Physics Buzz

It's New Year's Eve, and that means it's time for a rundown of our top blog posts last year complete with an unnecessarily hyperbolic headline! Here's our list based on traffic numbers: Canadian fireworks at the 2007 Malaysia International Fireworks Competition. Image Credit: SJ Photography 10. Physics Halloween Costumes Ideas included a Doppler shift dress and Maxwell's Demon. 9. Reinventing the Wheel? These wobbly skateboard wheels don't live up to the pseudo-physics hype. 8. A Tour of Plasma Physics in Downtown Cambridge Our writer, Quantum, captured this sweet photo gallery of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center.  7. The Physics is Clear on Foamy Beer A perfect combination!  6. NASA's Cold Fusion Folly Will cold fusion ever take off? Not likely, says our contributor Buzz Skyline.  5. Turn Your Phone into a Spectrometer — For Free! Discover the spectra of colors around you with our SpectraSnapp app. 4. The 5 Most Extreme Atomic Experim

It's been an eventful year in the world of physics. Curiosity landed on Mars, physicists found a Higgs-like particle, and ponytail physics made its popular debut. We covered these big stories in 2012, but many others proved more popular on our blog. Here's the list of our 10 most popular blog posts of the year based on pageviews. 10. National Physics Day Physics departments celebrated the day with fun science experiments for the public. Physics enthusiasts celebrate this unofficial holiday on April 24th. 9.   Zombie Apocalypse Survival Gear: Ham Radios Shotguns, skillets and shovels may help you battle the undead, but don't underestimate the need for amateur radio.

We're almost done with 2012, and it's time to look back and figure out which physics stories and breakthroughs were the most important. But how should we rank importance in physics? Is the most important research the kind that influences our everyday lives? The kind that saves the most lives? Or should we give the title to the research that slowly but surely moves technology forward? In this week's podcast Mike and I try to come up with a definition of "important" when it comes to physics research, while we share some of our favorite physics stories from 2012. We cover the discovery of what is believed to be the Higg's boson ( here's our jumbo podcast about it), the room-temperature maser  (click for our podcast), the physics of spilling coffee (one of the stories covered in Mike's Ig Nobel podcast ), neutrinos encoded with information , and the physics of mosquitos in the fog . Next week we'll be back with our favorite astrophysics and astrono