Weekend Reads 1/25/20

Hillary Clinton blasts Sanders, won't commit to backing him as party nominee

"He was in Congress for years," Clinton says in the soon-to-be-released four-part Hulu documentary "Hillary," The Hollywood Reporter said in a report. "He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it."

The math of brewing a better espresso

The flavors in espresso derive from roughly 2,000 different compounds that are extracted from the coffee grounds during brewing. So Hendon and his colleagues focused on building a mathematical model for a more easily measurable property known as the extraction yield (EY): the fraction of coffee that dissolves into the final beverage. That, in turn, depends on controlling water flow and pressure as the liquid percolates through the coffee grounds. Modeling the actual grounds—a form of granular media—proved much too daunting.

New walking sharks discovered in the waters of Indonesia

“At less than a meter (3.2 ft) long on average, walking sharks present no threat to people but their ability to withstand low oxygen environments and walk on their fins gives them a remarkable edge over their prey of small crustaceans and molluscs,” says Dr Christine Dudgeon from Australia’s University of Queensland.

Alan Dershowitz: Constitution dictates acquittal for Trump

The program’s host, George Stephanopoulos, pressed him on the point: “Is it your position that President Trump should not be impeached even if all the evidence and arguments laid out by the House are accepted as fact?”

“That’s right,” Dershowitz replied. Invoking the founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, he maintained that impeaching based on the current articles could result in “nightmare” scenarios, giving Congress too much power over the president or turning impeachment into a question of “who has the most votes in the House.”