Physics Buzz

Originally published: Jun 26 2014 - 1:30pm, Inside Science News Service
By: Ker Than, Contributor

(Inside Science) -- Terrestrial animals may owe a special debt to the sun and the moon. It may have been their combined pull on ancient Earth's oceans that helped primitive air-breathing fish gain a toehold on land, new research suggests.

In a new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, physicist Steven Balbus argues that the gravitational forces generated by the sun and moon would have been conducive to the formation of a vast network of isolated tidal pools during the Devonian Period, between 420 to 360 million years ago, when fish-like vertebrates first clambered out of the sea.



“By the end of the Devonian, there were vertebrates that were quite at home moving around on land,” said Balbus, who is at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

According to Balbus, a rather remarkable confluence of cosmic, geological and biological events occurred durin…

Last month, we took a look at a spectacular crash that came about during Guerlain Chicherit's attempt to set the world's longest car jump record. A new video detailing some of the back story, preparations, and shocking in-car footage of crash is now available. Although Chicherit talks at length about the complex calculations he and his team performed in preparation for the jump, he doesn't explain why he thinks things when so wrong. There is, however, a fleeting clue at the 7:54 mark in the film.


The clip is slowed quite a bit at that point, but it appears that the left rear tire is not turning.

Materials scientist Mark Miodownik's book Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World was recently published in the United States. It's a great look at the science and stories behind the seemingly mundane substances that make up almost everything, and the subject of this week's podcast.

But what exactly is a materials scientist, and what do they do? Answering that is actually tough. There's countless ways to develop a new material because really, almost anything can be a material. When I was talking with Miodownik, he pointed out that when a baker bakes bread, that's taking one material, dough, applying a process to it and turning it into something with totally different properties, bread. That's the essence of materials science.

Even though it's been a warm couple of months already, it's officially summer. A delicious, science-filled way to beat the heat? Making homemade ice cream.

(We've since updated this article to include the science behind vegan ice cream. To learn more about ice cream science, check out The Science of Ice Cream, Redux)

Over at Physics@Home there's an easy recipe for homemade ice cream. But what kind of milk should you use to make ice cream? And do you really need to chill the ice cream base before making it? Why do ice cream recipes always call for salt on ice?

The Golden Age of comic books stretched from the 1930s through the 1950s and overlapped with a time of unbridled optimism about the progress of science. People wanted to know about how the latest technology worked, and LOTS of people wanted to read comic books, so putting the two together seems like a no-brainer.
Comic Book Plus is an amazing archive of public domain comics from this era. sprinkled amongst long forgotten titles like Lars of Mars and The Adventures of Captain Havoc and The Phantom Knight are a plethora of scanned comic books about real science. They run the gamut. Some are illuminating, funny and really helpful while others are just weird, wildly inaccurate and are terribly dated. So, my list of the top seven public domain science comics worth reading are...

7- How Atomic Energy Works 

Golly wilikers! Who wouldn't wanna learn how atomic energy works from a man in a fedora?! In all seriousness, this Bill Cosmo character is a bit over eager to tell little Johnny more t…

According to recent stories coming out of China, at least three soccer-obsessed fans have died after seeing too much of the world's favorite sport.


The news should probably make me a little nervous, I suppose. I've seen every game of World Cup, either live or recorded. The articles about Chinese deaths suggest that the problem stems from the time difference, which exhausts futbol-addicted fans who are forced to watch games in the wee hours. I'm in the US eastern time zone, which isn't far removed from Brazil time, but I still watch at least two games very late every at night because I can't sit at my desk screaming "goooooooooooool" all the time.

The scary thing is, while I don't know the specifics, I'm pretty sure that around 27 deaths in the US were associated with the game between team USA and Ghana alone!

 How does the order of questions influence people's answers?


Quantum theory, developed about a century ago to explain the puzzling behavior of elementary particles, could also help explain seemingly irrational aspects of human reasoning.

We're starting a new tradition here the Physics Central Podcast: once a month we'll be bringing you a roundup of our favorite physics news stories from the past 30 days.

June has been a rocky month for science news: an asteroid that made a drive-by past earth; scientists made a new discovery about rocks brought back from the moon; and the earth's most abundant mineral just got a name. And then there's the fact that frogs eyes can see single photons.

That's this week on the Physics Central News Podcast.

Sound waves can be powerful - powerful enough to move large groups of particles. Recently, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced an acoustic sieve that can sift, move, trap, or align large groups of particles by size and density under water.

They began by focusing an ultrasound beam on a flat plate. The brass plate has a grating on top made of materials (phononic crystals) specifically for manipulating acoustic waves. Below the plate is a container of glass spheres of various sizes and densities. When the ultrasound beam turns on, it creates a localized field underneath the plate that can trap the particles.


The plate moves closer to the particles, and scientists can manipulate the particles as they wish.

Originally published: Jun 13 2014 - 10:00am, Inside Science News Service
By: Joel N. Shurkin, Contributor

(Inside Science) -- If the paint job on your car is not applied properly, rust happens. If a cell in your skin behaves improperly, cancer can happen.

An instrument developed by a father-son team in Pennsylvania can measure whether the layer of overcoat meant to protect the paint on a car was sprayed properly. The same technology can be used to analyze archaeological artifacts and perhaps detect skin cancer, the inventors said. It can also help manufacture microchips without defects.

