Physics Buzz

Originally published: Mar 28 2014 - 1:00pm, Inside Science News Service
By: Marcus Woo, ISNS Contributor

(ISNS) -- Mars was once a wetter world, and according to a growing body of evidence, could have had water gushing through rivers, pooling in lakes and possibly even oceans. But the water somehow vanished, leaving behind the parched planet it is today.

Now, a new analysis of Martian meteorites is helping to reveal the history of Martian water, suggesting that large amounts of water escaped into space within the first half-billion years of Mars' existence. Most of the remaining water -- as much as one tenth of the Earth's oceans -- then froze, forming vast, yet-to-be-discovered reservoirs of ice still hidden below the surface.

Scientists have long known that there's water ice at the poles and previous observations have hinted at the presence of subsurface ice at lower latitudes. The new study now strengthens the case that huge amounts of ice remain hidden on Mars today, sa…

Particle Fever is a new documentary that brings viewers inside the home stretch of the decades-long hunt for the so-called "God Particle."
CERN's search for the Higgs boson has everything a film could ask for; amazing visuals of the alien-looking Large Hadron Collider, the dramatic anticipation of whether it works, the heartbreak of near disaster and ultimate triumph of discovery. A Hollywood screenwriter couldn't have come up with a better story of science.

Particle Fever follows the lab's top scientists in the months leading to the completion of the LHC and the discovery of the Higgs boson, four years later. The theorists and experimentalists are the film's stars and seeing their contrasting approaches to understanding the elusive particle is the most interesting dynamic of the film.

A video game where you immerse yourself into the game's world is where the next generation of virtual reality video gaming is headed. Now that Facebook has purchased the company Oculus VR, the prospect of widely-available, next-gen virtual reality gaming is one step closer.

Oculus VR includes the developers and creators of the virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift. Oculus Rift has come a long way since its Kickstarter campaign in 2012. The Rift headset takes virtual gaming to an entirely new level with a large field of view that makes users feel like they're part of the world of the game. With the help of Facebook’s deep pockets, Oculus designers could usher in the next generation of affordable, in-home virtual reality gaming.

In light of this news, it’s only natural to start thinking about the gaming possibilities. What are some video games currently out that cater to physics fanatics and would also make for great gameplay with a device like Oculus Rift? A few come …

This week on The Physics Central Podcast we're talking about the ancient Chinese game of Go. Researchers in France want to model the game as a complex network. Other examples of complex networks include airplane flight plans, social networks, neurons in the brain, and fungal communities, to name a few. By modeling Go as a complex network, the researchers hope to find patterns and symmetries that could assist scientists who are working on Go-playing programs, that they hope will some day beat the best human Go players (something that already been accomplished in Chess).

To learn more about the game of Go check out Sensei's Library and Go Game Guru; here's an article about a computer program that beat a master Go player, but only because the computer played with a handicap; an article about computers trying to beat humans at go and some of the science related to the game; here's the clip from A Beautiful Mind I referenced in the podcast; and here's some info about th…

The mystery behind the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 is no more. Engineers working out of the British company, Inmarsat, have used a “groundbreaking but traditional mathematics-based process” to conclude that the plane landed in a remote region of the southern Indian Ocean. Plane wreckage has yet to be found to support this notion.

Yesterday afternoon, the Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak, announced in a press statement that the investigation was completed with a never-before-used analysis. However, few news articles are getting their hands dirty with the details of this mystery-solving method.



From most of the articles you’ll get a sense that it has something to do with the Doppler effect, trigonometry, a satellite and a magical mathematical equation that ties everything together. But how do these elements coalesce into a single, coherent story?

If you look at a general equation of the Doppler effect, you’ll notice that nowhere does it offer information about an objec…

I just got my tickets for tonight's showing of Particle Fever, the new documentary about physicists at CERN looking for the Higgs boson. I'm pretty stoked, I'll post a review of it tomorrowFriday.

Particle Fever (2013)


It got me thinking about how over the last couple of years, there's been a whole mess of full length features and short films released featuring real particle physicists talking about and doing real science. It's been an exciting time in the field, and moviemakers have really picked up on it. Not only that, but it's easier than ever for scientists to make their own shorts about their science. So I came up with a list of the top five movies about the Higgs boson. In no particular order...

Print, print, print your boat with ABS plastic. Twenty-eight pieces And no gaping creases, 3D printers are fantastic!
Jim Smith of Grass Roots Engineering has built the world’s first 3D-printed kayak. It rocks nearly a dozen different colors, floats like a dream and is relatively inexpensive to make.

Granted, you first need your own 3D printer, but after that you just need some screws, silicone caulk and roughly 60 pounds of the same plastic used in Lego bricks, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS).



This is not the first 3D-printed boat that floats. In 2012, University of Washington students entered the very first 3D-printed boat in Seattle’s annual Milk Carton Derby. The students dumpster dove for milk cartons, which they then melted and fed into a 3D printer to create the 7-foot long boat.

Judging from images, the UW students printed the boat in a single go. Smith, on the other hand, printed 28 separate pieces over 42 days that he then assembled with machine screws, brass threaded …

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory's (PPPL) new experiment appears to be operated by a ghost: It will turn on by itself and emit a purplish glow without any researchers flipping a switch.

