Good Morning, RVA: Back to life, back to reality (almost)

I hope the first half of your year-end holiday was acceptable.

December 29, 2014; 7:02 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: VanessaO

Good morning, RVA! It’s 45 °F, and, as Staind once said, it’s been a while. Today, temperatures and rain fall throughout the day; tomorrow we may once again see the sun.

Water cooler

The RTD’s Zachary Reid has a look back at Superintendent Dana Bedden’s first year as head of Richmond Public Schools. While the good/bad format unnecessarily tries to create balance that isn’t always there, it’s a piece worth reading if only to remember just how much happened in 2014. In what other year was so much citywide attention focused on our public schools?

Today’s best headline, also from the RTD: “Tar follows cracks, not geometric preferences.”

Chef Will Richardson’s ramen is amazing, and you should head over to his pop-up Ramen shop in the Lunch space immediately (well, on Mondays and Tuesdays). Brandon Fox sat down with him for a quick interview. About the name, Shorkyuken, which he did in fact borrow from Street Fighter, Richardson says, “I actually just wanted to be able to answer the phone with ‘Shooooooryuuuuken!’… My marketing partner didn’t love it at first, but she’s warmed up to it.”

As 2014 winds down, you must prepare yourself for the time-honored tradition of news sites recapping the previous year while anyone that can string together a sentence takes a vacation. RVANews is no exception. Here is our look back at the top food stories of 2014.

“All kudos to the Rams, they give us lots of slam…DUNKS! We’re wreaking havoc!” This new tune by Singing Shorty, whom you probably recognize if you’ve spent any time hanging out on Grace Street over the last 15 years, is pretty dang catchy.

“…every state has some sort of law that discourages people from traveling in the left lane on multi-lane roads and highways. It’s not that you’re never allowed in the left lane, just that you should only use it when necessary, for passing, then get back over.”

Sports!

• Washington mercifully closed their season with a 44-17 loss to the Cowboys.
• Spiders kept it close but were unable to pull off the win against Wake Forest, losing 63-65.
• Rams host the Cleveland State Vikings tonight at 7:00 PM in the final game of 2014.
• Caps face the Islanders tonight at 7:00 PM.

This morning’s longread

Graphene: Fast, Strong, Cheap, and Impossible to Use

Science, you guys!

The layers of carbon that make up graphite are weakly bonded (hence its adoption, in 1564, for pencils, which shed a visible trace when dragged across paper), so tape removes flakes of it readily. Geim placed a piece of the tape under the microscope and discovered that the graphite layers were thinner than any others he’d seen. By folding the tape, pressing the residue together and pulling it apart, he was able to peel the flakes down to still thinner layers.

Geim had isolated the first two-dimensional material ever discovered: an atom-thick layer of carbon, which appeared, under an atomic microscope, as a flat lattice of hexagons linked in a honeycomb pattern. Theoretical physicists had speculated about such a substance, calling it “graphene,” but had assumed that a single atomic layer could not be obtained at room temperature–that it would pull apart into microscopic balls. Instead, Geim saw, graphene remained in a single plane, developing ripples as the material stabilized.

This morning’s Instagram

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December 29, 2014 7:02 AM 0