Anis Rahman, and his son, Aunik, founders of Applied Research and Photonics, Inc. in Harrisburg, work in a relatively new field of optics that makes use of terahertz frequency radiation, the invisible electromagnetic radiation between infrared and microwave radiation.

"It solves a number of problems," said Anis Rahman. None of the current technologies make precise measurements as well, he said…

To hear Al and Betty Perry tell it, they were lucky to survive the direct hit from a lightning bolt that struck their pickup. It's true that it provided for one heck of a dramatic video.




 How much danger were they really facing?

At a little past 7:30, just as the light of the day was beginning to fade, I walked up to the tables outside the Newseum in Washington, DC. House music thumped from inside the tents erected around the door, and through their sides, billowing in the hot humid wind, I could see about a hundred people in suits and dresses, champagne in hand. It was the unveiling of the Dragon V2, SpaceX's new 2-in-1 landing and escape pod.


"Hi, I think I'm on the list — I should have just been added." I said to the man at the table, trying to mask my nerves and the flush in my face. I had practically sprinted there in full suit and tie.

"Name?"

I gave it, mentioning that I had just run into my friend an hour ago and been invited along. This was a bit of an exaggeration; I had, in fact, just met Benny, but he had invited me nonetheless. That made him the best friend I'd met so far in this city. The attendant ruffled through a few sheets of paper, first on a clipboard that s…

If you're up for an outing, but don't want to leave the couch, how about a trip to the quark zoo? Scientists at CERN, working on an experiment called LHCb, have found substantial evidence for a particle made of 4-quarks. The protons and neutrons that make up atoms are made of 3 quarks, and plenty of other 3-quark particles have been found; 2-quark pairs are also quite common. But if 4-quark states exist, it could indicate a whole zoo of increasingly larger quark particles. This isn't the first time such a thing has been spotted, but scientists are still investigating the weight of those findings. Tomasz Skwarnicki, one of the scientists who worked on the new result from LHCb, says this is one of the strongest pieces of evidence yet for the existence of a 4-quark state.

Oh, and if you do visit the particle zoo, be sure to check out the glueballs.

Listen to the podcast to hear physicists Eric Swanson and Tomasz Skwarnicki talk about the new results.

Originally published: Jun 6 2014 - 12:15pm, Inside Science News Service
By: Ker Than, Contributor

(Inside Science) -- Collecting samples from the volcanic lakes of northern Chile, scientists have discovered microscopic organisms preserved in long, narrow blades of gypsum salt. The discovery, according to researchers, suggests a new way to examine Mars for evidence of life.

It might not just be fossils encased in the Martian salts, either: The gypsum salts from Chile contained tiny bubbles, or “inclusions,” filled with water and air. If these imperfections exist in salt crystals found on the Red Planet, they could harbor “a living, yet isolated and likely dormant, microbiological community on Mars today,” researchers write in a new study that will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Geology.

The two Chilean lakes, Salars Gorbea and Ignorado where the crystal-bound organisms were found, are a good analog for some of the environments on Mars, said study coauthor Kathleen Beni…

In the ongoing battle between alternating and direct current, there may be a new player. Timothy J. Sommerer presented research at APS DAMOP 2014 on a more efficient way to marry alternating and direct currents. Using self-healing materials, Sommerer's new cathode would allow for greater and more effective conversion.

In alternating current, the direction the current travels along the line reverses (or alternates). In the US, the current coming out of your wall reverses 60 times per second. Direct current is a high powered, constant, and direct flow of current. The American power grid runs off of alternating current, but how that came to be was a contentious battle.

The early days of power distribution used direct current (DC), developed by Thomas Edison. But direct current wasn't easily transmitted over long distances, and there was no way to regulate the voltage. As houses began using more appliances that pulled different voltages, regulated voltage became necessary. Nikola …

I've seen some good yoyo-ers and I've seen some young yoyo-ers, but 6-year-old Kazuya Murata really stands out in both categories.




The yoyo has sure come a long way since I was a kid. I remember learning a lot about physics from my old Duncan Butterfly - including the difference between static and dynamic friction.

The painting you see here is called The Raft of the Medusa. It was completed in 1819 by the French artist Theodore Gericault, and it's based on a true story. The ship the Medusa ran aground off the coast of Africa in 1816 and more than 100 people found themselves stranded on a makeshift raft. 15 people made it out alive, after surviving on the raft for nearly two weeks. Later, the survivors would tell one of the most grisly tales of shipwreck the world had ever heard. The first night on the raft people were swept away by bad weather, or crushed between the raft's planks. There were no supplies on the ship, save a few casks of wine, so the cannibalism started quickly. At one point, the stronger half of the survivors thought the weaker half were going to die anyway, so they decided to murder them.

The world watched with fascination and horror as the story unfolded, and at least one person thought to himself: "This has got to stop."* So the physicist Augustin Fresnel, …

At dinner recently a friend asked, “With pitchers having more Tommy John Surgeries, would making the pitcher’s mound higher change the torque on their elbows?” The fast answer: "In theory. But in practical application? Probably not."

Altering the height of the pitcher's mound is an interesting idea, especially given that the height of the pitching mound hasn't been consistent in the history of Major League Baseball. From the early 1900s until 1968, the pitcher’s mound was 15 inches (depending on the park). 1968 was a a particularly abysmal year in hitting, and MLB changed the rules to lower the pitcher’s mound to 10 inches.