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I think this news story is absolutely great.

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/cbe/news/cracked-cold-case-why-boiling-water-freezes-faster

I’ve long been fascinated by the Mpemba effect, where hot water can freeze faster than cold water. It’s fantastic that there still is (was?) an unknown phenomena in fields as well understood, researched and industrially relevant as heat transfer and phase change.

I once wrote an extensive technical engineering report documenting a fictitious experimental investigating the Mpemba effect, to provide an exemplar for students on how to write up. I didn’t want to provide an exemplar of an experiment that students would actually be asked to do, as there is a reasonable chance they would reword what had been supplied rather than translating the general principles of technical report writing into their own work. And it was unlikely we would ask them to do an experiment on the Mpemba effect, as we couldn't explain why it happened.

Apart from my attraction to the effect, the reason I think this story is great is the approach Professor Zimmerman took that is described at the end of the article.
 

Testing a new theory requires a prediction, and that usually means conducting new experiments. Probably like most University labs, conducting new experiments was banned in the last year, with only high priority exceptions. It dawned on me last December that I should analyse experiments already published on this topic. I did, and a prediction that my theory makes about microbubbles and dissolved gases, correlates beautifully with Mpemba and Osborne's 1969 paper."


I’ve a preoccupation with writing technical engineering reports and recording experimental findings. I’ve written a 6 week MOOC about the subject. Part of my delight with this story is it provides the perfect example of the value in properly recording what you did in an experiment and what results were obtained. Because the results of an experiment were properly documented 50 years ago, they can be used in contemporary research, the likes of which was probably unimaginable at the time.

It is sometimes hard to convince students of the value in doing things for reasons beyond their immediate benefit. They may believe they are writing up an experiment because it is required in order to demonstrate to their teacher they have performed a task in a laboratory. The real reason that we ask students to write up experiments is to teach the process for doing so and the standards that should be applied, as the documentation of work is a critical part of the engineering process. We can tell them that they may, in the future, need to refer back to their results and interpret them in new ways to discover hidden meaning, but this is a hard sell for a routine undergraduate lab class. I will now be citing this work as an example of why it is important to document findings well. And possibly to defend my disproportionate fixation with report writing and keeping an experimental record.