Hair Ice

Did it feel like normal ice?

> When I first saw it, I didn't even recognize it as ice! It looked more like a fungus at first, and only after touching it and seeing that it was dissolving did I realize what it was.

You weren't too far off:

> In 2015, the fungus Exidiopsis effusa was identified as key to the formation of hair ice.

Your location (address photos were taken) and full name are visible from the link you shared.

I skimmed the paper wondering if there could be some fitness benefit for the fungus. Unless I missed it, they don't suggest any. Anyone have a guess?

Since that server is very slow in USA, here's a mirror: https://www.docdroid.net/i1zITmK/evidence-for-biological-sha...

I nominate "Winter's Whiskers".

Canadian aftershave is probably the better name for the facial hair variant.

We have similar stuff growing out of geothermal ground where I worked on Mt Erebus, and we called it "angel's pubes".

Even in a thread about ice forming on trees, someone manages to bring up Trump. Amazing.

sigh as a non US citizen could we please have less mentions of US politics and US political figures on HN? I don't know about others but the extreme US centric nature of HN is wearing me down. When I go on Reddit I go to /r/worldnews specifically to get away from US only news content but even then every second article concerns the Trump administration and its foreign policy.

How in all that is holy can you connect a bio-meteorological phenomenon to the Donald? When people say we are living in dark times I have to concur, public discourse is being destroyed with partisan and identity politics.

Also, not a supporter, but I think his rhetorical flourishes are quite arresting and quirky at times.

This is related to another burning question I have (maybe someone knows): why aren't more resources, students, professionals focused on material sciences?

I have friends in AI, biotech, clean tech, web/apps, robotics, but none in material sciences. And yet materials are so important technologically that we name ages after them (Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age). I lived in "Silicon Valley" even — our industries and progress are so tied to materials, why isn't there more of a focus on material science?

Sometimes I find myself in a state of mind that is more commonly achieved by other people with drugs, where contemplating something mundane in a new way amazes me.

One example is I was thinking about path dependence in manufacturing or growing things. If you take a large handful of dry spaghetti, you can break it fairly consistently in half. But if you cook it first, there is no way to split all the strands in half any more.

Me too! I love these random chunks of knowledge floating by...

Yep - this is one of the main reasons I first gravitated to HN about 8 years ago

If I wanted to click 'random' on wikipedia, I can do it myself.

I don't browse HN for this garbage.

I can report that it does. I've seen this hiking in Snohomish County, WA. Hair ice looks a bit like cotton fluff, like something splitting out of a seed pod. It looks like it is growing out of the pieces of wood or bark. The ice crushes like a lightly packed snowball.

Of course this means you have to go hiking in the cold. Totally worth it.

Huh. I wonder if it's the same fungus, or if there are other fungi that have evolved the same trait.

We got good models for pretty good chunk of phenomena of scales from subatomic to galaxy wide and beyond. Astonishing is the fact that same laws give good predictions on both ends of the scale. I think that's the reason behind the assumption we have most figured out.

But in the middle happens most what we cannot comprehend. How does a cell know when to divide. How exactly the process goes. Why do we have consciousness? Having theories capable of describing atoms and stars we can't figure out the middle, this is fascinating.

Imho the issue is the complexity of system. Stars and atoms are actually not that far apart. In the middle the amount of effects with comparable magnitude and stable states are the greatest.

You can put your idea on the Talk page, or just put it in. You'll probably want a source that relates to ice formation (a source relating it to this specific phenomenon would be better .. or this might be brought up in one of the existing sources and you can re-use it).

This sounds like statistical mechanics thinking to me. At the macro-level, water that is at freezing temperature but that has not frozen yet will appear liquid. However, what's happening at the micro level in the fluid is that small pockets of the water are switching back and forth from frozen to liquid as their bonds tighten up from loss of thermal energy. There's still enough energy in regions of the liquid mass such that these isolated crystals may not be crystals for very long, because the thermal energy transfers from hotter to colder regions, but because the whole mass is bleeding energy into an external system it will eventually reach a tipping point where larger crystals can persist for longer, until eventually the water turns into ice.

Yeah, I kept reading it as "Hair lice". Glad to have been mistaken.

Well obviously, harri man...

Tolkien wrote Treebeard in LOTR. Grey beard could be this?

"a large Man-like figure, at least fourteen foot high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say. Arms, at a short distance from the trunk, were not wrinkled, but covered with a brown smooth skin. The large feet had seven toes each. Grey beard, deep brown eyes, shot with a green light"