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篇目1

A Pizza Geek Discovers the World’s Smartest Pizza Box
世界上最智能的披萨盒长啥样？

The next time a pizza is delivered to your doorstep, just take a brief moment to admire the vehicle it arrived in.A pizza box is a woefully under-appreciated object; oftentimes brutally ripped open before being tossed directly into the trash.But let’s not forget these boxes have a very important job: Namely to ensure your pizza gets to you safe and delicious.

Just imagine if we lived in a world where no one cared about what their car looked like or how it functioned; a world where all that mattered is that we get from point A to point B. “That’s what’s going on with pizza boxes,” says Scott Wiener, a pizza box expert.“But it’s such an important element to the quality of the pizza; it’s really something we should be paying attention to.”

By and large, pizza box design hasn’t evolved much beyond the standard cardboard square, but a few boxes out there are elevating the field’s design.There are boxes made from ultra-green material which is a major score for the environment, and others with fun quirks like a fold that turns the box into a coffin for pizza “remains.”

But you’d probably be surprised to know that the smartest pizza box wasn’t born in Italy, New York or even Chicago.The most innovative pizza box in the world actually comes from India, a country with a booming appetite for slices.“I used to think the best box was from Eataly,” Wiener says of Mario Batali’s NYC italian food emporium.

It’s not an exaggeration to say the man is obsessed with pizza.For the past six years, the Brooklyn-based pizza aficionado/tour guide has been amassing a huge collection of pizza boxes.

The whole point of a pizza box is to keep your pie warm.Typical boxes, like those you get from most of your chain restaurants, come with four ventilation holes that are rarely used.This hot-box technique traps in steam, which not only makes your crust mushy, but allows the moisture to break down the cardboard, resulting in pizza that tastes like paper.

All well-designed pizza boxes tackle a problem.In Chicago, deep dish pizza requires a totally different design on account of the pie’s thickness.Instead of using the Walker Lock, the standard box fold that locks the top flap into the third wall, Chicago-style pie boxes are designed so that when you flip the lid open, the walls collapse, making the pizza easier to serve.

Most pizza boxes are made from corrugated cardboard, a material that’s made from three layers of paper liners glued together.In traditional boxes, this material is combined, printed and then run through a die machine that cuts out vents and creates creases that will later be folded into a box.The VENTiT reverses this process, so instead of stamping the cuts after the corrugated cardboard is assembled, the middle and inner liner are cut together before combining it with a precut outer liner.

These misaligned holes give steam an escape route that takes it through the fluted middle layer and and then exit out the top without ever touching the pizza.“In other words, there’s no direct hole,” Wiener explains.“You’re taking the exact same box but reorganizing how it’s put together so it creates better movement for steam.”

Unfortunately, you can only find the VENTiT in India, Dubai, and at Wiener’s apartment in Brooklyn, where he stashes all 650 boxes into three closets.But it’s actually not as bad as it sounds since he makes sure each box is flattened and rigorously organized.“I’m in my apartment right now and don’t see a single box,” he says."It’s not until you open the closet and look up that you think: “Ok, this guy might have a problem.”

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篇目2

Scientists Found an Entirely New Way of Measuring Time
科学家发现测量时间的全新方式

Determining the passage of time in our world of ticking clocks and oscillating pendulums is a simple case of counting the seconds between ‘then’ and ‘now’.

Down at the quantum scale of buzzing electrons, however, ‘then’ can’t always be anticipated.Worse still, ‘now’ often blurs into a haze of vagueness.A stopwatch simply isn’t going to work for some scenarios.

A potential solution could be found in the very shape of the quantum fog itself, according to a 2022 study by researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden.

Their experiments on the wave-like nature of something called a Rydberg state revealed a novel way to measure time that doesn’t require a precise starting point.

Rydberg atoms are the over-inflated balloons of the particle kingdom.Puffed up with lasers instead of air, these atoms contain electrons in extremely high energy states, orbiting far from the nucleus.

Of course, not every pump of a laser needs to puff an atom up to cartoonish proportions.In fact, lasers are routinely used to tickle electrons into higher energy states for a variety of uses.

In some applications, a second laser can be used to monitor the changes in the electron’s position, including the passing of time.These ‘pump-probe’ techniques can be used to measure the speed of certain ultrafast electronics, for instance.

Inducing atoms into Rydberg states is a handy trick for engineers, not least when it comes to designing novel components for quantum computers.Needless to say, physicists have amassed a significant amount of information about the way electrons move about when nudged into a Rydberg state.

Being quantum animals, though, their movements are less like beads sliding about on a tiny abacus, and more like an evening at the roulette table, where every roll and jump of the ball is squeezed into a single game of chance.

The mathematical rule book behind this wild game of Rydberg electron roulette is referred to as a Rydberg wave packet.

Just like actual waves, having more than one Rydberg wave packet rippling about in a space creates interference, resulting in unique patterns of ripples.Throw enough Rydberg wave packets into the same atomic pond, and those unique patterns will each represent the distinct time it takes for the wave packets to evolve in accordance with one another.

It was these very ‘fingerprints’ of time that the physicists behind this set of experiments set out to test, showing they were consistent and reliable enough to serve as a form of quantum timestamping.