Physics Buzz

It is a truth universally acknowledged that nothing—nothing—is more pointlessly irritating than a poorly designed water jug. You know—the kind that mindlessly dribbles all over the table every time you try to serve yourself? For centuries ceramicists and potters have slowly perfected ways to get around the so-called “teapot effect”, but scientists have long struggled to properly model the phenomenon.

On April 23rd, NASA InSight scientists announced they had detected a small seismic event on Mars, aptly referred to as a marsquake. This event, the first of its kind ever detected, promises to bring revolutionary insights about planetary interiors and seismic activity on other worlds.

Credit: Punkin Chunkin Website  punkinchunkin.com Last weekend, thousands watched as competitors from around the country competed for the 28th annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin trophy. Trebuchets, resembling something out of a Lord of the Rings film, flung their pumpkins while air cannons, rivaling some cranes in size, fired the helpless gourds toward their inevitable, squashy doom. American Chunker Inc. launched this year’s farthest-flying pumpkin at a distance of 4,694.68 feet , about 585 feet shy of a mile. The team sent their winning pumpkin flying on the first day of the event when conditions were more favorable for chunkin than the final two days of the competition. The trick to winning Punkin Chunkin relies more on just the machine. The machine controls the pumpkin’s launching speed and angle and therefore is a major determinant of how far the pumpkin travels. However, there are other components, which affect distance, that chunking competitors cannot control. Win

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

Making small adjustments can improve an entire system's state Originally published: Jul 16 2013 - 1:00pm, Inside Science News Service By: Sophie Bushwick, ISNS Contributor (ISNS) -- From the World Wide Web to the electrical grid, networks are notoriously difficult to control. A disturbance to just one part of the system can spread quickly and affect the whole thing. But this problem is its own solution: by selectively damaging part of the network, we can bring the entire system to a better state. Image Credit: Andrew Imanaka via flickr Why is it so important to manipulate networks? These complex systems pervade our everyday lives, from telecommunications systems to the connected neurons that form memories in your brain. Unfortunately, nudging just a few nodes of a network can cause the entire system to malfunction. Take the electrical grid: A few downed power lines can trigger widespread blackouts. And it takes a lot of work and expensive materials to fix the broken

Operations research finds an increasingly important application in health care. Image credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Savannah District via flickr | http://bit.ly/Zm0xcG Rights information: http://bit.ly/9h3qT6 By Joel Shurkin, ISNS Contributor ( ISNS ) -- A new army is marching into the war against rising health care costs: engineer-mathematicians. These individuals occupy a field called operations research, also known as advanced analytics. A subset is game theory, a way of modeling complex human behaviors and decision-making to produce the best outcomes. Applied to health care, the work includes scheduling operating rooms, setting fees, training technicians and deciding where to build hospitals.

Disaster struck this weekend in Brazil as a fire broke out in an extremely packed, overcapacity nightclub in Brazil, immediately sparking panic among the partygoers. Thousands of patrons rushed to the club's exits, and one person fell. Tramplings soon followed. Over 230 people died from tramplings, smoke inhalation and falling debris within the club. Many of the victims were students celebrating summer break. A number of factors seemed to contribute to the tragedy: confused nightclub staff, double capacity and sheer panic. Physicists have been studying the dynamics of such crowd stampedes for awhile now, drawing from the field of fluid dynamics. Scientists have offered a number of preventive measures in light of this research, and perhaps these studies can prevent future tragedies. The Griffin nightclub in New York. Image Credit : VancityAllie via flickr .