The Weight of a Cell
asimov.press
asimov.press
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.
You can buy a coffee scale for $10-$20 that has 0.1g to 2000g or 3000g accuracy. I run a cafe and have tested these using our much more expensive scales, they are accurate. Not suitable for high volume commercial use but probably good enough at home if you're on a budget.
You should also check on the back of the scales how the accuracy changes across it's range, they'll often be accurate to 0.1g up to 1000g, and then accurate to 1g for the rest of the range. This includes expensive scales.
Obviously if you have the money, you can buy actual certified ASTM weights, but they are insanely expensive.
This kitchen scale was cheap, perhaps $10, and it is made by some no-name Chinese company, but despite that it has proved to be much more accurate than I had expected.
I have checked it with various standard weights between 5 gram and 500 gram, and all of them were displayed correctly, usually with no more than 0.1 g difference. At most there may have been a 0.2 g error once. Most of the standard weights were displayed exactly. I assume that the kitchen scale is calibrated in the factory with a standard weight, and it has good linearity, so it is expected that if one weight is displayed correctly, all the others will also be correct. So what is significant is that it has not drifted since the factory calibration, not even after more than a year later, because I have rechecked it.
The higher resolution has been very helpful with some things that I weigh every day. For instance, when I weigh every day with it 50 grams of something and 125 grams of something else, both being taken for 1-kilogram packages, I can be pretty certain that the first package will suffice for 20 days and the second package will suffice for 8 days, and in the last day for each package I will still use the normal quantity of that product.
With the previous lower resolution kitchen scales, the accumulated 1-gram errors were enough so that in the last day there would remain an abnormal amount of product in the package.
The only disadvantage of the higher-resolution kitchen scale it that it can weigh only up to 3 kg, while the previous kitchen scale could weigh up to 5 kg. However, I normally cook only for myself, therefore I very rarely need to weigh something above 1 kg, so the lower maximum limit did not matter.
Do you mean accuracy or precision? If you get the same measurement from the same scale twice, that’s precision. However, it might not be accurate.
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.
0.1 gram is definitely the sweet spot for kitchen though, measuring salts, supplements, baking,that extra .1g comes in handy.
I got an Ohaus Scout 0.01g scale, and it's so sensitive it's almost a thermometer. You can literally blow on it softly and the scale starts fluctuating wildly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foraminifera
Even some bacteria can grow to visible size:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomargarita_magnifica
There are some other examples here:
http://cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/appliance-science... verifies this.
Which, ironically, are both only haploid.
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.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nnano.2012.42
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/04/measuring-yoctogram-...
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.