Physics Buzz

On a cold day in Holland last week, 12 of the top street artists in Europe took their places in front of a chain link fence. Each artist faced a 2x2-meter canvas, and the possibility of being the first street artist to experience zero gravity. Not actually in space, but the first to experience weightlessness on one of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) parabolic flights—and to create art in that environment.

In the southwest corner of Washington DC, just across the river from the Pentagon, you'll find the unassuming entrance to one of the city's most fascinating places: ARTECHOUSE. Descend the seemingly endless staircase inside, and you'll emerge into a cavernous underground space where light and sound are twisted into dazzling, dynamic displays. This is Naked Eyes .

Not too long ago, I had an internet run-in with a "flat Earth" type who hit me with an argument I'd never heard before: the sun, they insisted, is actually only a few hundred miles from Earth, as can be proven with some simple mathematical analysis of sunbeams. By measuring the apparent angle between sunbeams striking the opposite sides of a valley that they knew the width of, they could trace back and use geometry to calculate how far away the source must be! I want to share this little anecdote because it's a great reminder of how important a diverse and well-rounded education is: someone with training in visual arts would never have missed the error that this person made.

Works of art by masters like Rembrandt may have harnessed the power of light to create awe-inspiring, realistic paintings. This being Physics Buzz, artistic techniques are not really our specialty. However, it’s worth a look at the way that the scientific and artistic side of light merge in an article that just came out in the Journal of Optical Physics , published by the Institute of Physics.

Laser printing has taken a large step forward into the diminutive realm of nanotechnology with recognizable, albeit imperfect, reproductions of images so small that they could fit comfortably on the finest human hair.

Fluid dynamics often produces some of the most beautiful, albeit under-appreciated, physics images and videos. To celebrate this field's striking images, the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics holds a contest every year for related posters and videos that best display "artistic value, scientific content, and originality." One promising entry this year features a high-speed capture of fluid jets juggling ping pong balls. It's a gorgeous video, and you can watch it below. As researchers Roberto Zenit and Enrique Soto (National Autonomous University of Mexico) explain in the video, streams of water can suspend the balls due to a Bernoulli-like effect similar to the one responsible for lift in an aircraft. To levitate the ball for long periods of time, the researchers needed two things: a balance of vertical forces (we'll call this levitation ) and horizontal forces (we'll call this stability ).

There's a derelict atom smasher nestled in the middle of suburban Washington DC. The old Atomic Physics Observatory sits in the middle of the  Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism , a scientific research campus in the city's Chevy Chase neighborhood.  The APO was named and likewise designed to look like an astronomical observatory, in hopes that the nearby residents wouldn't put up too much of a fuss when the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism built a particle accelerator in the well-off suburb.  When it was built in 1938, it was one of the most powerful particle accelerators in the the world. Less than a year after it was first turned on, it played an important role in confirming the  nuclear fission  of uranium, the discovery that directly lead to the atomic bomb. Today, it's mostly used to store garden tools. The maintenance staff let us look around at what's left of the old machine.

Imagine diving into the placid surface of a painting by Vermeer, parsing apart Klimt's bejeweled surfaces, or untangling Jackson Pollock's knots of paint. Art historians, collectors, and restoration scholars have long sought to uncover the methods of great painters. Over the past decade, scientists have peered with light beneath the varnished surface of paintings to discover the chemistry of pigments, to identify the authors of unsigned works, or probe the crack depths from damage or age. Now, researchers at the University of Barcelona in Spain have used light at terahertz frequencies to uncover the hidden carbon signature of a painting previously thought to be unsigned. Though unsigned, the painting has been studied by art historians and confirmed to be painted by the Spanish artist Goya in 1771. Such secondary validation made the piece an apropos choice by the researchers, who published their findings May 14, 2013 on the arXiv .  "Sacrifice to Vesta" at three

"Accidental painting" is pretty simple: Drop some paint onto a horizontal surface, wait, then pour a different color of paint on top of it. When done in the correct order, however, the results can be fantastic. An art historian and physicist decided to find out why after investigating the works of the artist who perfected this technique: David Alfaro Siqueiros Check out the video embedded below for more on this research. The results are absolutely stunning. Also, check out our Physics Central article that goes into the detail of the research.

CERN, the organization behind the Large Hadron Collider, welcomed its first artist in residence to its Geneva headquarters today. Julius von Bismark won a competition to hold the three month position, and he's teaming up with theoretical physicist James Wells for his artistic project. Bismark will spend two months at CERN developing his art project before realizing it with an interdisciplinary team of scientists, artists and designers. While no one know exactly what Bismark's project will look like, he's already attracted attention for his photo hacking device that implants text onto the photographs of unsuspecting photographers. Bismark's photo hacking device can implant hidden images or text onto photographs. Image Courtesy Julius von Bismark.

Earlier this week, APS hosted a panel of speakers on the topic of communicating science to the public at the annual March Meeting. A cartoonist, artist, and science festival organizer were among the speakers, and each of them has made their own unique contribution to making science more fun and accessible. The first speaker whom I saw was Todd Rosenberg — also known as "Odd Todd." Ironically, Odd Todd started his career in cartooning after being laid off. Since then, he has started making cartoons covering science for outlets such as NPR. Below, you can see his cartoon made with Robert Krulwich that explains research on ants' ability to count their own steps.