if it was put that way to the public it probably wouldn't raise those millions, so they will often put it differently. When it comes to things like taking pictures at a "micro-miniscule" scale, it seems likely to me that the methods of magnification need research, and even after implementation need to be compared for relative benefits and weaknesses in different situations. So this research may not be as useless as it first appears.
Another thing: some research has no practicality at all. Other research initially has none, but develops it later (non-Euclidean geometry). It's difficult to distinguish between the two ahead of time.
...why on earth would it take $5 million to get images of magnified beer?
This is so true, it's not even funny. Alcohol (in particular beer) is partly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people every year. Yet everyone always looks the other way when this is brought up. I don't understand this. Not that alcohol should be outlawed, but something needs to done. Every night people die because some fucktard decided he wasn't too drunk to drive. This goes for anything that impairs your driving ability; alcohol is just the most predominant.