> A typical kitchen scale has a sensitivity of 0.1 grams
As someone who's been looking for a good kitchen scale, your typical kitchen scale is actually precise to then nearest gram at best, and in terms of precision it's probably not very precise at all. 0.1g is rare, and these usually cost more, especially if they're actually reliable.
nxpnsv · 2m ago
Coffee specific scales typically are around 0.1g accurate. They are a little more expensive, but certainly not unobtainable.
I have the ooni one that i use for my baking and to measure yeast and it was one of the best investments i made.
madcaptenor · 1h ago
I hadn't thought about this, but this is probably why in baking recipes where amounts of flour, sugar, etc. are specified by weight, baking powder and any spices will be specified by volume.
Of course this is all false precision once you start adding eggs.
duped · 20m ago
imo the reason to bake by weight is because the ratios of the major ingredients (flour, fat, sugar, and water) determines the properties of the dough, and it's impossible to measure by volume reliably (especially flour, which is the largest ingredient by weight in most recipes). Meanwhile you don't have to be precise with baking soda or yeast. Mix-ins like herbs are completely to taste. Salt could go either way.
Recipes absolutely adjust for the weight of the eggs and some rules of thumb for water and fat content. But that said, a chicken egg is like 55g with 10% tolerance (at least the eggs I buy, and I do everything by weight). 5g of mostly water one way or the other doesn't have a massive amount of impact on the dough, and you can always adjust based on feel after mixing.
At scale everything is measured by weight fairly precisely. But you really don't care about accuracy, since it's the ratios of ingredients that make the product and not the raw amounts.
Metacelsus · 2h ago
Very cool. I wonder how the accuracy of weighing a single cell would compare to counting a huge number of cells (let's say 10^9) and doing a bulk weight measurement. The problem would shift to being able to accurately count cells, and being able to exclude the effects of liquid trapped in between the cells.
ridgeguy · 1h ago
Cool results and methods, but I'll disagree with one of the article's statements.
In talking about the work done on e. coli, a non spherical cell, it says the methods had to be changed due to "turbulence" attendant to the e. coli's departure from sphericity of the earlier tested yeast cells.
My rough calcs show a Reynolds number in the range of 1e-6. The onset of turbulence happens at Reynolds numbers of ~2300 for pure water. The 1% sugar solution would have a negligibly higher turbulence onset Reynolds number.
I expect the need for different methodology wasn't turbulence, but the difference in drag presented by an elongated e. coli compared to a spherical yeast cell.
Scene_Cast2 · 1h ago
I've built a scale with a kHz sampling rate and gram precision at +/-100kg range.
One thing I found out is that getting calibrated accuracy beyond 0.1% is hard and expensive despite having all that precision.
SeanSullivan86 · 51m ago
What happens when something is put on the scale while it's sampling? Does the curve depend on properties of the scale, or just properties of the object and the manner in which it was put on the scale?
Scene_Cast2 · 37m ago
It's the latter. The scale is meant for real-time monitoring of rapidly varying force (the primary application is about monitoring the force derivative and repeatable max force logging). It uses an aluminum load cell if you're familiar with those, there's a tad of a multi-kHz resonance that is typically overshadowed by the object properties.
lblume · 3h ago
> Cells are physical objects
This might sound trivial, but in me sparks a much larger point: which kinds of experimental designs and tests might we miss when engaging in a special science? In establishing dedicated methods I think it's highly likely for there to be low-hanging fruits of experimental setups not considered due to prevalence of these very specific frameworks.
franciscop · 2h ago
Some surprising science fact that many people don't know, an animal egg (chicken, birds, etc) is a single cell, so there's a huge variability in the weight of a cell.
btilly · 1h ago
I found this claim unbelievable, but it is mostly true. It isn't quite the whole egg, it is just the yolk. But that's still a very large cell!
As someone who's been looking for a good kitchen scale, your typical kitchen scale is actually precise to then nearest gram at best, and in terms of precision it's probably not very precise at all. 0.1g is rare, and these usually cost more, especially if they're actually reliable.
I have the ooni one that i use for my baking and to measure yeast and it was one of the best investments i made.
Of course this is all false precision once you start adding eggs.
Recipes absolutely adjust for the weight of the eggs and some rules of thumb for water and fat content. But that said, a chicken egg is like 55g with 10% tolerance (at least the eggs I buy, and I do everything by weight). 5g of mostly water one way or the other doesn't have a massive amount of impact on the dough, and you can always adjust based on feel after mixing.
At scale everything is measured by weight fairly precisely. But you really don't care about accuracy, since it's the ratios of ingredients that make the product and not the raw amounts.
In talking about the work done on e. coli, a non spherical cell, it says the methods had to be changed due to "turbulence" attendant to the e. coli's departure from sphericity of the earlier tested yeast cells.
My rough calcs show a Reynolds number in the range of 1e-6. The onset of turbulence happens at Reynolds numbers of ~2300 for pure water. The 1% sugar solution would have a negligibly higher turbulence onset Reynolds number.
I expect the need for different methodology wasn't turbulence, but the difference in drag presented by an elongated e. coli compared to a spherical yeast cell.
One thing I found out is that getting calibrated accuracy beyond 0.1% is hard and expensive despite having all that precision.
This might sound trivial, but in me sparks a much larger point: which kinds of experimental designs and tests might we miss when engaging in a special science? In establishing dedicated methods I think it's highly likely for there to be low-hanging fruits of experimental setups not considered due to prevalence of these very specific frameworks.
http://cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/appliance-science... verifies this.