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Buzz Skyline
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5/29/2015 10:59:00 AM
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They may be child's play, but some serious physics makes them bounce so well.
Originally published: May 22 2015 - 11:00am, Inside Science News Service
By: Joel N. Shurkin, Contributor
(Inside Science) -- Super Balls are toys beloved by children because of their extraordinary ability to bounce. Physicists love them for exactly the same reason.
Drop a baseball on the floor and it will hardly bounce at all. Drop a Super Ball from shoulder height, and it will bounce back 92 percent of the way to the drop-off point. Super Balls also are just as bouncy vertically as they are horizontally, and they spin oddly.
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Image credit: Beao via wikimedia | http://bit.ly/1HmKkJz Rights information: http://bit.ly/cEcCkh |
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pendulum
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5/28/2015 12:06:00 PM
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Labels: Force and Motion, physics education, super ball
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This "Slinky" hyperlens measures a few micrometers across. The light-colored, grainy layers are made of gold and the darker, smoother layers are made of a transparent thermoplastic, PMMA. The two slits in the gold at the bottom of the arch create a 250-nanometer-wide object to image. Credit: Sun et al. 2015. |
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Resolving two points near the diffraction limit as the spacing between them decreases. Eventually the two points merge in a blur. Credit: Public domain |
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pendulum
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5/26/2015 01:36:00 PM
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Labels: diffraction, hyperlens, light and optics
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Image credit: Stefan Kontur| http://bit.ly/1PtZ2IG Rights information: http://bit.ly/cEcCkh |
Posted by
Buzz Skyline
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5/22/2015 09:25:00 AM
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James Clerk Maxwell and his wife, Katherine, circa 1869. Credit: Public domain |
Posted by
pendulum
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5/21/2015 01:03:00 PM
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Labels: electricity and magnetism, james clerk maxwell, john tyndall, physics poetry, spectroscopy, thermodynamics and heat
As someone who has trouble understanding and following movies without subtitles, I got into the habit of not jumping to go see new movies in the theater growing up. My local theaters’ closed captioning devices were these small, LED screens you could set in a cup holder that would provide titles, and did not lend themselves to easy viewing experiences. A few years ago, Regal Entertainment theaters began rolling out Sony holographic glasses that project captions. In addition to providing a better visual experience for viewing closed captions in movies, it puts to use some interesting physics.
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Sony Entertainment Access Glasses. Image Credit: Sony Product Details |
Posted by
Singularity
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5/20/2015 01:40:00 PM
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Labels: glasses, holograms, light and optics
The strength and flexibility of an octopus arm has inspired Italian researchers from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies to create a robotic tool that may assist in future keyhole surgeries.
An octopus-inspired robotic arm adapts to delicate objects in its environment. Image courtesy of Tommaso Ranzani, The BioRobotics Group, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies |
Posted by
pendulum
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5/19/2015 12:38:00 PM
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Labels: bioinspired, granular physics, jamming, robotics, soft robots, surgery
Traffic scientists study ants because they manage traffic better than humans.
Originally published: May 11 2015 - 12:45pm, Inside Science News Service
By: Joel N. Shurkin, Contributor
(Inside Science) -- The old children's song about marching ants is a good explanation for why traffic engineers love them.
Ants -- most are teeny creatures with brains smaller than pinheads -- engineer traffic better than humans. Ants never run into stop-and-go-traffic or gridlock on the trail. In fact, the more ants of one species there are on the road, the faster they go, according to new research.
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Image credit: Clicksy via flickr | http://bit.ly/1G06cyj Rights information: http://bit.ly/NL51dk |
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pendulum
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5/18/2015 10:00:00 AM
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Labels: ants, engineering, traffic jams
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Walter Siegmund via wikimedia | http://bit.ly/1HjxEbL |
Posted by
Buzz Skyline
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5/15/2015 10:16:00 AM
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Murky water is an excellent cloak, masking underwater features and objects from view. Sound can pierce straight through the murk by traveling around suspended particles in the water with minimal scattering. But sound's penetrating ability, thanks to its relatively long wavelengths, also means that it is difficult to "see" underwater objects in any detail. Scientists are currently developing a new sonar technique that can image objects only a few inches in size.
