Physics Buzz

"Protest"

What comes to mind? Maybe civil rights, gay rights, abortion legality, animal rights, immigration, war, poverty, religious freedom, environmental issues, physics...Wait, did that just say physics??

Most Americans know they shouldn't take their freedom of religion and freedom of the press for granted (even if we still do), but I didn't realize I was taking my ability to study physics for granted until recently.

I know what you're thinking. Photoshop. Although this picture would be a clever edit, this is real life. The picture and an excerpt from the news broadcast (see the full 10 Meg clip on Nepal News) show university students protesting in front of Nepal's Ministry of Education and Sports, holding signs that read "We want to study physics" and chanting:

Leader: We want...
Group: Physics!
Leader: We want...
Group: Physics!

Kinda crazy. Surface level I have to admit that I find it amusing. Pretty amusing actually, although the deeper issue is no…

A group of physicists in Brazil have managed to create luminous balls of burning silicon that behave much as ball lightning has been reported to behave.

Click the photo to see a brief video of artificial ball lightning.

Although the glowing balls fall to the floor rather than floating, as ball lightning reputably does sometimes, the hot blobs duplicate other typical phenomena such as

- Following erratic paths, randomly speeding up or slowing down

- Breaking into smaller balls

- Bouncing off of the ground and obstructions

- Scorching cloth and other objects they contact

The researchers, who hail from the Universidad Federal de Pernambuco and the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, created the artificial ball lighting by touching an electrode to a wafer of pure silicon and heating it with a high electrical current. When they pulled the electrode away from the wafer, it created an arc that spewed out a cascade of burning silicon blobs roughly once in every thirty attempts.

The experiment …

A couple days ago I came across an article in Wired News about Luciana Haill. I think she's my new hero. Luciana records the activity of her frontal lobes by wearing a sweatband embedded with EEG monitors, which explore brain function by measuring voltage differences between different parts of the brain. This data gets fed to her computer via Bluetooth Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyser interfaces and, through a waving of the hand, is output as music.

Apparently Luciana became interested in the brain after a bout with Viral Meningitis, which eventually led to her interest in neurofeedback. Seriously, you can look at a graph of brain waves in a book or on a monitor, but listening to them this way is an entirely different experience.


I got a little uncomfortable when the talk started about how this technique is used in hypnotherapy and "invokes a real-time feedback loop between the conscious and subconscious" (this site), but I fully admit that I've only done a superf…

Win the Nobel Prize.

Forget the fountain of youth, winning the Nobel Prize can increase your lifespan - at least according to a study performed by Professor Andrew Oswald and government economist Matthew Rablen from the University of Warwick. They compared the lifespans of over 500 male Nobel Prizes nominees for physics and chemistry and found an average lifespan of 76 years. But, they found, those that won the prize tended to live about 1.4 years longer than nominees that didn't win.

Oswald attributes this to status: "Status seems to work a kind of health-giving magic. Once we do the statistical corrections, walking across that platform in Stockholm apparently adds about two years to a scientist's lifespan." (the gap widens to about 2 years when winners/not-winners within the same country are compared)

This study raises many questions in my mind. If status has that much influence on longevity, how do I raise my status?? Or that of my aging parents? Maybe insurance comp…

Some people have unforgettable noses. Jennifer Grey (pre-surgery), Barbara Streisand, and Sarah Jessica Parker all make my list. Celebrity cosmetic surgeon Anthony Youn recently told Jane magazine that the most popular celebrity nose requested is HalleBerry’s. Of course our noses do more than define our faces; they allow us to explore a whole other dimension of reality. I won’t go into the physics of smell, although you can a recent development here, instead I’m going to wonder out loud – why don’t we incorporate smell into science education? It might seem like a silly idea at first. I mean, who talks about the smell of a cell or the smell of space? Well, as I’ve recently learned, more than one person has discussed the smell of space. Don Pettit, an Officer on the International Space Station wrote this in an article for NASA, It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as "tastes like chic…