One of the advantages of working in a biology lab is getting deliveries of stuff in dry ice and getting to play with the dry ice afterwards. Sadly, while dry ice is clearly very cool (a-ha ha ha ha ha (dies)) it makes a lousy way of cooling down your drinks[1]. With a latent heat of sublimation of merely 199kJ/kg, CO₂ draws less energy out of the liquid than ice's latent head of melting of 334kJ/kg. That's easily dealt with by using larger blocks of dry ice, but the fundamental problem seems to be that most of the sublimed CO₂ boils straight out of the glass and just gently cools the atmosphere instead. Maybe ethanol cubes are the way forward.

[1] Much like Red Stripe, it is also a lousy fabric softner.

Syndicated 2008-05-06 22:48:06 from Matthew Garrett