For more than a hundred years, scientists have used sonar (SOund Navigation And Ranging) to pierce underwater depths, but the most common technique, called side-scan sonar, works best on very large objects like shipwrecks or the contours of the ocean floor.
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Image of the shipwreck "Aid" in Estonia using side-scan sonar. Credit: Subzone OÜ via Wikimedia Commons |
Posted by
pendulum
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5/14/2015 02:07:00 PM
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Labels: compression waves and sound, sonar, underwater acoustics
Have you ever wondered how a sailboat sails upwind?
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Sailboats racing upwind. Credit: Public domain |
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An 18th-century square-rigged ship sailing downwind. Credit: Public domain |
Posted by
pendulum
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5/12/2015 12:52:00 PM
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Labels: Fluid dynamics, Force and Motion, sailing
Posted by
pendulum
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5/11/2015 12:34:00 PM
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Labels: john updike, neutrino, physics poetry
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Image credit: tedmurphy via flickr | http://bit.ly/1F7za0f Rights information: http://bit.ly/NL51dk |
Posted by
Buzz Skyline
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5/08/2015 11:01:00 AM
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The Milky Way and the Cosmic Microwave Background, as imaged by the Planck space telescope. Credit: European Space Agency, HFI and LFI consortia |
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Karl Jansky. Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI |
Posted by
pendulum
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5/07/2015 11:27:00 AM
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Labels: Karl Jansky, light and optics, radio astronomy, space and The Universe, Square Kilometre Array
Earth’s surface gravity is about 9.81 m/s2 -- a value familiar to any high school physics student asked to calculate the trajectory of a baseball -- but in reality, that number is an average, lumping together slight variations around the globe. Just as mass isn’t distributed evenly worldwide, gravity isn’t the same everywhere either, and it’s not even constant over time. As the solid earth responds to changing loads and tectonic forces, and as water mass moves around the surface and subsurface, the gravity field adjusts as well, and these changes can be detected.
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Image:NASA |
Posted by
Halfstache
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5/06/2015 03:18:00 PM
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Labels: Force and Motion, gravity, NASA, space and The Universe
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Image credit:
nasa.gov | http://1.usa.gov/1zxRkpq
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Posted by
Buzz Skyline
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5/05/2015 04:16:00 PM
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What makes skin so tough?
Originally published: May 4 2015 - 11:45am, Inside Science News Service
By: Lisa Marie Potter, Contributor
(Inside Science) -- Skin has to be flexible enough to jump, crawl, and kick with us. It also has to be resilient enough to withstand our falls, scrapes, and cuts. Scientists have marveled at skin's strength for years without knowing why it's so durable.
Now, scientists have identified the mechanical properties that give skin its toughness. Their findings are the first to show that collagen, the most abundant protein in skin, moves to absorb stress and prevent the skin from tearing. In the future, this knowledge could help us use nature's blueprint to make better synthetic skin and improve the strength of man-made materials.
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Collagen in its twisted, curly form with no skin stress. Image credit: The Jacob School of Engineering at UC SD |
Posted by
pendulum
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5/04/2015 02:48:00 PM
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Labels: Force and Motion, materials science, skin
Einstein and the controversy surrounding the Nobel Prize in Physics take center stage, while Franz Kafka steals the show
You would think it's impossible to simultaneously spurn a professor and award him the greatest academic prize in the world, but you are not Allvar Gullstrand, and you are not snubbing Albert Einstein. Rather than award Einstein for his groundbreaking theory of relativity, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922 for discovering the photoelectric effect - unarguably significant work that helped in proving quantum theory, but not the theory that reshaped the fundamental understanding of matter and time.
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Posted by
Buzz Skyline
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5/01/2015 12:33:00 PM
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