Physics Buzz

You could say that Tim Larson, Seth Shafer, and Elaine diFalco were brought together by the Sun. Now the three of them are sharing the sounds of the Sun with scientists, musicians, and the general public through a unique effort called the Sonification of Solar Harmonics (SoSH) Project.

Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber… If you want to know about a generation, listen to its popular music. Songs rise to the top of the charts because they resonate with a lot of people. In fact, one way to explore cultural evolution, says researcher Jan Stupacher, is to examine trends in popular music over time.

Researchers from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have produced an underwater sound so intense that it rivals the Earth-shaking roar of a rocket launch. “It is just below the threshold where [the sound] would boil the water in a single wave oscillation,” according to lead researcher Claudiu Stan, now at Rutgers University Newark. This research by Gabriel Blaj et al. was published in a recent issue of the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review Fluids .

The sound of a sonic boom may produce about the same magnitude of gravitational pull as a 10-milligram weight, a new study finds. Oddly, the findings also suggest the pull is in the opposite direction of the gravitational pull generated by normal matter, meaning sound waves might fall up instead of down in Earth's gravitational field.

Read part I of this story here . When I set out for Orfield Labs, I expected the anechoic chamber to capture my full attention. After all, so many people come to experience the quietness that the lab had to start charging for tours, to compensate for lost productivity. As I talked with founder and president Steve Orfield about the evolution of his career and his lab, though, I started to appreciate that the chamber is a tool. And eventually I concluded that, like all tools, the true value lies in what it can do in the hands of an artisan.

Scratchy . My ultra-smooth gel pen made a distracting and mildly irritating sound that I can only describe as scratchy with each stroke. I became acutely aware of the process involved in forming each letter. I flipped a page in my memo pad to make room for more notes, but the loud, prolonged crinkling of the page only left me more distracted and further behind.

What is it that makes us trust one politician over another? Surely vision and values are key, but as science demonstrates, we are influenced by much subtler things as well. It turns out that our perception of political leaders and even our voting preferences can be swayed by something as simple as the acoustic properties of a leader’s voice, according to Rosario Signorello and Didier Demolin from the Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie in Paris. This is the subject of the work they presented at this week’s 174th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The leverlike guitar accessory known as a whammy bar is best used to bend and distort a single note—think Jimi Hendrix's famous rendition of the Star Spangled Banner from Woodstock 1969. But it doesn't sound very nice if used when playing multiple strings simultaneously, such as when strumming a chord. To solve this problem, a researcher from the U.K. has engineered new guitar strings that respond tunefully and as a group when you use a whammy bar.

In a vacuum, light moves fast enough to travel all the way around the earth in about a tenth of a second. In recent years, though, scientists have found ways to slow and even stop light in its tracks by using new states of matter and other specially engineered materials. Now, researchers in France are reporting that they’ve devised a new way to tackle the challenge, one which circumvents many of the technical difficulties associated with previous techniques.

Scientists find the route to listening is more complex than they thought. Originally published: Jun 10 2015 - 8:00am, Inside Science News Service By: Joel N. Shurkin, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- You are sitting in a concert hall about to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, anticipating, among other things, the famous first four notes. When it comes, it sounds just like you thought it would. Man with headphones credit to Warren Goldswain via shutterstock  | composite image credit Michael Greshko That anticipation may not just be the fact you know intellectually what’s coming, but something quite physiological: your brain is anticipating some essential properties of the sound and may even be adjusting what you will hear toward what you are expecting. According to research in Germany and the United Kingdom, sound perception is often “top-down”--ear to brain and back down to midbrain in the auditory system. Conventional theory has been fundamentally focused on bottom-up,

A futuristic, 3D-printed violin is making its musical debut next month during the New York City  3D Print Week . The sound it creates promises to be unearthly — instead of the traditional vibrating strings of an acoustic violin, this instrument is piezoelectric, which means applied pressure is converted directly into an electric signal. This electric signal is then amplified and converted into sound through a speaker. 2-String piezoelectric violin. Credit: MONAD Studio The violin is a prototype created by  MONAD Studio , an architecture and design practice headed by Eric Goldemberg and Veronica Zalcberg, in collaboration with musician Scott Hall. As a violinist and a physicist, I was curious to find out more about how the instrument worked. The studio website doesn't provide many technical details, so I did a bit more research on how piezoelectric sound works.

The flame tube, first described in 1905 by Heinrich Rubens and Otto Krigar-Menzel as a novel acoustics teaching apparatus, is a mesmerizing thing to behold. It is at once an early analogue to the oscilloscope , illustrating the nature of sound waves, and an alluring manipulation of fire that appeals to the pyromaniac in all of us. I had a chance to play with a flame tube over the holidays and had great fun blasting Wagner down the length of the tube and watching the row of flames dance in unison. But more than a cool background to music, the flame tube also highlights some simple physics of waves in a pipe.

