Physics Buzz

The same sun that shines on bright, cheery days is also responsible for the biggest explosions in the solar system. These explosions, called solar flares, can detonate with the energy of more than one billion megaton bombs and spew dangerous radiation and high-energy particles into space.

How do you know if something is random? If you were a substitute teacher that only taught on Wednesdays, you might interpret a dip in attendance as a random fluctuation. If you taught that same class every single day, however, the dip might signal the tail end of a local flu epidemic that caused even more students to miss class on Monday and Tuesday. Most “random” events are not as random as they appear.

You have 100 billion neurons in your brain, each one connected to a multitude of others. Every time you think, feel, or move, neurons in this massive network react, rapidly sending, processing, and receiving signals. Through this behind-the-scenes activity we learn about and navigate the world. Well, through our brains and Google.

A new kind of material discussed at last week’s American Physical Society March Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana could someday make its way into your body. From artificial hips to pacemakers, medical implants give countless people relief, health, confidence, and more time to do the things they love with the people they love. Developing implants that are durable, reliable and well-matched to the body is an active and important area of biomedical research.

What goes better with mornings than coffee? And what goes better with coffee than pie? Today, of all days, is the perfect day to enjoy a slice of pie with your morning coffee—it’s Pi Day!

Like a busy interchange, the surface of every living cell hums with activity. Proteins and lipids are constantly in motion, detecting, processing, and responding to signals from the outside world. They interact and move along a surface called the plasma membrane, a complex fluid barrier that separates the inside of a cell from everything else.

As nights lengthen with the coming of arctic winter, one can sometimes walk across water—on natural, frozen bridges. Wind and waves can drive sea ice together to form giant superstructures of ice stretching miles longer than any bridges that people have built over water. Now scientists have developed models describing how these ice bridges form and break up, findings that could shed light on a variety of seemingly unrelated phenomena, including jamming in grain silos that can lead to explosions.

Hum a note to yourself, even just in your head. Any note will do.

The mini tornadoes that form in superfluids won’t send any cows flying through the air, but the scientists from Newcastle University behind a new study were surprised to see that these mini twisters can create quite a tangled storm. Their results suggest that superfluids have a deeper connection to everyday fluids than previously thought, and will soon be published in the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review Letters.

Roses are a common sign of love, or of an attentive gardener, not a common sign of cutting-edge scientific research. However, new work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows roses in a whole new light—as beautiful energy storage devices. This work brings us one step closer to being able to harvest energy from plants.