I’ve not heard of nanobubbles before but apparently it is possible to form them from conventional microbubbles. Researchers in Japan have figured out how to make the nanobubbles more stable by using salt. Nanowerk has the media release, which includes a pretty graphic, here. Applications for nanobubbles have much potential for preventing arteriosclerosis, better food preservation, and as cleaning agents.
Researchers have discovered that salt can be stretched physically. (That’s not what my science teachers told me!) The unexpected discovery may help researchers better understand sea salt aerosols which have been implicated in ozone depletion, smog formation, and as triggers for asthma. The full media release can be read here on Nanowerk News.
I mentioned the bubble charts on Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog yesterday and noted that I have some difficulty fully understanding the information they convey. I’m much more comfortable with standard bar charts. I know how to read them and can tell if the information is being manipulated.
I noted that in Maynard’s screen cast he describes them as “classic” bubble charts. I haven’t come across them before but that doesn’t preclude their use in sectors that are not familiar to me. At any rate, it got me to thinking about a paper I just wrote called, ‘Nanotechnology, storytelling, sensing, and materiality‘. In it I suggest that we will need modes other than the purely visual to understand nanotechnology (or science at quantum scales) and implied that we rely too much on the visual. Then yesterday I posted here that I think visual data will become increasingly important. My suspicion is that both are somewhat true and I think the answer lies in a multimodal approach. More about that tomorrow.
Yeah, that “classic” sort of crept into the screencast – by the time I had made ten botched attempts to record it, I guess the bubble charts were beginning to look a little old!
To be honest, I’m not sure how widespread they are. I used them here because it’s a convenient way to summarize data covering a large span – because the plotted area is related to the data being visualized, it is easier to compare very large with very small numbers.
In this way, I think the display offers some intuitive insight into what might be relevant. But I’m not convinced it provides much of an analytical insight. Which is one reason why it’s useful to have access to multiple visualizations I suspect. And probably more importantly, why I prefer to allow access to the root data.
Hi Andrew! Thanks for clearing up the ‘classic’ comment and I can sure sympathize with have to rerecord a piece multiple times. There’s a point at which something that minor just doesn’t matter much, eh? I very much enjoyed your screencast, BTW. Also, as I’ve gone back to your site I’ve been learning how decode the info. better. Maryse