Credit: Lecates via  Wikimedia Commons Can you tell the difference between the two tones played in this recording ? I'm not convinced that I can, but a group of trained musicians were able to listen to a series of tones like this and consistently distinguish between the two. This is important because there is actually a difference in the tones: in this particular recording, the first tone is an E note played such that the piano key does not hit the bottom of the wooden frame that holds the keys in place (known as the key frame), and in the second tone, the key does hit the key frame. Otherwise, the tones are identical. From this experiment and others, a team of musicians and acoustic scientists have concluded that touch can be heard in piano music, addressing a century-old debate . Their work has been recently published in the November issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America .

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 experimental setup used, where an ultrasound beam is focused on a plate to trap particles. Image Credit: Phononic-Crystal-Based Acoustic Sieve for Tunable Manipulations of Particles by a Highly Localized Radiation Force .  The plate moves closer to the particles, and scientists can manipulate the particles as they wish.

On the outside, trees can look perfectly healthy, but on the inside they might be rotted to the core. One type of tree rot, called heart rot, is the result of a fungal infection that enters the tree through wounds in the bark. Once inside, the fungus then begins eating away at the center of the trunk and branches killing the tree from the inside out. Acacia caffra logs with heart rot. Credit: Paul venter. Because certain rot occurs deep within trees, scientists, carpenters and others cannot know if a tree is healthy by appearance alone. And looking inside the tree would involve invasive methods, like drilling and coring, which might harm or destroy the plant. Therefore, a nondestructive, noninvasive approach is ideal. One of the oldest methods for identifying internal infection in trees, and also wooden planks, was to hit them with a hammer. An attuned ear could distinguish between different tones of the resulting sounds, whether they were a dull or hollow sound and what that

At sports venues designed to maximize crowd atmosphere, beware of hearing loss. Originally published: Apr 14 2014 - 2:45pm, Inside Science News Service By: Brian Owens, ISNS Contributor ( ISNS ) -- The roar of the crowd is a major part of the excitement of attending a sporting event. A noisy, engaged crowd makes for a better experience for fans, and is often credited with helping the players on the field, too. "The players love it," said Carl Francis, director of communications for the NFL Players Association. "Fan support definitely has an impact on the players." Stadium designers know this, and the new generation of stadiums now incorporate design features that help boost fan support by trapping and amplifying crowd noise. The most important aspects are to keep the size of the stadium as small as possible, and to provide reflecting surfaces that can turn the noise back to the crowd, said Jack Wrightson, a Dallas-based acoustical consultant who has worked

When physicist Tim Leighton saw documentary footage of dolphins using bubble nets to catch their prey, he knew something was fishy. How were the dolphins differentiating the bubbles and the fish? Even the most sophistocated man-made sonar doesn't have that ability. At least, not until Leighton and his colleagues at Southampton University designed Twin Inverted Pulsed Sonar or TWIPS, which can see through bubbles and focus on a true target, like a fish. Leighton's development of the technique was inspired by his curiosity about dolphin sonar abilities. In the October 23 issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society A,  Leighton and his colleagues at the University of Southampton announced that they've successfully done with radar what TWIPS did with sonar. TWIPR (twin inverted pulsed radar), as it's called, is particularly apt at detecting electronic circuits, even amid clutter like scrap metal, soil, snow and concrete. The potential applications include searching for hid

A favorite tradition at the APS March Meeting is the annual Physics Sing-Along! Old show tunes and contemporary classics alike are remixed and reworded with a distinct physical sciences flavor. Old favorites made an appearance like "Oh How I Love to Do Physics" sung to the tune of "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" from Oklahoma and numerous Tom Lehrer ditties. My personal favorite of the evening was "Fabricate" sung to the tune of "Cabaret", about the notorious physics fraud Jan Hendrik Schön . The whole event was organized by Walter F. Smith of Haverford College, who keeps a whole database of songs at his website .

Researchers present evidence of sophisticated sonic illusions in ancient sites around the world. Image courtesy svachalek via flickr. (ISNS) -- Stone Age cave paintings evoke reverent silence in most people. But David Lubman, Miriam Kolar, and Steve Waller prefer to shout and clap instead. They are among a growing number of researchers probing the acoustic properties of ancient sites. Their research, presented this week in Vancouver, British Columbia at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, shows that ancient peoples created sophisticated sonic illusions in ceremonial spaces ranging from Mayan temples to Stonehenge.

As carbon dioxide continues to build up in Earth's atmosphere, it will also accumulate in her oceans. This rise in CO2 has already made the upper ocean more acidic and the same is expected to happen even in the lower depths in the coming century. Physicists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution now say that these changes will make some far flung reaches of the ocean more noisy. In a paper published last week in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, the team modeled ambient shipping noise for the deep ocean, incorporating forecasts for ocean pH levels and shipping noise in the coming century. Any first year physics student knows the thickness of a fluid is important in considering how well sound waves propagate , but also of crucial importance in sea water is the concentration of boric acid and other chemicals. Boron ions help filter out low frequency waves , but as the ocean gets increasingly acidic, the amount of boron ions will decrease and these low freq