In fact, physicists at the lab aren't even using the experiment. Instead, people from around the world now have direct control of the experiment through their laptops, and you can too.

PPPL's Remote Glow Discharge Experiment is housed in New Jersey, but you can turn it on, tweak its voltages and control its pressure with your web browser from anywhere in the world.

As you conduct your own studies, a live webcam will show how your adjustments influence the experiment. If you do it right, you'll be able to make the experiment glow like in the picture below.

As PPPL's Head of Science Education Andrew Zwicker told me at the APS Division of Plasma Physics meeting last November, "It's just really cool."

On this week's podcast, John Amos, founder of SkyTruth, shares just how satellite images help tell some of Earth's most important stories.

Mountaintop removal mining, where the tops of mountains are blown away to harvest the coal underneath, leaves unmistakable scars across the landscape. Satellite images of coal country are dotted with the grey smudges that indicate a mountain used to be there, and Amos has been tracking their growth and proliferation. This Landsat image shows the Hobet mine in Boone County, West Virginia in 1984...

Physics doesn't forgive - you obey the laws or you fail. It's a tough lesson that rally car driver Guerlain Chicherit learned as he tried to set a new record for the world's longest car jump. Check out the video below to see if you can tell what went wrong after he launched his modified Mini Countryman off the ramp.


Everything seems to be fine for the first two thirds of the flight. But then the sound of the engine dies and the car starts to rock forward. Those two things are intimately connected.

As the engine and the wheels slow, their angular momentum decreases. But angular momentum has to be conserved, so if the engine and wheels rotate slower, something else has to rotate faster. That something, unfortunately in this case, is the car.

It's possible Chicheritlost lost his nerve and let off the gas. The more likely problem, I'm guessing, is the setting known as the rev limiter. In many cars, including regular road-going Minis, if the engine spins too fast it can…

The next time you’re taking a nightly stroll downtown, take a minute to count how many people are looking up at the sky. Chances are the number will be small, if it’s not zero.

Light pollution drowns the brilliance of the night sky, leaving city and town dwellers little reason to look up. Meanwhile, technology is providing an incentive to look down at our screens. As a result, we are losing touch with the cosmos. Have you ever seen the star-lit band of the Milky Way Galaxy?

Below is a trailer for the award-winning feature documentary released in 2011 addressing the many effects of light pollution.



A waning, underlying sense of connection with nature is harder to quantify than the threat that light pollution poses for astronomers’ work. In order to extract information from the light of stars and galaxies within our universe, astronomers need clear, dark and preferably light-pollution-free skies.

Distant quasars could help confirm "spooky action" between particles.
An experiment of cosmic proportions, looking at some of the most distant visible corners in the universe, could help close what may be the last major loophole in quantum physics, or shake it to its very foundations.

Could you outrun a dinosaur? Well, it depends on the dinosaur. According to Scott Lee, a professor of physics at the University of Toledo in Ohio, herbivorous dinosaurs moved more slowly than predatory dinosaurs that often chased down their prey and could reach up to 30 miles per hour. Plant eaters, on the other hand, moseyed along at about 3 miles per hour.

This means you could easily outrun, and even out-walk, some herbivorous dinosaurs. But if you caught the attention of a ravenous raptor, chances are high that it would be the last race you ever ran.

It’s no surprise that predatory dinosaurs evolved to move faster than their prey. Otherwise, they would be hard pressed to find a decent meaty meal most days. But it would also make sense, from an evolutionary standpoint, if herbivorous dinosaurs at least gave predators a run for their money in the cat-and-mouse chase.

By studying 56 sets of distinctive fossilized footprints, or trackways, belonging to herbivorous dinosaurs that pal…

Greetings, podcast listeners! This week's Physics Central Podcast is a short story I heard about at the APS March Meeting that just wrapped up in Denver, Colorado. A physicist at Cornell University is studying bull sperm, and is looking at a phase transition that the sperm undergo. Basically, in a relaxed fluid, the sperm are disorganized: they all point in different directions. But when the flow of the fluid is turned up to a certain "critical flow rate" the sperm spontaneously point upstream. This type of order/disorder transition is a physics specialty: learn about the transition, look for commonalities with other systems that also undergo transitions, learn something new about bull sperm. Listen to the podcast to hear more!

With a gargantuan head flaunting the largest teeth of any predatory dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus rex embodies the ideal nightmarish horror. So, what was such a ferociously large animal doing with such tiny forelimbs that look more like a humorous afterthought than an evolutionary tool?

“Some people think T. rex forearms are just vestigial organs which evolved away, but I claim no,” said Scott Lee, a professor of physics at University of Toledo, who argues that a T. rex could move its forearms quickly enough to prevent a struggling prey's escape. Therefore, the arms were an integral part of the predator’s hunting tactics, he said, and not useless stubs.


One of the key pieces of evidence supporting Lee’s notion are the stress fractures paleontologists have found on the handful of wishbones they’ve recovered from fossilized T. rex remains. Today, birds are the only animals with a wishbone, which helps them achieve flight. The boomerang-shaped wishbone, also called the furcula, of a T. re…