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Fever pitch as Dublin tar drop fall captured by webcam

Chalk up another loss for Australia

Not content with recently beating Australia at rugby, cycling and cricket, the Anglo-Irish axis has added an academic triumph after boffins at Trinity College Dublin captured live footage of a drop of pitch falling.

To refresh your memory about this … erm ... pitched battle (sorry), get thee to this story from April about the University of Queensland's 83-year experiment in pitch doctoring. It explains that pitch is a liquid, just a very, very, very viscous one that appears to be a solid. So solid that the Queensland experiment has produced eight droplets in 83 years. The last one fell in the year 2000, but the resident webcam was offline at the time. The droplet's fall therefore went unrecorded, as did all before it.

Trinity College, however, knows how to run a webcam, and as the video below shows last week recorded pitch plummeting.

Nature carries offers details of the Irish event, and also reports that the Queensland crew are gutted.

The good news in this transnational pitch-fest is that Queensland's vial of the substance is apparently not far off dropping.

And two pitch drops in a year is surely far more momentous than any mere sporting contest, of which there are tens of thousands every year. ®

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